Really enjoyed reading that. Thanks.
Will never understand what kind of executive management group-think possessed NCL to abandon support for the Wii console. There was tons of stuff to mine from the GCN library (for New Play Control for starters).
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I'm almost certainly going to sit this gen out or jump in at the tail end when everything's going cheap. About the only thing that appeals at the moment is some of the VC stuff on Wii U.
Also enjoyed the twin convenience of on-board memory storage and wireless controllers as a standard feature last gen.
While NCL is better than most of the industry - AAA devs and "originality"-obsessed indies alike - in that they don't feel that games need to be a "seriously taken form of art", they have been infected by a different form of insanity. Namely, that games should be about "surprise".
If you ask me, the purpose of a game should be to spark the imagination of the player, and to have a solid feel to the mechanical gameplay. The AAA industry and the indies ("industry") are hellbent on forcing
their imaginations down the
players' throats, not just giving the player's mind the sparks to light up fireworks, which is what proper content does. NCL doesn't believe in that either. They think games' job is to surprise people. It's why they come up with mechanical gimmick after mechanical gimmick, and then forcibly contort some extant Nintendo property around the gimmick and call it a game. It's why they feel lackluster. To put it in different words, Modern Nintendo would never have made Starfox - they would have made Metroid: Space Combat instead. Old Nintendo instead had an idea and created an entire world around it.
The common thread in both the industry madness and the NCL madness is that they're not about what's fun for the player to play, but what is fun for the developers to make. It's why the AAA dudes make movies - it's fun playing director. It's why NCL loves 3D vision so much - it's surprising, they think, and they've been trying to do it for ages and always failed. Making 3d camera pans and such is fun. Making puzzles for Indie Puzzle-Platformer with Original(tm) Art Style #395639 is easy and fun.
Tuning stages for a fast 2d action game that has to stand on it's flow and mechanics, where you have to communicate things simply and effectively, and can't employ craptons of technical graphical effects to make it impressive? IT'S WORK. You have to spend ages fine-tuning the controls so they feel just right, you have to spend ages fine-tuning the levels so they flow well at different skill levels. You have limited room to do things like spiffy camera angles. You can't do stuff that screams "impressive".
Combine that with our society really pushing creativity as an end in itself, and you end up in a pile of s*** posthaste. It's why when people talk lovingly about abolishing limits to creativity I balk at the idea. Back in the day, "creative" was simply an unusual way to solve a problem. Now, end in itself. Problem is? Being creative is easy. Being
good is hard. Example: A Finnish artist once literally put a bunch of blood and s*** in a washing machine and turned it on.
This is art. Creativity as an end, and not a path to something good. Another example: Heavy Rain. Cage literally thinks games should stop being games. A bunch of my friends jokingly call him David "Antichrist" Cage because of that. We don't want Heavy Rain. We want games.
It's why indie games have so much potential that ends up wasted. A good bunch just focus on being pretentious, artsy, on being "visionaries". Sorry folks, I want games, I don't want stuff that "makes a statement" or some bs.
Back in the day when hardware limitations were a thing and you got revenue from the arcades, you tried being artsyfartsy and you went bankrupt. Good, simple games that brought new people in were what you simply had to do. Creativity wasn't pouring yourself to the disc in an embarassment that would get laughed out of Hollywood or any big published in two seconds, it was using the same sprite for the clouds and the bushes in Super Mario Bros. Because otherwise there just was no space. A game had to stand on it's merits.
Which brings me to the last part: Bringing in new people. Why? Because, if Nintendo is to be believed
*, past gaming growth has been driven by population growth, multiple console ownership and access to new geographical markets. Furthermore, most of the post-NES years have been years of economic growth. That is to say, the portion of the population videogames reach has remained largely static over the past decades, and the industry has just milked more money from the same people.
Now? Economy's looking dire, Europe and Japan are in a population decline, and new geographical markets are pretty slim. Clearly, that can't continue. If the industry is to survive, let alone grow, it must reach a broader amount of people. Back in the NES days when many of us started playing games (the same ones many "hardcores" amusing call non-games now that they're Kool(tm)), adults used to play too. They used to play because games were simpler. Controllers were not monsters and games could be grasped easily. Progress was more about skill, less about raw hours spent. Good for people with not much free time.
Amusingly, everyone and their dog is making "hardcore" games. Let's see the financial reality of it:
1. Massive competition. Check.
2. Massive costs. Check.
3. No prospects of market growth. Check.
End result: Say hello to bankruptcy. It's why midsize devs basically died out last generation. They tried to kill CoD and failed, as everyone did.
* Reggie went over this in a 2005 press briefing that no one paid any attention to. It explained very concretely why Wii and DS were made, yet people thought it was dry business talk and then proceeded to go wtf Nintendo is insane when there 100% was a method to their "madness". Talk was on Youtube once upon a time but I can't find it for now, so here's an IGN transcript:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2005/11/04/reggie-talks-nintendos-future
Remember, whenever something seems strange and doesn't quite make sense, start following the money. Turns out most strange things make a ton of sense the moment you follow the money instead of what's being said publicly. Whether it's politics or war or the video game business.
EDIT: Final amusing tidbit. Nintendo used to not believe in the "casual"/"hardcore" divide the game industry manufactured up to demonize the Wii (which they hated the guts of, after all it's the retardation of gaming and all that's good and holy, main reason they were remotely friendly toward it was because from the old frame of reference it was basically 100% certainly a short-lived fad.) in the eyes of their "hardcore" audience (I find the using "hardcore" or "real game / gamer" to describe the hand-holdy QTE festivals AAA games are to be amusing). They simply made games for people who played games. Now? They've turned into an industry company. They bought the idea of the "hardcore"/"casual" divide hook, line and sinker. Just go through Nintendo's old press conferences from the Revolution/Wii/DS era and now. The way they talk is
vastly different. It used to be different from MS/Sony. Now it's they all sound the same.
