Terror

I recently put a lot of time into "Mark of the Ninja". Its an exceptionally good 2-D Stealth platformer. I'm not gonna gush for too long, but its a great game with a nice balance of stealth and stabbing. But it did have one element to it that I loved to play with and wish was in more games. Terrorizing the guards.

There are a handful of ways of terrorizing guards in this game. You can string a guard up from a light post by his neck or drop a guards body in front of another, to name a few. When terrified, guards will first fire randomly in front of them, potentially hitting the other guards. From then on, that guard will move very slowly and be much easier to sneak past or kill. Its a potentially powerful tool in your ninja kit.

But what I liked best about this mechanic was how permanent it was. Once terrified, you could count on that guard being permanently shaky and maybe even shooting his friends again if you scared him again. It made me feel powerful, whenever I shook a guards psyche like that. It also over came a persistent flaw in the stealth genre: Guards forgetting they saw you.

Since Metal Gear Solid, stealth games have suffered from an unfortunately binary detection system that is difficult to overcome. When guards don't see, they follow a scripted path that is set up as a kind of puzzle. If you get detected, they rapidly converge and murder you unless you can run. But then, if you avoid them, after a while they will act like they never saw you and go back to their walk route. Now some games have a third state, cautious, that guards go into after the alarm is raised and is harder to bypass. But it still is pretty obvious that its scripted.

Now, thats not to say that the fear reaction isn't scripted, but its a more believable scripted. When terrified, its totally reasonable for a man to not want to leave an area and fire randomly in hopes hitting the ninja. Beyond that, it makes sense for people to be scared of you; you've killed a lot of people.

Lets take Dishonored as a game that might benefit from a terror state. Dishonored is a great stealth game that has much more believable guard behavior once you have been detected. But, it always struck me as odd that all these guards thought they could kill me. I mean, in the beginning of the game its fine, but as the game goes on, I had time and again easily murdered their compatriots and demonstrated my supernatural abilities. If I were a guard and saw a man reflect grenades with a hand wave and then teleport into a friend and stab him in the face, I would abandon my post. I think they ability to terrify enemies through demonstrations of bad-assery would be a great addition to such games.

He's only killed 49 men with magic. I got this. 

COG

Hopefully, the club will open soon. I really want to see KK Slider. In the mean time, I opened up the second floor of the museum, which apparently gives Celeste (Blather's Sister) a job. She was always my favorite character from Wild World. 

MUSEUM GOT BIGGER

Apparently this freaky thing is called the Napoleon fish.