Mark of the Ninja

[youmeyou]

I've just played through the first few levels and have to say that left brain right brain anology is pretty accurate. Speaking of Arkham City, it recalls the mixture of gamey elements like Batman's tool kit with the immersive results of actually using said tools seamlessly in a fight.

[syntheticgerbil]

You are the most militant motherfucker in the world. You've also been consistent about it for like 15 years, which is impressive.

Haha, well... I probably should have made the effort to also say I find the animation and backgrounds to be amazingly well crafted and charming.

[Brothe]

I just finished it. Best $15 I've spent on the XBLA in a looooong time. Now I have to play the harder new game plus and complete all the challenges. Excellence all around.

[youmeyou]

How long did it take you, incidentally? *nervously eyes calendar, next week's Blands 2 release*

[Brothe]

About 3 days of light playing between work and school. Light being 1-2 hours. It felt just about right in length with the option of a lot more replayability,

[berniesbc]

I haven't played Mark of the Ninja yet, since I'm trying to stop buying way, way more games than I have the time or drive to play. However, I did want to say that at this point the game is featured pretty prominently on the dashboard (its the first thing you see!) or at least it is on the dashboard beta. I would like to think that Microsoft decided to promote it in response to a million podcasts and internet people complaining that the game was buried in their shitty UI, but I guess they probably just realized that they would like to make some money on this game that they published.

[shammack]

I don't really understand why everyone was complaining about the game being difficult to find. I found it exactly the same way I find every other newly released XBLA game: by going to the "new releases" section of the XBLA marketplace -- which does take more clicks to get to than is probably ideal, but why single out this game specifically for that complaint?

[youmeyou]

So I just finished it. What a fun experience! And rather unique-feeling too, which is surprising considering the well-tread genre/content. (I guess I shouldn't be that shocked, look at Walking Dead, Telltale managed to squeeze lemonade out of the most well-squeezed lemon conceivable.)

It took me a few levels to realize I could get way more points by not killing guards. This completely changed the game for me. I had already started getting tired of the linearity of waiting for a guard to pass>gutting him>looking for a spot to hide the body, repeat. Attempting to complete a level non-violently makes things way, wayyy more interesting. I would recommend it to anyone playing the game, and I'm glad the developers put in the point incentive to make it a viable option. It also really vibes with the attitude of the game: sticking to the shadows, achieving your goals while remaining unseen. When you smoothly achieve that objective, say taking out a target or killing a generator, without alerting any guards, so that to their eyes an invisible hand is changing the environment around them despite their hardest efforts to the contrary, it feels good, it clicks. Not that it's easy in the slightest, and now I'm attempting new game plus, which takes away a lot of the visual indicators of the first play-through, even going so far as to dim the visibility of whatever direction your character is not facing!

[Merus]

See, I felt the opposite way about the Arkham games - the standard stealth game tradition of sneaking right behind an enemy because he won't see you is broken, because he inevitably surprises you at some point by turning around. It's a degenerate strategy, and I feel like making that stuff hidden forces the players to not rely on it, which allows them the much more interesting gameplay of spotting opportunities, being in the right place at the right time, and making sure their escape route is clear.

I would like to see a stealth game where the guards have a mental model of the world so if something changes they get suspicious. It used to be computationally expensive, but honestly I think at this point we could probably afford it.

[youmeyou]

Just to disclaim: you cannot use the strategy of hiding behind an enemy the entire game. This is fine the first few levels (and only if you're not going for the non-violent bonuses) but once you get dogs who can sniff and enemies with flashlights/night vision and snipers and all other sorts of traps and setups, it becomes completely non-viable.

I think what Mark of the Ninja succeeds at is being a puzzle game in execution: (you are given a bunch of problems to solve blocking several avenues forward and must use what you have learned thus far to proceed) without spoiling the player's sense of immersion. I really think SpectreCollie has it right. If you had another game that didn't give you the same visual cues your focus would be directed toward worrying about whether or not you were in some arbitrary AI vision cone, which is fine for a certain kind of experience. But for MotN, the experience is a puzzle/problem solving one that gives you a set of tools and lets you have fun figuring out how to use them in the coolest possible way and gives you a sense of superiority over the obstacles the game presents.

[Frenetic Pony]

I've lost progress due to auto-save no working right twice, apparently you MUST quit the game before just turning off your Xbox. But that's not really why I found this game uninteresting.

This game is, kind of like a static puzzle game to me. Or, rather exactly like. The guards are slow and EXACTLY predictable, as is everything. It doesn't even feel like a stealth game. At no point have I had to suddenly hide in a dark corner, silently trying to project waves of hope directly into the game and make the enemy not see me. At not point has NOTHING unpredictable happened. I've always known exactly what's going on, why I failed exactly each time, and what I should try next.

So, a static puzzle game that's just dressed as a stealth game, at least to me. To me a stealth game has always been nerve wracking, always wondering if they'll find me, if I'll screw up. There's nothing of that in Mark of the Ninja. So I'm not going to pick it back up. But, if you're going to buy it, at least know this, hopefully if you've already bought this then you do enjoy it.

[shammack]

I've always hated stealth games, but that sounds like it fixes everything that makes me hate them. The demo didn't really grab me, but maybe I should give this a shot after all.

[Korax]

I really like this game, to the point of doing a NG+ no alarms/no kills (aside from boss assassinations) run, but there are a couple of really disappointing things that are making it a hassle. On two different levels, restarting at a particular checkpoint has put me right in front of a guard, who immediately goes on alert. I can hit him with an upgraded smoke bomb quickly enough to keep him from sounding an alarm, but then the end-of-level scoring penalizes me for the alert. There are also tripwired traps introduced in the last few levels, but enemies aren't smart enough to avoid them, and then they get killed (not sure if that counts against you, score-wise, but I'm trying for no deaths at all). It's really aggravating to be sneaking around and suddenly have the "Indirect kill" notification pop up two or three times because enemies aren't programmed to avoid the traps that they ostensibly rigged up.

[Kolzig]

Still haven't bought it, but won't buy it in XBLA in any case. I'll go for the PC Steam version when I have time. It's really great that they got the PC version released surprisingly quickly after the first XBLA release.

[toblix]

From what I understand you rack up way more points by murdering everyone spectacularly and hiding their bodies ...

[Forbin]

I picked it up during the steam sale last weekend and have been playing it a bit. I feel like it's way to easy to kill dudes, but maybe that's because the checkpointing is done so well and I don't feel punished when I fail. But I am just plowing through rooms which seem to be elaborate puzzles if you're playing non-lethal. I do want to play stealthily, but I never seem to be able to bring myself to commit to it, when it's so convenient to remove people.

I'm not all the way through, and I presume their is a twist later that may make me feel worse about the atrocities I'm committing. But there seems to be nothing in character of the enemy units that seems worth preserving. Also given they start off with a genocide, I don't care at all about cleaning their house. I do try to avoid dogs though, I don't want their blood on my hands.

[Twig]

Heh. You can't kill dogs. You can only "incapacitate" them.

I weirdly did the same as you, until I reached a point where the dog just wouldn't fucking leave me alone.

[shammack]

I picked it up during the steam sale last weekend and have been playing it a bit. I feel like it's way to easy to kill dudes, but maybe that's because the checkpointing is done so well and I don't feel punished when I fail. But I am just plowing through rooms which seem to be elaborate puzzles if you're playing non-lethal. I do want to play stealthily, but I never seem to be able to bring myself to commit to it, when it's so convenient to remove people.

You're doing yourself a disservice if you kill dudes. When I first played the demo, I felt the way you describe and that led to me not buying the game, but then the other day I got it in a Steam sale and decided this time I'd ignore the tutorial and just commit to not killing dudes and staying undetected, and it led to me enjoying the game so much more.

I then went back and replayed some of the levels to complete all the optional objectives, some of which require you to kill dudes. So since I was already forfeiting the bonus for not killing anyone, I figured I'd just kill anyone who got in the way, and that made the level seem really boring in comparison.

[Erkki]

Sorry if this has come up in the thread already, but does anyone else find it odd that you can hear lighting strike before you can see it in this game.

I understand the reasons for better gameplay experience, but it seems odd to show natural fenomenon turned upside down.

[Twig]

Well, it's more like there are always two lightning strikes in a row. One far away, one up close. Been a while since I played those levels, though, so I could be wrong

Either way, it's weird, I agree. Not sure how else they could've handled that, heh. Other than using something other than lightning, I guess. But the lightning is pretty cool! Soooo, blah blah! Ramble ramble.

[youmeyou]

Totes agree Shammack. When I play it lethal it's like a very nice looking platformer. When I play it nonlethal it's a fascinating puzzle game.

[TheYoungCato]

I really like that there's no non-lethal ways to take out guards, as opposed to most stealth games. In most cases, rendering a guard "unconscious" is hardly different from actually killing him, because either way, once you hide the body, he's permanently eliminated as an obstacle. Mark of The Ninja restricts you to purely non-confrontational tactics, and I feel that's made me test the systems far more deeply than If I had simply been stabbing dudes.

I find that in 2D, playing cat and mouse with guards actually can be more tense, it's much harder to avoid their gaze when they have less space to search.

That path of silence costume is pretty sweet, being able to run everywhere is a really empowering feeling in a stealth game.

[Tanukitsune]

I kinda find that stupid, because all he has to do is whack them with the hilt of his sword to K.O. them, or something else. Mechanically, it makes no sense, how can NOT know how to knock out a person? Specially when he can K.O. a dog with one hit!

Anyway, I just beat it and I love the gameplay. Can you really get enough points by simply evading all enemies? You only get 200 if they pass in front of you and didn't get seen. You get 250 points just by hiding their body. And how on Earth do you get by some of the laser systems without dragging a body?

I had some hilarious moment with the terror mechanic, I had no idea you could dump bodies to the lower level and scare everybody into killing each other.

The power suit ladies make no sense, how can they sense me even from behind, but they will run into a bomb clearly visible on the floor? But what really bothered me about the game is the

hallucinations. I liked it when in the final level you could see the hallucinations take place, but when you find out the girl was a hallucination? What?!? That was too much, if the protagonist could suffer this malady soo soon, how am I to know if anything that happened in the game WASN'T a hallucination? For all I know I could have been killing orphans and puppies for the whole game... NO, just no! If this was a Silent Hill game, I would have found it neat, but the fact the ending says "You were hallucinating since the beginning, so... MORAL CHOICE ENDING!?" just made go "UGH!".

Didn't the girl know things he didn't? Aren't you supposed to give a minimum of a hint in these cases? OK... the fact the she never fights could be a hint, but still... No, just no...

[youmeyou]

You get a ton of points for playing non-lethally. Also, like Dishonored, you don't really need points if you're going to be playing it stealthy/non-lethal.

I thought it was interesting that you could ignore the obvious hints that you had gone insane and kill the master anyway and have that be the way the game ends. So it allows you to decide the game's reality, and it doesn't feel like it's making a heavy handed moral statement about which reality you chose. It's just one of two ways to end the story.

[Erkki]

I'm starting to think that endings that you decide just before are a cop-out. The designer wanted to please everyone or couldn't make a decision as to which ending suits the story the most so they made two. Bah. Just pick one. Applies to Deus Ex: HR and Dishonored (somewhat) and Mark of the Ninja, Stalker and so on.