Q+A: Minigames in Platformers

BlazingWaters asks:

have any thoughts about platformers - typically 3D - incorporating “minigames” (i.e. anything not directly related to vertical/horizontal plane tissues) into their elements? some are just minigame distractions but others keep it cohesive somehow

This is a pretty standard complaint to throw at 3D platformers from their “golden age”; it felt like the third game of a lot of classic 3D mascot platformer trilogies transitioned into more minigame-driven content, usually to their detriment. The particular examples that come to mind for me are Crash Bandicoot: Warped and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, although the latter example weaves it in a bit better thanks to the lightly Ocean’s-inspired ensemble heist approach, which explains why there’s a whole suite of new, limited-toolkit characters you play as.

My original draft for this was dedicated to differentiating between Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie as “system-focused” versus “structure-focused,”¹ but to make a sound rationale around that would require a much more in-depth analysis than I’m about to give. Truth is, I don’t like Banjo-Kazooie very much. So many of the objectives are nakedly built around exploration and lock-and-key “puzzles” that the movement gets left out to dry, with little left to support it other than smooth strafe-jumping with the Talon Trot. It’s much more reliant on stock adventure elements than Mario 64: scouring for items,² interacting with NPCs, and changing game state throughout the world. There’s benefits to that style, but in a game with so little second-to-second complexity and a lack of aesthetic ambition, it turns into non-stop checklist completion. A real misread by Rare on what made Mario 64 a special game and, in many ways, the “original sin” of 3D platformer design.

I say all of this to point out that the minigame “issue” is really an issue of system focus and depth. Banjo-Kazooie doesn’t dwell on its few minigames, but because each of the objectives are so disjoint in what they require from the player, it has the same choppy effect even in “normal” gameplay. The similar sections in Super Mario 64 (such as the flying levels) benefit from layering their unique rules on top of the pre-existing mechanics. You may have fallen down a hundred times trying to get through all of the rings in “Mario Wings to the Sky,” but you have the opportunity to find unique ways back to the floating island with your new flight ability, or you can approach the rings from a different angle using a separate cannon.

To add some clarity to my definition of minigames here: I see these different sections in terms of system overlap (or really, rule overlap) on a spectrum rather than trying to specifically delineate between them. I don’t necessarily agree with a definition based on the planes/terrain, as it’s not uncommon for disjoint systems to each deal with topography in separate ways. I’m using the term relatively loosely here to make the point that contextual rule changes aren’t uncommon even in games that have traditionally not been the “worst” offenders for minigame usage.

Also worth noting that more traditional minigames actually benefit from some common bounding rules, such as timers and internal scoring systems. Not that most of these are necessarily good solely for including these things, but we could stand to learn something from any random whack-a-mole game where you can win time back by hitting golden groundhogs or whatever. Maybe the best example of this are the Spyro Speedway stages (at least in the first game, I never played the other ones). The more complex handling and the routing focus when collecting all of the items in a limited time was, in hindsight, superior to the ho-hum standard platforming.

Final quick thought: I feel like this discourse will fade (or at least mutate into a “wow, I can’t believe games used to be like this”) now that we’re in a 3D platforming renaissance. Mario 64’s design style won at the end of the day (with a lot of help from speedrunning communities that extracted latent sauce from other games like Battle for Bikini Bottom), and we’re now in the era of movement-focused platformers like Pseudoregalia, Demon Turf, and The Big Catch. Unfortunately, I’m really behind on this wave… but eventually I’ll try a couple of these and post reviews.