Game Design Advance

If you could design any game for the Wii, what would it be? The Wii seems to be at its best when people gather to play it, so I think the best ideas should incorporate this social aspect. But beyond that, I’d love to hear what people would like to see developed for the Wii.

For me: how about Wii Dodgeball where you velcro one remote to your head to dodge the balls, and have a second remote to throw the balls? But could this be social?

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Last week, N’Gai Croal and Geoff Keighley had a great conversation about the weekly sales chart, focusing on the amazing slide Sony seems to be lost in. I had been thinking about Sony’s problems for a while, and wrote to him. I have pasted my email below:

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Charles emailed me a reminder to post that game design proposal, so without further ado, here is a start.

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Deeper into the intricate little puzzle box which is Link’s Awakening, I’m finding myself more and more surprised and impressed by how well the game is constructed. Latter-day Zelda legends have, by and large, been rather bloated affairs. Ocarina of Time might’ve had the best story of the series, but its even with its 3D environment and targetting revolutions, its mechanics fall short of the gold-standard set by the previous flagship console instalment, A Link to the Past, while subsequent titles like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess remain merely playable, predictable and never anywhere near the creative zenith of the series. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting LA to have much of anything more than some post-modern winks here and there in terms of its contextual nature as a LoZ game about LoZ games, but in truth it might have some of the most sound demonstrations of practical gameplay. Once again, I believe a large part of this is due to the fact that it arrived on the Game Boy, rather than the Super Nintendo, wherein they learned a fundamental lesson for procedural outlining:

When it comes to game design, brevity is the soul of wit.

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Since nobody else has mentioned it, it falls upon me to point out this.

Please tell me I’m not the only person who thinks this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever? 

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There’s a part of me that feels like this is very important.

I’m a long time reader of the New York Times, and I’ve watched them coming around on video games for the past couple of years. When they published Clive Thompson’s article on Peacemaker on the front page of the Arts section (not the Technology section), I felt like it was a turning point. I know I shouldn’t care about legitimacy so much, but part of me thinks that it isn’t just about pride. Legitimacy also brings opportunity; the more people who at least give gaming a second glance, the more interesting projects might get off the ground. The more people who are interested in the possibilities of games, the more variety of perspectives, the stronger the community becomes.

I’m not a big fan of Ian Bogost’s games or his theory, but I do think that on the whole the work he is doing is good for everyone. Hopefully he will continue to use his growing influence to open doors, to push the art form itself forward, along with his own games.

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I love Roguelikes. I admit that I maybe love them more in theory than I actually love to play them, but I’ve played enough Nethack to genuinely feel a deep affection for the actual gameplay itself and not just its spiky, spartan, elitist, and techno-mythic aura. Roguelikes are awesome, insanely deep, demonstrations of the power of combinatory systems, a kind of state-space pr0n, and because of their ridiculous and wonderful ascii surface, they are also sort of like the computer game equivalent of brilliant radio drama.

It turns out that Game Set Watch has somebody writing a column about Roguelikes, his two most recent articles are about ADOM, and I think they nicely capture the quality that makes these things so beautiful -

Things to do While Visiting Ancardia
ADOM, Nethack with a Goatee

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The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released for the Game Boy in 1993, just might be the place where you can put your finger down and definitively state “This is where Nintendo officially started whoring out its best franchises,” or “This is where the people at Nintendo officially went insane”– either one will do, and likely both of them are pretty much true. It’s a Zelda game that doesn’t star Zelda, involve the Tri-Force, Ganon or any of the Hyrulian elements we’ve come to either know and love or at least come to expect. For a long time I’d pretty much rested my memory of this game upon the vague recollections of its smooth, solid mechanics, which it certainly has and pretty impressive when you take into consideration the time and handheld hardware it was made for. To be quite honest, though, the main thing I’d forgotten about LA was how just plain weird it is. Shigeru Miyamoto’s always said he was influenced by Lewis Carrol, but most of the time it’s just something people point out whenever they want to joke about how the Super Mario games were “obviously” designed by “somebody high on something.” Playing this game again for the first time in about 13 years, I just might be agreeing with that sentiment for the first time.

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Now, I’ve been keeping my distance from the blog for some time now. Mainly it’s because I haven’t had the time for it, since I’m spending all my writing time on my thesis manifesto, which I’m 47 pages deep into. Furthermore, I haven’t even been playing that many games, so it’s not like I’d have a great deal to write about here. Occasionally I dip into Another World, mostly to alleviate writer’s block with the trade-off of gamer’s block (I still can’t get past those fucking guards after doing the reservoir puzzle), and at the moment I’m staving off Psychonauts until I beat Ico for a third time, as it’s my vacation for all the sweat, blood and editorial angst I poured into God of War. Besides that, I haven’t even been doing that much with my PSP lately, as I spend my train rides to and from the city rediscovering the pastime of reading (Orwell’s Keep the Apidistra Flying, for one, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man at the moment), yet when I do take it out I’ve only been playing exactly the same game you’d think I would be playing, after all this time. If nothing else, you certainly can’t accuse me of not getting my money’s worth out of MPO, even if I haven’t figured out how to get the damn online multiplayer option working. A little while ago, however, I had an experience with the game that I believe is worth sharing here, as it speaks something not only to the nature of Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, but also to the nature of portable gaming in general.

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I don’t know how many of you guys listen to Gamasutra’s GDC Radio, but their latest episode had something that I thought was pretty interesting, especially in light of Bob having recently finished his epic, eleven part examination of God of War. It’s a panel done by GoW’s lead programmer, Tim Moss, which is mostly about programming, but also the relationship between the technical and the creative sides of the project. The insights into the process of creating what is, if not everyone’s taste, on of the biggest games of last year. I would really recommend that it is paired with David Jaffe’s Q and A session with Lorne Lanning (the Oddworld guy), also published by GDC Radio.

Tim Moss vs. David Jaffe

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