So the game I'm working my way through now is Renegade Kid's Moon, published by Mastiff. As a technical achievement it's marvelous, one of the few true N64-quality titles to come out of third parties on DS. It's been a busy week so I'm only about halfway through it, even though the game isn't especially long.
Now, Moon is an FPS. Not the first on the DS, but by far one of the more successful and original efforts ever to grace the system. I'm having fun with it, but I have to say: I keep wondering why this game exists, and who was supposed to want it so bad they'd run out and buy it the first day it was out. Moon is a beautiful, thoughtfully made game, but one where I can't begin to imagine who would really want to play it.
I believe my... let's call it a "lack of comprehension" with Moon stems from what feels like a fundamental disconnect between the nature of the game and the nature of the hardware. The DS is a system can deliver some very great games, but they frequently aren't immersive games. The hardware power you need to create immersively detailed graphics is simply not there.
A DS game is never going to make you imagine you're actually in some all-encompassing fantastic other place. DS has always lent itself to more arcade-like experiences, where it's the patterns of the gameplay that draw you in.
Take, for instance, Order of Ecclesia. This is a fantastic title and has some of the best 2D graphics you'll get out of the DS, but it's not really a game about making you feel like you're in the Transylvanian mountains. It's a game about jumping, dodging bosses, juggling combos-- as purely acrobatic as a Castlevania game has ever been. It's about the action, not the setting.
FPS, on the other hand, is pretty much about the setting. The genre in a fundamental way removes even the idea of playing a distinct character from the gameplay, instead relegating the personalities of guys like Master Chief and Gordon Freeman to be expressed in story content. When you play an FPS, what you're really playing is a floating camera on a stick with a weapon-wielding arm jutting out of it.
(Don't believe me? Flip on your favorite FPS and try to look down at your main character's own feet. Go on, try it. If it happens you can somehow see your own feet, post the name of the game where you could in the comments. I predict this post does not get more than ten comments.)
Now, frankly, a floating camera on a stick with weapon-arms is a fantastic way to approach a game's main character if the game wants to achieve immersion as its primary goal. Think of BioShock-- so much of what made that game amazing was the ability to wander around, controlling the camera freely and precisely, examining your detailed, engaging surroundings for as long as you wanted, from any angle that you wanted. In BioShock, when the game was at its best, you felt like you really were in Rapture.
Most other really successful FPS games have this same effect. F.E.A.R was scary because you weren't just observing scary events in scary places, there was a feeling you were right in the middle of them. Halo's cosmic saga is engrossing because you feel like an active participant in a battle that by itself is of near-unimaginable scope. The Half-Life series and Portal are so thoroughly immersive that you begin to feel like the primary actor in an extremely well-written and gripping action film.
Moon is desperately trying to work in this storytelling tradition, trying especially hard to be a sort of new portable Half-Life. The science fiction involved is unusually hard for a game (though not "hard" in an absolute sense), and the setting is absolutely believable in every significant way. The characters aren't quite compelling, but believable enough that it's easy to sink into Major Kane's role in the story. He is primarily a vector for exploring his world, and it is as much of a world worth exploring as the DS's hardware is going to be able to offer.
Ah, but that's the catch: the DS's limitations. Moon's great technical achievement is squeezing 60fps N64-caliber 3D graphics out of the Nintendo DS hardware, and while everything is perfectly fluid, very little of the game's world is detailed. The sprawling "dungeon" areas, for example, are generally long sterile corridors with only the occasional sign that you're supposed to be wandering through abandoned alien factories.
There's a sequence where you're in an alien spaceship that apparently contains of exactly one hallway that leads directly to a boss encounter. The most detailed area of the game is your "home base", where you need to believe humans once worked and lived. While it is fun to explore, the game gives you very few opportunities to do so. Even sequences where you're driving a moonbuggy around the surface of the moon somehow feels flat and sterile.
It's no fault of Renegade Kid's that the game feels like this. It is basically a miracle that they got the Nintendo DS to run something like this at all, and the technology lover in me admires how beautifully the combat unfolds, and all the little details they could squeeze in. But by pure FPS standards, it's not enough to make me love the world or feel like I'm really there, surviving in a spacesuit with unimaginable alien weapons in my hands, because the screen is just to small and the gameplay experience too limited.
Isn't that missing the point of the entire FPS genre, then? For the single-player aspect of these games, do they really have anything to offer but exploration and immersion and a world rendered in extensive detail? Or am I missing the point by thinking that Moon needs to deliver anything but solid action and a smooth-running engine to be a successful FPS?
I'm not sure, to be honest. I just know Moon by far is one of the best games of its type on the DS, and I keep failing to experience an overwhelming urge to play more of it (though I plan to later on today, anyway). Right now, I'm even failing to experience the ability to imagine what sort of gamer would.
