PAC NEEDS FOOD BADLY!
There is an intrinsic difference between the Asteroids/Centipede model of game design, and the Space Invaders/Pac-Man one. It’s the latter, somewhat less flexible, design sensibility (through a Miyamoto filter) which has most directly evolved into our current ideas about console and arcade games. I’m not entirely sure if this is ideal, although it’s lent some mass appeal to the medium.
I wonder how things might’ve been different if the American model had continued to evolve into the modern era. If we’d gotten a chance to hone it as well as the Japanese model has been (up to the painfully entrenched form that it’s in now).
I’m too tired to illustrate. I might, later.
I’m sure some of you out there already are tracing my thought patterns, however.
I think it’s kind of interesting.
Again. Probably the solution is to combine the two sensibilities. Retro and Silicon Knights remain the test cases for a rather different kind of a merger (that being the quickly-tiring Miyamoto school and the modern Western PC-oriented mindset). I wonder what’d happen if we were to work back in some of the Ed Logg mentality.