On the Roguelikes front:
Brogue. DoomRL is a great game, but its theme and reliance on ranged weapons means that it doesn’t accurately reflect most other traditional rougelikes. I think after playing Brogue people are “more equipped” for things like Nethack or DCSS than they are if they play DoomRL.
I’d disagree on Skullgirls for fighting games. Yes, the game is excellent and the tutorial is excellent- but the game really punishes being bad in ways that is harder and more discouraging than most games in the genre. I’d probably recommend Persona 4 Arena for 2D or Virtua Fighter for 3D over Skullgirls in that regard. Those two games also have excellent tutorials in the same category, and are much more new-player tolerant. (This can be defined as easier to understand why you lost, or easier for a worse player to do something against a better player)
One factor in Skullgirls favor is that the art/music draws in a lot of non-FG folk, so bad players can play equally bad players which may not help learning, but does help confidence. Skullgirls is super-depressing, much more than most other FGs when you’re punching above your weight class since the game encourages steamrolling.
For Shmups- maybe something like Little Red Barrel, but that’s an obscure game not on Steam.
Roguelikes- obviously Dredmor.
Strategy Games- maybe Warlock Master of the Arcane?
Mario 64 - It taught me to love 3D platformers. The camera can be problematic at times but aside from that, the game has a really smooth difficulty curve as it teaches you Mario’s various moves and jumps. Everyone playing this can be a master by the end of the game.
Rayman: Origins - Just like Mario 64 taught me 3D platforming, this game finally taught me how to appreciate a wonderfully designed 2D platformer that gets pretty insanely difficult by the end, having me perform moves with a pinpoint precision I didn’t even know I was capable of. It finally made me understand why people love the old 2D Mario games and games like Super Meat Boy.
Braid - Until I played Braid I used to hate puzzle games. That included most adventure games and the puzzles within them. But Braid has puzzles that are completely internally consistent and when you have that oh so satisfying aha moment, it is truly cathartic, unlike older adventure games where I said “what? That makes no sense”. After Braid, I’ve gotten better at puzzles games and adventure games.
Alstein, a quick Google tells me it’s Flying Red Barrel: Diary of a Little Aviator. Looks nice but I’m at work so can’t watch the video! I don’t think it matters if it’s not on Steam ;-)
I was late to the party with Mario 64, so late in fact that I couldn’t stand the early 3D graphics – and I’m pretty hardy when it comes to playing crusty old games! I’d probably go for Super Mario Galaxy or the sequel (which I haven’t played but have heard it’s tremendous) because they’re more up-to-date and full of crazy ideas thanks to the galaxy/planets/space thing going on.
I totally agree. I mention it above for exactly the same reasons. It’s just such a perfect introduction to the joys of platforming and the thrill of movement in two dimensions. Legends doesn’t really have that same quality unfortunately.
I never hated puzzle games but Braid and World of Goo really hung the genre up and beat all the fusty dust out of it. I think they’re both great gateway games.
Going by watching my wife the past few years, she really got into First Person Shooters with Bioshock and Borderlands. I believe the difficulty on them is not too great and since playing each of those, she is hooked and has played through all 3 Bioshock games. We also have played the heck out of Borderlands co-op both 1 & 2. We weren’t sure we should try them with the art style and not really being shooter fans, but both are wonderful games and broke us both into the genre. Both are also RPGs and have other genres that can be attached to them, but they are still first person and lots of shooting in them which we previously would write off right away. So:
Single player FPS (Action/RPG): Bioshock
Co-op FPS (Action/RPG): Borderlands, I still believe the 1st is the better gateway game as it seems to be a little more forgiving at the beginning if I recall correctly. The creatures at the start of Borderlands 2 can be a bear for beginners.
Please bold the genre so people can skim through the debates later on.
I now definitely encourage everyone to narrow down into subgenres. Trying to find a gateway strategy game is a bit silly.
I already mentioned the gateway game for wargames in the first post. Anyone who thinks differently will need a really good argument! I don’t think there is a ton of debate there like there is for these other genres.
You are a strange person so I’m not going to worry about your experience. :)
Are these on PC?? I guess I was also thinking ‘gateway’ in terms of easy access: games anyone can download from Steam and get going quickly. But I listed some iOS games too. Sometimes it can’t be helped.
Gateway? I try to think of potential gamers more optimistically. For instance with Roguelikes I say go right to a middleweight like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. For a Roguelike it’s pretty friendly. Yes there is still a lot to go through but with just a little guidance a fresh player can get going pretty quickly. Crawl remains my Roguelike go to. I love DoomRL to but that’s kind of its own thing.
I think people that are going to be into something will get there pretty quickly and while you definitely don’t want to overwhelm them with the complicated games you can probably get away with more than you might initially think. For instance worker placement I might not go right to Agricola although with the family version you probably could. I would bring out Village, one of my favorites, if I wanted to show them something they could buy. Carson City if I wanted to show a great game that’s out of print.
Well, I’m sure I have more but I say why not turn it up a notch and give them a little more credit. ;)
Tom M
@geggis: You might be right on the graphics being a barrier now for Mario 64. But I thought about Mario Galaxy and both that and the sequel use the waggle on wiimote that some people have a really tough time with. I’ve seen both my elder brother and my nephew not be able to pull off certain moves because they can’t waggle at the right time.
Yes and no. Some genres might benefit from training wheels. Others just need a decent presentation so people don’t bounce right off it. Rise of Flight is still going to take some commitment.
This reminds me of a debate that Matrix and Paradox had about pricing and presentation and the size of the potential market for serious strategy games. I think listing gateway games is very affirming. It says that anyone can learn to appreciate most genres. You just need a game with the barest concern for new players. The funny thing is how hard that is to find in some of the dark and dank genres. Whereas others, like roguelikes, have entered an era where newbies are embraced. You have a lot of good choices there.
I get it, and there is a place for gateway games for sure. I’m just saying you might not need to start with a Lords of Waterdeep or a super light Roguelike. With strategy and war games there are tons of really intricate designs with bad UI. You’ll probably need to work up to those and a game like Unity of Command is great. That’s also selling Unity short. Even though it has very simple rules and metrics its expertly designed and can be quite difficult. But, Unity can point you towards heavier designs.
The best gateway is interest. Get someone interested enough in a subject and they’ll follow.
Tom M
I have to agree with Shiren the Wanderer on the DS as what I consider the best intro roguelike. Warp Rattler said it doesn’t have perma-death, which I find confusing. Maybe you’re referring to the Wii game or other Mystery Dungeon games? Sure, when you die, items you place in banks persist, but that’s it and never seemed like the game changer to me. Shiren the Wanderer on DS has a fantastic simple interface that allows a new player to experience and explore the game at their leisure pretty easily. It doesn’t require a guide to play because the in-game tutorial / puzzles teach you all the tricks and depth the game has to offer. It has a great balance between a depth of play and accessibility.
I would argue against DoomRL. I love the game to death, but I tried to get a bunch of friends into DoomRL as an intro roguelike and it turned out quite poorly. I had a group of friends where once a month, someone would suggest a game and we’d all play it and discuss it that month (like a book club, but for video games). When it was my turn, I suggested DoomRL to an audience where I was the only roguelike fan. The issue I noticed most was that people didn’t understand the depth of the game. They thought the game was just mindlessly clicking through encounters till you randomly won or lost (like some action-rpgs). The various weird strategies for positioning is where a lot of the depth of DoomRL comes from (in my opinion), and none of them realized these strategies even existed until I pointed them out.
I’m tempted to instead recommend Brogue, as it’s my favorite roguelike and seems accessible from an insiders perspective. But I’ve similarly had issues with friends not understand how to work strategically around enemy abilities. For example, you want to fight the Jelly in a hallway or against a wall. For some people, these tactics don’t expose themselves unless pointed out and the game seems unreasonably cruel if you don’t pick up on them.
As for Eurogames, I like Agricola, but agree with Tom Mc that it seems a bit too heavy for a gateway game. I’ve had a surprising amount of luck with The Castles of Burgundy. It seems like a confusing game, but for some reason people seem to get it pretty quickly. It’s also complicated enough that once players get through it and feel comfortable with it, they’re usually willing to jump into heavier games more fearlessly. But hell, if you can get people started on Agricola, that’s awesome!
If Castles of Burgandy is working out well I suggest Trajan as another fine Feld design.
I think Agricola can work. It’s intuitive. Most of the mechanics and concepts work in a way people would expect. It’s just really hard to get all your moves optimized and the gap between an experienced player and a newcomer is going to be huge. It’s just not my first pick when I like Village so much and it’s easier to see what everyone else is doing.
Tom M
I should have specified that Agricola is best for people like me with no boardgaming friends. Pretty much all the iOS ports are a nice way to experience the rules and elegant mechanics in these types of games. You’ll need friends to really get into it.
Yes, and I argue that gateway games are the best way to do that. Speaking from personal experience, I am curious about all genres but no one will get me interested just by talking about them. Sometimes watching gameplay is insufficient too. I usually have to play to see why others like it.
I’ve put a lot of effort into appreciating a broad range of genres in the last 5 or 6 years since I started playing games again. I had all the hype and buzz QT3 could muster to get me interested. Finding that gateway game was still the hardest part.
Definitely. Trajan is my favorite Feld game, and I think Castles of Burgundy makes a nice stepping stone to it.
No, they’re both console- but fighting games on PC aren’t anywhere near where they need to be yet, especially for Japanese games.
It’s less about “scoring systems” and more that if you’ve ever seen the Giga Wing shield system in action, the vaunt in Jamestown instantly leads to head-scratching; it’s hard to imagine how the devs could see Giga Wing, a game that was designed and balanced around a constantly-recharging reflector shield, and think “hey, we should add that to our game, but nerf it into oblivion!”
I mentioned this, yes. You have to unlock it by playing through the regular one-level-at-a-time game, which I know drove off a lot of experienced players right away.
Yes, and this is definitely a good thing, but there are better shmups out there that also have compelling metagame components. I remembered that Space Invaders: Infinity Gene (iOS, 360, PS3) exists and is not import-only; that game uses a level-at-a-time system, but without forcing you to drop back to a menu constantly if you want to play all the levels straight through, and it does a good job of dripfeeding unlocks and introducing new gameplay mechanics without using a shop system or tutorials that break up the action. Unfortunately, the console versions are also widescreen vertizontals, a strong point against them, but unlike Jamestown, your ship in Infinity Gene moves fast, and it doesn’t have the annoying horizontal scrolling that Jamestown also has.
This seems more like an issue with your friends than with the games themselves. It’s easy to say pretty much any game is a bad introduction to its genre if you give it to someone who mindlessly rushes in, clicks on everything, and dies repeatedly without ever making an effort to understand what’s going on.
Sure, but I think a good gateway game can teach a player how to think about the genre rather then expect them to engage it on its level, especially when players are so unused to the genre they’re not sure what that level is. I think for someone unused to the genre, it’s easy to walk away from a roguelike thinking luck is more important then skill, and if you’d just gotten a warhammer earlier you could’ve dealt with that stupid pink jelly (or whatever the case may be). There’s enough going on in the game that it can easily obscure the parts you actually do control. Plus, I think the aesthetics of DoomRL make it seem more silly and less skill-based then it actually is, though that may just be personal.
Shiren does a great job showing you how to think about it through its tutorials / puzzles. It’s similar to Skullgirls in this respect. If you play fighting games mostly by hitting random buttons and slowly learning combos out of repeatedly playing against equally unskilled friends, a tutorial that explains how to think about mix-up combos (both as an attacker and a defender) is sort of a revelation. Similarly, the Shiren puzzles teach you how many different ways you can effectively use an item. They give you the tools to understand what you could’ve done differently in a game, or what you did wrong, which actually allows you to get better at and appreciate the game (and hopefully from there, the genre).
Yeah, but we’re talking about gateway games, which are by definition for people who haven’t seen the Giga Wing system in action. I’m prepared to concede to your superior knowledge of the genre that there are objectively better systems out there, but coming in with only cursory experience, the Vaunt system was fun. The same goes for the aspect ratio – I can intellectually see that it’s better for the playfield orientation to match the direction of the display, but non-committed players aren’t going to turn their monitors sideways, and in practice it didn’t impact my enjoyment that much, and was certainly more friendly than having massive unused areas on both sides of the screen.
You’re quick to discount the level-by-level structure, but I think it really is an enormous advantage to getting new players into the genre. The traditional arcade model suffers from a couple related issues that make it hard to present a challenging but manageable level of difficulty for the new player. In terms of challenge there’s not really a great middle-ground between going for a 1CC (unattainable until you’re already an expert) or credit-feeding (cheapens and trivializes the experience). You can pick an arbitrary number of continues, but then you’re in the position of having to make your own game balance, which can be unsatisfying. And if you do, by treating the game as something that has to be done all at once, you wind up dying 2/3 of the way through, and playing the earlier levels many more times than the later ones that you actually need practice on. By contrast, playing Jamestown’s final level on one of the upper difficulties gives you a set number of lives to get through that fixed challenge, and I had to practice and really develop mastery, so finally finishing it felt like a significant achievement.
But the bottom line is that I had dabbled and bounced off a few other highly regarded shmups, but Jamestown grabbed me enough to see it all the way through, and then to want to check out more of the genre, which is exactly what you want for a gateway game.
That’s the reason I didn’t recommend the later Mysterious Dungeon games – they don’t have permadeath and lose most of the unique appeal of roguelikes. However, Shiren does have it, since it was only the second game in the series and they didn’t move in that direction until later on. There are some relatively small persistent features (gradually opening up additional resources in towns with donations, storing a few items to pick up in a different run, opening up the chance of having allies join you), but after death you start at level 1 with no equipment. The persistence features do gradually give a little extra edge on subsequent runs (which is a nice middle ground to let players feel like they made some small progress before dying), but they’re not necessary and it’s quite possible for an experienced player to succeed on the first run on a new save file.
I think the lack of a race/class/skill system is actually a good thing for a new player, as it keeps it closer to the original Rogue, and means that players can focus on the core elements of turn-by-turn tactics and long-term resource management, without having to worry if they’re failing because they built their character wrong or picked the wrong class.
The other reason it’s a perfect gateway game is that it has Fei’s Problems, which are 100 individual puzzles that give you a fixed situation and are designed to teach some non-obvious aspect of the game’s/genre’s mechanics, most of which carry over and apply to other roguelikes as well.
DoomRL’s a good game, but also a pretty significant deviation from the core of the genre, with its emphasis on ranged combat and de-emphasis of inventory item management or item-ID. Brogue would probably be my first choice for a PC-based gateway, followed by Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.
However, I have to strongly disagree with those recommending Dungeons of Dredmor as a gateway. It’s amusing and attractive, but relatively shallow and unbalanced and doesn’t do a very good job of showing what’s cool about roguelikes. The vast majority of monsters are straightforward designs that don’t force you to vary your tactics at all. And between the crafting system’s piles of junk and the large, same-y levels, there’s a lot of unnecessary tedium.
I agree, and “RTFM” is a lot more important in DoomRL than in the Mysterious Dungeon games, which could make those better for new players not willing to spend a few minutes looking through documentation before they actually start playing the game. (Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky might actually be the best one for someone who already has a Pokémon background, as they’ll already understand some of the core mechanics specific to that subseries, making it easier to focus on picking up the Roguelike-specific mechanics. No permadeath, though.)
I completely agree with all of this, and it’s a big part of why shmups are so difficult for newcomers to get into; again, my main issue is with the implementation in Jamestown, where they seemingly added the option to play it in a traditional manner as an afterthought, an unlockable bonus mode earned by playing the game the way they want you to. (You could argue that making players clear stages in a proper run to unlock them in practice mode is just the same thing in reverse, but this is seen as acceptable by the people who buy and play shmups, while the other way isn’t.) Space Invaders: Infinity Gene effectively offers the same “level at a time” functionality if you really want it, but doesn’t force you to play it that way if you prefer the 1CC-or-bust approach.
Questions for everyone who’s defending Jamestown as a “gateway shmup”: What other shmups have you played after playing Jamestown, if any? What did or didn’t you like about those ones? What about those other shmups would make you wary of recommending them to someone with no experience with the genre? (Aside from “traditional arcade-style structure,” because that’s going to be a given for most games.)