The decryption gadget in Batman: Arkham Asylum is a glorious little nugget of excellent game design.
In the game, you pull out Batman's handheld decryptor gadget when you want to disable an electric forcefield that has obstructed your progress. More specifically, you use the gadget to short-circuit the control panel that controls the forcefield. The decryptor itself looks roughly like a cellular phone, but the important thing is that it presents a kind of mini-game to the player.
Imagine that you walk into a room with two old fasioned clocks. The clocks will open up the door to a secret passage, but you have to set each clock's hour hand to the correct hour to trigger the door. The mini-game is hard to explain, but it's kind of like that, except the hour hands on the clocks are replaced by two analog sticks underneath your thumbs, which happen to move within the confines of a circular edge.
Anyway, the mini-game has four important elements that are crafted so well that I think they illustrate great game design in general:
1. Control
You must physically move your thumbs around on your two analog sticks, somewhat like trying to tune two different radio tuner knobs at the same time, until the two positions of the sticks harmonize with each other. Once they do, the security terminal blows-out, the force-field gate disappears, and you continue on your journey unobstructed. You can think of each force-field as having a "code" in the form of two clocks: for example, 1 o'clock and 6 o'clock. When you move your left thumb-stick to the 1 o'clock position, while holding your right thumb at the 6 o'clock position, a kind of "resonance" is produced by the decryptor which blows out the electronic security panel.
Every security lock has a different combination of frequencies (or clock positions, if you want to call them that, although there's much finer resolution than the 12 notches of a clock), so you have to play the mini-game anew whenever you encounter an electric forcefield. You must twiddle your thumbs, as if fiddling with two radio tuners, in order to arrive at the right combination of the two sticks. And you must hold the correct combination of positions for about a second or two, meaning you often have to do "fine-tuning" as you get closer to your goal. Sometimes you must do this fiddling in a hurry, because poison gas is filling the room or a bomb is about to go off, or what have you. Wonderful.
2. Graphical Feedback
As you move each stick closer to the correct position to blow the lock, a graphical oscilloscope-ish gives you graphical feedback about whether you are getting closer or further from the correct position. The waves displayed on the gadget's screen move frantically when you approach the harmony of the two stick positions. If your two stick positions are completely wrong, the waves on the scope barely move at all, and you know it. It's somewhat like being told "hotter!" or "colder!" when play that game where you search for a hidden object with your eyes closed.
Aside from moving more quickly or slowly, the waves on the retro-looking oscilloscope change in color from brown to green as you get closer to the solution. (And then back to brown again as you accidentally slip past the right position, and try to fine-tune.)
3. Audible Feedback
Sound effects also clue you in to your progress. As you get closer to the correct position (for the given electronic lock that you are trying to decrypt), a delightful whirly/whistley sound gets louder and more highly-pitched. If you get close to the correct position, but lose it again by continuing to move your thumbs, the warbling/radio-like sound effect gets lower and more dull.
The entire mini-game is highly tangible, highly visible, and highly audible. For that reason it's a prime example of good game design, and of what video games are supposed to be all about.
The icing on the cake is when you successfully blow the lock. The terminal blows up in a small shower of smoke and loud sparks. I love it. You get so much feedback about the effort you're putting in, and about how close you are to overloading the lock, and about how DEAD that lock is once you beat it.
Some other icing on the cake is that you literally see Batman's own thumbs mimic your own movements, because your physical controller very closely resembles the fictional decryptor depicted in the game.
Pressing buttons is fun! Turning knobs is fun! And these actions actually mesh with something important that's happening in the game world. It's phenomenal.
The Sad Counter-Example
I have a completely opposite example, of a terribly implemented game nugget, and it comes from Modern Warfare 2, which otherwise does everything so well. In Modern Warfare 2, you sometimes have to place explosives on a door in order to blast it open and attack the enemies inside. What you do is go up to the door, then press a single button on your controller. That single button press initiates a rather long sequence of completely discrete actions: your character pulls out some explosives, then places them on the door, then steps backward a little bit (to avoid the upcoming explosion), then detonates the explosive, then returns to the newly opened doorway so he can start shooting.
Rather than immersing the player with meaningful and relevant button-presses (for placing the bomb, and then detonating it), the game basically plays a short movie for you while your character does all the work. In Batman, the player does all the work, and Batman mimics it onscreen.
Everybody knows it's fun to plant an explosive in a game, and then press down on a button to make it blow-up at the exact moment of your slightest whim. So I don't know what went wrong with Modern Warfare 2.
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