The Gamer’s Quagmire #52: Pets, Guns, and Magic Wands
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
If you ever want a truly enigmatic experience, at this point you just may need a video game vacation. It does sound quite cliché, but it does a great job at soothing the body, the mind, and the soul. The gaming aspect about such a trip is always interesting (otherwise, why are would you ever plan one?), but the best part is invariably a discussion about the gaming itself. If you have a good group of people who can philosophize about this for several hours, you have yourself a winner.Replaying the week in my head this morning while on the way to work (maybe daydreaming along with cell phones need to be outlawed in cars- can we do that?) forced me to link two concepts that I originally thought were completely unrelated. Think about the success of the current consoles and health of the PC gaming market. Nintendo struck a chord with the Wii that tons of people did not expect, and that is the way in which we interact with video games. No, I am not referring to smashing a controller against a wall when the CPU defeats you.
People like to point to the PC gaming market as the place where all the best cutting edge games go, but is that really true? If you think purely about graphical achievements then you would be right on because looking at the video arms race, even just with a small reference window of this past year, you will see a gigantic leap in video card power… processing power and power consumption (remember, puns are our friends). Perhaps we have gone too far with the 2 PCIe slot graphic cards that you can easily use to bludgeon someone to death. Aside from pure power, the last real innovation the PC gaming market brought to the table was the online RPG.
Consoles have been the stage for the biggest innovations within the last several years in gaming. Look at the success of the EyeToy, Wiimote, DS, and the DDR pad. The world’s most successful games have largely been the result of a combination of any of these innovations, and that is discounting the Guiter Hero guitar (I cannot think of a quick catchy name for it, hence its earlier omission). It is true that there are games that just work on their own steam, such as a blockbuster console release like Halo, but the way I see it the truth of the matter is that gamers are tired of the dual analog and the keyboard/mouse.
If you don’t believe that the interaction is the latest big idea in gaming then you are missing out on some important things. First you should look at the stock price of Nintendo over the last year. If you are one of those ‘numbers are boring’ people or just don’t feel like doing the research then all you need to know is that your investment would have tripled in the past year. This is far more than just Nintendo getting lucky at the race track.
I am in the camp of people that need some graphical innovation, so shiny things do easily distract me. Unfortunately, cost of development is a big barrier for many companies that want to make a lot of successful games. This was easy when the gaming industry was just getting started because all you had was one button, a joystick, and 8-bit graphics. Games like Tetris don’t succeed because of graphics- they succeed because they are easy to understand and play.
So what did Sony and Microsoft miss this time around? Multimedia and online play do have a market, so they have put very good systems together (minus alarming hardware issues). Video game consoles in the home was new to everyone in the 80’s, and when games have one button and a joystick everyone can get in on the action. Bring a controller with 10+ buttons in front of your parents now and many of them will be scared away. Did you really thought DDR and the Wii were successful because the games were good? Seriously?
This has been the argument from the Sony and Microsoft fanbots almost since the consoles were first announced and to an extent it still happens today. Look at the games that were coming out in the 80’s and honestly tell me how games with such a simple notion could ever succeed today. Adventure was a horribly cheesy game, but the technology was so new that people had a unique experience playing it. What is very strange is that the dragons guarding the keys in the game still scare me.
Fast forward to today. Look at the stylus and the DS. After two years of struggling, Nintendo has finally found the games that sell the system. What, did you think Nintendogs sold because it was a deep and interesting game? Part of the reason for the game’s success is because of the previous success of Tamagotchi, but it is also one of the first video game translations of it. DDR is a sweeping success because everyone understands dancing to music. Girls will generally run away screaming from complicated controllers (almost as though you are trying to solicit a date), but throw down a pad where you can dance to modern music and they’ll have fun all day long. Put a guitar in the hands of people who are not used to it and they will be entertained for hours on end. Put a light gun in someone’s hand and they will be happy to shoot at anything that pops onto the screen. Put a magic wand in front of someone and they will do whatever they can (including embedding it in the TV, but that isn’t recommended).
The next time you catch yourself defending your PC for gaming because your graphics are always better or your keyboard and mouse will never be beaten you need to ask yourself when you became a dinosaur. Gaming innovation is now in the hands of new controllers, and any developer that does not seriously take this into consideration is going to endanger themselves with possible extinction.
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December 4, 2006
The Gamer’s Quagmire #35: Punch Drunk Gaming
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Something amazing happened recently that I feel is worth sharing. Yesterday I fired up my Nintendo DS for the first time in several months. Motivation to play set in because finally there are some local friends getting into playing games on it. This, naturally, required purchasing more games and testing them out. What was very surprising was that the battery was still powered. The last time the DS was turned on was in late April. Considering my iPod’s battery dies if not used for 2 days this was pretty impressive.One of the game purchases was a simple clubhouse games cartridge, complete with several card games, tile games, darts, bowling, and so forth. It wasn’t that bad, but I have to admit that this game is another instance of a game simply failing to make good use out of the touch screen for innovative play. Moving cards around (or tiles) was pretty simple. Checkers, hearts, dominoes, and a bunch of other games worked pretty well with this interface. Bowling and darts, however, suffered from what I like to call Acute but Severe Suckitude (forgive me if I don’t explicitly spell out the acronym for you). When a lifetime bowler is unable to figure out how to pick a 5-pin in 2 hours the interface simply doesn’t work. Flinging a bowling ball with the stylus is the skill equivalent of rolling a 20 on a D20 die every time. This is not good. Looking at the angles between the bottom and the top screen I figured out that the difference between throwing a gutter on the right side of the alley to throwing a gutter on the left side is about 6 pixels. Considering styluses are not known for their pinpoint accuracy, well, you can see where this is going.
I never imagined that those electronic devices in stores that turned your once smooth signature into chicken scratches sent through a fax machine several times over would look good compared to any other stylus device. Bowling in this game shattered those expectations. This came 3 days after bowling 2 near 300 games. A video game actually brought into question my ability to bowl at all. Thankfully things were bound to get better.
Darts, on the other hand, managed to make things considerably worse. I had originally given bowling a 10 out of 10 on the hopelessly annoying playability scale, but darts went ahead broke the scale completely beyond all recognition. It was like watching the 2005 Knicks, only to then watch the 2006 Knicks stink it up even more. Not only are the left-to-right angles frustrating just like bowling, but now the speed of the dart matches where the dart lands on the board. I was expecting this so at least the design of the dart game is intuitive. Still, when the dartboard is on the top screen and the dart is on the bottom screen it completely flushes any hope of adjusting for consistency down the drain. I would probably have more fun downing a case of beer, spinning myself around a bat for 20 seconds and then trying to walk in a straight line. I had to go to a bar just to recall the feeling of not wanting to take a dart and jamming it into someone’s neck. Well, that and the ability to hit the actual board with a dart. Luckily for me the bartender didn’t manage to botch my drink orders.
And just in case it was a little ambiguous- darts and bowling on the DS is atrocious.
The card playing experience has been much better. Sudoku has been a pleasure too. These games are perfect for the DS because they are simple, enjoyable, don’t require skills outside of playing the actual game to enjoy, and also do not require a hefty amount of attention. In other words, this is exactly what mobile game should be like. My home network also passed with flying colors again as having the DS find my wireless router and get an IP address to the outside world was almost completely painless (almost because, well, it took 10 minutes to realize that the Ethernet cable between the wireless hub and the router was not connected). Once the wireless connectivity started working for me the best of this clubhouse games cartridge was finally realized.
It was at this point I started thinking about what the DS and PSP have brought to the table and it finally hit me- the PSP failed horribly despite being the superior product. The PSP screen and multimedia capabilities are much better. This fact has never been in doubt, but the problem is that what the PSP tried to accomplish failed by losing support on their UMD. When the games never came the PSP’s fate was sealed. After owning both of the handhelds what Nintendo tried to accomplish with the DS succeeded. They were never trying to be the better technical handheld. Instead they just wanted a better gaming device. Despite there not being a lot of intriguing games for the DS, the way I see it there are only a couple for the PSP and they are the GTA expansion pack games (Vice City & Liberty City Stories).
This sentiment should go a long way to explaining what gaming is all about to people. This could be my major problem with Nintendo at this point. When I first started gaming the Nintendo games had a low level of difficulty and were just a lot of fun to play. Nintendo is good at making games that are easy to pick up and enjoy. The problem for me now is that I expect more from games, not because I’m older, but because I’ve been playing video games for over 15 years now. I have done the Mario games to death and, seriously, once you have played the Mario and Zelda games for a long time you grow as a gamer and want something more.
Listening to the hype from other gamers has been part of my problem with Nintendo because, in all honesty, I don’t believe they think of their games as blockbusters. In fact, Zelda feels like Nintendo’s biggest franchise now. There are hundreds of Mario games and none of them are overly engrossing. Mario is not the big Nintendo icon as much as he is the icon for a quick and enjoyable game. There are plenty of quick and enjoyable games available for the DS and no truly engrossing games that I’ll be playing for hours on end (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance being the one exception). This used to bother me. Now I realize what I should have a long time ago- mobile gaming should not ever replace console or PC gaming. Instead mobile gaming is something for traveling, network gaming with some friends, or, if you are a proponent of multitasking, even for sitting in front of the television and getting a quick game in.
So it only took a couple years to get used to the idea, but the DS has finally won me over as a great handheld gaming device. The only depressing parts are that the stylus has almost nothing to do with it while, inexplicably, a virtual pooper-scooper (a.k.a. Nintendogs) has.
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