7 Ways Rockstar And Nintendo Are Exactly The Same

Let’s get a nitpick out in the open before continuing. I hate the realistic walking pace in the Rage engine Rockstar made. Yes, it looks good as characters swagger and it’s certainly good at reproducing the hellish sway one gets after consuming one too many drinks, but trying to take cover when under fire or manoeuvre through a doorway? Forget it!

All that aside, generally speaking, Nintendo and Rockstar both have uncanny abilities to make gameplay feel just right. Red Dead Redemption has an excellent NPC tethering system when you’re off on a horse ride with a companion and they want to blather on about the upcoming mission to you.

You both ride at the same speed whether it’s a fast gallop or a more sedate trot to the objective. Similarly, the transition system between Michael, Trevor and Franklin was about as seamless as possible: open a brief menu for a couple of seconds, map zooms out, scrolls to your compatriot and zooms back to ground level. Quick, simple and straightforward.

Nintendo are good here, too. Again, rumours swirl that Miyamoto is such a design fanatic (or should that be visionary?) that entire controllers and hardware come into being because of the games he has in mind. In Metroid Prime for GameCube, Nintendo didn’t want to make just another dual analogue shooter and so the analogue triggers were using in conjunction with the control stick to aim and fire and the secondary C-stick was relegated to X. It gave a precision and elegance that you simply don’t get when you’re 360-no-scoping a n00b in Call of Duty multiplayer.