If you haven’t watched it yet, PBS’s (yes, that PBS) Games/Show is ABSOLUTELY worth watching. I don’t always agree with it 100% but there is a lot of good material to feed your head.
Last month there was a particularly good episode on why Mario’s music is so catchy, and I have to say I found their conclussion really mind blowing:
Thought I’d share it.
Also, the Street Fighter episode was pretty good if you want more:
Hope you guys like it as much as I did.
That is pretty fascinating, that Mario’s music and the animations are on the same rhythm. That’s fascinating. But they didn’t touch on the two biggest factors toward something getting stuck in your head: Novelty and repetition. That’s why pop music hooks are always so strange and they repeat them over and over again, playing new music multiple times per hour on radio stations and throwing snippets in commercials, etc. Just think about how “lovely lady lumps” became a hit song. And Taylor Swift, end of story. Period.
Always thought it was interesting when people say things like “so and so fighting game allows people to be artists with the game as their canvas”…
That’s more my experience when I play fighting games.
It’s not like it’s as sophisticated as the game of chess:
…
I like his take on things. But there’s always a simpler (less interesting) take on the same situation that you can get more mileage out of.
You can divide the screen up into regions and all that in Street Fighter, but ultimately it comes down to a concept called ‘metagaming’. Which is, in a sense, hey we have a thousand different things you can do but these 15 work better than all the others. So, if we focus on these 15 things and then make strategies out of these 15 things then we always win against people who are still playing the game the normal way. When you watch two master players play, the characters are no longer dynamic, living breathing entities, but cannons that can pump out attacks over and over again while the players try to stay in sweet spots. Instead of playing this brilliant, high-flying game of masterful attacks it comes down to “Hadouken, Hadouken, Hadouken, Hadouken, K.O!!!”
Heh, yeah Sagat has ALWAYS been king of the cheese.