Note: This was written in and refers to 2012, so just fucking go along with it, eh?
Legacy. It’s a word, in this year of the Olympics, we here in the UK have been hit over the head with at almost every opportunity. Turn on the television and WHACK! we’re treated to a face full of legacy-mania. It really makes a guy long for the good old days of nostalgia. Where before it was, “Wasn’t it great when…” now it’s, “We need to preserve…” and, “What will this say about us…?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, apart from the vague future fatigue it brings on.
Though not enough fatigue to stop me thinking about what the current crop of games will be leaving behind for future generations. I mean, I know lots of games have opened up innovative new ways of doing things, leaps forward in graphical capability, wonderful ways of pushing systems to new heights, storytelling that’s never been seen before and interesting, compelling game mechanics. All that stuff’s a given. We’ve gone through some of the biggest changes in computer gaming in the last ten years; that means the influence of games designers and programmers will be felt for several decades to come. That’s all just dandy, but not what I’m talking about – I’m talking about the games themselves.
You’ll have got it into your head by now that I’m some sort of retro gaming nut. I’m not really. I remember some games from my youth (and a little beyond) with great fondness and would love to play them again, but it’s not a carpet love of the past. I’m not one of those weird people who loved (and still love) Manic Miner. I’d heard this game hyped for years when I was a kid. When I finally played it I wondered if the whole world of Spectrum journalists were in on a big prank at my expense. It was terrible in the way that only Spectrum games of that era could be: bright, noisy, stupid and ridiculously hard. There was one of those shaking my fist in anger at the world moments. And, almost thirty years later, who plays Manic Miner? No one, that’s who. I’d bet even the people who claim to have an almost inappropriate love for the game don’t even play it. Or they’re simply crazy people*.
There are, of course older games that I still play, but not many of them are from those far off days of the eighties. Sure, I’ll fiddle about with Chaos if I find it, but so many of the games are so bad, fair poorly against games even a decade older or are simply broken. It’s interesting to discover that when a game won’t work almost instantaneously, it’s just as frustrating as the first time you tried it and, after five minutes of squeaking and wheezing from the tape, you find yourself horrified to be stuck on the loading screen. Sometimes we grow in the wrong ways, I suppose, but I like to at least have a chance of being disappointed by a game. Ah the disappointments: games that promised to be something other than what they were (Blade Warrior by Codemasters still infuriates me to this day, there were no damned blades!) or were missing important and advertised features (like the game in which you were one of two rival wizards looking for spell ingredients without the ability to use the ingredients! now there’s game design for you**). You might offer the excuse that it was a simpler time of experimentation. I think it’s because the eighties were inherently bonkers and a tiny bit slipshod.
Some console games have fared better; Super Mario Bros is a good example, Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but they’re rarefied. They still have life because they were created as franchises that still allow life to flow into characters that would have shrivelled away to nothing (and that’s not even mentioning the fact that they worked). It’s amazing SMB survived the awful Bob Hoskins film – that’s how hardcore the franchise is. You don’t have people picking up the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game or Fester’s Quest, do you?
Of course there are loads of games from the nineties that still have followings. The Final Fantasy games from then are still well-loved and often played. I have Resident Evil sitting on my PS3 hard drive, waiting to release the power of dreadful voice acting on me in a wave of nostalgia-repulsion. I’m fairly sure there are myriad N64s, SNESes and Megadrives, held together with duct tape and Blutack, weeping to be put out of their misery and playing one more game of Star Fox, Super Street Fighter 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog. From the nineties I can feel the love.
This brings me to now, right this second†. Who will be playing the games of the moment in ten, twenty years time? Which games from now-times will people be playing?
Halo and Call of Duty will still be about, but will many people be playing Modern Warfare or Halo 3? Certainly the online play option, sitting as a sad remnant of a glorious time of shooting some stranger halfway around the world, will go unused. Or worse the mad purists who want the unfettered experience of an earlier time will haunt ancient levels murdering the final remnants of the original game’s fanbase like an online version of Highlander that will never end…‡
Games that try to force online and community play will suffer, no doubt. A prime example of this is Little Big Planet. Try playing an online cooperative game of the first one now, go on. All you’ll find are the mad and the terminally annoying. It’s a game that tells you everyone’s supposed to be working together and having fun, but that feels like someone forcing a laugh at a terrible joke made by the boss who’s one bourbon away from sacking a whole department. It’s a game that’s amusing as a platformer for while and it’s supposed to come alive when more people play. What it really makes you want to do is smash your console to bits with your own spleen because the twitchy loons who’ve hooked up with you can’t stop themselves from slapping you. Imagine what the online community’s going to be like in a few years time – a gulag in January would be more fun.
There are scores of games that will last and last thanks to the future iterations of XBox Live and Playstation Store. I’m sure as the years and generations of consoles pile up, so will the games of yesteryear, scrambling for the attention of the game-playing public, hoping beyond fevered hope they won’t get forgotten and lost in the mix. I’m sure publishers will be thinking the very same thing. Will we see a second remake of the Monkey Island games? Are they working on them right now to be encoded right into your brain in 2069? Could be, although I actually hope they’re not, it’s a creepy thought.
We’re in the middle of a golden era for computer games. It just remains to be seen which games from now will carry on into the future and whether they’ll be truly representative of the gaming times in which we live. Then again there’s always the chance tastes will take a huge leap into unexpected territory and everyone in the future will be into games all about sweeping driveways and everything from now will be abandoned, leaving future games columnists to lambast us people from the twenty-tens as a bunch of mental cases who wasted their time on games with action and story. I already hate those future people.
* Okay, I’ll admit I’ve heard of some people who play, but I can’t help thinking, “For fuck’s sake why?”
** I don’t remember the name of this game, and if someone could supply the name I’d be most appreciative.
† Or over a year ago. You know, whatever your level of pedantry.
‡ At least until the someone notices the lecky bill and pulls the plugs on the servers.
Will
Showing posts with label Nintendo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nintendo. Show all posts
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
The Wii U: A Step Too Far?
Note: This article was written over a year ago, just before the Wii U skulked into the marketplace. Y’know, just so you don’t think I’ve gone fucking doolally, but I think a lot of what I’m saying still stands.
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.
Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)