Game Unlocks
Recently I have been playing through a game Called Sayonara Wild Hearts, an awesome score-hunting game where you race along on a motorcycle, amongst other things, and experience a beautiful blend of arcade action and hyper stimulating synaesthesia. It’s not my first time playing it- it’s a lovely little game where you can play it for a few sessions, forget about it for half a year, and then jump right back in without skipping a beat, which is what I normally do.
But this time I decided to take a detour into some of the games other modes and options and it is here that I ran into two option on the menu called ‘extras’ and ‘zodiac riddles’.
Intrigued, I clicked on the extras tab and found out that the game potentially had more to offer me. You see, I beat the game rather quickly, sometimes stopping to make sure I get an A rank on a level and sometimes just breezing through levels, depending on my mood at the time. And hey, would you look at that, I already fulfilled one of the criteria to unlock the first extra- complete the game to unlock a mode called Album Arcade, basically a mode where you play through the whole game, and thus the whole album, in one sitting. Not something that I particularly cared to do, but then I swiped right and found out that there was another unlockable, and the game very tantalisingly doesn’t tell you what it is. All it tells you is how to unlock it.
Get gold rank on all regular songs to unlock.
And just like that my play has purpose again. I’ve barely put five hours into the game and already achieved gold rank of eight of the levels in no particular order, but nonetheless my curiosity got the better of me. What was the game holding back? If I achieved a gold rank and passed the game’s test, what would be waiting on that extras screen? Of course I went online and found out that- ‘oh, YOLO arcade’, a mode exactly like Album Arcade, except you only get one life, meaning that you would need to play the whole game without dying once to beat it.
Hmm.
Truth be told, after finding this out I felt a little deflated. Not because of the mode itself, honestly I will probably never attempt a perfect run of the whole game but I will still try and get gold on every level just because that’s how I want to play the game. No, the reason I felt deflated was because this did not feel like a good unlock to me. Or, at least, not a good enough unlock to require such a commitment to access. Now, Sayonara Wild Hearts isn’t a super difficult game, and I am sure that with enough practice most people would be able to get a gold rank in every level but I doubt most would be do it just to access a small, extra mode that is really ancillary to the whole experience. As an extrinsic motivator, it unfortunately falls short.
Thankfully, the game itself is so engaging and fun that people who do wish to fully master its stages will do so probably because of how much fun it is to just do that- the game itself is very intrinsically rewarding.
But this got me thinking about the lost art of videogame unlocks. Aspects of the game that you could only access if you earned it. What makes a good unlock? And is it ethically right to gatekeep content away from people who have paid for the whole game?
Videogame unlocks are a special kind of magic. A perfectly pitched videogame unlock can feel like a gift. Just when you think your time with a game is coming to an end, you are suddenly rewarded for your commitment with just a little bit more of the thing you love. And it is just for you, because you earned it. Both a love letter and a swansong, a great unlock can elevate a great game to a phenomenal one by making sure that the last moments are the best that the game can offer.
The forging of a perfect videogame unlock is not a perfect science. Sayonara Wild Hearts is just one example where the pot at the end of the rainbow has been fools gold rather than the real deal, and so I got to thinking why. Why, when the game was fun enough to play all on its own, did the promise of an endless mode did not feel like a satisfying payoff.
In the end it all comes down to challenge, commitment and reward. I think that Sayonara Wild Hearts nails the first two aspects of this equation but not that final piece of the puzzle. That’s why I am still happy to achieve a gold rank in each level, because the high challenge yet low commitment suits me- as a player who likes to play in short bursts- really well. But when I do that I will probably just put the game down without having that final celebration with the game- a thank you for a job well done and for putting the time in.
So what would have been a better reward? Casting my mind back to some of my experiences unlocking features and content across three decades of gaming, a lot of examples spring to mind.
Unlocking my first boss character in Tekken 2, after playing the game for months and just turning it off once I beat the arcade mode, never checking to see if anything changed once you had done so.
The Grand Master Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy 2, which only unlocks after collecting 240- yes, two hundred and forty stars.
Linking up Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion after completing both to unlock the Fusion suit and the original game in Metroid Prime.
But one videogame unlock that shines brighter in my mind than any other is the AX cup in the seminal Gamecube Game F-Zero GX.
F-Zero GX is one of the best games ever made. It has probably still unsurpassed as the fastest racing game of all time and is also one of the most complete racing game packages of all time with a story mode, character bios, time trials, a custom ship builder and five- that’s right five- grand prix, each with five tracks each and a bonus track leading to a total of twenty-six tracks. And it was so, so hard.
F-Zero has always been a franchise that wasn’t afraid to put you on your ass and GX did so as much as it possibly could. Even the easy difficulty was a challenge on the story mode and the expert difficulty in arcade mode was basically just Dark Souls the racing game. Yes, you can die in this game. And you will. You’ll be smash, crash, and fall out of stages so frequently that sometimes just staying alive can feel like an achievement, never mind winning.
But F-Zero has one of the greatest unlocks of all time buried deep on its disc. A whole collection of insanely complex and difficult tracks, accessible only to those who could overcome one of the toughest videogames challenges of all time. In order to unlock the final AX cup, you had to beat every other cup on Master difficulty.
Master difficulty is one of the most brutal challenges I have ever overcome. That’s right, I did it. As a teenager I beat all the other difficulties, beat the story mode on hard mode, built my own custom ship that controlled exactly how I wanted it to and I grinded… and grinded… and grinded. And even after I’d grinded for weeks, first place was still not guaranteed. Heck, even surviving was not guaranteed. You die more than once in a grand prix and it’s game over. It was virtually impossible to reach first place in every race and so sometimes you would instead just focus on killing the racers who were top of the rankings in the hope that crashing them out would mean they would gain no points and thus be out of the equation for the rest of the tournament.
The desperation and determination it took to finally race in the AX cup was at times soul destroying. So many almost, so many missed Z-spin attacks, so many tiny mistakes which lead to certain death. But I did it. I did it. The tracks were mine. I had poured my blood and sweat into this game and this game rewarded me with just that little bit more. That last hurrah. And let me tell you, it was spectacular.
The tracks that comprise of the AX cup are simply phenomenal. The most imaginative, exciting rollercoaster ride I’ve ever been on. Your jaw will hit the floor when the outer tube you are racing on gets narrower and narrower until it is basically a point which you fall off and fly through the air as if shot out of a cannon. Tracks loop around each other upside down and you can see your opponents speeding above you in the opposite direction. As far as a rewards go for putting in the effort. F Zero GX is a masterclass.
And yet, it is still not a perfect unlock.
You see, F-Zero GX has the inverse problem of Sayonara Wild Hearts. While the AX cup is one of the GOAT’s in terms of the unlock itself, the conditions you need to meet in order to actually earn it are absurd. Outside of those lucky few who managed to find an F-Zero AX arcade cabinet out in the wild and managed to score the cup this way, I would guess that maybe around 1% of the people who played F-Zero GX got to experience its greatest content it has to offer. 1%. That means 99% of the people who played F-Zero GX never even got to see experience its most sublime offerings. And this I think is a damn shame. People who love F-Zero owe it to themselves to play these tracks. They deserve it. And now there is a way to. For those who can emulate the game, you can download a save file with 100% of the content unlocked. I have left a link to the save file in the description. If you have played F-Zero GX in the past and enjoyed it, then I implore you to give this a go. Don’t let what was an unfair requirement back then and an insanely sadistic requirement now hold you back from experiencing what is one of the most intense and exhilarating experiences ever printed on a game disc. And if you do let me know in the comments how it went.
And so here we are. A game with a great challenge but a lacklustre reward, and a game with a fantastic reward but with a set of utterly ridiculous hoops to jump through. Is there any one franchise that has gotten it right? Well, yes in fact, there is. And it might surprise you when you discover which one it is. A flawed series for sure, but a series with many devout followers (myself included.)
For all the things the Sonic The Hedgehog series got wrong, one thing it got right was rewarding its players for getting good at the game. And this makes perfect sense. The games intrinsically motivate you to get better, by allowing you to keep your momentum as a reward for good play and they extrinsically motivate you to unlock all it has to offer. Take, for example, the special stages. The special stages require you to either play the game without taking damage a la Sonic 1 and 2 on the Mega Drive, or to explore and remember the layout of the levels and exploit that a la Sonic 3. Both of them require you to pass a certain skill check before they let you into the special stage, and although I know that these special stages aren’t perfect (I, for one, absolutely hate the Blue Sphere special stages in Sonic 3 and Knuckles and have thus never once managed a complete run-through of the game), beating these stages allow you to access one of the greatest and most iconic unlocks of all time- Super Sonic.
This is your reward for mastering the game. You become a God and take out everything in your path. Difficult enemies and pike placements become trivial, and you basically get to do a victory lap through the game with increased speed, increased height and invulnerability.
Personally speaking, I don’t love Super Sonic and usually don’t try to unlock him as I do think he gets in the way of the ‘purity’ of the Sonic experience but in terms of the amount of challenge and dedication it takes to unlock him, and the reward itself, I think it is pitch perfect.
And this is one of the reasons that I think Sonic Adventure burns so brightly in the minds of those who played the game when it released. No one knew Super Sonic was in that game. You have to beat all other six storylines to access him and even then, instead of him appearing on the character select screen, you’re presented with a huge, spinning question mark, as if the game is just as confused as you are. As if even the game doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. You play through it and the tone is decidedly different. Things are more serious, people are taken out and no one really knows what’s going on. Eventually you realise that the unthinkable has happened. Chaos, the God of Destruction, has succeeded in collecting all of the seven Chaos Emeralds and gathered them within him, and now has the power to destroy the entire world, and he does so immediately, starting with Station Square.
Still we don’t know what is happening. Everything we have fought for has been for nothing and there is now nothing we can do.
And then it happens. The music starts to swell, the main theme blares through the speakers. That awesome chunky guitar riff that has followed you all throughout the game rises up to call you to action just one more time. And off you go once again, as the legendary Super Sonic, to save the world.
All things considered, this final boss is pathetically easy. It’s not a test of your skills and it is not something that should even give casual gamers much trouble. But what it is, is an awesome victory lap. A crescendo and a send off to the adventure you’ve embarked upon. You feel the speed, you feel the stakes and you feel the relief as the triumph of final victory washes over you.
I know that 3D Sonic and Sonic Adventure get a lot of hate these days. Sure, they’re not as ground-breaking as they once were and their flaws are drawn into more sharp focus now that we have games that learned from its mistakes. But in spite of all that, people still remember these games fondly. Heck, I can acknowledge all of the games flaws and still say that I love this game. And I think a big part of that is because, when it’s all over, the game leaves on such a high note. A jubilant crescendo that says ‘well done and thank you for playing, now let’s go out with a bang.’
All good examples, but I think it’s better to talk about games that got it wrong to really see what we can learn and improve
It seems so rare these days that this sort of stuff happens. Games either want you to play them forever and so unlocks are used more as an incentive to keep playing rather than as a grand swansong. And games that do have unlocks are all too happy to let you experience them, so long as you pay up for them rather than earn them the good old-fashioned way. Although there are hundreds of examples of good videogame unlocks, greed in the industry means that this one aspect of videogame design has wilted before it ever really got to truly flourish. And don’t get me started on achievements, which offer nothing outside of the task they ask you to complete.
Only recently have games like Outer Wilds and Tunic begun to play with the idea of Knowledge Based Unlocks, where learning about the game itself is the key to unlocking all that there is to see and do in it. I hope that, in the future, these mechanics can be explored more thoroughly. Although not necessarily a part of game design itself, I do believe that crafting unlockables that enable more fun to be had with your game and offer a rewarding payoff will help dames to maximise their staying power, both in players’ hands and in their minds once their time with the game has come to an end.
