Videogame clichés

1. Minecart level
2. Ice level
3. Egyptian level
4. Underwater level
5. Forced scrolling level - a race to escape from rising water, lava, or the deadly edge of the screen
6. Inconsistent water - on one level you can swim, another you drown
7. The healing power of offscreen - enemies can regenerate if you leave an area then return
8. The dead end the end of which you can't see until it's too late - in R-Type style shooters this is a classic
9. Weapons disappear after 3 uses
10. The Dark World / The Light World
11. Food heals injuries
12. Mimic Chests - regardless of the game universe
13. Deadly Animals - even Spiderman gets his ass kicked by bees, rats, etc. in games...
14. Train level
15. Red Key for Red Door
16. Incredibly useful power, skill, spell or weapon you can only use once
17. King kidnapped and replaced by demon imposter - one for the Square fans
18. Guns less powerful than bare hands - see Darkstalkers, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, in fact most Capcom games!

(n.b. regarding NSA's excellent appraisal of Half-Life below : I would say that the game does feature a couple more of the cliches listed, just in slightly disguised forms : there's the occasional headcrab in a crate that serves the purpose of a "mimic chest", and I could've sworn there was something akin to a minecart level about halfway in).

But I didn't actually write this just to whine about the state of the industry. I wrote it because I have a few clichés of my own to contribute:

• The Metroid/Zelda Design Model: Maybe it's a little unfair of me to pin this one on two series' which I greatly admire. In games that follow this design school, the player is given a huge world to explore, but at the start of the game a sizable portion is locked off because a certain piece of equipment is required to pass obstacles. For example, you can only reach Zora's Domain in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time once you have found a bomb bag, because you need bombs to destroy the boulders blocking the way. Usually, you only gain access to the last area at the very end of the game, because that area contains the final boss. Both Metroid and Zelda are chock full of this kind of thing. However, they rise above the essential arbitrariness of their play structure by giving the player a lot of places to explore anyway, by cleverly disguising the first-this-then-that nature of the play (You don't finish level two so you can reach level three, you get the bombs so you can enter Zora's Domain!), and sometimes by offering choices as to where to go next. To give another example from Ocarina of Time, after getting the Bow in the Forest Temple, nothing prevents the player from going on to either the Fire or Water temples and completing them first. However, all three must be finished to enter the Shadow Temple.
  To be fair, the roots of this cliché lie at the very heart of the adventure genre. The Atari 2600 game Adventure, the very first game of the type, had this type of design.
• Zippers: This is an example of where the boundary between a cliché and a legitimate part of the emerging shared videogame language are blurred. A Zipper is a place in a kart racing game that looks kind of like a stylized arrow that, when driven over, gives the player's vehicle a great burst of speed. Because Zippers have been in so many games, players don't have to question them. They can be reasonably certain that this thing that makes you fast in R.C. Pro Am will do the same thing in Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing, and other games too.
• Hearts give you health: Thinking about this too long will give you that warm "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" feeling. What does Link do with those things once he picks them up?
• Bosses: Boss enemies are used very often to give a player an exciting climax to a level or a game, but nothing says you actually have to use them. At the end of Might and Magic II, for example, the player must solve a cryptogram! Banjo-Kazooie is a recent example of a popular game that only had a boss at the very end.

1. Minecart level? NO, but see #14.
2. Ice level? YES - a walk-in freezer you must traverse quickly while solving a jumping puzzle.
3. Egyptian level? NO.
4. Underwater level? YES, many, with big nasty alien fish.
5. Forced scrolling level? NO, but this scenario occurs in a few puzzles.
6. Inconsistent water? NO.
7. Offscreen healing? NO - dead is dead, sucka.
8. Too late, dead end? NO.
9. Weapons disappear? NO (thank God!)
10. Dark/Light Worlds? SORT OF. Some very dark & scary levels, others out in the desert sun (still scary).
11. Food heals? YES - drink cans of soda for 1 health each!
12. Mimic chests? YES. Sure, I'll buy that headcrabs = mimic chests.
13. Deadly animals? YES, oh yes... Houndeyes and headcrabs for example.
14. Train level? YES - A loooong train level (ON A RAIL), with many stops (and not for ice cream either!).
15. Red key/red door? NO - a little more subtle than that. You need Barney to open some doors.
16. One-off item/power? NO.
17. King impersonated? NO.
18. Guns/Bare hands? NO, though the crowbar can be more useful than the Glock in the first level.

It has to be mentioned (SPOILER ALERT) that although the "official" Boss is defeatable by the player, there's an additional "Boss" at the very end who CANNOT be handed his own ass. Too bad, because by then you really want to.

Score: 6.5/16. I think Half-Life passes the test as a relatively non-cliched game.

Many so-called "clichés" are necessary for any game to be playable. You MUST be the only person who can save the Earth. Otherwise you could leave the game running untended for six hours, and come back to find an NPC had completed it for you, offscreen. Then there's no game, right? You must be able to take many more hits than your enemies or the game ends instantly; there must be bigger weapons later on as a reward for progress and an incentive to keep playing.

But on the other hand there are a lot of things in videogames which seem to appear simply because of precedent. An experienced gamer will automatically destroy crates/pots/boxes/rats to look for ammunition/health/magic/gold inside. If you think about this logically for a few moments, it makes no sense. But in the videogame world, this is just how we do things, and have been for years. Then there are sniper rifles. There are always sniper rifles. Ever since GoldenEye 007 there have been sniper rifles in first-person shooters, and that a time may come when there are NOT sniper rifles is inconceivable.

• Player one is blue and player two is red
• If it has a weak spot, it'll flash yellow when you shoot it
• Any broken machine of any kind will work perfectly once you have found the correct spare part. Moreover there is exactly one spare part hidden in the level. It is the correct one
• If it's covered in fur, its a good guy. If it's covered in spikes, it's a bad guy
• The Ancient Evil returns to savage the land every thousand years on the dot. The last time it showed up was 999.9975 years ago, give or take
• There is only one thing capable of stopping the aforementioned evil, but last time around it was split into between 2 and 10 pieces, all of which now require finding
• Climbing a ladder is more life-threatening than engaging in a gun battle
• All "Game Over" messages are essentially a lie

I'd like to see a games designer go straight through that list of clichés and break every last one of them. It would be refreshing to play an RPG or FPS which behaved in a totally unexpected way. It would make the player think about the solutions to puzzles instead of automatically looking for the red key to the red door. It would inject some much-needed creativity into an industry that in recent years has been slipping dangerously close to becoming evolutionary or even stale, not revolutionary as it should be. I'm telling you, back in the old days you couldn't just get by on fancy graphics, you had to make your game worth playing to make up for it. But that's another node.

I want the bad guys to win for a change. I want my character to be left-handed by default. I want to be told about an ancient prophecy and NOT have it come true by the end of the game. I want to see weapons jam and NPCs that trip over branches occasionally. I'd like to see an explosive crate that isn't.

I'd like to BE a bad guy, and have it left up to my morals alone whether I enslave the globe or eventually turn my back on evil. I'd like to start with a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher and gradually be stripped of my weapons, so the final encounter is a terrifying affair fought with fist and knife. I'd like to see a fat woman in a game.

Dang it, I want to go behind a waterfall and NOT find a hidden cave.

Break clichés! Make the gamer think!

• Grandia
• Chrono Cross
• Secret of Monkey Island
• Seiken Densetsu III
• Wild ARMs
• Xenogears
• Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker
• Super Mario World
• Super Mario RPG
• Super Metroid
• Lufia II (it's a boss)
• Final Fantasy V
• Final Fantasy VII (again, it's something you fight)
• Breath Of Fire IV
• Legend Of Dragoon

The Dungeon Keeper series has the player capturing heroes and torturing them as either entertainment or to convert them to your cause. Can't say I've gotten around to playing this one yet, though.

Black & White is half real-time strategy and digital pet simulator. Albeit your pet is a huge bipedal animal and humans are but tiny insects in comparison. But there is the potential to be an evil god and therefore have an evil animal avatar. The look of your pet, your temple and evil the land inside your influence reflects how good or evil you play.

Grand Theft Auto series has you playing a car thief, hit man, drug runner, and gang member, if you so please. In fact, stealing cars and/or murdering their former owners is par for the course. There are very few redeeming moral actions, besides saving one of your own cartel members.

One of the No One Lives Forever games has you playing as a member of H.A.R.M.. Can't say I've played this one either, but it's true. It's not a very long game, more of an expansion pack, from what I've heard.

The Aliens Versus Predator series casts the player in the role of the Predator, Alien, or Marine. Obvious, the human is the 'good' character and doesn't have do anything immoral, just survive. The Predator and Alien are debatable evil characters, since the each do only as their biology suggests. In the case of AvP2, the Predator has an even worse human nemesis to go after. Any Marines that get in the way are incidental. Aliens are mindless killing machines in own right and have few objectives. Kill, reproduce, and protect the Hive. So, barring a discussion of morality, the Predator and Alien characters are evil in that they kill human beings for sport and food, respectively. They only look out for their own species.

The two Postal games cast the player as a psychopath mass murderer. Go figure. The first game had wonderfully painted backgrounds, but the gameplay and the horror quickly became repeditive. The second game, however, despite being entirely politically incorrect, had many original ideas and conform to very few of the above cliches. So you're on fire? Pee on yourself. Want more health than you would normally? Smoke some crack. The player just wants to finish his seemingly mundane tasks (get milk, go to the bank) but the game world goes out of its way to goad the player into reacting violently. Sure, you're killing innocents, but they were annoying to begin with. It's probably the only game series that puts the company that produced the game into the game itself as a plot device. It's certainly not my favorite game, but it does things (albeit in a very offensive manner) in an original and never-before-seen fashion.