Videogame Decathlon

[icycalm]

Here's what the fags did with my suggestion from the Best Videogame Player In The World article:

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=40323

Canabalt, Spelunky and Ziggurat as metrics for gaming skill, lol. Never change, fags.

So I thought I might take a stab at a real decathlon. Here's what I got:

1. Real-time Grand Strategy: Europa Universalis IV
2. Turn-based Grand Strategy: Sid Meier's Civilization IV
3. Real-time Strategy: Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
4. First-person Shooting: Far Cry 2
5. Third-person Shooting: Vanquish
6. Third-person Action: Bayonetta
7. Shooting: Ketsui: Kizuna Jigokutachi
8. 2D Fighting: Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R
9. 3D Fighting: Dead or Alive 4
10. 2D Action: Daimakaimura

Rhythm games are out because they are stupid and not videogames, sports games are out because they are stupid and not a genre anyways (sports is a theme). Racing games should perhaps be in, but I am not quite sure which titles would be candidates at this point, since the last time I was seriously into a racing game was ages ago, and I would anyway prefer to include a game, like Far Cry 2, which contains lots of driving in it. The point here is to think, not it terms of genre, but in terms of abilities. You don't want all genres tested, you want all human abilities tested. First you figure out the abilities, and then you go looking for which genres test them. In this sense, 2D action, 2D fighting and 2D shooting are extremely close, so you could conceivably cover all three genres with two or even one title. 2D fighting is also very close to 3D fighting, and so on. The list is anyway a first pass at the problem. Perhaps we could add a pattern-recognition game a la Tetris or Chu Chu Rocket or something, but then again this sort of thing is not very good as a videogame, so I'd rather not include it for the same reason I'd rather not include a rhythm game.

On the other hand, the purpose of the list is not to promote good videogames, but to test human abilities. So perhaps I should give ground here and include a rhythm game and Tetris or something. In which case I'd need to remove a couple of the redundant action games. So like I said, the list needs work, but at any rate it's already about 3 million times better than Canabalt, Spelunky and Ziggurat lol.

Note also that the game is one thing, and the form of the contest another. Even with games that allow versus play it's not clear whether the contest should take this form, since with many games the versus mode is merely an afterthought and does not include the full breadth and depth of the single-player experience. That's why I didn't pick something like Counter-Strike or Quake for the FPS: Far Cry 2 includes all the abilities that are tested by these games, but also dozens of others (on top of being the best FPS ever).

If I end up perfecting the list and the event forms at some point, and if we find some way of easily accepting and comparing submissions, I might be interested in competing in this thing.

[icycalm]

Ver. 2.0

1. Real-time Grand Strategy: Europa Universalis IV
2. Turn-based Grand Strategy: Sid Meier's Civilization IV
3. Real-time Strategy: Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
4. First-person Shooting: Far Cry 2
5. Third-person Action: Bayonetta
6. 2D Shooting: Ketsui: Kizuna Jigokutachi
7. 2D Fighting: Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R
8. Racing: ?
9. Rhythm: ?
10. Puzzle-Action: Tetris

I think this is a far better metric of abilities. I removed the 3D fighting entry since the 2D fighting one is almost identical, and also the third-person shooting entry, since it's very close to the first-person shooting one (and Bayonetta includes a little third-person shooting, even), and finally the 2D action entry, since it's very close to the 2D fighting and shooting ones that I am keeping. In their place I added racing, rhythm and puzzle-action entries -- though I'll probably need help with determining which games to represent them. I've not the faintest clue about rhythm games, for example, or Tetris versions or recent racing games.

[icycalm]

You might think I've left out a lot of genres, but that's not true. Take for example tactics games. My RTS choice includes a great deal of real-time tactics, and if you are good at real-time tactics, you'll also be good at turn-based tactics. Or city-building games. If you are good at building empires in Europa Universalis IV and Civ IV, and also at building good bases in Supreme Commander, you'll also be good at city-building games, whether real-time or turn-based.

Or take isometric CRPGs. I could add something like Baldur's Gate II or Temple of Elemental Evil, but if you are good at the strategy/tactics games I've already included, you'll be good at that too. Or take stat-heavy action like Diablo. If you are good at 2D action, in the form of the shooting and fighting entries I've included, and also good at the strategy games, you'll be good at that too. My choices hinge around the fact that I only have 10 slots to cover all human abilities tested by videogames to as great a depth and breadth as possible. So the question is, would a Baldur's Gate or a Diablo provide greater capacity for testing this than any other game currently on the list? -- because in order to include them, I'd have to knock off some other title. And the answer I think is no. Though the complexity of stuff like BG and Diablo is nothing to be sneered at, all the other games on my list that test relevant abilities are far greater heavyweights, in my estimation, so BG and Diablo-like games simply don't make the cut.

[icycalm]

Another category I just thought of is something like a flight simulator, or any other kind of vehicle simulator. If we can find the most heavy-hitting such game, it might be worth knocking something off the list for it.

[icycalm]

A racing game is a kind of vehicle simulator, but an extremely dumb one, since a car is about the easiest kind of vehicle to operate. What you are testing there is basically reflexes and little else (which are also tested in all the other action games, which is why this category is a little redundant). The point of the "simulator" category would be to test how good the player is at operating complex machinery like a fighter jet or a helicopter or a tank or a submarine, all of which require that you keep your eye on dozens of parameters at once, and everything while under extreme combat pressure.

[icycalm]

The winner of this competition -- as long as there were enough participants to be able to say that the winner is indeed "mankind's best" -- would be quite an individual. It'd be even better of course if, instead of action VIDEOGAMES you had action SPORTS (i.e. real-life sports). Then if you added some science and philosophy tests you could safely make him mankind's emperor and watch the species prosper under his reign. But I'll talk about that elsewhere. This is a videogame website, and if we manage to come up with a proper videogame decathlon it'd be a great first step.

[icycalm]

You can see how absurd the fags' choices are. They are deliberately picking the shallowest games they can think of, so that the distance between them and the winners will be as small as possible, in order for them not to come out looking like the utterly incompetent douches that they are. Canabalt, where your sprite moves on its own lol. And no thinking games at all. Only action games, and the shallowest ones that exist. Whereas in fact, for reasons I've already explained in the scoring essay, the thinking games are the most important ones -- from an educational point of view -- on the list.

[El Chaos]

I haven't played it yet, but from Szczepaniak's review it sounds like Tekki would make for a good choice in the vehicle simulator category.

[icycalm]

That's a good idea. However, I doubt it would work out in the end, because I doubt Tekki is anywhere near as complex as the most complex Western simulators. The Japanese are simply bad at this sort of thing, and I suspect that Tekki is at the level of complexity of an Armored Core, only with an impressive controller. Of course, we can't tell that from Szczepaniak's review because he doesn't really analyze the game apart from the permadeath feature (and that's why I have it in mind to either add some comments to the review, once I play the game, or write my own). So the jury is out on this suggestion, but I don't hold much hope for it.