Slippery Slope and Perpetual Comeback
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.
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| The outcome of this game of StarCraft was basically decided during this early rush: Zerg will lose the game. |
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....
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| Lau (right) has Sarah (left) at the edge of the ring. Another hit could result in him ringing her out. |
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!
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| Ken (left) was close to losing, but he got the yellow crash gem he needed just in time. Donovan (right) will lose. |
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?
March 5th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
The old quake Deathmatch Mode 4 is perpetual comeback. In DMM4, you spawn with full weapons(sans grenade launcher), infinite ammo, full red armor and 200 health. When you fight it out with someone you end up much weaker, where as they die and respawn with a full stocked out setup putting you at a huge disadvantage.
This works somewhat okay on public free for all games, but in a 1 on 1 it leads to simple “I kill you, you kill me” give and take only won by the player lucky enough to juggle the opponent to death without taking damage.
There are also games that are entirely in the middleground, where you’re both at equal positioning at all times. The boardgame quarto would be a good example of this.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
One game that incorporated a bit of the comeback mechanics was (I think) Mario Kart 64 with regard to items. This is coming entirely from personal experience, but it seemed to me that whatever position you were in seemed to give you the best item for that position–if you were in 1st, you got mostly bananas, if you were 7th or 8th, you’d get a lot of lightning bolts, inbetweeners got a lot of shells. It’s certainly not as pronounced as puzzle fighter, but it did make for some damn exciting matches and some unexpected comebacks.
March 17th, 2006 at 10:31 am
There was a mod for Quake called Expert Quake that did auto-handicapping, though it was more towards bringing the game into equilibrium than swinging a pendulum. The rules were, first one to fifty points wins. Scoring a kill gets you one point. Being killed makes you lose a point, unless you’re already at 0. You start with access to all the weapons. As your score grows, your weapon choices become restricted, starting with the most powerful weapons: at ten points (or something - I don’t remember precisely) you lose access to the Lightning Gun, at eighteen, you lose access to the Rocket Launcher, and so forth until you reach a score of 49 and lose access to the plain old Shotgun. The game-winning kill HAS to be scored using the axe, which in Quake is a slow swinging melee weapon that requires several hits to inflict a fatality.
March 17th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Puyo Puyo 4 for DC (aka Puyo Puyon) was very similar in this regard. There are several characters which have “super attacks” such as clearing away all the clear blocks (usually can only be cleared by clearing blocks next to them), turning the board upside down, etc. I love playing these characters. All you have to do is stack up loads and loads of pieces as the other person drops the odd clear piece here and there. You’re almost to the top, your character is doing their “I’m about to die” animation… and then you hit the super attack. All those pieces drop down and connect, and suddenly they have about 5 billion clear pieces queued for their side. I’ve seen that repeat multiple times too, until someone runs out of super attacks (which must be regained by clearing blocks the old fashioned way).
Very interesting game. Not quite as exciting as Puzzle Fighter (I agree, it’s awesome :))
March 18th, 2006 at 2:55 am
[…] Slippery Slope and Perpetual Comeback Why some games are designed to be won and lost far before the game’s official end. (tags: games design science) […]
March 18th, 2006 at 11:10 am
There’s a whole genre of Japanese puzzle games that feature “perpetual comeback”. Try the Magical Drop series for example, or Puzzloop. Probably the best example is “Money Puzzle Exchanger” (aka “Money Idol Exchanger”). Again, it features tokens in the player’s bin, but this time they are coins, and are shuffled around to make change. Five adjacent one yen pieces become a single five yen coin; two 50’s become a single 100, and two 500’s that touch disappear. Add to that wildcard coins, that either remove or round up whatever denomination of coins they land on, and the fact that like in Puzzle Fighter, combos or chains act as a damage multiplier, and a losing game can very rapidly become a winning one.
March 18th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Havent you ever played multiplayer tetris on the gameboy? I’m talking about the original tetris that came with the original gameboy here, not the numerous lesser versions they’ve put out recently. It is by far the perfect example of this (besides being one of the rockin’est games in history). Two ways to win: line out (get 25 lines), or force the opponent to the top. 2 lines on your screen sends 1 row to the bottom of the opponent’s screen, 3 lines sends 2, and a tetris sends all four. Both players recieve the same pieces in the same order (as far as i’ve ever been able to tell). The catch is that all sent lines have the same spot to place a 1×4, effectively giving the other player the ability to send all those lines right back if given the right peice. It’s an old tactic to go as slow as possible, wait for them to send two or three tetris’ (tetrises? tetri? tetrad? whatever.) and then burst through pieces as fast as possible to get 1×4s. It’s also rather interesting when one player stays two or three pieces behind his opponent, and immediately sends back every tetris sent to him, resulting in a sort of shoving contest. The addition of the heighth meter off to the left assists in knowing exactly the right time to send lines. I’m fairly sure this predates pretty much all the examples on the page - perhaps it was the inspiration to some of them?
March 19th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Multiplayer tetris makes me think of Tetris Attack, for the SNES, or Pokemon Puzzle League/Challenge for the N64/GBC (they’re very nearly identical), my favorite console game ever. It is also subject to the perpetual comeback principle. Wonderful article, by the way. :D
April 23rd, 2006 at 4:04 pm
The original Unreal Tournament shipped with an absolutely brilliant mutator called “Fatboy.” Whenever you fragged someone, you would become slightly fatter and easier to hit. Whenever you got fragged, you would become slightly thinner and harder to hit.
The secret is to disguise your game’s handicaps as rewards.
June 5th, 2006 at 12:09 am
Mario Kart has this syndrome in spades. use the lower positions to gain items like the triple red shell. theoretically if everyone shares the same tactics no one would finish the race.
1st place is the worst place to be for most of the game. unless its the ds version where 1 sucessful attack combined with snaking leads to a slippery slope effect. but of course you use the lower places to get triple reds first.
For this reason i dont think mario kart is a legitimate competitive game at all. (SNES version is exempt from this critiscism)
June 13th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
That’s not true in all versions of Mario Kart. In Mario Kart: Double Dash, they had the clever idea of giving each character a special item. The catch is that each character’s special item only really appeared in certain places, and it was tailored to help people in those places. This introduced a whole new competitive aspect of choosing your two characters based on what items you would need. You could use a character like Baby Mario/Baby Luigi who got the Chain Chomp, an item you basically didn’t get if you were doing better than 7th, but it was insanely powerful and rocketed you several places forward while causing everyone inbetween to spin out. The extreme was the special for DK and Diddy; the got giant bananas that were very common in first place. These giant bananas weren’t nearly as flashy as other specials, but they were amazing. They basically not only acted as a “get out of jail free” card for all sorts of shells, but they allowed you to hinder those who would hope to approach. A smart player would take shortcuts and then clog the shortcuts with giant bananas. Giant bananas also broke into three smaller bananas when hit so it’s not like they are a one shot either. There were also evasion techniques in that game to avoid all varieties of shells, even the dreaded blue shell. So basically I’m saying that Mario Kart: DD really does qualify as a competitive game, and it is only really held back by a lack of 8 player online multiplayer and a silly restriction against two people choosing the same character. This all relates to slippery slope as you choose how slippery the slope is. If you choose a character combination like Waluigi/Diddy, you’ll be able to hold a lead very easily, but it will be very, very hard for you to reclaim one. However, a combination like Toad/Baby Luigi will make it very easy to make drastic comebacks, but you’ll lose the lead as quickly as you gain it. I personally was very disappointed in Mario Kart DS as it threw away all the great ideas of this game instead of developing them further, and you are right about the slippery slope it has that it really didn’t need.
June 21st, 2006 at 5:39 am
Mario Kart 64 I belive also gives a slight speed bonus to those in the back.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
I found another perpetual comeback situation in the form of Advance Wars: Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS. It is a grid-based turn-based war strategy game akin to Fire Emblem. In it, the more casualties a team takes, the higher their “super meter” builds up, and the super meter powers are very effective. Better yet, in some battles, two Commanding Officers tag-team, and each has his or her own super meter. If both super meters fill, not only do both super powers activate, but the team who is using a “tag power” also gets to use each unit TWICE, which essentially gives them two turns in a row.
These double-turn double-super tag powers can only be charged up when a Commanding Officer LOSES UNITS. Thus, the more damage you take, the more damage you can deal; a tag power, using two waves of units that are powered up by the two super powers, can completely turn the tide of battle. It isn’t complete perpetual comeback; the lost units still do weaken the CO who lost them; however, it’s a method that combats slippery slope, and very effectively at that.
June 28th, 2006 at 5:43 am
Total Annihilation is an excellent example of a perpetual comeback strategy game.
C&C is a great one for bouncing back, too - it’s harder to do than in TA, but it’s a lot easier than in starcraft.
June 29th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Warmaker, CO Powers in the Advance Wars series are already around for Perpetual Comeback, such as Andy’s Hyper Repair, which repairs his units; Eagle’s Lightning Strike, which allows any units that have already moved (besides foot soldiers, obviously to prevent them from instantly taking the enemy HQ) to move again; and Drake’s Tsunami, which damages all enemy units. Tag Breaks are overpowered if not broken broken, for the same reason that Eagle’s Lightning Drive in AWDS is: they can be charged up during the turn and the drawbacks of doing that to use them as soon as possible and convenient will be minimal.
June 29th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Wow, I’m surprised this article is still around… I read it so much time ago. It’s a great article, by the way! I often remember of it when I’m thinking about a game…
I agree with nick and Warmaker: Tetris Attack and Advance Wars are two great examples of perpetual comeback. Doing chains and combos in Tetris Attack will make garbage pieces fall in the opponent’s screen. But these will become regular pieces if you clear pieces that are touching them, which gives the opponent ammunition to attack you back! Not to mention that the big garbage blocks are great for making long chains, which in turn, drops a huge block in the opponent’s screen… This is why, with skilled players, VS Mode battles take so much time to end that they even lose the fun. (Hah, an example of a perpetual comeback system that backfires?)
In Advance Wars, receiving damage makes your power meter charge 2x or 4x faster (depends on the game: 1, 2 or DS) than dealing damage. This means that the losing side will get its powers earlier and more frequently, allowing them to do a comeback if they play right. The Tag Powers are broken, though - you practically win (as long as you weren’t losing horribly before) if you get one before your opponent. This is an example of an overdone slippery slope preventor…
July 9th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
First off, I want to say congrats on all these excellent articles I’ve recently been reading! Second, there’s another DS game out there that uses the Perpetual Comeback theory, which I would consider to be the next Tetris: Meteos. Multiple colored Meteos (blocks) fall consistantly from the top of the screen, and you use the touch screen to align 3 or more of the same color Meteos to launch them upwards. The ones that go above the top of the screen will be launched at an opponent’s planet (screen) as unmatchable black Meteos, which turn into matchable colored ones after a short period. So, hitting your opponent with a large attack that fails could leave them to counterattack in full force! There’s also a technique that allows you to be invulnerable to meteos that are launched at your planet for as long as you can keep it up (the game has a system to keep this under control). So you also have to keep this in mind, as your entire attack could be instantly launched against you!
Different planets also have different gravity, burn times (how long the black meteos stay black), etc. so there’s variety in how you play them. Beginners and agressive players prefer the planets where matches instantly rocket matches to the top, resulting in consistant small attacks, whereas more conservative, one hit KO players would tend towards a planet that allows them to build up a huge combo (matches rocket upward and fall slowly, allowing for chances to match the floating ones together for a huge, full-screen rocket platform where the right ignition could easily finish off an opponent).
Finally, I’d like to address the Advance Wars tag powers. I believe these were made to combat the “slippery slope” effect that previous games had. In evenly matched games between two good players, the winner was practically always the one who could first sieze the key strategic location(s)- once captured, there was virtually no chance of it being recaptured, and defeat was only a matter of time. Tag powers can make that once-impossible comeback possible, if the defender can hold off long enough for such an opportunity.
July 13th, 2006 at 7:54 am
The person who takes the key locations can typically afford to kamikaze or quasi-kamikaze a few units in order to charge up their own COP Meters. Also, COP Meters can still be charged up before any COP is used, including any that allows double-turn, which is also the problem with AWDS Eagle’s Lightning Drive. So TBs are a case of absolutism, which is an awful thing to base balance for anything around to start with.
August 12th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
I came to this site because i was looking for the good formula to use for online games/board games, in terms of losses. ie, if attacker has 2x the army of the defender, attacker losses x%, defender losses y%. But, instead i find this useful article. Doesn’t help with my problem, but helps with some other ideas, like the comeback mechanics..
Anyway, if you wish to see my ‘work’ in ‘action’ head over to www.thelenshar.net/MOI
Also try email me, if that doesn’t work, at:
josh AT thelenshar.net
August 14th, 2006 at 1:41 am
“Total Annihilation is an excellent example of a perpetual comeback strategy game.”
It’s harder to defend a large base than a small one. So that levels out the slope a bit, but killing resource buildings sets the victim at a disadvantage. So no, it’s not a perpetual comback game. If a large base is harder to defend, still, imagine that you attack such a base, and destroy some of it, you will have used your strength to make his base look more like your own.
I know one game that has perpetual comeback. It’s a WarCraft 3 custom map. It’s a game of miniature golf where players can place obstacles on the course. Firstly, the player that is in the lead gets to go as the last one, and all the obstacles that has been placed on the other players still remain. The reason for not putting out all obstacles in the beginning is of course you have to put them where it will be the most problematic for the current player.
In addition to that, every one sees the scoreboard so everyone will try to ruin the game as much as possible for the player that’s in the lead. Not exactly, but you know what I mean.
That said, I don’t think that is any fun. It basically means that if you play good in the beginning of the game, it doesn’t matter, because you will get so harassed by the other players. I’d rather have slippery slope than that. But, I do not mean that perpetual comeback is bad.
With the example of most fighting games where one only loses health is kind of good. But it doesn’t set back the victims ability to fight. But the player obviously is at a disadvantage, because of the health. The point is, the attacker must gain something in a successful attack.
Slippery slope is not always bad. Most games have slippery slope. Counter-Strike, my favourite game, has it. The money system is designed to level out the slippery slope, so that it doesn’t make comback all too hard. But it’s also the money system itself that introduced the slippery slope. Anyways, a game without the money system (all players has access to everything, all the time) would still be almost the same game. It’s the strategy during the rounds that counts. And most of the time player will have sufficient money. But the money system, and slippery slope, adds some additional strategy to the game. You have to take decisions like: “Should we try to defuse the bomb and win the round, or save our weapons?”, “Should we buy cheap weapons and no granades now, when we know they have weapons but not much money, to force them into an eco the next round or should we let them win this round and stack up on money?” and so on.
Also, having a slippery slope makes players fight harder to gain the advantage. That’s, to me, a good thing with slippery slopes.
August 18th, 2006 at 5:39 am
This is probably a delayed response to the posts contained here, but perhaps someone will still read it. What Sirlin is talking about when he says ‘Perpetual Comeback’ is not somehow giving consolation to the losing party, it’s about actually having the ‘losing party’ at a disadvantage. It is not uncommon in video games for the losing player to receive certain bonuses, such as Mario Kart or Quake, but this does not truly exemplify slippery slope, since in Mario Kart, regardless of the powerups the guy behind you picks up, you remain in the lead, and in control of the match. In Quake, it may be likely that your opponent will kill you again, but during the dog-fight, you will damage him and if the pattern keeps going on, with you each trading kills, you will still win since you went first.
To truly understand what Sirlin is talking about, you have to play Puzzle Fighter. I guess there’s just no other way to really understand what he means. Not only does the losing player receive certain consolation prizes, as it were, he is actually put at a positional advantage. The player who appears to be losing is, in fact, not losing at all. He has more power than his opponent. This is, as Sirlin said, a very slippery slope in and of itself, excuse the use of the term. What I mean by this is that if you give TOO much of an advantage to the losing player, it could become a bad idea to ever do anything, lest you gain the lead and have the opponent beat you clean. This could lead to a really horrible game.
Puzzle Fighter is beautiful because it doesn’t make you ‘never attack’, in fact, you can feel free to attack as often as you want if your opponent has failed to set up a defense to your Counter Gem, or isn’t taking advangtage of your weak colours (doesn’t know what he’s doing). However, when two good players go up against eachother, the game doesn’t become a boring stall-fest, it becomes a race of tactics, strategy, and a little luck to see who can set themselves up for the biggest ‘one-two punch’, as it were, and finish off their opponent in one fell swoop.
No offense to the guys who brought up the games I mentioned, or even other games like Counter-Strike or Tetris, but I think you just need to play Puzzle Fighter to get it.
September 22nd, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I dunno, Tetris Attack is different than normal tetris and pretty much has the same concept, and it came out first.
September 25th, 2006 at 6:36 am
One response: Total Annihilation, while an amazing game, does not have perpetual comeback in any way. It has a Mario Kart-like comeback mechanism: when you defend your base you can cash in on the wreckage of enemy units. It also has great comeback potential in multiplayer, because in the late game, map control and base size are no guarantee of victory. Neither of these is what Sirlin is actually talking about, which is the ability to leapfrog off of the opponent’s progress towards victory.
October 3rd, 2006 at 12:48 pm
In my opinion, the classic board game that exhibits this quality best is backgammon. In backgammon, in order to win you must block off points on your inner board. However, if you build your points improperly, or even have an exceptionally awkward roll of the dice, you may be forced to leave a blot that can be captured by an opponent’s man on the board. Even the most stable positions leave a threat of capture and further contact.
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:13 pm
I believe another good example of a fighting game with slippery slope and perpetual comeback is super smash brothers melee. While damaging other opponents and racking up percent, opponents are knocked back farther and farther. While this aids in killing the opponent, it also makes them harder to combo, and at higher level play it is much easier to kill with a good combo or edgeguard than it is to chase after an opponent at high percent (as they are in “evade and deal as much damage as you can before you die” mode). Thus, the character at the higher percent, while being easier to knockout with one strong attack, is at the same time harder to kill as strong attacks are usually very laggy and are best combo’d into. Though smash brothers may not be as good an example as puzzle fighter, I believe it is worth notion as I think this aspect of the game allows for very possible comebacks when the player plays smart.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:39 am
Cool to see a comment from another SSBM player! It’s true, the closer to being KOed you get, the more difficult it is to land a strong attack on you. I wouldn’t really call this a true “perpetual comeback” device however, because while it is making it more difficult for the opponent to get rid of you, it isn’t giving you any true advantage. Also, competetive SSBM is usually played with 4 stocks, and the number of stocks you have left doesn’t have any effect on the game at all, so someone could still have all their stocks, in the high percent range, against an opponent who only has one left, and be difficult to KO despite having a big lead.
October 21st, 2006 at 5:09 am
My pick for this “perpetual comeback” is Tetris 2 for SNES (I imagine Puzzle Fighter is similar).
Requisite Description of the game:
SNES Tetris 2 VS Mode is two grids with falling blocks, but they have 3 colors (it’s exactly an advanced version of Dr. Mario). There’s a bunch of tiny nuances to it, but it’s all for the better.
There’s two ways to win: clear all your ‘hard’ blocks or overflow the opponent. Combos (break 3 pieces, blocks fall, break 3 more pieces, and so on) send fast fallers down on the opponent. Breaking a ‘flashy’ block both shrinks your opponent’s grid and expands your own (if it was shrunken).
This leads to a very fun and addictive ’seesaw-ing’ of the winner until finally someone wins.
At higher skills levels (me and my friend), the game is more intricate than simply ‘not making mistakes’, which is how you normally lose games of Tetris 2. You actually try not to break blocks, instead setting up combos that you finally break at the last moment to rain down death on the opponent nonstop.
There is a counter-strat to this, though, which is to quickly break your ‘flashy’ blocks at the bottom of the grid to shrink their grid, which completely disables their high-stacking combos. I’ve had games where I’ve had to survive with half my blocks sticking up through the ceiling because my combos were disrupted in this way.
The counter-counter-strat to breaking ‘flashy’ blocks to shrink grids is a ‘delayed’ flashy strat. If the enemy breaks say 5 flashies very quickly, your grid is 5 rows smaller and his is still max size. That puts lots of pressure on you. However, if you now break 5 flashies, you get your size back to max and his side is the one 5 rows smaller, and he hasn’t the flashies to attack back. His flashies gave +5 row advantage early, but your flashies gave you an effective +10 row advantage because they were late.
However, once me and my friend got skillful enough, the counter-counter-strat becomes the best strat. You simply keep your side of the grid very clean (I call it clean for all colors lining up and dirty if you’ve jumbled your colors) so you are not vulnerable to either chain-drops (of reasonable size) or a flashy attack. When the players are very good, overflow is a bad strat, and simply clearing all the requisite blocks is the best strat. Then the game loses some of its appeal.
That is, until you crank up the speed and initial height settings more than enough to make the chain strat and flashy strat viable again. I personally love this pendulum of momentum, but many would argue that it removes most of the skill from the start of the game.
November 10th, 2006 at 10:20 am
After reading this article I was thinking about my favorite game genre (RTS games) and how perpetual comeback could ever be implemented into it. At first I found it nearly impossible. Sure, there are things you can do to help the player come back like allowing them to scavenge dead bodies and salvage destroyed vehicles but that means you have to be in a position to actually kill those things so that is not really perpetual comeback at all but just a benefit easier to optain while defending.
An idea I had for perpetual comeback in an RTS was very different. I’ve heard of an up and coming RTS game (Warhammer: Mark of something or another I think) where all units share a common mana pool. I assume it just goes up over time. What would happen if losing your own units caused this mana pool to increase a lot faster than actually waiting on it? Then an entire new set of tactics would emerge. You would have to decide “Do I need this unit more than the mana?”. New abilities like the ‘ring power’ stuff in BFME, BFME2, and COH could be added that require very high amounts in your mana pool so even if you’re getting raped you could summon units to help or use an ability that gives you resources to build units or fend off attackers with strictly offensive abilities. This system though would be ‘close’ to perpetual comback but still not quite there yet.
You could turn that system even closer to a perpetual comeback system by giving bonuses to a player with higher mana.
The other idea I had was a ‘zeal’ kind of thing in RTS’s. This idea was somewhat brought on by Warhammer 40k:Dawn of War/Winter Assault/New expanion thing. Basically, instead of decreasing the effectiveness of your remaining troops when one dies by lowering morale what if you changed the morale meter to a sort of anger meter. When an allied unit dies the rest of your units become more angry even to the point where they nearly go insane and become very powerful. This is just a random idea though.
What if an economic system in an RTS was based on this idea of perpetual comback? The only thing I can remotely think of is Upkeep in WC3 that is similar to this. I suppose all of these ideas combined would make a game with a ‘fail safe’ for losing but never really perpetual comeback.
The very last comeback idea I had for RTS is that, what if when you killed a building all the units that were keeping that building operational hop out and help your forces win.
And I actually thought perpetual comback was possible in RTS games…
If any of you can think of a non-broken idea for perpetual comeback in RTS games then please tell me. e-mail lordqzip@yahoo.com
November 17th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Tetris Attack / Pokemon Puzzle League / Panel de Pon is it, and absolutely has the Perpetual Comeback.
I appreciate the elegance of Tetris Attack… the “swap 2 piece, >= 3 goes away” mechanic is lovely and pure.
The thing I most dislike about Puzzle Fighter is how each character has his or her own pattern. I find the “memorization” aspect kind of nasty, as well as the asymmetry. I think a fighting game fan might appreciate those same aspects, allowing a strong and weak player to balance that way, and finding hidden strengths, but still… give me Tetris Attack any day.
November 18th, 2006 at 12:17 am
There are also fighting games that have a perpetual comeback of sorts.
Currently, only the King of Fighters series and the Last Blade come to my mind, but anyway, in these games you gain access to your character’s most destructive super-attacks (”desperation moves”) only when you get extremely low on life. So basically if you’re starting to lose a battle, sometimes it’s good strategy to intentionally take a bit more damage so you end up in a position to unleash the decisive strike.
November 18th, 2006 at 12:50 am
“Puyo Pop Fever” for a couple systems has this “perpetual comeback” idea. Player1’s combos queue up pieces to drop on player2, and player2’s combo’s can “cancel out” the queue; when player2 does this, it fills up a ‘fever meter’ that allows them to enter “fever mode”, which presents them with large, pre-set fields of blocks that are easily cleared for GINORMOUS combos.
There are essentially 2 strategies I’ve found for Puyo Pop Fever:
1. Do almost nothing, wait for your opponent to send pieces, and cancel them out, get
fever mode, and smash them in one fell swoop.
2. Build up a super-hugegantic combo with your field to kill the opponent in one fell swoop.
Strategy #2 is favored by the insane CPU opponents, and is incredebily difficult to do. Getting a 2-player game where both players use strategy #1 is boring - both purposely don’t drop pieces quickly because they’re waiting for the opponent to do something so they can counter it.
November 18th, 2006 at 2:27 am
Two stand out in my mind, Poy Poy for the orginal PS, a simple game of throwing rocks, logs or whatever is supplied per board, at three other players. Always easy to set up and great to play sober or not, and World of Warcraft. I am not a big fan of the easiest MMOG ever made but it is the first multiplayer game my girlfriend has ever played. She was stuck on Sims 2 for so long I thought I would never turn her into a gamer but now she asks me if we can go play (since we keep our couple characters seperate from the rest). Now if I can only get her to play Vanguard or WarHammer when they come out.
November 18th, 2006 at 8:05 am
while reading this i had an idea for a perpetual comeback style rts revolving around strength switching your types of skills. so as you became stronger the tactics which your build options would allow would be more suited to fighting similar sized armies but succeptable to smaller more tactical style raids. to put this as an example consider if in C&C when you had a networth less than a certain value you had access to the stealthier more tactical nod forces but then you would slowly be phased into the rigid style GDI heavy armour style of play. If you coupled this with a switch between salvage or kidnap style abilities into WMD’s you would have a system were if the proper tactics were employed by a recently defeated commander they could stage a comeback but would still be at a disadvantage in their total strength leaving them succeptable if they ever run into a full enemy force. meaning that you would have a bit of guerilla warfare at the end of the game. also this should probably be time limited as it could also lead to chasing after that last goddamn stealthed unit
November 18th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Don’t forget NASCAR.
Really. The cars are all pretty much identical. The car in front has the most disadvantage. Those behind get to draft the cars in front of them. This gives rise to some pretty interesting strategy.
So if you ever wondered what people see in NASCAR, now you know: it’s just like Puzzle Fighter!
November 19th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Handicapping should only be used to normalize skill differences when playing with friends in a closed environment or to offset situations where momentum can make a situation unfun for one side involved.
November 20th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
Another game of the “counter-counter” type is Twinkle Star Sprites where shot enemuies are passed back to and fro between each player’s half of the screen. Each time this happens they become more powerful but rhere is a limit to the number of times (3) this can be done.
November 25th, 2006 at 2:50 am
Thought I might mention the Initiative system in Game Boy Wars 3. It’s a lesser form of perpetual comeback, or at least a way to stop slippery slope. Here’s how it basically works:
-Each unit has a base Initiatve rating. They have that amount at the start of each player’s phase.
-There’s also an Initiative Cost, which is subtracted from the unit’s Initiative for each space it has to move.
-If both units have similar Initiative ratings, then they’ll attack simultaneously. If not, then the one with the advantage attacks first, which is bound to hurt the disadvantaged unit since attack power relies on HP.
As you can see, a player can have a good deal of control over the center of the map, but that player may not be able to attack effectively because moving is bound to be required to attack and a punishing counterattack could result, and the other player is going to have time to rebuild and strike back with a vengeance.
(Game Boy Wars 3 was rather extreme with this, though, even with the existence of matchups where the unit that gets the first attack wouldn’t matter. The attacking unit doesn’t gain a bonus, which turns dogfights into a mess.)
December 7th, 2006 at 3:16 am
Another game that makes use of perpetual comeback, while also avoiding slippery slope (until near the end) is the Game of Thrones CCG.
Quick description: The goal of the game is to claim the Iron Throne by acruing 15 (or 20) power. Power can be acrued in a number of ways, but virtually all of them require characters to participate in challenges to get it. Thus, the player who is winning the character fight is the one who will win the game, usually.
As a result, the focus of the game tends to be on who has the characters available. Quality and Quantity are both viable routes to go, so long as the route isn’t extreme.
The game thus revolves around being able to eliminate the opponent’s characters, either in play or before they enter play, while simultaneously protecting your own. And characters die very quickly here - the game is especially true to the source material in that respect. If you can get off a couple of targetted kills (rather than simply the kill that results from a challenge, which the loser gets to pick), you can quickly send the opponent down a slippery slope.
This is especially important due to the fact that most of the ways of acruing power (the win condition), killing characters, and discarding cards from opponent’s hand require offensive victories. If the opponent can’t mount an effective offense, they’re in trouble.
Enter House Martell. Martell is unique among the houses in that they don’t rely upon winning on offense to get most of their kills or hand discards (although they are dangerously good at both). Instead, they have a number of vengence effects: kill a character of theirs (or beat them in a challenge), and in return they kill one of your characters, or discard cards from your hand. It’s usually an unfavorable rate of exchange (kill one of your guys in exchange for one of theirs - usually a fodder - and a card), but the fact that they have just bypassed your fodder makes it harder for you to keep on winning, while making it easier for them to do so. In effect, they create conditions where they can exercise their strengths by losing at their weaknesses.
Obviously they can’t rely exclusively on “vengence” to win. But, the anti-slippery slope mechanic radically alters their playing style and their design space. FFG has had to be extremely careful about what else they give Martell, simply because giving them most of the “standard tools” would instantly create a broken house. No other house has the Vengence tool, and it makes Martell a tricky house to play as and against.
December 21st, 2006 at 3:57 pm
One rts I think no one has mentioned yet is Battle Realms. In the game, instead of creating new units from scratch players are given a new peasant, that is generated every x seconds from a randomly chosen peasant hut (the standard resource building). These peasants can be used as resource gatherers or sent to one of (from memory) four or five training buildings to be trained into certain different combat/support units. These units can also be sent into one of the other buildings to be trained into more advanced units up to two more times (at which point the most advanced available unit is created).
The point, though, is that the amount of time before the next peasant is generated is inversely proportional to your population size. The larger your population the longer before your next peasant. The smaller your population the smaller the time. With this system, whenever a player were at a numerical disadvantage he would be gaining peasants faster than the opponent. These peasants could then eventually be trained into new troops.
December 22nd, 2006 at 5:32 am
Hmm yes Battle Realms does have an ingenious comeback idea. It is actually of my favourite games, cos who can say no to Samurai!!!
Back to topic, there are interesting strategies in BR, because if you say keep your army small and constantly attack the enemy, not only will you never run out of ‘men’, but he will then be forced to do similar things. The problem with this is that he will be able to get a tech advantage, due to you not really having time to upgrade your units to the more powerful ones. Of course it also varies depending on which team you play.
I think they balance it fairly well, the idea of the more you have, the less quickly you get more men, however it can depend on the map and the playing style of whether it is balanced or not. For example, if peasant production is way way faster than training them to military men, then you would be more inclined to have a smaller army, because you get people faster than your opponent can kill them, meanwhile you build up large reserves. However, with this you would obviously be in an even better position on larger maps, but what about if training military men was about equal. In this case i think that they have this type of balance in the game, but again it depends on the map size. Obviously a defender will always have the advantage, because while travelling to his base he can then build his army a bit more, no to mention the tower defences.
January 8th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I disagree with the statements that “There basically aren’t comebacks in Starcraft,” and also with the implied lack of combacks in chess. In starcraft, comebacks are fairly common in high levels of play, and even in relatively low levels of play. Rarely do rushes predict the outcome of the game unless they are incredibly devastating(i.e. numerous workers killed, little to no compensation for the defender).
I am not very good at fighters or FPS games, but I think one could make an argument that there is a bit of slippery slope even in these games. When you are very low on health, you cannot use strategies that involve exchanging of damage, and other suicidal-ish strategies. In SSBM, for example, if one player is at one life and the other has two, the second player will have more options open up to him if he is DK or kirby. Either of those characters can suicide with the player with 1 life and win the game, so the player who is losing must avoid certain situations, making his play weaker.
In Virtua Fighter, you say that ring outs allow for comebacks. In chess, there are brilliancies in many games where a player will be down a few pawns or even a piece, yet they find a combination giving them checkmate in several moves. Also, sacrificing a piece to gain a perpetual check or stalemate occurs very often when a player is down material.
I feel that the slippery slope mentiond in many of these games is more due to bias of the writer than any actual aspect of the game. Since he is much more experienced in fighters than strategy games, he does not realize the possibility of comebacks in strategy games.
It is quite evident to me that he especially knows very little about chess. Most games in chess DO end when a piece is lost, they do not continue on until checkmate. When a knight is lost, there is no slippery slope leading to checkmate, this is just the end of the game. However, this is not to say the game ends prematurely compared to fighting games. In chess games at high level, winning a knight or bishop is usually the result of several move combinations or even the result of obtaining a stronger position throughout the entire 20-30 moves of the game.
January 8th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Meteos for Nintendo DS.
The idea is that you have to fill up your oppenent(s) screen with block, making a row of 3 of the same colour will launch the meteos up. While they are moving up any meteos falling, or that your foe sends, will slow down the launched meteos, any fired meteos are unuseable and the meteos you used to launch your lot are also unuseable, but you can line up any of the unused meteos ontop of the intial set. Thus sending more back.
The main problem is when players aren`t using the same planet… or when beginners play and don`t see that launching everything quickly actually hurts them.
Meteos is one of the best multiplayer puzzle games I have played.
January 26th, 2007 at 1:24 am
perpetual comeback is an interesting aspect that can destroy a game, or be the very foundation of it. pure perpetual comeback seems to be very uncommon and i think that is, besides other factors, because of the “reality background” of many games: almost any rts, be it ww2, sci-fi or fantasy, has that background of armies opposing each other using military tactics. cutting enemy support lines, getting rid of isolated enemy units and so on. this “reality background” (even when it’s fictional) forces these games into the real-world pattern of slippery slope. that could explain, why perpetual comeback is significantly more frequent in puzzle games: they simply lack any “reality background”, more than any other genre.
the key to perpetual comeback in other genres, say strategy, may be finding an aspect of perpetual comeback in the “reality background” and integrate that into the game concept. one relatively successful (but as far as i’m concerned not really convincing) example for that is civ4.
when one player chooses to gain an advantage by attacking another, it’s more than a simple “the stronger civ wins the war”. the attacker suffers from war weariness stronger than the defender, making his population revolt and thus cutting productivity. in addition to that, the more military units you have outside your borders, the stronger this effect gets. the second effect is “imperial overstretch”. when you manage to conquer a number of enemy cities, your economy will suffer. that is because every city far enough from your capital costs gold. this may lead so far, that research and production come to a complete halt in large empires, which gives the smaller countries not only the chance to catch up, but actually to get better and stronger than the former hegemonial power.
in fact there are strategies that are all about waging a defensive war all the time to bring down the opponents economy until your technological advantage is so huge, that you could conquer most of the world in a couple of turns. of course this feels more like abuse than anything else, but at least it’s one approach to perpetual comeback in other genres.
January 31st, 2007 at 6:27 am
As far as cardgames go, Hearts seems to possess this interesting trait.
The goal of Hearts is to avoid gaining points. However, if a player manages to gain all the points possible in the game, everyone ELSE is punished instead.
The closer a single player gets to really losing, the closer everyone else gets to really losing.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
If you are a great fan of Puzzle Fighters, you should definitely check Tetris Attack. It is as good as as puzzle fighters and a little more complex.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:52 am
The PC game Rise of Legends has some interesting comeback mechanics. Every time a player builds a unit he already has, it costs more and takes longer to build than the last one. Now, not only does this encourage diversification of units, but it also lends itself to comeback. It makes it hard to create a truly dominating army because your units cost more and come out slower while your ahead. Or you could diversify and build different unit creating building, but this leaves you spending resources on a building rather than an immediate military, giving your opponent further chance to catch up if he assaults at the right time.
June 21st, 2007 at 10:35 am
I’m just reading your articles with great enthusiam (such that it’s now 4:30am). Here I’m reminded of a great family board game that I enjoyed when I was younger - The Hare & Tortoise.
You choose how many squares you wish to advance, but it costs carrots and the costs goes up exponentially with distance (well, triangularly - 1 carrot for 1 square, 3 for 2, 6 for 3 etc).
The trick is that the amount of carrots you receive each turn depends on your position in the race, 10 times your current position. Also there are “juggling the hare” squares where you roll a dice and add the number to your position to recieve a reward/penalty. The higher numbers give you better rewards, lower numbers worse, so it’s preferable to be in last before taking the risk.
There’s much more to the game than I’ve mentioned & it’s a worthwhile family/group game.
June 29th, 2007 at 4:27 am
This isn’t really perpetual comeback, but it’s close to it. Wobbly Bobbly, a multiplayer game in the GCN Wario Ware, has quite interesting gameplay. Up to four players each have one turtle to sit on. First, a multiplayer minigame is played. The winner of that gets to play one of the microgames the Wario Ware series is known for. If that player wins it, all other players get another turtle to sit on. If he loses, he gets a small turtle. Then, the turtles flip onto their backs and the players have to balance for 5 seconds. The more turtles stacked, the harder it is to stay on. If you fall off, your character gets turned into a turtle. The last player standing wins.
So a Wario Ware veteran would have a huge advantage over those new to the series, right? Wrong. Any characters transformed into a turtle can still play. If they win during the multiplayer round, the one-player microgame is skipped and the other players all get another turtle. Here’s the fun part: During the balancing round, the players transformed into turtles get to bump the other players and try to knock them off their turtles. This gives the winning players a disadvantage, and allows the ones who lose to take revenge.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Dylan: I completely disagree. The veteran players should rarely lose, and nearly never against those new to the series. Even with two ennemy turtles bumping his tower of turtles for “The sake of fairness”, he shouldn’t have many turtles compared to the last one left, and should win pretty easily.
And the loser players have already lost. They can NOT win, let alone comeback. So the winning player is only truly at a disatvantage if the loser players try to make him lose because he’s too good or something, but other than that, the winning player should win.
Wario Ware veterans DO have a huge advantage compared to those new to the series, simple as that.
July 7th, 2007 at 10:06 am
This phenomenon is sometimes called a “Death Spiral” effect, in roleplaying games at least. The Riddle of Steel is an RPG which boasts one of the most realistic, sophisticated combat systems ever devised for a swords and sorcery game, but it has a critical flaw compared to something like D&D. As characters become wounded they lose their ability to push resources into both offense and defense, and therefore become even more likely to be hurt and so on. This means that in simple one on one situations where a single fighter fights another, a first strike can be all that’s required. As I understand it the game also has mechanics for heroes to mitigate this death spiral, but it’s still an issue.
In things like RPG’s though, where you have a lot of different variables acting on a single element of competition, there is the everpresent risk of excessive synergy. A character who becomes stronger when he deals damage is on a sort of reversed spiral, where dealing damage causes him to do more damage which causes him to deal more damage which causes him to do even more damage. This even extends to things like resource gathering in MMORPG style environments, where the most powerful characters have the ability to get the most powerful gear which allows them to collect even more powerful gear to become more powerful ad nauseum. The end result will not truly reach infinitely far for practical reasons (only so much gear, only so much killing you can practically do), but the end result is always that these effects far outshine others and become staples of character design while the game designers scratch their head trying to reign everything in. Inevitably it’s just an endless series of band-aids because the degree to which players can indulge themselves in infinite geometric growth is hard to predict. Suddenly a “do +100% damage when you kill an enemy” ability becomes much more powerful when weapons become powerful enough to kill in one hit, for example.
There’s a lot of different ways to try and fix that, but the one I’ve noticed succeed more than any other is the sanity check. While there is an intellectual thrill in finding out how to make a game spell or a magic the gathering card do infinite damage, or in your case finding an infinite combo, if the designers only intended you to do a pittance they might just be better off defining their upper limits up front in the rules.
This is way off topic for competitive games, but even non-competitive games have to worry about slopes, they just go up instead of down.
August 3rd, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Something I really like about the physics-based gameplay of Super Smash Bros. Melee is the extreme care the attacker must take to prevent the opponent from making a comeback — and the ability the defender has to get a comeback. There are many situations where if you hit your opponent and they “DI” (directional influence) away from your next hit in the combo and you misread/mispredict their DI so you miss, they can “tech” the hit (by pressing a button before they hit the ground) to recover really fast and then rush you. What I like about this is it’s not automatic.. the player getting hit must DI AND tech to recover — but this can be countered by the offensive player if they take DI into consideration — so when you hit your opponent, you have to play “harder/smarter” if the defender knows what they’re doing, otherwise you find the roles reversed.
October 22nd, 2007 at 1:48 am
Shogi ^^ Japanese chess. The difference from regular chess is that the board is 9×9, you can use the pieces you capture and place them anywhere on the board, so exchanges might actually HELP your opponent, because you wasted tempo getting the piece in range to be exhanged. You can also promote any piece out of the 21, excluding 3 (king and 2 gold generals). Rooks and Bishops get enhanced movement ability when they promote, and make powerful drops. Often, 2 players will both be on the verge of checkmate and make “drops” of pieces back and forth to attack each other’s kings. Often, you have checkmates given by a player who’s down in material ^^.
Truly an amazing game, I recommend it to anyone.
October 24th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Sega Rally favors the one who is behind, he drives faster. So falling behind, and then driving with the same quality will always catch up.
October 28th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Duelmasters has a continual comeback system
It is very much a magic clone(hey it’s made by the same people)
But the key difference being instead of life the game uses shields, is shield is a card, and when you lose your shields you get to add those cards to your hand. Theres also certain special cards(shield triggers) which can be played when you take damage without paying resources.
November 1st, 2007 at 2:04 am
They aren’t video games, but check out <a href=”http://www.gipf.com”>the GIPF games</a>, especially YINSH. You play to three points in YINSH, but each time you score a point, you have to remove one of your pieces from the board. As a result, there’s a catchup mechanism built into the game.
I’ve also heard “slippery slope” called a “death spiral”.
December 26th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Agree with above comments concerning Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon. It preceded Puzzle Fighter by ~1 year and works in a similar fashion vis a vis the ’slippery slope.’ I love Puzzle Fighter and its many clones, but the ‘freeze’ mechanic of TA is simply amazing. Meaning that as long as your brain can move fast enough you can be dead 100 times but still remain alive and continue to attack. Compare that to the instant death possible in PF. In human matches victory sometimes comes down to pure mental fatigue!
Lack of pattern memorization is also another huge plus for TA, as Kirk said. Mind you I still memorized all of the old and new ones in PF ;)
I recently discovered a remake of TA for the Nintendo DS called Planet Puzzle League. It is wonderful, easily the best multiplayer puzzle game of all time. Why? The DS stylus of course. You can react faster and more creatively than you ever thought possible when not limited by how quickly you can push the swap icon around the board. Of course with an increase in human abilities the computer had to be improved as well . . .
I implore anyone with a DS to pick up this game and challenge the hard mode AI in garbage mode. Or a puzzle-game loving friend. I’m still on stage 7 of 10; soon I think I will admit the AI is more powerful.
Anyways great article as always Sirlin. I feel better knowing you are among the people updating Puzzle Fighter.
December 27th, 2007 at 6:26 am
Well, I’m going to say this as nicely as I can. From what I’ve read on Mr. Sirlin here, he seems to have a fairly strong grip on the concept of fighting games. He understands the mechanics, the mentalities involved, as well as “what it takes to win.” He has also attended tournaments and played fighting games at the competitive level. That’s all well and good. However, based on his comments regarding the “slippery slope” nature of games such as chess and StarCraft, it has become apparent that he has much less experience in the realm of strategy games. I will attempt to clear up some of these awkward misrepresentations in order to minimize the damage that is done to these games.
I can understand why Mr. Sirlin was tempted to dub these games “slippery slope” - someone used to playing fighting games, where all you have to focus on is one character and his/her moveset, would be very likely to generalize about different types of complexities in different types of games and bring them to their own level. By this, I mean they take all the layers, schools of thought, and processes within a given game and “compress” them all into one, convenient little layer that can be easily attacked.
Mr. Sirlin has done just this. He has taken the games of StarCraft and chess, reduced them into mono-faceted trinkets, and fashioned a convenient generalization about “what tips the balance” in each game and thus makes them slippery slope. He even posted a picture of a few Zealots beating off some Zerglings, and labeled the picture something like, “The outcome of this game of StarCraft has been basically determined: Zerg will lose the game.” I have to admit - this made me laugh. To think that you can make such a massive generalization about the outcome of a game when there are so, so many options and so many more factors to consider before the game actually ends is appalling. Basically, Mr. Sirlin claims that whoever loses the first battle or loses workers first is going to lose. And “there are basically no comebacks.” I am inclined to think that Mr. Sirlin did not truly tap into the competitive experience behind the game of StarCraft. But, this could only be expected – he has probably spent a far greater amount of time working with fighting games than with strategy games. The two are extremely different, and thus making the transition from one to the other would be no easy task. Even so, it’s a shame that StarCraft and chess were labeled as “slippery slope” and used as examples for the term. To show how ridiculous this argument is, I will simply apply it to something that Mr. Sirlin can, no doubt, understand (and defend): Street Fighter.
Let’s pretend that I’m someone with little or no knowledge of fighting games. I come into contact with Street Fighter and become instantly enraged as I see how “slippery slope” the game is. Heck, it’s so slippery, it’s a “vertical slope” game – there’s NO coming back, period. I say this because I know that each character on the screen has a health bar. This health bar is what determines how close each character is to death; i.e., how close that character’s opponent is to winning. I will now make the claim that the character that earns the FIRST HIT is “pretty much” the winner, and there’s “basically no coming back” for their opponent. Why do I say this? Because OBVIOUSLY, that health bar above your character is the ONLY thing that matters. As SOON as you take a hit, you are that much closer to death than your opponent is. Even worse, your opponent can SEE this! Not only do YOU know that you’re closer to death, but HE knows! And at this point, when a character takes the first hit, the game has become a horrible, slippery, muddy, centipede-infested slope: the character who took that first hit will have to hit his/her opponent MORE than his/her opponent will have to hit him to win the match. It will therefore be MUCH easier for that character’s opponent to win because he has to hit the other character LESS to win, and he KNOWS it. So there’s the whole psychological factor there as well, putting pressure on the character that got hit first. Not fair – slippery slope. And, to save Mr. Sirlin the trouble, I won’t even BEGIN to talk about IMBALANCE in fighting games and how that contributes to the slippery slope.
So – is Street Fighter slippery slope? Hah, no – of course not. Is any fighting game? Not any that I’ve heard of. Now let’s examine how Mr. Sirlin applied this argument to StarCraft and chess.
By Mr. Sirlin’s definition, a slippery slope game is one in which, when “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.” Alright, now that that’s settled, let’s start with StarCraft.
First, let’s talk about the picture that Mr. Sirlin posted on his site. In it, you see some zealots dispatching some rushing zerglings, and the caption reads, “The outcome of this game of StarCraft was basically decided during this early rush: Zerg will lose the game.” Now let’s think about what this implies: by losing a few zerglings, that Zerg player has just LOST that game, with no chance at coming back, according to Mr. Sirlin. The Zerg player cannot, for example, dance his remaining zerglings out of the zealot’s range and go harass his workers – oh no, he can’t do that. The Zerg player cannot, for example, do a fast tech to mutalisks and raze the Protoss player’s probes – of course not. Do…do you think he could post a zergling at the choke of the Protoss player’s base to see when his opponent is sending an attack? No, dummy! He can’t do THAAAAT! He already lost, remember? He lost a few zerglings to the Protoss player’s zealots…he’s lost the game, okay!? I mean, really, why doesn’t the Zerg player just LEAVE…he knows he can’t win, right? Heh…hopefully, you get the idea. Mr. Sirlin has made the same mistake that my hypothetical Street Fighter criticizer made a couple paragraphs back: he assumed that the game revolved around a SINGLE aspect of gameplay; in Street Fighter’s case, it was the character’s healthbar, while in StarCraft’s case, it was the outcome of the first rush. Both are uneducated, obvious assumptions on the part of the criticizer, and both indicate that the criticizer does not know enough about the game in question.
Without railing too much on Mr. Sirlin’s skill at StarCraft, let me just say this: StarCraft is a game that is played at extremely high competitive levels. It can be extremely difficult and intimidating to jump through all the hoops necessary to understand the game on a competitive level. Most, MOST people cannot do it…in fact, most cannot even come close. Some people are tempted to write the game off as “slippery slope”, as Mr. Sirlin did: they look only at the superficial layers of the game (i.e. the tangible units, buildings, workers that each player possesses) and make snap judgments on how the game works, based off of those puny glimpses of the bigger picture. You may as well say you know how much water’s in a pond by measuring the mass of one drop out of that pond – good luck. StarCraft is a game that can change any second. Comebacks happen all the time, and it’s impossible to “predict” the way that any game will go because it all comes down to the player. The example picture that Mr. Sirlin posted on his site tells you nothing – that Zerg player may show up a few minutes later with five lurkers and blockade that Protoss player from expanding. Then the Zerg player will expand twice, gain more resources, and fly in with a fleet of Guardians and Queens and lay waste to the Protoss base. Or, the Protoss player may decide to press his advantage against the Zerg player and rush him – only to be repelled by Sunken colonies and driven back to his base. The Zerg player can then counter with a batch of Mutalisks and take out some defenseless probes that the Protoss player forgot to fortify because he was busy rushing. You see where I’m going with this? The possibilities of a game like StarCraft are essentially infinite – anything can happen at any time, and you can’t reduce the game to “who loses the first rush.” If the game was really like that, no one would play it, because no one likes knowing they’re going to lose. Watching a professionally-played StarCraft game would help you understand what I’m talking about (and also make you go “Wow!”, but that’s another story…). There’s a reason that StarCraft is the number one professionally-played competitive game in the world – and, I assure you, it’s not because it’s “slippery slope.”
Now let’s take a look at chess. By Mr. Sirlin’s logic, the player with less pieces is bound to lose the game – he/she cannot “bounce back.” Again, let’s remember the ignorant criticizer of Street Fighter. This criticizer assumed that the game revolved around the health bar and how much each character had remaining. He did not take into account the fact that each character can STILL harm the other, the fact that one player’s overconfidence may lead him into a deliberate trap planned by the other character, the fact that, even with only one “hit” worth of health remaining, a character can still drain his/her opponent’s health bar to zero. All he looked at was the health bar. Likewise, all Mr. Sirlin looked at with StarCraft was the status/amount of each player’s units and workers, while ignoring all the other tactics, strategies, mind tricks, etc. that can change the course of the game. Mr. Sirlin makes the same error with chess – he looks at the game based on WHAT a player has, not on HOW that player USES what he/she has, regardless of how much he/she has. Let us now consider what it takes to win a game of chess: the opponent’s king must be checkmated, meaning that he must have “nowhere to run”, so to speak. How many pieces does it take to checkmate a king? 16? 10? 5? Does it matter? All that MATTERS is that the king is “checkmated” – heck, a player’s OWN pieces can contribute to a checkmate against their OWN king, since in some cases the king is actually restricted by the placement of that player’s own pieces. Again, as with StarCraft, there are so many mental tricks/traps/tactics that can be used to steer the course of the game to different directions, and that’s what determines who wins: NOT how many pieces you have, but HOW you use them to your advantage. (If I was really mean, I’d say that Mr. Sirlin hasn’t quite understood yet how to “play to win” in chess and StarCraft, but I won’t say that because I think his statements arise more from his circumstances than from his intellect – I have no doubt he’s a smart man). Again, watching chess at the highly competitive level would reveal that the pieces a player has do not matter nearly as much as what the player can do with what he has. To say that the player with LESS pieces in a chess match will lose the game is utterly, horribly incorrect. It would much more accurate to say that the player with less BRAINS in a chess match will lose – because, he can do so much less with the pieces he has, while his opponent can do so much more with the pieces he has, even though he has less.
Part of the problem with truly understanding chess and StarCraft is that the aspects that really define them as games are hidden – to even begin to understand them, you have to play the game for an incredibly long time and suffer some pretty humiliating losses. StarCraft, for example, is criticized for being “anti-newb” – it forces you to perform incredibly fast feats of micro and macro just to stay in the game, let alone execute any complex strategies. Most players cannot even wrap their heads around maintaining several bases/expansions, keeping a constant stream of units flowing from their production buildings, scouting/harassing their opponent constantly, etc. etc. etc. All for good reason – it’s incredibly difficult. Same thing with chess: beginning players tend to examine only what’s on the board at present; they do not think ahead and put themselves in their opponent’s shoes. Top chess players have the ability to literally re-create the chessboard in their head and plan their tactics mentally – sometimes up to four or five moves ahead of where they are currently. And, guess what? They RECREATE that “imaginary chess board” EVERY TIME a new move is made, and they try to act accordingly. Most people, again, cannot understand this and thus cannot understand what the game of chess really IS. If you can’t understand the higher levels of a game, you can’t understand the game completely because at the higher levels is where the game is truly defined. That’s where each and every aspect of that game is being milked to perfection, and many people choose to write that perfection off because they don’t understand it.
Mr. Sirlin has recognized this perfection is games such as Street Fighter; more power to him for that. However, he has not seen it, played it, or recognized it yet in chess and StarCraft. I encourage Mr. Sirlin to delve more deeply into these games, although I doubt that he would have the time to do this. After all, Mr. Sirlin, I’d say you’ve already accomplished enough with your Street Fighter career, and I congratulate you heartily on making it to the top-level tournaments. I feel bad having to correct this misrepresentation of StarCraft and chess, but I think it will help others understand more about what defines the greatness of those games. To tell the truth, I have a lot in common with you – I, too, think that Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of the best platformer games ever created, and to this day the SNES remains my favorite video game console. So, as a friend to a friend, I ask you: please, try not to misrepresent the complexity of games like StarCraft and chess – you’re only discouraging players from learning to play some of the best games in the world.
December 27th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Dear Slippery, your comments are condescending and ridiculous. Chess and StarCraft obviously have slippery slope, by the very definition of the term. They have it whether or not I’m here to label it or not. Having fewer units to attack reduces your ability to attack. Does it reduce it zero? No. Does it reduce it? Obviously yes.
This does not make those games bad. Both of them are good and your assumption that I don’t know much about them is quite bold. I’ll let the other various commentors explain the rest.
–Sirlin
December 27th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
You couldn’t be more wrong, slippery. Sirlin is not “picking on” starcraft or chess… slippery slope is not a problem in these games, it’s just a fact that exists, and most players value that element of the gameplay. It’s also an element used in many other games mentioned in comments here, including both fighting games and FPSes.
And Patrick’s comment about Chess shows a complete lack of understanding of the tenets of game design. The *reason* a player might forfeit is because he’s been disadvantaged by the loss of piece. The fact that the disadvantage exists proves the existence of slippery slope as an element of game design. The fact of the actual forfeit itself is meaningless though… it just means the player correctly read that he would lose by the actual end of the game, which is to say, he saw he was too far down the slope, and didn’t even bother trying to climb back up.
You seem to be implying that the concept of slippery slope can’t possibly exist unless every single game of chess ever played shows a disadvantaged player losing. That’s completely missing the point of the article. Comebacks are possible, and are nearly required to make gameplay enjoyable. Slippery slope is just a way of generalizing how positions of advantage and disadvantage tend to affect the outcome on average. The existence of a brilliancy in a specific chess game is a completely seperate topic. The only way you could possibly relate it, is if you did some research on how often brilliances decided a game, and made a comparison that way.
December 28th, 2007 at 12:54 am
You seem to be confusing “point the finger at” with “using as examples.” Should he have used crappier and obscure games as his examples? Should he have described the slippery slope in KKND and Crossfire?
December 28th, 2007 at 2:56 am
No - that’s not even the point. I could use “point the finger” OR I could use “using as examples”… my point would be the same either way. It’s not that he should be using more obscure games - it’s that he overexaggerated the “slippery slope” in StarCraft and chess by saying things like “there’s basically no comebacks.” That makes it sound like the game is very one-sided and shallow after the first battle is fought, and the game goes downhill for the “losing player” from there. It’s not at all an accurate representation of these games, OR of the concept of slippery slope - THAT’S the point.
If you want, I can re-word it just for you:
Mr. Sirlin is using StarCraft and chess as inaccurate examples of the concept of slippery slope. All games have some degree of slippery slope, but comebacks are ALWAYS possible and the game is never determined as rapidly as Mr. Sirlin states in giving his examples. Games do not “suffer” from slippery slope, as Mr. Sirlin says, but are actually improved by it because they put pressure on BOTH players to do well, not just one. (Both players can experience slippery slope in the same game as the tide turns and tactics change). For example, the end of a game of StarCraft is almost never determined by the outcome of a Zealot VS Zergling rush in the first few minutes of the game. Perhaps Mr. Sirlin should have used a BETTER example than the one he did, in order to more accurately represent the point at which slippery slope starts to occur.
Basically, the problem is this: it was stated by Mr. Sirlin that games “suffer” from slippery slope. There are “basically no comebacks” and “the outcome of the game is determined long before it actually ends.” All massive generalizations. All inaccurate. And all very poor examples and explanations of what slippery slope is. I suggest that Mr. Sirlin update his pictures/examples of StarCraft and chess in order to better explain slippery slope. At this point, it sounds like a game with slippery slope is no fun to play at all because you know whether or not you’ll be losing/winning in the first few minutes of the game. All games have slippery slope, as we established before - if this is true, than that means that EVERY game would be boring and miserable to play. And we all know it’s not like that, right?
January 6th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Chess and Starcraft *obviously* have slippery slope. It’s so obvious that I don’t know how to explain it any more than I already have. When you start to lose, there is a force that pushes you to be more likely to lose. Can it be overcome? Yes, sometimes. But the existence of the force in the first place is the definition of slippery slope. These are terrific examples of slippery slope.
All things being equal, it would be better to make a game without slippery slope. Yes, Chess and Starcraft “suffer” from it, in the sense that slippery slope is not a good quality in a game. And when we weight all the good things and bad things about Chess and Starcraft, the final tally is that they are both good games. There is nothing to even argue about here because there is no other reasonable stance than what I just said. I mean, do you WANT the property that the game basically ends early and you make lame-duck moves for a while? Or do you somehow think losing pieces in Chess and Starcraft has NO negative effect at all on your ability to win? It’s preposterous. Slippery is just grandstanding for the sake of arguing on the internet.
–Sirlin
January 7th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Perhaps Slippery would appreciate some examples of games that don’t have a slippery slope. Puzzle fighter has already been covered in this page, so i’ll use two that I know of that have mechanisms to offset the slope: Settlers of Catan and Mario Kart 64
In settlers of Catan, if you pull ahead, then other players are able to punish you for it by trading with each other, and not with you. This means that your progress is stifled, and theirs is not. This does not mean that if you get in front you lose, it just means that it’s harder to keep your lead, and it means that games are usually very close.
There is a comparable effect in Starcraft free-for-all, but in a head-to-head or team battle, there is no disadvantage to being in the lead - having more units means that (everything else being equal) more of your units win a skirmish and you have *even more* units, and having more units makes it easier to get an expansion and get even more units still. That’s not to say that you lose immediately if you ever have less units than your opponent, but that’s the way to bet.
In Mario Kart 64, you get better weapons from the mystery boxes the further behind you are. In first place, your weapons are limited to green shells and bananas, both weapons that are tricky to use effectively, and slow down a single opponent. As you get further back, you start to get red shells that home but still only target one enemy, and further back still you get weapons like the lightning bolt that hits every single opponent on the track.
In Mario Kart, it is sometimes a viable strategy to deliberately lose the lead to try and scoop up some better weapons that will let you get back into the lead and keep it.
While we’re on Mario Kart, a racing game is a good analogy to rebut your claim that fighting games have a slippery slope. There is no inherit benefit in being ahead, only in being ahead at the finish line. If you are in last place for virtually the whole race, and pull ahead only in the last seconds, you still win, no more or less than if you were in the lead the whole time.
Similarly, in Street Fighter, you win by doing an entire bar’s worth of damage first. Getting hit doesn’t make you hit any less hard, or move any less quickly, and it doesn’t change your goal of doing an entire bar’s worth of damage before your opponent. Being ahead is a good thing, but it doesn’t change the balance.
By contrast, in the rush that Sirlin described, the defender loses a worker and is economically disadvantaged for the rest of the game. Not only is the defender disadvataged by having one less unit - but his ability to compete has been compromised - he is now getting less resources with which to build more units.
Slippery - In your defence, the picture and it’s caption does not match the description (in the picture, the zerg loses, but the protoss buildings suggest that the zerg were attacking, but the text describes a defender losing), but if you honestly feel that there is no slippery slope, let’s play some Starcraft for money. I’m not very good, and I’m sure the outcome of our first game will be far more decisive than the cost of 5 drones, so on the second game, let me kill 5 of your drones before we start. If you’re right, you should still win by a decisive margin, but slightly less so. I’ll bet you a crazy amount of money that those first 5 drones secure me victory - without them, your ability to compete is completely crippled.
Afterwards, we’ll try the comparable example with Street Fighter, and see how far a few hits before the fight starts go. I think you’ll find that it’s still a fairly level playing field - sure I’d rather have the extra health, but I can still put up a good fight without it.
Streetfighter doesn’t have a slippery slope, because you have access to all the same options whether you are in the lead or not.
Starcraft does have a slippery slope, because being in the lead gives you options your opponent does not have. In chess, you are only taking options away from your opponent, but the net result is still the same.
January 8th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Interestingly, there are a few “fighting games” with slippery slope. The Bushido Blade series comes to mind.
But in general, RTS games have slopes, fighting games have plateaus. Losing health puts you on a lower plateau, but your capability to win the round is not hindered by a conceptual slope (the “force that pushes you to be more likely to lose,” as Sirlin put it). Your winning is only hindered by the difference in plateau height, ignoring things like blocked specials being able to kill a critical health character, which was conceded in the original article. I suppose (potentially) increased stress from being low on health could be a factor as well, but that’s completely external to any game mechanics.
January 8th, 2008 at 7:21 am
My thoughts on slippery slope on fighting games… say your standard combo does, for example, 1/3rd of one player’s health. And we all know through applying yomi that landing that combo is basically a guessing game against your opponent. Given that one player has 1/3rd less life at any point in the game, they basically are required to guess correctly one more time than their opponent does in order to win. If it was a 50/50 guess, then it’s easy to assume the players would just exchange combos at that point by guessing correctly roughly the same number of times (assume equally skilled players), and the winner has already been decided, in a sense. Of course, there’s nothing inherently changed in the gameplay, as in some of these other games… but I think there’s a valid point there.
And to Slippery, you said:
“At this point, it sounds like a game with slippery slope is no fun to play at all because you know whether or not you’ll be losing/winning in the first few minutes of the game.”
Noone ever actually said that except you. In Chess, the point at which one player knows they’re going to lose usually comes when they forfeit, which is the whole point of forfeiting. There is almost never a section of the game that’s actually played where the game is completely one-sided.
You’re also still not understanding the conceptual element of the article. Sirlin starts his example with: “Consider two Starcraft players of nearly equal skill.”. Imagine two computers that play equally well, and use exactly the same strategy. It’s quite conceivable that an early rush could completely decide the game between those two computers. The fact that real human players have varying skill levels, and play using varying styles is what keeps the game interesting in practice. An early rush, at most, creates a very slight disadvantage for one player. Most players don’t know each other well enough to predict the outcome until a larger disadvantage appears, which is one reason to keep playing. And a slightly disadvantaged player of obviously greater skill usually has no trouble making a comeback at an early point such as that. However, none of that negates Sirlin’s generalization, which is still completely accurate.
January 11th, 2008 at 8:32 am
While it is not technically ‘perpetual comeback’, Chris Taylor’s RTS games (Total Anihilation, Supreme Commander) features wrecked metal that can be harvested to make more or your own war machine. So in effect every attack the opponent sends your way is just more potential resources for your coffiers. Games could be won/lost dependant on the reclaiming of an opponets destroyed Experimental unit left ony our doorstep.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Arathi Basin in World of Warcraft avoids Slippery Slope wonderfully:
There are 5 bases to capture and hold. The more bases you have, the more points/time you receive. But the more bases you have, the harder it is to keep them all.
Lovely article Dave!
January 30th, 2008 at 1:25 am
I think you’re underestimating the exponential effects that the first few minutes in a Starcraft game have on the rest of it. The game really, really does work exponentially in terms of early resource-collecting. Really, the biggest discovery in the game of Starcraft, in all likelihood, was the discovery that you can get an extra zerg drone (or whatever their resource collector is called) by having it turn into a building, then building another drone, then cancelling the building, resulting in an extra collector, which greatly affected how people play the Zerg, resulting in a great eventual differential in terms of resource collection.
But still, if somebody builds a supply center at the wrong time, either too early, stripping resources from SCV construction, or too late, maxing out the supplies…that’s it. Game over. GGPO. You lose. Hell, I’ve had people say that to me. “Oh, I forgot the supply depot, I lose.” And if I was a player of equal skill to them…that’d be true (I happen to suck at Starcraft, though I love it, so I still lose). SC is my favorite PC and RTS game of all time. But it’s got a pretty slippery slope. That’s not deniable.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:30 am
“But still, if somebody builds a supply center at the wrong time, either too early, stripping resources from SCV construction, or too late, maxing out the supplies…that’s it. Game over. GGPO. You lose. Hell, I’ve had people say that to me. “Oh, I forgot the supply depot, I lose.” And if I was a player of equal skill to them…that’d be true (I happen to suck at Starcraft, though I love it, so I still lose). SC is my favorite PC and RTS game of all time. But it’s got a pretty slippery slope. That’s not deniable.”
This is additionally evidenced by the huge emphasis on build orders. Aspiring (but not expert) players try to copy the build orders — and even building placement — of the pro players. Why? Because the early game really is that important in an even match.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:14 am
Wow - this forum’s really starting to heat up. As for my input, I don’t think it’s really fair to say that any one game is “slippery slope”, because, as multiple responses thus far have shown, EVERY game has some degree of what was described as a “slope.” For RTS games like StarCraft and WarCraft, you have the possibility of losing a large number of workers/soldiers at the beginning that would place your economy/army significantly behind that of your opponent, effectively crippling your chance at winning the game (as explained by Jules, Forty, Claytus, and spudlyff8fan). For fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter, if your health bar is lower than your opponent’s, you must make more successful “guesses” and score more hits overall against them to win, assuming that both players are familiar with the “Yomi layer” of the game (as explained by Claytus). Turn-based games such as chess could also arguably have “slopes”, although at the professional levels of chess, the first mistake almost always determines the game - whether or not this can even be called a “slope” is debatable, since essentially the game is OVER at that point, but we’ll call it a slope just for the sake of argument.
Another point I want to make is that, though all games have some semblance of slippery slope, it is not a bad thing in itself. Slippery slope puts pressure on both players to play well and to play better than their opponent. In StarCraft and WarCraft, you’re going to be extra careful to defend your workers from harm, because you know that if you lose enough, you’ll be put way behind in your game. In Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, Tekken, etc., you’ll obviously try as hard as you can to keep your health high because this will give you more “room for error” and allow you to make more guesses at your opponent’s moves and thus score more hits. In chess, the pressure is probably the greatest - you know that if you lose a single piece, then you have just lost the game. Basically, slippery slope puts the skills of the players to the ultimate test; the more slippery slope the game is, the more skilled, alert, and perceptive the players must be. For players who like hardcore competition, such a game is a dream come true.
My final point is that, no matter the “slope” of a game, comebacks are always possible. I think the original poster made an error in saying that “comebacks are basically impossible” in games with slippery slope, because comebacks can and do happen, especially at higher levels of play (this applies to all types of games, sometimes even chess). Humans are not supercomputers; as such, they will always make mistakes and those mistakes can always be capitalized upon by their opponents. At the true core of competitive sports/gaming/anything, I think it’s this quality that really spices up the experience - trying your hardest to play flawlessly while looking for flaws within your opponent’s strategy.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
One thing everyone kind of left out, including Sirlin, was that the theory is far different from the practice.
Player A gets the advantage with an early rush. Let’s label that advantage 10%. Player A then has to continue to play flawlessly to keep that advantage. The above poster says it best:
“Humans are not supercomputers; as such, they will always make mistakes…”
IF player A makes even the smallest of mistakes, or god forbid /luck/ comes into play (which it does, even in StarCraft) AND player B capitalises on it, the slippery slope effect reduced by X% — and possibly even neutralised or reversed (a “comeback”).
January 31st, 2008 at 11:30 am
While this is true, Chess, Starcraft undeniably has a slope so slippery that, as the Demoman in the “Meet the Demoman” video would say, “one crossed wire, one extra pinch of potassium chloride…ONE ERRANT TWITCH! AND KABLOOEY!”
If you make even the slightest little mistake at the beginning of a game of Starcraft, that really is that. You just can’t do anything about it, and in all likelihood, 99% of the time, you’re gonna lose because of that minute little part of the game. Is the game still fun? Yes. Competitively viable? Yes. Does it have a huge, glaring design flaw that it is nigh impossible to make a comeback after even the simplest little turn of events? Once again, yes.
If you really want to apply % likelihoods of comebacks, then 10% swings in momentum is immensely underestimating this in SC.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I hate to contradict you, but based on what you said about StarCraft, I’m going to have to assume you haven’t played the game very much. “One mistake = death?”
Let me make a point here. Is it possible to lose from one mistake in StarCraft? Yes. If you allow your opponent to shred your drones with a stimmed marine rush, for example, and leave you with no workers, you will lose the game. Congratulations. However, most mistakes in StarCraft are not game-determining. Why? Think about how shallow the game would be if that was the case - would anyone even bother playing if they knew that they’d lose after one mistake? StarCraft is currently the number-one competitively played video game in the world. (Chess being the number-one board game) Do you honestly think that players across the globe would play a game that “kills” a player for making a single mistake