Warning Forever

A bit like Snood for action gamers, Warning Forever cuts out the extra bits from top-down space shooters and pits your little ship against an increasingly elaborate series of enemy motherships. It's not completely a puzzle game, which is what I'm inclined to call it since games with simple rule sets and environments tend to be categorized as such. Although, I shy from that designation because you actually develop an actual skill at the game as opposed to a solution.

This tends to be how I prefer my single-player experience (sometimes, multiplayer is simply social). I'll read - so-to-speak - games that simply gobble time, and puzzle elements are generally interesting the first time around, but games that revolve around their rules design tend to engage me the most.

Considering that's the very idea behind interesting rules design, there's no real surprise there.

The game I am most reminded of with Warning Forever is the first iteration of Crazy Taxi. Simple rule sets, fast-paced action, and room for skills to be developed. Given extensive playing of Warning Forever, players will evolve into dodgers or like masters of the slip-switch in CT will become artfully proficient with the occasionally superfluous focus fire.

What may be interesting about the comparison is that both use the racing-game time-extension system as their play-time(1) defining principle, which, incidentally, governs Snood in a demented form. If time-extension is the perfect play-time system, it's because it's directly skill based. If you do a task efficiently enough, you are rewarded with a longer period of play which results in new content. Could this work in an RPG? Everyone knows the evil way of slaughtering a town is the easy way to find the stolen jewelry, but what if it were more time-consuming than neogitiating its return and thus a venture that would penalize a consistently evil character in the long run? I don't know. It's possible that the RPG base would never accept such a system.

Of course, I'm also one who argues for more completist environments in games of larger scope (making game elements make natural sense within the fictional world of the game i.e. what is xp, really?). Call me a hypocrite, whatever. That's an issue of polish which I think is on a different level from structure. Grr.

Anyway, none of this rambling is really important. Play the game.

(1) I don't know the technical term. Sorry.