Tag Archives: wii

Idle thoughts

Posted by under Uncategorized

Big post in the works. Meanwhile, some brief updates:

Motorstorm (PS3) is very pretty but Excite Truck (Wii) is more fun. I was quite surprised how much fun Excite Truck has turned out to be.

Have you noticed how some driving games don’t include any human beings at all? Excite Truck and the Burnout series too. No visible drivers, no spectators, not an actual human anywhere. I tell you, it’s not a lack of processing power or development time. Hint: it tends to be games with big vehicle crashes.

I downloaded Mozilla Firefox yesterday in order to try out a game-based plugin, of which more anon. I now understand the point of distributed open-source projects like this: it would be too much work for me to find everybody who contributed to it and punch each of them in the face. For the record, for more than a decade I have been using Opera, which is what you get when you decide to build a browser like Firefox but hire professionals to do it.

The updated Internet channel on the Wii is very nice. Coincidentally, it uses the Opera browser.

I know I’m not going to have time for a full review of the nice-try-no-cigar RPG Contact for the Nintendo DS, not least because I’ve lent my copy to a friend, but I can’t remember the last game that included breaking the fourth wall as such an integral part of the gameplay—to the extent that when your avatar discovers you’ve been controlling him throughout the game, he picks a fight with you and you have to beat him up. Which, with the DS touch-screen, is a uniquely physical experience. The game has a lot of interesting ideas (different art-styles for upper and lower screen, a Tamagotchi element, you can continue playing after defeating the game, you can find and win girlfriends by giving them the right attention, there’s a whole level of otaku jokes, and you heal by having a nice relaxing bath) but at its heart it’s basically a succession of dungeon-bashes in search of a magic jigsaw and never transcends “interesting” to reach either “intriguing” or “involving”.

(‘Magic jigsaw’—a magic football that has been separated into pieces. ‘Magic football’—the object of a journey, search or quest, and without which the game will not progress. A plot token, but larger and often more fatuous.)

Gathering nuts in May

Posted by under game design, narrative

The world is full of bullshit awards.

In a few days we’ve got the Oscars, where an Academy dominated by retired actors will vote for films in which other actors get to showcase their acting, and scripts and directors that showcase acting, and people will call foul because these films, these scripts, these directors and even these actors were not the “best”. That’s a value judgement. That’s not what I’m talking about.

On 8th February, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gave out its tenth annual Interactive Achievement awards, thirty reasons for the computer-game business to rent a dinner jacket and fly to Las Vegas. The big winners were Gears of War and Wii Sports and Nintendo had a good night all told, with two Lifetime Achievement awards and gongs for Brain Age and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess which picked up ‘Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development’.

Now that’s a bullshit award.

Not a bullshit category, mark you. I think it’s fantastic that the AIAS respects and honours excellence in game narrative. But giving it to Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a joke because there’s precious little story in the game and literally no character development, whether you’re talking about the avatar or the NPCs. Nobody learns anything that changes their life. Nobody changes. Nobody matures. What story there is unfolds in wildly inconsistent info-dumps, mostly irrelevant to gameplay.

Link, our avatar, begins the game as an cypher and ends it as a cypher with a few more hit points. He has no personality and never says anything. Over the course of the game we learn almost nothing about him that we didn’t know at the start (lives in a treehouse outside a village, rides a horse, herds goats, has odd taste in clothes and a chest in his basement he’s never bothered to open), other than he’s got some kind of mystic destiny. All that he learns about himself, his past and this destiny is some new combat skills. His relationship with Ilia begins promisingly, then she gets kidnapped and loses her memory (hurrah for strong female characters, eh?) and Link has to find out what happened to her. When he does it turns out to be very boring, and she plays no further part in the story apart from a cameo at the end. Link ends up having a more meaningful relationship with his horse than with Ilia. Another potentially interesting character-arc, that of Prince Ralis, is left hanging after its second act. He doesn’t even get a vignette during the credits sequence.

As for the story, once you get past the fluff about the world of shadow invading the world of light, it’s two sequential hunt-the-magic-jigsaw quests. Link assembles one jigsaw (one piece per dungeon, of course), is immediately told that this jigsaw is no good, and must set off to assemble another one. At one point you do reach a place that promises to explain something about the ancient beings who set up the events that have caused all this mess, and who set in motion Link’s mystic destiny. What we find out there is that these people liked statues and built a lot of traps.

As a rich, interactive narrative experience, Legend of Zelda: Twlight Princess is a pretty good 3D platformer. Lots of jumpy-jumpy stuff. Sliding-block puzzles. A snowboarding minigame that made me intensely nostalgic for the one in Final Fantasy VII. And okay, I admit the sheer variety of activities (sumo, jousting, horseback archery, flying contests and even the fishing which a lot of people seemed to hate but really wasn’t so irritating) keeps one interested and amused. But that doesn’t make the game an outstanding achievement in story and character development.

There are, of course, side-quests. You can spend time finding every Heart Piece. You can hunt down every Poe soul to receive a reward. You can locate every golden insect in the world to make a small rich girl happy. These side-quests appear to be more important to our hero of mystic destiny Link than saving the world, since the climax of the game will wait indefinitely for him to complete these quests, and he can’t complete them after defeating the final boss. This makes no sense, either narratively or in gameplay.

And the background world is strictly generic: that weird and never-explained post-FF blend of magic, technology and every imaginable kind of terrain that makes no sense and doesn’t work. There is a community with two inhabitants, one of whom is the community shaman. There’s an oil-seller whose business is on a road that nobody except Link ever uses. And there are dungeons filled with vicious monsters that, if left in proximity, should have eaten each other. Maybe they don’t eat meat. Maybe they just hate Link. I know that by the end of the game I did.

I should say—and it may be obvious—that I’ve not played any of the earlier parts of the Zelda franchise. I suspect a lot of Wii owners won’t have done either. All I can report is that this game gives no hint of having more than twenty years of story and character behind it. Admittedly neither do the recent Sonic games, but then Sonic was never about either story or character, and I say that as someone who wrote two novels and two gamebooks about him in the early 90s.

So why has the AIAS chosen Zelda as the recipient of the award for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development’? The only other category in which it was nominated was Action/Adventure Game of the Year, which went to Gears of War. And it’s not a bad game, qua game, but if you go to any game shop and pull any CRPG from the last ten years off the shelf, there’s a strong chance it’ll have more story and character development than LoZ:TP.

So why this award, and why now?

I can think of two reasons. Firstly, the first 2-3 hours give the impression that LoZ:TP is going to have a strong narrative. The characters in Link’s home village are established with confident if broad strokes and it’s suggested they have roles to play in what follows, though most of them don’t. The storytelling is tight and there are hints of great mysteries to be revealed, though most of them aren’t. Although LoZ:TP is a game requiring 40+ hours to finish, for me to suggest that the Academy’s panel has only played through its opening chapters would be unfair. I have no evidence to support it.

That leaves the second reason: it’s a sop. LoZ:TP is groundbreaking, its control systems are brilliantly innovative, and it’s the latest installment of one of the most respected and commercially successful games franchises in the industry’s history. Clearly to a panel made up of industry players it should get an award of some kind, but the all-conquering Gears of War was equally clearly going to win its category, Action/Adventure. What else is there? Art direction? Sound design? Original music? I know, it’s a bit like an RPG and everybody likes Link, let’s give it Story and Character Development.

A brief summary for those who don’t know me: story and narrative in games and interactive media is my thing. It is the drum I bang, and I bang it relentlessly. It is acceptable for an arcade or casual game to have no story (note that story is not the same as backstory: the latter happens before play, the former during it. Many games have both; some have neither) but I believe absolutely that any interactive experience that aims to engage you for a single play-session of anything over an hour needs a coherent narrative. As games get more sophisticated, so should their stories and story-telling techniques. “Our princess is in another castle” doesn’t cut it any more. And yet that’s not a million miles from what the plot of LoZ:TP boils down to.

I call bullshit on this award.

If anyone from the AIAS judging panel—or anyone else—can tell me why LoZ:TP deserves this award for 2007, having better story and character than other category nominees like Dreamfall, please do. Otherwise I say it’s a sop, something for Nintendo to take home at the end of the night for a game that deserved a gong of some kind. That’s reprehensible enough, but the fact that they thought nobody would particularly object to a manifestly unqualified game like LoZ:TP getting the award for story and character development makes it doubly so, and casts a poor light on the rest of the Interactive Achievement Award winners, who in my experience deserve their trophies.

Meanwhile… a few posts back I described LoZ:TP as ‘gathering nuts in May’ and I’m going to stick to that summary. I’ll leave the last word to the excellent Rebecca Borgstrom, who observed that if you want to play a wolf with an intensely irritating rider, you’d be better off with Okami.

Wii want Wiinformation

Posted by under consoles, technology

In all the hubbub and furore about the commercial success of the Wii, its strengths as a games machine and its viability against the PS3, one thing’s been missed. Nintendo is about to snatch a huge crown out from under the noses of Sony and Microsoft. While the Xbox 360 and PS3 fight it out to provide the best online play, movie downloads and iPod playback in the name of being not games consoles but Home Entertainment Centres, the Wii is making a stealth approach on the position of market leader in a different space: the Home Information Hub.

When you switch on a Wii, you see a brief text screen and then you’re at the system’s front end. This is a grid of 12 boxes like massive desktop icons, six filled and six waiting for downloads either from the Virtual Console (retro games) or in the form of ‘channels’. Your out-of-the-box Wii already has two (Photos and Forecast, meaning weather), plus the News Channel (not up yet but video here) and the optional-download Internet Channel. That leaves space on the main screen for five more. Scroll right and there’s another grid of 12 boxes waiting to be filled—and another, and another.

A Wii desktop. My Wii desktop, in fact. Would you believe there's no other images of one on the net?

I believe Nintendo’s intention with these channel-spaces is to make the Wii a one-stop at-your-fingertips centre for all the information you want at the touch of a button or flick of a Wiimote. When you think about whether you should take an umbrella, or what happened in the cricket, they want your primary source for that information (and by primary I mean easiest and fastest to access, most convenient and after a while instinctive) to be the Wii. It won’t download movies, it won’t hold all your MP3s, but barely a day will pass without you consulting it. That at least is the intention.

I’ll go further. Wii channels you will see before long will include: sports news; business news and share-price checking; travel news which remembers your regular journeys; family health; food, diet and fitness, probably tied to the shopping channel and maybe even to the fitness section of Wii Sports; and (longer shots these) online grocery shopping with delivery in association with a major supermarket chain; online pizza delivery; and more.

How can I predict this? Because I’ve been here before.

Six years ago I was part of 3Com’s short-lived internet appliance division. We brought one product to market, called Audrey. With 50s styling and a 10″ touch-screen, Audrey was a cross between a grown-up Palm Pilot—more of a family organiser than a personal one, it could sync two Palms and combine their calenders and address books—and a dedicated net-machine, with IR keyboard, web browser and a sweet email client that would record and embed audio and pictures at—literally—the touch of a button. It was, in a word, sweeet.

Audrey. Gorgeous, wasn't she?

But it was more than that. Directly below the screen was a dial, like an old TV. Settings corresponded to six basic information channels, updated regularly throughout the day so that whenever you touched the dial, you had access to information no more than a couple of hours old. And those channels were, in rough order: weather, news, sports, business, showbiz news, and space for us and users to add more. To people who remember five paragraphs up, this may sound a bit familiar.

One of my jobs was choosing and creating the information channels for the European launch, so I was intimately involved with this end of the business. And while the Wii is very far from an Audrey knockoff—Audrey didn’t play games for a start—I recognise many of the thought processes underlying the look and feel of the Wii’s interface design. Time-to-data, for example. An Xbox 360 takes 22 seconds to boot, even with no disc in the drive. To get to its desktop the Wii takes less than half as long, and that includes pressing the (A) button to synch the Wiimote.

This is crucial. The Wii is not the only device that can give you this kind of information on demand. Opera Widgets and Firefox Extensions can put this functionality in your browser, as can Google if you’re prepared to type a couple of words. Avantgo will put it on your smartphone or PDA. The Apple iPhone will have it built-in, judging by the early screenshots. But the key point is the time between demand and delivery, and it’s my bet that the Wii will beat all of them on speed and ease of accessibility.

(This was something Audrey did astonishingly well. It had an instant-on, and though it was pre-broadband it logged onto our server five times a day to get updates, so the information you saw was never more than a couple of hours old. If Nintendo is smart—and the name it’s chosen for the Wii’s internet connection, WiiConnect24, indicates it has been—the Wii channels will do the same. In other words, when you want the weather forecast the device won’t need to retrieve it from a server because the latest update will already be stored on board.)

Nintendo clearly considers time-to-data so crucial that it’s done away with any Wii splash screen at startup. This is, if you’ll pardon the geek-pun, revolutionary. When was the last time you switched on a console and didn’t get the brand-name front and centre? By removing its own logo to save a couple of seconds of load-time, Nintendo has signalled that it considers the Wii to be more than just the next generation of games machine. That may turn out to be its biggest play of all.