A Lil' Slice O' Butta

The most important aspect of game design, in my opinion, is giving the user the ability to make decisions. These decisions can be a number of things: choosing plot direction, customization (appearance, armor, skills, weapons, etc.), controls, or difficulty.

Recent games like "Mass Effect" have introduced the idea of giving the player the choice of making different decisions that advance the plot in multiple directions. They emphasized the point, "never play the same game twice."

Anyone who knows me will tell you "I LOVE CUSTOMIZATION!" Games like "Armored Core," "Soul Calibur IV," or even "Castle Crashers" really capture and keep my interest just for that reason alone. There are people out there that, for some odd reason, seem to protest the idea of customization, stating that it is silly and compare it to dressing Barbie dolls. I guess that means I like to play with Barbies then...^_^

I was huge fan of the "Fight Night" franchise and was so excited for "Round 4" to come out this summer, but when I played the demo and found out you couldn't change the controls, I completely lost interest. No one should be forced to use one control layout.

If games didn't have difficulty settings, they would lose they players interest pretty fast. When you play a game, you want it to be challenging, but still beatable at your current ability.

To put it simply, the more decisions a game allows the user to make, the more replay value it has.