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Yes, totally, although I'd class that as a different thing from what happens in arcade gaming. The best arcade games don't just ask for perfection, they also define what sort of perfection is required. You have the freedom to decide whether you're going to play them for a quick blast or if you're going to go for that perfection, for the score. It's still freedom, and - importantly - it's still a lot more freedom than a lot of modern games offer. Something like Half-Life 2, on the other hand, gives the player the freedom to create their own rules, their own definition of perfection.
It's the same thing in Halo (the original, not the sequel) - you repeat sections because the game encourages you to think outside of its defined ruleset by offering up an almost infinite number of ways to approach any one situation. If you don't play it to try out new tricks, you play it to watch the AI try out new things itself, or adapt to your behaviour. You set yourself a task that isn't anything that you've been explicity asked to do, nor told that you can do, and you try it out. The level select option makes it obvious that this was the intention of the developers and designers. You go to the level select screen, you highlight an option and you think, right, this time I'm going to try and do it *this* way.
Look at the sequel and it's a different matter. Level design is closed off, reduced from the wildernesses and open spaces of the first game to a bunch of identikit corridors. There's no feeling of freedom now. Instead of the adaptive AI and the opportunities for experimentation, more time - in terms of the development of the single player - appears to have been spent on the storyline, on a misguided attempt to make the game more involving by putting all of the emphasis on the narrative.
Again, it's that thing about completion - Halo was never finished because there were always new things to try out. The storyline was fairly insignificant, something that came after the development of the gameplay, so when the credits rolled it didn't matter - the story had finished, but its unimportance meant that this had no impact on your desire to go back to the game. In comparison, Halo 2's single player campaign is all about the storyline, so when it's finished the game is over. They wanted to tell a story more than they wanted to create a game.
(Weirdly, it's in the sequel's multiplayer that the old freedom returns - playing in locked friends-only matches online, you find people creating their own gametypes, or trying to break through level boundaries, get up onto the tops of buildings that are blocked off by invisible ceilings. And that's notable, because it was clearly the multiplayer game that was the main focus of Bungie's development efforts.) |
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Of course I don't mean it. I just had to link it. While I fully agree everything you say about equal appreciation across the board, there's some stuff there I disagree with.