Good idea - Rainbow Six Vegas 2's experience system

Non-RPGs have often dabbled with adding in experience systems, and recently the idea seems to have really taken off in first person shooters. Halo 3 had fairly limited multiplayer progression, and then Call of Duty 4 had a fantastic online experience system. Now the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (and that's the last time I'm ever going to type the ridiculous football score name out in full) developers have implemented a logical progression from that.

In R6V2 you have a single character, who is shared across all three game types - campaign, multiplayer, and terrorist hunt - and every kill that you or your team makes earns you experience (though obviously you earn more for making the kills yourself). At certain experience levels you earn a new rank, and with those come new types of armour and camouflage.

R6V2 also adds the A.C.E.S system (I forget what it stands for), that rewards you for kills made in certain ways. So shooting enemies at long distance will improve your sniper level, and killing filthy terrorists with explosives increases your assault rating. Leveling up these categories gives you experience bonuses (towards your rank)and is also how you unlock weapons, themed to the category you improve.

Good idea - Army of Two's GPS

This game features a lovely map / waypointing system that overlays onto the screen, turning the entire thing into a nice simplified HUD view that simplifies and highlights the geometry. At the same time it winds a lovely bright spline along the player's route, and tags up anything that can be interacted with.

Despite it being both practical and very nice, I've not been able to find any screenshots on the internet of it. So you'll have to make do with this one that I took with a camera. Sorry.

Good idea - Overlord's jester

One of the many nice touches in the game is the jester who lives in your tower.

Whenever you're near him he'll shout out a nickname for your overlord, all of which are linked to in-game events. If, for example, you'd just butchered an entire village, he might refer to you as the "oppressor of humans".

As you progress through the game the number of nickname-worthy events increases, until eventually he has a whole roll of overblown titles for you, which he uses in the reverse order that you did them. The order actually has a nice side effect, in that standing around him quickly clues you up on what the last thing you did was.

Good idea - Video and photo editors

Video and photo editors in games are a brilliant idea, and thankfully this sort of thing seems to be getting more popular. All three of the big name 360 games I'm playing at the moment (Skate, Halo 3, and PGR4) have some sort of video or photo capturing mode.

There are two excellent reasons to include this sort of thing in a game.

First, it helps build community. Players will mess around in your game in the hope of getting an interesting video, and will want to share it with their friends. If their friends like what they see then you might even get an extra sale out of it!

Secondly, it's something that your marketing department will probably love you for forever. Screenshot taking and movie making is part of their job, so the better the tools are for this, the easier their job is. If you put it in as a game feature then everybody wins - they get something that has a good level of instruction, user friendliness, and functionality (instead of something hastily cobbled together in an afternoon because the developer was told they had to), and you get to use the time it takes to implement such a feature on something that's not going to be stripped from the release version. It's a USP for almost free, essentially.

Although it's a brilliant feature in these games, each gets some areas right, while being poor in others - I haven't come across something that I'd consider a 'perfect' implementation yet.



Skate's has the option to jog forwards and backwards as slowly or quickly as you like, and to set markers for camera and effects changes (adding slow motion, full screen effects, and the like). It uploads video footage as pre-rendered movies, so they can be viewed outside of the game (which makes them great for sharing online). That does, however, mean the videos downloaded to view on your console are displayed at a fixed resolution, and have larger file sizes.

Halo 3's theatre has background uploading and downloading of files, so once you have recorded your masterpiece you can keep playing the game while it uploads. It also stores the videos as raw data - so movies can only be viewed in-game, but do result in smaller files, and allows viewers to switch cameras on downloaded clips, and watch the movie in whatever resolution they use. Halo 3 also records entire matches, and allows you to share the whole thing (though you'd have to play a blinder for anyone to want to watch a full 15 minutes of you playing).



PGR4's editor I've only had a brief mess around with, but mainly seems to feature much more in-depth camera control - allowing you to set zoom, rotation, and focal points for your pictures.

Good idea - The Godfather's assassination missions

The Godfather game got a fair amount of flak, and it's easy to see why. Film license games never get an easy ride of it, but when you're doing a game of what's widely considered one of the best movies of all time you'd better hope you really ace it. And Godfather didn't.

That's not to say it's a terrible game, while there's plenty that could be improved upon, there are a lot of things it does very well.

One of them is the assassination side missions. Upon meeting with various made men you're instructed to whack a range of targets. Each has a little scenario set out with it, and each also offers a bonus objective.

Completing the bonus gives you much more respect and money, but they add a lot to the challenge. In a sandbox game you can usually kill anyone quite easily with your array of weapons, or just by running them over. But when you know that you'll treble your payout by shooting the target in the knees and then killing him with a broken bottle, it adds a motivation that can drastically alter how you approach the situation.

The beauty is that making the much harder objectives optional allows you to bypass any that you're having real trouble with, and fall back on your usual shotgun / molotov / car wielding ways to progress.

Good idea - The Darkness' loading cutscenes

The Darkness has quite long loading times between areas. In order to help maintain the immersion while the game brings up the next level the developers have put in little cutscenes.

These are little monologues by the main character giving details of his background, or filling you in on his thoughts on the story's progression. The story ones are triggered by entering the next level that the game knows you have to pass through to continue, whereas re-entering other locations gives more generic dialogue.

The protagonist stands under a single light in an otherwise featureless void, and the only other things involved are occasionally weapons - quite clever since it means that they only use resources that are guaranteed to be loaded in.

Good idea - Overlord's treasure room

The tower in Overlord is one of those in-game menu type things. Functionality-wise it's just a nice-looking hub that lets you access armoury and dungeon rooms that you could otherwise imagine being on a front-end options list.

It's dressed up nicely though. You can buy upgrades to make it look more impressive, and characters you bring back with you from the main game worlds can be seen wandering about it.

You can find out how much money you have at any time through the pause menu, but while you're in your tower it's always nice to visit the treasure room - a chamber that seems to serve no purpose but to visibly fill with your plundered loot. It gives you a sense that your wealth is increasing that you just can't get from numbers.

It's just a shame you can't interact with in, Scrooge McDuck style.