Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
What’s the most important skill an evil henchman needs to stand a chance against a team of superheroes? A sniper’s eye perhaps, or mastery of the Hydra stun stick? No. He must know where not to stand.
When I’m controlling Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, and Magik, I don’t really think about saving the world. I’m here to play bad guy billiards. Marvel’s Midnight Sun gives you an arsenal of pushing and pulling that would make a schoolyard bully drool. The proper use for them is to hoist your enemy so hard with their own petard that they’ll be plucking chunks of that petard from their buttocks for a week.
Standing too close to an ally? You get punched in the face of that ally. Are you too close to an explosive barrel? You get smashed into its (non-existent) face and then it will explode, taking out all the other losers who thought hanging around a big red cylinder was a cool thing to do. Being on the other side of the map in relative safety? You’ll be pointed through a portal into Limbo and back again so I can punch you in the face of your buddy right before he makes his big AoE attack where none of my guys are around. Maybe your spatial awareness skills have nothing to do with it, now that I think about it.
Knockabout fun
Mechanics like this fall into a realm I like to call dumb-smart. It really doesn’t take that much tactical sense to pull off a nice human bounce, especially in a turn-based game where you have all the time in the world to get the angle right. “Push man into other man, make men hurt” is what it really boils down to, once we get rid of our pretensions of strategy players. And yet, every time you do it, you feel like a genius – a master of angles and efficiency, turning the enemy’s own power against them like Bruce Lee. That’s a good place for game design right there.
It fits in perfectly with Marvel’s Midnight Suns, with its cast of comic book superheroes. What could be more suitable for these tough boxers than to throw their enemies around like rag dolls? You can practically see the sound effect bubbles. crook! Peacock! Zoop!
But honor where due. The most beautifully distilled form of killing a man with another man can be found in In the break. The giant bugs of the strategy classic seem to have evolved on purpose to be slammed into each other, waiting for just a nudge from your squad of mecha pilots.
By giving you a perfect information state where you can look across the battlefield and see all the next turn’s attacks in front of you, Into the Breach turns you into an arthropod prankster. Did you think you’d claw my poor little giant robot? Think again. You blinked and I slammed you back against your mate, ready to scratch him instead, weakening both of you for the next turn when I slam you into a building and then have you mulched from below by the desperate digging of your own unconscious reinforcements. Welcome to Earth.
The lesson here is obvious: we need to get rid of boring tools like guns and swords and embrace recoil. Turn Call of Duty into a game where you throw terrorists at each other. Let me drop a storm on one of those horned ogres in Dragon Age so the horns poke him in the ass. Release a Crusader Kings 3 expansion that allows me to load my political enemies into trebuchets and fire them at the Holy Roman Empire.
Let’s be stupid in everything and we will enjoy a golden era of PC gaming.