As part of my normal Kwanzoo duties, I’ve been doing some thinking about what games appeal to what types of people.

There’s some games that really ought to be awful, if you’re looking at it from a pure gameplay perspective. Maybe the game mechanics are broken as heck. Maybe stuff is done sloppily. You can see the bones of the game poking through its skin, as it were. But for some reason, they wind up being great to a certain type of person, just because of the sheer amount of exploration of a virtual world you can do.

Fallout 3 is the latest game in this category. It’s definitely broken, sometimes hilariously so. Occasionally one of the house characters will wake up in her bedroom with an unnamed man in power armor looming over her, who promptly turns on his heel and sprints out the front door, saying “Move along, citizen.”

The combat’s… okay. You pretty much need to go into VATS to get things done. That’s not terrible, but Gears of War 2 it ain’t.

I think there’s a difference between people who play games for that polished 30-second loop of gameplay, as Gears’s CliffyB put it, and people who play for the virtual world.

Now, that’s not to say someone can’t enjoy both gamplay-oriented and exploration-oriented games, and it’s not to say specific games can’t cover both grounds. But a guy who isn’t down with the exploration pole is going to look at Fallout 3 and see a big broken mess rather than the rough-ish gem that people are clamoring about.

As an exploration-oriented guy myself, here’s a few games that rose above their gameplay problems to be genuine classics.

Deus Ex

Deus Ex may have been built on the contemporary Unreal engine, but in 2000, it ran badly. Sure, you start out as a nanotech’ed-up secret agent on Liberty Island, where terrorists have siezed control of a Statue of Liberty that was decapitated in a separate incident that led to martial law. But all that spicy-potent imagery wasn’t much help when the game ran at three frames per second. Firefights don’t go smoothly in that much chop.

And the animation! Oy! Two years after Half-Life nailed polygonal characters speaking and moving, Deus Ex gives us cinematic closeups of blocky heads with low rez textures doing awful lip syncs.

So why does Deus Ex consistently rock the “all time greatest” lists?

A big part of it is the sheer amount of interaction you can do with the world. In your first trip to UNATCO headquarters, you might wander into the ladies restroom. Hey, might be something in there, right?

Well, there is. There’s a secretary. And for the whole rest of the game, to her you’re going to be that creepy guy who walked in on her in the bathroom.

That level of interaction isn’t consistent throughout the rest of the plot, a mashup of every conspiracy theory there is, but the occasional sprinkling of that kind of thing does enhance the illusion that the world isn’t limited. Sometimes it’s even true.

Bioshock

Bioshock is a little different from the previous exploration examples. It’s totally on rails.

You’re going right from one area to another, point A to point B to point C. That doesn’t seem exploratory. People who took away from the previews that you’d be wandering all over exploring express disbelief that the game took so many game of the year awards.

The joy of Bioshock is taking the time to look around the world that Irrational Games created. Drifting through the underwater wreckage of an objectivist paradise gone wrong is plenty fun for me.

The game’s plotline is more than just “Objectivism is bad”, though some people read it that way. Mad visionary Andrew Ryan takes a turn for the sympathetic when he proves that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and when he quite literally dies for his idealism.

It might be the overused cliche of a broken elevator that sends you through the leaking markets and cafes of Rapture, but I’m glad for the trip.

Portal

Man, what can you say about Portal that hasn’t been said already? It’s one of the best games of the last five years, for one thing. I say that about a lot of games, but it’s always true.

It’s one of the funniest games ever made, too, and one with the most memorable characters.

This is all from a game whose core gameplay, stripped of everything else, looks as interesting as a Rubik’s Cube.

That’s not a slam against Rubik’s Cubes. They’re an excellent puzzle and some people find them very interesting indeed. Not my personal thing. Same with Portal’s core gameplay, though it could very well be one of those rare games that leaves explorers just as happy.

Portal accomplishes this feat of being an exploration game by dint of superb minimalism. Finding a small hideaway with scrawled graffiti paints a more vivid picture of the setting then a thousand lines of dialog in a lesser game. The picture that gets painted is just right, filling in the gaps but leaving enough to the imagination once the credits are over.

And once you’re done with the game, if you think the pure-gameplay challenge rooms are more fun than the spectacular credits, you must have a different sense of fun than I do.

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