Batman also rarely if ever leaps and misses - he never buffoonishly attacks empty air in a decidedly non-Batman way. (Batman only does cool effective moves once he's pumped himself up enough apparently) To leap towards an enemy you press the stick vaguely in the direction of an enemy and Batman attacks one - when enemies are clumped together which one Batman attacks feels arbitrary. The input here is the same as it was before - the player isn't doing anything different, it's that Batman has decided to step up his game. Once you reach a few hits on the combo meter Batman goes into badass Batman mode and the combat verbs change - whereas pressing attack may have previously done a single weak punch now Batman leaps at an enemy and does a flying knee, knocking them over. These observations are valid but also trivial, so this section is done.Дark Souls is 'What You Do is What You Get' - each button maps to a well-defined action.ДЇor comparison take a game from the Batman series. It expects the player to fail, perhaps forever, and does little to ensure that they can tour all the content in timely fashion by way of lower difficulty or breadcrumb quests, which makes exploration and progress feel like an achievement by the player rather than an inevitability. I'm going to quickly dispense with the easy stuff of how Dark Souls is like an NES game and unlike a modern one: The game is obtuse, lacks ease-of-use features like on-screen aids or exclamation marks over heads. Recently on my Twitter feed was a picture of Bloodborne ( Souls successor) with text along the lines of 'Bloodborne as a Western AAA game.' It has about what you would expect - onscreen tutorial text, a quest log with 'Rats killed:7/10', a minimap, etc.

There's a lot to talk about with the design of Dark Souls so this is my angle: what are the specific design decisions that make it feel like an NES game? (Or alternately: unlike a modern game) The game made him feel the way NES games did. (The same sort of people who think any game with pixel art is '8-bit') But when my friend who grew up on games like Castlevania 2, Rygar and Battle of Olympus said that I paid attention. I never paid much attention to it - it's just something people say. This is something that gets thrown around a lot regarding Dark Souls. Hopefully you'll appreciate this analysis, even if you're familiar with prior work.ДЄbove: Dark Souls and I can't Believe it's Not Dark Souls I'll try not to be too duplicative of previous writing. Another reason is that Dark Souls is a game most people are familiar with and perhaps have read other writing about. I'm starting with Dark Souls for a few reasons. (It sure is easy to find 'think pieces' though!) My goal is to write about the design of games - the specific decisions that were made for an individual game that make the game what it is. It's hard to find writing on design, period, from either critics or developers. It's hard to find good writing on design. Sietz calls this the 'form' of the film, a term I'll use here, though I have little interest in 'formalism.' This blog is inspired by Matt Zoller Seitz's Please, Critics, Write About the Filmmaking, the gist of which is that critics, rather than writing solely about how a film made them feel, should examine how the film made them feel that way.

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