Enjoyable Unbalance

Balance has become an important part of the "fun factor" of games. At least by today's standards. You'll hear the constant drone of the Starcraft players bantering "STARCRAFT IS TEH BEST GAME ON EARTH CAUSE IT'S SOOOOOOO BALANCED!!1!1!1one". The entire industry will make a case for balanced games.

After thinking about this for about 3 seconds, I thought "hold on, some of the most popular and successful (and fun) games of all time don't entirely meet this balanced requirement too well". An example from my games design lecture was that of Command and Conquer, where the Soviets were clearly more powerful than the allied units. And yet, it's still one of the most popular strategy games of all time.

One aspect of balance referred to the difficulty of player vs machine/environment games not suddenly ramping up. However...

Guitar Hero 3 is a fantastic game, and one of the best selling games of the current generation of consoles. It's an amazing multiplayer game and a highly satisfying singleplayer. After about the sixth set of songs, however, the difficulty ramps up to a ridiculous level. The note count of the songs almost double, and the rhythm of the songs almost disappears, leaving you relying purely on visuals and not audio to strum. And yet it's this level of challenge that completely adds to the enjoyment of the experience. Plus, it's created a culture of gamers that will be trying to get 100% on Through the Fire and The Flames for years to come.

Another aspect of balance is not having to rely on the player dying several times in order to make progress. But...

Megaman X on the Super Nintendo has made many "best games of the SNES" lists and is still a blast to play. The premise of the Megaman series was to play through levels with crazy robots and instant death traps at an extremely fast pace. One segment of the game has you jump on this go-cart and go down the side of a step hill. After about 5 seconds of standing still, you're killed by a massive amount of enemy lasers. You need to be jumping to get around them. However, jump too high and find yourself crushed between a wall and the cart. If, after playing through it another 10 times, you're still alive, you'll need to boost and jump, else you'll fall into a bottomless chasm and instantly die. Sheer bliss of fun getting the jumps and attacks just right.

So while complete unbalance could ruin a game, maybe a seasoned amount of unbalance would heighten the experience. It's worked in the past for Megaman, and it's worked more recently for those crazy rock 'n roll kids with their toy guitars. I think I need to process balance in games a bit more, and then put some more thoughts up later on.