FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Other Action Games
A great many action games don't fit neatly into any of the preceding subgenres, and the variety among them is enormous. They are difficult to categorize except in negative terms: They don't involve shooting, hand-to-hand fighting, or abstract puzzle solving. They do, however, frequently use representational puzzle solving. Most of these action games demand skills such as maneuvering and path planning.
Frogger, shown in Figure 13.5, is a good example of an action game that belongs to no obvious subgenre. The player maneuvers the world's only nonswimming frog family across a busy road and a logging river infested with crocodiles. A highly successful arcade game launched in 1981, the Frogger series eventually became one of the most successful of all time. Hasbro's 1997 remake, Frogger 3D (also shown in Figure 13.5) sold millions of copies, remaining on the software bestsellers charts for many months after release. The developers kept the gameplay virtually unchanged and just updated the presentation, increasing the variety of the levels available to the player. Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge, a sequel to Frogger 3D, introduced a more structured game while still remaining faithful to the gameplay of the original.
Other notable action games that don't fit into defined subgenres include Pong, Marble Madness, Pac-Man, Q*bert, Lemmings, and Katamari Damacy. Both Marble Madness (1986) and Katamari Damacy (2004) use an excellent but seldom-seen challenge, controlling a rolling object that exhibits inertia. Lemmings, a brilliant game about trying to prevent a group of dim-witted creatures from killing themselves by
falling off cliffs, involves selecting particular creatures and assigning tasks to them that influence the way the others move, all under time pressure.
