The Wow Factor
Eventually, Castle Wolfenstein made its way to the Commodore 64. I'm talking the original 2D game. The one that had standing around and waiting as a gameplay element. I'm serious! You'd point your gun at a lock and hit the spacebar (I think) and literally wait a certain number of seconds until the lock was picked (giving the guards more time to find you). It was a terrible idea, but somebody had to try it...

Several friends in school told me about it (mostly for their Apple IIs), and I awaited the day it would be ported to the C-64. I didn't have to wait too long. I borrowed a copy from a friend (I had no money to buy games back then), and that first night I got to see what people had been talking about for two years.

As a game, it wasn't bad. But the kicker was the voices. The game had really rough voice playback of German words and phrases. I'm talking super-rough here, as the entire game had to fit inside of memory constraints that wouldn't hold a 5-second MP3 today. While I was expecting it, the sound of actual voices coming out of my computer was an immediate thrill. I had to tell my parents about it.

They weren't too impressed. My mother said, "You'd better be at least that excited when your first child starts speaking!"

Okay, I was. But at the time, hearing speech come out of my own computer was kinda mind-boggling. It had a high "wow" factor. It wasn't so much the fact that speech was there - we'd heard it before in some arcade games ("Bite the dust space cadet," "Run, Coward!," "Intruder alert, intruder alert!," and "Red five standing by!" all come to mind). But it was coming out of my little home computer. Wow! Cool!

The early days of computer and video games were full of "wow" moments as the new medium grew from infancy and regularly surprised people with new and exciting possibilities.

Not quite a decade after my first "Wolfenstein" experience, I found myself playing Wolfenstein 3D - id Software's take on the license. Anybody who was playing computer games back then remembers the "Guten Tag!" moment - yet another victory for speech in games. But it wasn't just the speech, it was the whole 3D environment that blew people away, too. And the solid gameplay (at the time). History was repeated with Doom a couple of years later. Ultima Underworld also blew me away around the same time as Wolf3D. Unreal gave me (and most other players) a few "wow" moments with its graphic excesses.

In the past, the "Wow!" factor of a game was almost entirely dependent upon technology - principally graphics and, to a lesser degree, sound. Game makers and publishers have been going down that road for a long time, now, and are slowly realizing it only gets longer and harder as you go. The wow factor comes from being novel and surprising, and that's hard to do with technology with today's hardcore gamer. It still happens - Oblivion and Far Cry are somewhat more recent examples, but those are still just incremental micro-wows, lacking the surprise awesomeness of their forebears.

But there are other ways of pulling it off that are not tied quite so tightly to technology.

Falcon 3.0 and Falcon 4.0 did it for me with their devotion to realism and incredible dynamic campaigns. Falcon 4.0 continues to reign supreme in its more recent incarnation (Allied Force). Baldur's Gate II impressed me with its massive scope. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines had a twist ending (with the Anarch ending) that really surprised and amused me - a great "wow" factor coming from story rather than technology.

Indies can do it too. For example, Depths of Peril really impressed me with the dynamic, evolving quest system. And extremely recently, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity! thrilled me with its sheer audacity and innovation coupled with solid, fun gameplay. In fact, I think I said the word, "Wow!" quite audibly a couple of times while playing the first few levels.

I don't think a game necessarily needs to have an amazing "wow!" factor to be great, but it sure helps it stand out and rise to the heap more quickly. But the important point here is that it doesn't need to be based on novel use of graphics or sound. There are so many different ways it can be achieved - if only more developers and publishers would wake up and try 'em out, instead of constantly trying to up the polygon detail and light bloom.

UPDATE: Oh, hey, a forum thread about this! We still have these!

Labels: Game Moments

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:34 AM (Permalink)