1230: In Pursuit of Score

The sole aim in a lot of video games circa the ’80s and early ’90s used to be to attain a high score. But in all but a few genres of gaming, that simple pleasure of watching a number get steadily higher — a number which proved indisputably how much better than your friends you were — has fallen by the wayside. This is kind of a shame because, having been playing a bunch of games recently in which the old-school objective of “score as many points as possible” is their reason for existence, it’s, you know, fun. Lots of fun.

My fondest memories of high-score chasing in recent years came with two different Xbox Live Arcade games: Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. Both of these games got their hooks into both me and my friends and saw us eschewing bigger, more exciting, more impressive releases that were around at the time in favour of simply pumping in virtual quarter after virtual quarter. Geometry Wars 2 in particular completely monopolised the gaming time of a number of us for a good several weeks, as each of us vied for dominance of the game’s six different leaderboards. It became a sort of hypnotic ritual — fire up the game, start up (say) Pacifist mode, play, die, immediately restart and repeat. Three hours later, I’d look up and see that, well, three hours had passed, and that my hands had locked into a claw shape only suitable for 1) holding a controller or 2) in a pinch, wanking.

Since those two games, however, there haven’t been that many other titles that have drawn the attention of my friends and I quite so consistently. This is a shame, as I greatly enjoyed that feeling of competition, and relished the opportunity to take a snapshot of my latest high score and rub it in the face of a competitor via some form of social media. (This is where the term “Be A Dick Mode,” often stylised as the hashtag “#beadickmode” on Twitter, originated.)

I’ve been thinking about how and why there hasn’t been a simple score-attack game to get everyone’s teeth into for a long time. And the only plausible reason I can think of is the fact that gaming has grown even more broad and diverse since that time. The rise of mobile phone games in particular has all but eliminated the perceived need for “simple” arcade games with a score attack mechanic, which is somewhat sad.

Bejeweled Blitz remains popular, of course, but I now refuse to play that game because it’s become infested with pay-to-win crap. Leaderboards are utterly meaningless if you sell advantages to players, which is what PopCap’s doing. Unfortunately, I appear to be in a minority thinking this, as the “Blitz” puzzle template is immensely popular — in-app purchases and all — with the latest addition to the formula being a rather sorry addition to the Tetris legacy from EA. I’m just not interested; what’s the point in playing if all it takes to top the leaderboards is being more willing to dip your hand into your pockets than your rivals? Bullshit, I say. Bullshit!

Fortunately, there is a degree of respite, albeit one that I’m yet to convince my friends to engage with. The shmup genre — which people on the Internet don’t quite seem able to agree as to whether it’s flourishing or dying — remains a resolutely score-focused genre, and demands a great deal from its players both in terms of simple manual skills and in the learning of often-complex scoring mechanics. Like a good fighting game demands that you spend time exploring its systems and getting to know how everything fits together, a good shmup demands that you study it, figure things out and then try to put all that knowledge into practice while attempting to avoid fiery laser death.

It’s immensely satisfying when you figure out how a particular game “works”, and the first time you see your score skyrocketing into the high millions or even billions. It’s a genre that brings thrills and excitement with minimal effort expended on storytelling or trying to do anything particularly “artistic”, but at the same time the finished result can be oddly beautiful — hypnotic bullet patterns; the “dance” of the player’s ship navigating through these perilous onslaughts; the sheer, unrelenting energy of most of these games. But these games aren’t trying to say something in the same way that an arty indie platformer is trying to say something; no, instead, all they’re trying to say is “c’mon, one more try and you’ll beat that score” or “c’mon! Bet you can’t clear me in one credit.”