posted 10-28-2000 02:44 AM               

Even some of the very best strategy games (chess and Starcraft, for example) suffer from slippery slope. That means that once one player begins to lose by a little bit, he’s at a disadvantage and likely to fall further and further behind. In this type of game, one player usually loses long before the game is technically over, which isn’t exactly fun.

When a player loses a piece in chess, his ability to attack and to defend has been slightly reduced. Sure, there are many other factors in chess—positioning, momentum, pawn structure—that determine if a player is actually “losing,” but losing a piece does have an affect. Clearly, losing a lot of pieces, say 8, puts a player at a significant disadvantage. It’s pretty hard to make a comeback in a chess game, and a chess game is usually “won” for all intents and purposes many, many moves before the actual checkmate move.

Starcraft is the same way. Consider two Starcraft players of nearly equal skill. One player rushes the other (sends a small attack force very early in the game). The rush forces the defender to spend some time defending himself, and his worker units are disrupted for just a few seconds. One worker unit is killed, then the defender is barely able to defeat the attacker’s units. This conflict was actually very close. It probably didn’t feel devastating to the defender, but he’s just taken the first step down a very slippery slope. The defender spent time managing that battle that the attacker used to build a stronger economy. The defender lost a few precious seconds of collecting resources, but the attacker did not. The defender must spend both the time and money to replace that lost worker, but the attacker does not. Resource collecting is nearly exponential in Starcraft. A small disadvantage early on becomes more and more magnified as the game goes on.

Apart from the exponential nature of resources, there’s the same concept of losing pieces as in chess. If an attacker kills some of the defender’s units in Starcraft, the defender is that much less able to defend or attack in the future. If a defender barely holds of an attack, but comes out slightly on the losing end, he’ll be even less able to defend against the next wave of attacks that are sure to come moments later. He’ll then probably fall further behind, and be even less able to stop yet another attack wave. There basically aren’t comebacks in Starcraft. And just as in chess, the moment of loss comes long before the actual conditions of the game ending are fulfilled. As fun as Starcraft is, this slippery slope aspect definitely detracts from the experience.

Fighting games typically don’t suffer from slippery slope. In Street Fighter, for example, your character still has all his moves even when he’s about to lose. While it might be “realistic” for a nearly dead character to limp, move slowly, and have generally less effective moves, it sure wouldn’t be fun. Comebacks are frequent in Street Fighter, and games often are “anybody’s game” until the last moment. Street Fighter does have some very minimal slippery slope aspects (if you’re very near death you have to worry about taking damage from blocked moves which aren’t a threat if you have full life), but overall it’s pretty “slippery slope neutral.”

There is one version of Street Fighter that stands out as an exception: Marvel vs. Capcom 2. In this game, each player chooses 3 characters. At any given time, one character is active and on-screen, and the other two are off-screen, healing back some lost energy. The off-screen characters can be called in to do an assist move, then the jump off screen again. The main character can attack in parallel with the assist character, allowing for a wide variety of tricks and traps. The player can switch the active character at any time, and he loses the game when he loses all three characters. But here, slippery slope rears its bitter head. When one player is down to his last character and the other player has two or even all three of his characters, the first player is at a huge disadvantage. The first player has can no longer attack in parallel with his assists, which often means he has no hope of winning. Comebacks in MvC2 are quite rare and games often “end” before they are technically over.

Fighting games with “ring out” such as Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur as especially devoid of slippery slope properties. In these games, a player instantly loses if his character is ever pushed out of the ring, no matter how much energy he has. Basically, no matter how far behind you are, no matter how close you are to losing, you always have a 100% damage move: ring out. Long ago, I thought this concept was “cheap” and served only to shorten games while adding little benefit, but actually the threat of ring out adds quite a bit to both these games. Since the threat of ring out is so great, another whole element of positioning is added to the game. A player must fight both to do damage to his opponent, and fight for position to avoid ring out. But back to our story….

Perpetual Comeback: Puzzle Fighter’s Claim to Fame

Is there an opposite to slippery slope? A game in which losing actually increases your chance to win, rather than decreases it? It’s a strange concept, and I’ve dubbed it “perpetual comeback.” In all the world, I’m aware of only one game that truly uses it: Capcom’s Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, or Puzzle Fighter, as it’s commonly referred to.

Puzzle Fighter is, in my opinion, far and away the best puzzle game ever made, and even one of the best games ever made. It looks standard enough; it’s one of those games where each player has a basin that pieces fall into. There are four different colors of pieces, and you try to build big, single colored rectangles (power gems). You can then shatter those rectangles with special pieces called crash gems. The more you break, the more junk you drop on the opponent’s side. When your side fills to the top, you lose. Sounds pretty standard, right?

Several factors come together to create perpetual comeback in Puzzle Fighter. Firstly, each “character” (there 10 to choose from, including secret characters) has a different “drop pattern.” A drop pattern is the pattern of colored blocks that a character will send to his enemy when that character shatters blocks on his own side. For example, Ken’s drop pattern is horizontal row of red, followed by a horizontal row of green, then yellow, then blue. Every time Ken sends 6 or fewer blocks to his opponent, he’ll send a horizontal row of red. Every time Ken sends 12 blocks, he’ll send a row of red, then a row of yellow. Since the enemy knows this, he can plan for it. He can build his blocks such that Ken’s attack will actually help rather than hurt. There’s one catch: when you send blocks to the opponent, they appear in the form of “counter gems,” which can’t be broken immediately by normal means, and can’t be incorporated into deadly power gems. After about 5 moves, the counter gems change into regular gems.

The other very critical property is that power gems broken higher up on the screen do more much more damage (send many more counter gems) than gems broken at the bottom of the screen. So consider what attacking is actually like in this game. Attacks are really only temporarily damaging, until the counter gems turn into regular gems. At that point, the opponent will probably be able to incorporate the gems into their own plans, since the opponent knows your drop pattern. Even if the opponent isn’t able to benefit from your attack in that way, he can still “dig himself out” of trouble by breaking all the stuff you sent him. By filling up his screen most of the way you’ve basically given him more potential ammunition to fire at you. What’s more, as he is nearest to death, his attacks will be the most damaging due to the height bonus. Gems broken at the very top of the screen do significant damage.

Puzzle Fighter has the extremely unusual property that “almost losing” looks exactly like “almost winning.” Let’s say you break a whole slew of power gems and send a large attack at your opponent. You’re screen is now almost empty. You’re winning right? His screen is nearly to the top—almost full. He’s losing, right? Well, he is on the verge of losing, but he has all the ammunition and he has the height bonus, whereas you have almost nothing left to defend with. In effect, your opponent is both “losing” and “winning” at the same time. Very curious, indeed!

It turns out the best way to play Puzzle Fighter is to very carefully never attack until you can make it count. All those little jabs you make just help the opponent in the long run. You’ve got to save up for a huge, 1-2 punch. You need to send a big attack that almost kills them, then immediately send another attack that finishes them off. 1, 2! The point is that Puzzle Fighter is a high energy, edge-of-your seat game. Your opponent very often has enough attack to kill you, so you have to have enough defense to stop them. Whenever the scales start to tip in your opponent’s favor, they have also, weirdly, tipped in your favor as well, in some sense. A game of Puzzle Fighter is never over until the last moment. Comebacks are the name of the game, and the excitement goes to the very last second almost every time.

If you know of any other games that use perpetual comeback, I’d love to hear about them. It’s a powerful and dangerous concept that could very easily ruin a game, even though it shines in Puzzle Fighter. It spurred me to design a puzzle game based on Puzzle Fighter to capture the genius of perpetual comeback. I’d also enjoy designing perpetual comeback into other types of games—a challenging notion indeed! Any thoughts, fellow designers?

posted 01-02-2001 06:33 PM               

In this game, however, it was a very necessary feature, because if you spun out or crashed, you wouldn't have a chance against a skilled opponent. This feature made it possible to have fun by providing a boost to the non-leaders.

posted 01-13-2001 12:11 PM               

Does Mario Kart do the same thing?

posted 01-16-2001 06:54 PM            

- Alan

posted 12-15-2001 07:19 PM               

quote:

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Starcraft is the same way. Consider two Starcraft players of nearly equal skill. One player rushes the other (sends a small attack force very early in the game). The rush forces the defender to spend some time defending himself, and his worker units are disrupted for just a few seconds. One worker unit is killed, then the defender is barely able to defeat the attacker’s units. This conflict was actually very close. It probably didn’t feel devastating to the defender, but he’s just taken the first step down a very slippery slope. The defender spent time managing that battle that the attacker used to build a stronger economy. The defender lost a few precious seconds of collecting resources, but the attacker did not. The defender must spend both the time and money to replace that lost worker, but the attacker does not. Resource collecting is nearly exponential in Starcraft. A small disadvantage early on becomes more and more magnified as the game goes on.

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posted 12-16-2001 06:14 PM               

quote:

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Crap guy, the harassment tactics are based on the assumption that the attacker *isn't* microing the initial assault wave.

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posted 01-26-2002 04:07 PM               

If you're down to 25% or less health, you can do Super Moves at any time. Normally this wouldn't be significant, but in this game supers do up to 50% damage and turn the tables in a match completely.

Knowing that your opponent is capable of unlimited supers forces you to be ready to block your opponent's super at any time. If you're below 25% yourself, you can use supers without fear of wasting your super meter. With a strong, fast super like Iori's Maiden Masher, you might even let your opponent beat you into critical range on purpose, then come back with two supers and win.

Anyway, I thought I ought to say that whil;e I'm here. All I really came here to do was rip some graphics from your Puzzle Fighter screenshot and make a TetriNET theme out of it, but that's another story. I guess if I ever end up making my own games, I'll really have to consider one's ability to come back. It makes losing fun!