One of my very favourite features in videogaming is the after-action movie, a quick-fire replay of your successes and your mistakes laid bare for you (and these days often the world by virtue of a share button or two) on completion of a level.
When first sitting down to write this, I was confident that I first came across the idea playing N: Way of the ninja, a web-based flash platformer that I played an absolute shedload of back around highschool days. In my memory, on completion of a level N would gleefully show you a replay of each and every one of your attempts and each of your ninja' gory deaths (and there were a lot!); but a bit of a trawl of people's videos online don't seem to show this feature. The newest incarnation of the game N++ does record your successful plays for you so that you can go back and analyse your efforts, but the satisfaction of the feature for me was always watching dozens of little pixelated ninjas plunge to their deaths and one heroically pull through, so just watching the runs that worked out loses some of the appeal.
It's possible I was just conflating N in my memory with Super Meat Boy, which I also played an absolute shedload of, just somewhat later, and which definitely had the same feature, complete with lots of squishy meaty blood, which congeals around all over the level as you played it and stuck around between attempts, but arrived in an absolute torrent during the replay which would fire immediately after a successful attempt, providing a much-needed breather in what was otherwise a lightning fast, precision-controlled experience. It's also possible that one of the many versions of had the feature before Meat Boy came along and I'm not crazy after all, but I'm putting my money on the first option.
It's not just platformers that benefit from this killer feature, though. Another game that I first encountered as a browser game before it made the jump over to Steam, the king of casual games Mini Metro, will also automatically record a .gif of your ever exanding and adapting public transport network for you. I thought I had a bunch of old .gifs sitting around from past plays, but I couldn't find them (probably because the game seems to dump your newly created gifs straight onto the desktop and that's a recipe for deletion each time I start feeling cramped by the mess on my start-up screen. What a pity, then, I guess I'll just have to play a round of this old favourite peaceful-until-it's-not-anymore resource management game just for the gif.
This one was an abortive attempt to transport passengers around Montreal using just four lines that combusted when I took too many trains off the green line to service the struggling yellow line. But enough about the game, this post is about the after-action video. Isn't it neat? Isn't it fab? I could watch those things over and over again. So mesmerising.
But the king of these videos for me lately has to be the after-action replay in Wilmot's Warehouse, a simple but satisfying little warehouse management game in which you have to keep a handle of an every increasing number of different products represented by little brightly coloured squares, and then deliver them to clients when they ask for them. This addictive little beastie arrived in the Humble Trove earlier in the year and consumed my every waking moment for a couple of days after I stumbled over it. Best of all, the replay is built-in, as it acts as an unlockable 'CCTV' reward in the game, so you can walk your little Wilmot character up to the CCTV display monitor at any point during your shift and watch how the warehouse has played out so far. Sadly, there's no automatic extract button on this one, so I had to point OBS inexpertly at my screen to capture this one set just before this warehouse reached capacity, but ooh... it's so nice!
Thanks for indulging me celebrating this small but oh-so-precious feature, that I wish was more widespread but that I fear has fallen by the wayside in the world of streaming and live content. Do you share my attraction to the action replay? Do you have games that have replay features that you love? Do you have any favourite .gifs to share? Or would you rather just hurry up and play without stopping to look back?
1 comment:
Action replays are great. :) I remember the feature you're talking about of showing all the attempts -- so you see as the replay goes on the better attempts surviving until at last, just one makes it to the end.
I can't recall what title I saw it in either, but if Super Meat Boy definitely had it, it was likely that. While I didn't play that game extensively -- I did a bit.
Metro is such a cool game too, and I had no idea it could export gifs like that! I was watching yours with interest and the strategy taken, esp. when removed the loop nature of green and no longer had spoke and wheel, but just spoke!
I kinda wanna play again now too. xD
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