“Wow.”
That was my reaction immediately after defeating The End, the wizened sniper of legend in Metal Gear Solid 3. It took two hours to end The End. Two breathless hours, filled with tension, frustration and exhilaration. As I continued on Snake’s trek through the jungle, I kept thinking back to The End and how I would like to play that section of the game again. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a save, so I would have to play about seven hours to get there again. And that is just not appealing to me.
But what if there were a service on PSN, XBLA and even Steam, that sold you snippets of game? What if you could buy the most memorable moments of classic games (classic being anything other than current gen) for a small price? Wouldn’t you pay $.99 or even $2.99 just to skip right to The End? Or perhaps play the entire level of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s infamous Ghillies in the Mist mission? What if Square Enix sold just the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII? Or even the Gold Saucer section, if you have a hankering for mini-games? How has this idea not been exploited yet? If there are two things we know, it’s publishers enjoy our money and we enjoy giving it to them. This is a win-win and it might even spur sales of those classic games. Maybe someone enjoys The End battle so much that they run out and purchase the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection.
What say you? Would this be something you would like to see? What memorable moments would you be willing to pay for? GO!
If I had no other way to get to those moments, even by means of painfully playing through a game again, then I’d say it depends on the type of game.
I’d love to be able to play through the free-fall scenes on Force Unleashed II, and a few other moments like that, but for some games I don’t know if it’d work too well. Especially games where your choices affect story/how well you do.
Though that could be fixed by simply letting you make all those choices at the start, selecting all the various factors. That’d be especially great if it’s something you’ve played through before, and just want to see how it’d be with different scenarios, but that’s just me thinking aloud.
Haha, great idea. At first I was going to say it might be tough to convince someone to install a huge game engine and code just for a piece of the game, but then realized that’s exactly what a demo does anyway. Duh. The Sleeping Dogs demo was 3.2 GB’s alone.
However, on PC, if you do already own a game, there are Save Games floating around online that you can download and place in your save folder so that you can jump right to any area of a game. Normally, these are used as work-arounds for bugs, or cheating to have maximum “place_item_here” at a certain point of a game. But it’s a very interesting idea.
Gotta say that I consider The End sequence to be one of the greatest boss battles in gaming…ever. You didn’t have to memorize a pattern of lasers, hit him in a specific spot that opened up an additional weak point, blow into a microphone, or press a special sequence of buttons. There weren’t any gimmicks; it was just you, him, and a sniper rifle.
I really like the idea. They could perhaps even include extra behind the scenes stuff to sweeten the deal. Throw in some concept artwork, video commentary, and 1 or 2 game sequences and you’ve got a $10 download.