Q-Games and Sony Computer Entertainment America's PixelJunk Monsters

Does reading Level Up sometimes feel like drinking water from a fire hose? Or surfing a tsunami? Does it ever give you the sensation that you've been buried under an avalanche of words, words, words? Yes, we know that the dizzying length of certain Level Up posts can read more like a manifesto or a jeremiad than a blog entry. For you, we offer the occasional feature "Things You May Have Missed," which will cull compelling excerpts from our more voluminous posts.

While reading the newest issue of Game Informer (the one with Double Fine's Brutal Legend on the cover), we came across a story on upcoming downloadable titles published by Sony for its Playstation Network service. One of the featured games was PixelJunk Monsters, a tower defense-style game from Q-Games, the studio behind the already-released slot-racing game PixelJunk Racers. What caught our eye, however, was the following sentence from the preview: "The game holds true to the studio's goal of making titles that fit on one screen; there is no scrolling around to different key points on the map, and all of the action is always visible." That's one of the pluses offered by certain 2-D perspective games, and reminded us of an exchange from the September 17th-20th edition of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, wherein we talked about the games BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. During our email conversation, our back-and-forth over the merits of the 2-D Metroid titles vs. the 3-D Metroid Prime series led us to discuss the topic of what was lost in the transition from 2-D gaming to 3-D gaming. Read on, then share your thoughts these issues in the comments section below.

N'Gai Croal: Retro Studios deserves every bit of praise for its yeoman's work in transforming the Metroid experience into 3-D first-person. But for me--and I fully realize this is something of a minority opinion--I've always believed that there was something fundamentally misguided about the decision to rebirth Metroid in this manner. The mechanics that are at the heart of Metroid, most notably backtracking and scouring the environment for hidden passages, don't translate well to first-person gaming. I'm generally not a fan of backtracking in 3-D games, but that goes double for first-person shooters. (Yes, I know that the Metroid Prime series has been described as first-person adventures.) When I play an FPS, there are two cues I use to determine whether I'm headed in the right direction: if I see enemies ahead, or if I see a new area. It's all about forward movement, so having to backtrack throws me off completely.

With the 2-D Metroid, I could much more easily maintain a mental map of where I'd been, so backtracking wasn't a problem. And if I ever got lost, there was a simple one-to-one visual correspondence with the games map. The 3-D Metroid Prime, unfortunately, compounds my backtracking difficulties with its 3-D map, which you yourself acknowledge is confusing in our first Vs. Mode Gaiden. And since Metroid is about steadily developing one's mastery over an environment that is not completely navigable at the start, Retro couldn't simply eliminate backtracking and design the game around a simple proceed from point A to point B. The end result is two great tastes that don't quite taste great together.

Stephen Totilo: What's it like to watch a great 2-D game series go to 3-D, have the masses praise it, and yet see it abandon key aspects in the process? I'm trying to put myself in your shoes which don't feel altogether unfamiliar. Do we praise this situation or shake our heads? Did no one notice what happened to the Mario platforming series? Should anyone mind? None of the three 3-D Mario games I've played (64, Sunshine, or preview versions of Galaxy) feels as combative as the old 2-D games. This has bugged me. In the Mario side-scrollers I was always wading in enemies. I could jump from the top of one enemy to the next, knock down rows of them with Koopa shells, and blitz through a whole bunch while invincible with star power. Mario 3-D games are desolate by comparison. There are barely any Goombas and Koopas to fight. How many do you get on the screen at once? How many do you see in the average game minute? Very few. I've got to imagine there's an M'Gai Broal out there who just can't stand the violence done to his beloved Mario 2-D games by bringing them into 3-D. This gamer may think that the 3-D Mario games are sacrilege and must not exist. He may be firing up his time machine right now in the hopes of changing gaming history. Others, though, might not mind the changes required of the transition to 3-D, because they think enough of the essence is still there....

I don't begrudge you your tastes. Instead I encourage you to tackle this topic too. There's a very real argument to be made that something was lost in the transition from 2-D to 3-D, which is what the Wii's backers have been happy to talk about. While it's worth exploring why the transition ruined things for some gamers, I think little has been discussed about why other gamers didn't lose touch and what kind of tastes may have developed in those of us who stayed hardcore on both sides of the break. What do such gamers have to add to a discussion that so often deals only with the lapsed 2-D gamers and the children of the 3-D era, to say nothing of the outsider casuals?

N'Gai Croal: [You're] not going to make me reverse my opinion on the Metroid Prime series, but I will explain further.

The introduction of 3-D brought with it the need for a camera. Cameras generally depict 3-D objects on a 2-D plane. The odds of being disoriented when you introduce a camera, particularly a moving camera, rise astronomically. The whole Y-axis debate (to-invert-or-not-to-invert) comes from this. So does first-person vs. third-person, and within the latter, the creative decision among fixed cameras (Devil May Cry), player-controlled cameras (Gears of War) and A.I.-controlled cameras (God of War).

As I said before, it's much easier to maintain a mental map of a game world in 2-D. If all you're doing in a game is moving from left to right, as in Super Mario Bros, or continuously moving forward on a clearly defined path, as in the classic Medal of Honor games, you don't need much of a mental map. But if a game asks you to backtrack or to scour its environment in clues, you most certainly need a mental map, and that's especially true if the game is a first-person 3-D game, where you are the camera. Metroid Prime games involve all three. It's a sure-fire recipe for potential disorientation.

Here endeth our summary. To read the entire four-part exchange, click here.