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Too Much Unlockable Videogame Content Can Suck
Note : This is a rework of an older 8bitjoystick article that I did for Playfeed.com
Unlockable video game content can be a wonderful thing. It can be a Pavlovian joy to have more stuff unlocked and to have your game play actions positively rewarded like a laboratory rat mouse working through the maze in a college psychology course. However there can be some darker B.F. Skinner type approach to unlockable game content that I must frown on. As time passes it seems like I have less and less time to play video games as I used to and it is really frustrating when a game developer will take most of the content in a game and only dish out a pittance at the beginning and then the game will demand hours after hours while dishing out a few new items and cars once and a while.
If a game designer does their well job then all the hidden content should be with in the reach of the average gamer after a week or two of normal game play. That is only spending one to three hours a day on videogame playing. By restricting unlockable content to those who spend way to much time it cheapens the game experience or it forces the gamer to look at codes and cheats. I understand that unlockable content extends the time that a gamer will spend playing a particular title but it is a bit of a cop-out if it requires 40-hours a week just to unlock all the levels and fighters and random good stuff. The games that stand out in my mind is Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Gran Tourismo 3 and of course SNK vs Capcom : Match of the Millennium. I mean I play games because they are fun and do not want to have to invest as much as a second job in order to get my freaking money's worth.
Take SNK vs Capcom : Match of the Millennium on the NeoGeo Pocket. Here is hoping that perhaps I will finally luck out and get the last damn tile I need to unlock B.B. Hood. You see once you beat the last boss there is a tic-tac-toe board with a hidden character. Some spots are randomly chosen and are removed but you need to play the game several times in order to unlock a single freaking character. Some times you get closer to unlocking a new fighter but most of the time you luck out and the time you spent beating the game is gone forever for no constructive reason. If I had one of the rare NeoGeo Pocket to Sega Dreamcast link cables I could transfer my unlocked credits from Capcom VS SNK and open all the nice hidden stuff.
I do like some Unlockable content that is released after you have been playing the game but I think some game designers go to far and make it to damn hard to unlock content. The way that I think about it is that I already paid for this game and I should be able to enjoy 100% of it without having to spend months of playing in order to gain access to all of it. When you buy a car you do not have it be locked at 30 miles an hour only to have more speed unlocked after you have been driving after a week.
There has to be some balance in a progression of unlockable videogame content or it will lose the re-playability factor and start to suck. The devil is in the details and game developers need to strike a good balance between having the game being easily absorbed in a single night or requiring several months of constant playing in order to unlock everything. Games are all about having fun and they should not require a commitment of countless hours of mind-crushing labor in order to get the game content that you paid for when you bought the game. I don't want games to be over so quick but come on!
Do you remember when you finally breed the Golden Chocobo in Final Fantasy VII? That is weeks out of my life that I will never get back and all for one very cool very powerful summons spell.
Jake at July 14, 2005 
Games
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Comments
Bravo! I like unlockable stuff because it gives you a reason to keep on playing the game even after you've beaten it, but sometimes they go too far. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 wasn't that bad, I think I got all of the characters within a week, and the only stuff that really took a long time to get was all the alternate colors, and you can live without those. Probably the worst example of this I have seen is on the Sonic Mega Collection Plus for PS2. The CPU counts how many times you have "played" a game, meaning select it from the menu and then exit back to the main menu, and it auto-saves every time you do so. In order to get everything, you need to "play" every game(about 10 or so in all) about 30 times each. Talk about tedious. The Megaman collection did it much better. When you finish a game, another game is unlocked. Much better than looking at title screens for hours.
Posted by: BBQ at July 15, 2005 10:20 AM
I remember something like that on Ridge Racer Type 4 on the PS1. To unlock all the cars, you had to complete tournaments in very specific ways, like 2nd, 3rd, 1st, 4th etc.. for each race. after unlocking about half of the cars i just lost interest, it just bacame a chore, not fun. It wasn't impossible to unlock all the cars, just labourious.
As for an impossible unlock, have you ever played Sonic Adventure 2 on the dreamcast, to unlock the hidden remake of Green Hill Zone you had to get all 180 emblems, I think you'd have to have programmed the game to achieve that, getting A ratings on every level for every mission on the level, arghhh. I only managed to get that on the Metal Harbour level.
The only game I found that was challening, but not too easy was Tony Hawk's 2, was a bit repeatitive, but the game was fun enough. And Simcity 2/3000 where stuff was available when you got the population at certain plateau's. And Metal Gear Solid 1, where you got the bandana, invisibility and tuxedo after completing the game so many times, that added a good reason to play it again.
Anyway, my point, as yours seemed to be, was that unlocking extras should be fun not controller smashing hard or mind numbingly repeatitive.
Posted by: Katana at July 15, 2005 3:52 PM
Ah, the golden chocobo. FFVII had a lot of little missions like this that were tangential to beating the game, like defeating all the Weapon robot things. My brother played this game for months getting every last little thing.
Posted by: Justin Baeder at July 21, 2005 10:39 PM
