Just A Thought On Revolution Downloads
So who started the story that classic game downloads on Nintendo Revolution will be free of charge? Actually, I don’t care where it came from, because it’s obviously false.
Nintendo discovered with the ‘NES Classics’ on Game Boy Advance how much people are willing to pay for carbon copies of games from the eighties. So while they might, for example, give away a classic ‘Mario’ with a new release, or as a special promotion, they’re not going to give them all away anytime soon.
(Also, why are people copying that list of 200+ downloadable Nintendo games, including such gems as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ for Nintendo 64 — which turned out to be the development team behind ‘Pokémon Snap’, not a game.)
So how is Nintendo going to deal with micropayments? Well, they might enable you to pay with your credit card, but knowing Nintendo they’ll focus their attention on prepaid cards. And here’s another thought — I’d say they’ll bring in the web-based Star Catalog system that’s already quite popular in Europe and Japan.
If you haven’t heard about it, here’s how it works: with every boxed game you buy, you get a coupon with a unique code. After logging in at your local Nintendo website, you can exchange this code for stars. As soon as you’ve accumulated enough of them, you can use your stars to buy digital stuff like desktop backgrounds and screensavers — and, every once in a while, real world goodies. For example, at one point Nintendo used the service to give away the ‘Zelda’ bonus disc that came with the first run of ‘The Wind Waker’.
While succesful, the Star Catalog presents Nintendo with quite a bit of a problem. As it turns out gamers don’t care about digital assets they can download elsewhere for free. They only care about stuff that actually costs money. What Nintendo found out is people wait until actual goodies become available, then rush to get them — and if they’re too late, often a matter of minutes, complain that the stars they worked so hard to save up are worthless.
I’d say it’s quite a logical step for Nintendo to connect the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to the Star Catalog — and introduce it in the United States in the process. Being able to purchase and download classic Nintendo games using stars as credits would solve Nintendo’s Empty Catalog Problem — and, thinking about it, would probably even enable the company to sell additional stars. (Which they could call ‘Prepaid Star Cards’.)
In closing, just because I want to get it off my chest, here’s my vote for Nintendo to introduce wireless NES, SNES and N64 controllers. I’d buy them.
Update: it has been brought to my attention that a system similar to the Star Catalog is already in use in the US. That should make it even easier to link it to Wi-Fi, then.
The New 'Zelda' Is Too Big
Recently, an international group of games magazine journalists was sent off to Japan to play the new ‘Zelda’. I wasn’t one of them. So if my comments seem a little harsh, you now know why.
This time, I don’t want to talk about ‘realistic’ graphics — which really aren’t that realistic if you think about it. I mean, they’ve got skeletons walking around. Instead, I want to talk about size.
One by one, these lucky reporters’ magazines are being released to news stands worldwide, and slowly but surely, information is trickling out on the bits and pieces that Nintendo had playable — the exact same portions that will probably be on show at E3, later this month.
The tidbit that caught my attention is that the world of the new Zelda game is apparently two to three times larger than the world in ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’ on Nintendo 64.
This news is making a lot of fans happy. But I beg to differ. If anything, I was hoping for a smaller world. Not a smaller game, mind you, but a more compact world, crammed with detail and with puzzles on every corner. If anything, I felt the Ocarina of Time world was already too big.
The dense world design of ‘The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past’ on Super Nintendo still epitomizes Zelda for me. I’d much rather have the “So this dungeon is located on the same spot I’ve done my potion shopping all game!”-feeling than the wide-open space of Hyrule Field. Or worse, the sinking feeling of endlessly sailing around on the ocean of ‘The Wind Waker’.
Mr. Aonuma must have his reasons, and it’s not hard to guess which. People loved riding Epona in Ocarina of Time. People love the open game structure and feeling of freedom of ‘Grand Theft Auto’. They love the horseback battles in Peter Jackson’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movie trilogy. Or, for that matter, roaming ‘World of Warcraft’. So why shouldn’t Aonuma work with that?
There’s a technical angle to this topic as well. With in-game 3D-models as complex as the ones in the new Zelda, and the game engine running on the same four year old hardware, other elements will have to be compromised. You can’t have a super detailed Link and six enemies on horseback and a dense game world where at least three intriguing landmarks are in sight at all times.
What proves my point is that, even with the scarcely detailed landscapes in place in recent screenshots and movie footage, the texture quality for sand, grass and other ground types is generally quite low.
So maybe building a huge, wide-open game world, capitalized upon with horseback riding and grand battles, was really the only way to pull off this ‘realistic’ Zelda.
That this might be as much a technical decision as a design decision doesn’t automatically make me happier, though. I still hope this won’t be one of these games where you spend hours and hours wandering around, wondering what the game wants you to do next.
Which I guess really doesn’t sound too harsh at all. And did you notice I ended up talking about those darned graphics anyway?
Peach Has Got It
I guess it’s the kind of thing you’re destined to do if you start a blog called Nintendo Watch: I spent the last couple of days wondering about a Nintendo DS game named ‘Super Princess Peach’. At first sight it’s a game that doesn’t look like there’s much to it and the core fanbase seems to be outraged at Nintendo devoting resources to something like this — but still, here I am, doing a piece called ‘Peach Has Got It’.
Super Princess Peach seems to be a middle of the road platform game in which Peach gets to jump around, using her umbrella as a weapon and as a floating device. The HUD seems to indicate there’s a whole lot of coins to collect and Peach doesn’t die instantly — she’s got three heart containers.
That’s not all, though. On the top screen, madame Peach herself is depicted. I haven’t seen enough of the game to say for sure, but it seems her face shows emotions in sync with your actions. With this I mean I expect her to be happy when you finish a level, cringe when hit by baddies and more.
This is exciting to me. For years I’ve been writing about games like ‘The Sims’ and what game companies can do to achieve the Sims-effect, selling more games to female players. I believe young girls will feel attracted to a game that contains both a cute-looking, full-screen princess and classic videogame action (because chicks like digital violence too!) — especially if the princess’ emotions connect directly with theirs.
In short, I feel game companies should be doing stuff like this. I like the fact that DS, with its games easy to develop and cheap to produce, seems to become a bit of a breeding ground not only for experimental gameplay, but for experimental branding, too.
When Nintendo announced the line-up some time ago though, I grew sceptical. Previously I’d viewed not calling Nintendo DS a ‘Game Boy’ as a way to cut ties with the ‘Pokémon’ audience, the kids Nintendo is so often associated with. But when the company announced three Pokémon DS games at once, my hopes were dashed.
This changed once I realized how well the ultra accessible touch-screen technology, the Touch! advertising, ‘Pictochat’ and Super Princess Peach fit together. Perhaps Nintendo is not targeting DS at a much older audience, but it’s definitely reaching out to a much wider audience. It’s probably no coincidence that the words ‘game’ and ‘play’ are missing from the name ‘Nintendo DS’. (And the fans might want to be happy that Nintendo didn’t call it Touch Toy.)
Once again, my girlfriend played a role in understandig this: she loves playing ‘Zelda’ and ‘Metroid’ on her GBA, but she pretty much refuses to sit down with a TV console game, because it’s too complex and because she can’t take it anywhere. Videogames are better than wasting time waiting for a train, but they still don’t feel as valid as ‘Sex and the City’ or ‘CSI’ — maybe Nintendo DS can serve the good cause and help to narrow the gap.
It’s not that I don’t understand these angry fans. The game geek in me decided long ago that what I like to see most on DS is simply epic, original IP action adventures using the touch-screen to streamline stuff like selecting tools — or abstract action games like ‘Tetris’ or ‘Panel de Pon’, because geeks like these as well. They’re pure math, if you don’t count the soundtrack.
But it’s still good to sometimes look beyond your traditional state of play and that’s exactly what Nintendo is doing — contrary to what others are saying, though in subtler ways than sometimes suggested.
Mario Should Do What Midway Does
I really like what Midway’s been up to recently. This American publisher appeared to be going the way of Acclaim, then turned around with a new-found focus on high quality, original content aimed squarely at a slightly older audience — stuff like ‘Psi-Ops’, ‘Area 51’ and ‘The Suffering’.
It got even better when Epic announced that future ‘Unreal’ games would be handled exclusively by Midway. Talk about a great franchise to further expand the meaning of your brand name! To use Scott Miller‘s terminology, it’s a brilliant ‘line extension’.
I also like how the company is far from screwing up its most important IP: ‘Mortal Kombat: Deception’ is said to be pretty good, with a now finely tuned fighting system and some unexpected extra game modes including a ‘Puzzle Fighter’-style abstract action game. Deception is fully playable online as well, supposedly the first time a 3D fighter pulls this off.
Today I read that Midway is planning to capitalize on Mortal Kombat by releasing a new episode every year. To me, this is a great approach, especially since Midway is not simply going to rehash its fighting game. The next Kombat-branded title, scheduled for fall 2005, is an action adventure called ‘Shaolin Monks’. It looks to be much better than previous, deeply flawed attempts to expand the Mortal Kombat universe.
After Electronic Arts’ incredible success with annual updates it’s a mystery to me why so few publishers have followed suit. Yearly releases may be the only way for videogames to achieve the high visibility and recognizability top brands require. And combined with constant improvements, or even different types of gameplay, even us critics get what we want.
Of course, in a way, this is what Nintendo’s been doing. We get Super Mario’s annual ‘Mario Party’ birthday event, and a year after ‘Luigi’s Mansion’ we got ‘Super Mario Sunshine’, then ‘Mario Kart: Double Dash!!’ and this year there’s ‘Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’ for all to enjoy.
Still, I’ve argued before that Nintendo should go further. Why not create a huge 3D-platforming team with two subgroups, delivering a focused, just slightly evolutionary but certainly well-playing Mario-episode year after year?
Sunshine’s approach would have blended perfectly with lots of similarly themed follow-ups. Of course, Miyamoto’s experimental EAD-team could still work in the background — coming up with a revolutionary breakthrough at least once every console cycle.
Whether Mario should still be Nintendo’s focus is another matter entirely, but at the very least I think the company should feel no shame for capitalizing even more on what it does best.
The Minish Cap Play Impressions
At Nintendo Benelux in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands today, I got the chance to play ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap’ about halfway through. Out of respect for the magazine I’m reviewing this Game Boy Advance game for, I won’t go into a lot of detail — I can’t help myself sharing some impressions though.
So far, it’s magnificent. Definitely better than ‘The Wind Waker’ and miles ahead of Flagship’s previous singleplayer Zelda efforts for Game Boy Color.
It follows the Zelda formula standardized by ‘A Link to the Past’ quite strictly, but applies a novel twist to the multiple dimension concept — you can change to pixel size (and back) at magic portals. The game strictly limits where you can walk when you’re small, so you discover the microscopic wonders Hyrule has to offer bit by bit.
This gameplay concept blends perfectly with a great story containing tons of traditional fairytale elements — all quite in tune with the game’s top-down 2D-version of Wind Waker’s cell-shaded graphics.
Best of all, The Minish Cap avoids the ‘Zelda Saturation Effect’ I felt when playing the ‘Oracle’ Zelda’s — I’d seen everything before. It does this by quickly skipping through most major Zelda gameplay traditions and adding a lot of new, high quality stuff.
Though the games’ major dungeons contain some pushable blocks and statues, most time is spent solving imaginative puzzles with entirely new tools — not of the uninspired ‘special key to get past virtual doors’ Wind Waker kind, they’re true tools with multiple uses.
Though I admit to getting stuck in the overworld once or twice, The Minish Cap is quite easy. Probably unavoidable for a game that needs to appeal to both novice players and people like me, who have experienced at least five previous episodes in the series. Still, this is clearly a true gem.
Nintendo Shouldn't Have Shown DS Before Today
So, Nintendo DS will be introduced in North America at $149. In my opinion that’s a great price point. I kind of expected the company to go with the rumored $199, though the Game Boy Advance SP price drop made me wonder — there’s really no reason to make Game Boy cheaper except to create room for the new kid on the block.
The second hot piece of information in Nintendo’s press release is that the DS will come preloaded with ‘PictoChat’, a wireless chat application which allows up to 16 users to send each other text and drawings. It was pretty fun at E3 even with four players, especially because it allowed you to edit other users’ drawings and send them again. As an added fun factor, your DS will receive messages even when in sleep mode.
Since E3, people including myself have been saying Nintendo should build apps like this into the hardware. I doubt Nintendo specifically ‘listened to our comments’ though — enabling any DS owner to chat at any time is just common sense.
I’m not entirely happy yet, though. If Nintendo is including a built-in chat function, why not also include some PDA functionality? I know that for this to happen DS needs some more internal, writable memory, but easy to use note-taking, calculator, address book and calendar apps shouldn’t be too hard to program and could radically alter people’s perception of this machine. Who knows, maybe being a ‘PDA DS’ could stop it being banned from schools?
According to Nintendo’s fact sheet the DS also comes with a “date, time and alarm” function, another reason for me to say: why not go all the way?
I started this entry to discuss something else, though. Actually, I felt like returning from my summer break to write about this. Right now I’m glad I didn’t, because in the heat surrounding that $149 news, it doesn’t feel nearly as important.
I’m talking about the DS’s exterior design. It’s not the design itself, as I think it’s great — though I don’t like the logo and feel it should’ve been called ‘Dual-Screen’ instead of just ‘DS’. It’s not the discussion of whether Nintendo ‘listened to gamers’ with the new design either — though I’ll be quick to question whether our opinions were that important in the process. I mean, it was said right at E3 that what we were playing on were just prototypes.
What I wanted to question this summer is whether Nintendo did the right thing showing an unfinished hardware model. After E3 every website and every magazine printed pictures of a prototype without the slightest sense of style. After E3 Nintendo fans effectively hyped the wrong product.
Looks are very important to people and I’m sure many formed the wrong opinion on Nintendo’s new handheld.
But what else could Nintendo have done? It probably wanted to show DS no matter what and its engineers clearly didn’t finish the final design in time. The company is probably glad it got the point of the touch-screen accross at E3 — and it’s happily milking its momentum with regular press updates. (Is that a games line-up announcement I see at the horizon?)
Still, I maintain Nintendo shouldn’t have shown DS before today. Keeping external developers silent would’ve been tough, but coming out of nowhere with a $149 product sporting kick-ass functionality and a cool design would’ve created a far bigger splash. Launching November 21? Wow, that’s in exactly two months!
What I’m ending up writing is a broader comment on Nintendo’s business practices. Nintendo is often seen as a secretive company, but I feel it’s not nearly secretive enough. Nintendo could really learn from Apple — a company that’s got its silent periods and then, boom, suddenly announces something incredibly complete and new like the iMac G5.
Another example: at E3 Nintendo talked up ‘Mario Party 6’ and its innovative control system (“You can play it without a controller!”) without actually showing the game or the GameCube Mic. When the press release finally appeared, fans said: “It’s just a microphone.” I’m sure that, had Nintendo shut up about its future party game, fans would have said: “Hey! It’s a microphone!”
It’s the first impression that counts and if you ask me Nintendo should be more careful about the first time people hear about its future products.
It's Quiet. Too Quiet
After the E3 trade show I had a load of pages to write for the Dutch Nintendo magazine. It didn’t feel right investing time in a voluntary weblog when I knew my editor was waiting for articles.
When the ‘N Gamer’ deadline was finally done with, I had to jump head-first in the rewrite of my second novel, which I have to finish on July 9th. Then, I was asked to head up a secret magazine project that will actually be published in most European countries. More on that at some later date.
My point being I’ve been too busy to keep up with Nintendo Watch.
Still, a weekly update should be manageable from now on — in fact, a write-up on Nintendo’s new direction connected to the Bandai take-over rumour is coming pretty soon.
Please stay tuned! And in the meantime, check out some of my previous entries. They should still be quite a good read.
Update: I guess I shouldn’t have promised anything. Too many things going on, plus a vacation or two coming up. Nintendo Watch will be back in september!
Dual-Screen As The Hottest New Toy In Town
Alright. So I gave the DS tech demonstrations a try. All of them. And looking at my previous post and the opinion of ‘Dr. Suna’ I guess it’s time for some hyperbole. Because Nintendo’s Dual-Screen is really totally completely incredibly amazing.
It’s what I’ve been waiting for writing about games for all these years: hardware that gives developers tools to develop new ways of playing. Hardware that will change the way journalists and game players see the videogame phenomenon. Most importantly, though, it’s also just a fun machine that’s more accessible to non game players than any videogame hardware ever before.
I think Dr. Suna couldn’t be more wrong when he says DS will probably end up as the Dreamcast of handheld gaming. I feel that’s the hardcore gamer in him speaking. My main point is: don’t underestimate the touch-screen. It removes an entire layer of abstraction from the gameplay experience. Because people can just touch what they want to do.
It’s important to note that Nintendo is in no way forcing game developers to use the touch-screen. There will be some great uses of that, but what Nintendo is really doing is giving game creators a whole bunch of new options — if they want to, they can use the touch-screen, the wireless networking, the dual screens and the built-in microphone. However, the DS also allows them to just make a nice 3D game controlled with the regular face buttons.
Either way, Nintendo can and will market the DS as a new and extremely fun machine — maybe Suna shouldn’t think of it as a videogame device but as the hottest new toy in town.
On wednesday I visited a roundtable interview with Shigeru Miyamoto and other Nintendo producers. There, the ‘Zelda’ and ‘Mario’ creator specifically asked the attended press for an extra effort. “It’s hard to understand how fun the DS is to play”, he said. “You won’t fully get it until you experience it yourself. Because of this I hope you’ll try extra hard to get this accross to your readers.”
So, that’s what I’m going to do describing some of the tech demonstrations and early games.
- ‘Carving’ is probably the best demo of the bunch and also the hardest to find a good game application for. It start with you picking a material and carving it into shape with the stylus. This just feels brilliant — the demo gives instant feedback with sparkles flying and great sound effects. The best part is afterwards you get to look at your 3D object from all angles. Maybe someone could use a feature like this to have players design their own character. Come to think of it, an extended version where you have more ways to carve and where you can combine objects could be the most accessible 3D modelling tool yet.
- ‘Mario’s Face’ is similar to the start screen of ‘Super Mario 64’, except you obviously use the stylus to stretch Mario’s face. And this time you can also stretch Wario’s face. Another new option is switching between regular and cartoon shaded rendering. Cel-shading doesn’t look that nice though — DS produces graphics similar to those seen on N64, but without the anti-aliasing. Cel-shading suffers most of the resulting pixelated effect.
- I didn’t like ‘Super Mario 64×4’ that much because it lacks analog control. Maybe Nintendo should add a PSP-like analog stick because controlling a 3D Mario with the D-pad just ain’t the same. The four player wireless competitive aspect of this is fun, though.
- ‘PictoChat’ is a pretty neat application of both the touch-screen and the wireless networking. It allows up to 16 players — four at the show — to type messages or draw a small picture and send it to the others. It’s possible to alter somebody else’s drawing and send it again. Apparently the chat function in the new wireless GBA ‘Pokémon’ is the single most popular part of the game in Japan, so PictoChat is sure to be quite popular — a sort of modern age walkie talkie. I do hope, however, that Nintendo will build this thing into the hardware itself instead of offering it as full-price software. I also hope tons of games will include similar communication features.
- ‘Submarine Demo’ is another touch-screen only demo, where the top screen shows a submarine in a 3D environment and the bottom screen has a couple of sliders to set the speed, height and direction of the submarine. This screen also shows a small map. There’s an obstacle course players have to complete by adjusting these sliders. It’s an interesting style of indirect control that’s fun to master.
- I’m actually not fond of ‘Metroid Prime: Hunters’ so far, though I definitely think it has potential. The graphics are striking — though not as detailed, they look a lot like the GameCube versions, thanks in no small part to the small size of the screen. However, for this demo the designers at NST have opted to use the stylus for both looking around and shooting, while the D-pad lets players strafe and walk. Because the L-button targets enemies this is somewhat playable, but there’s still problems like shooting a missile when you just want to change the view. So what I’m suggesting is the creators change the targeting of enemies to the stylus and shooting to the L-button. With that setup the game could be as amazing as its console counterparts.
- Hopefully we won’t see a lot of games like the ‘Sonic E3 Demo’, where you make Sonic run by rhythmically sliding the stylus from one side of the bottom screen to the other, and back. It’s too simpe and as much fun as ‘Track & Field’. Which is not a lot, if you ask me.
- ‘Bomberman DS’ is almost as bad, or maybe even worse. It’s classic Bomberman, which is good with the wireless gameplay and all, but the touch-screen functionality seems tacked-on — you have to rub your character now and then because he gets dizzy. Or something.
- ‘Pac Pix’, then, is proof that not every third party developer will use the extra functions in stupid ways like you would expect after all the licensed crap and unimaginative sequels they’ve conditioned players with. In this demo you get to draw a Pac-Man, which will go on to eat the ghosts in its line of sight — players can redirect the yellow mascot by drawing a line.
- Hopefully Namco will create a bundle of Pac-Man minigames like this, also including ‘Pac ‘n Roll’, another fun demo in which Pac-Man rolls through an isometric game world. Players control him by turning a magnified 3D Pac-Man with the stylus, on the bottom screen.
- In closing ‘Wario Ware DS’ is really the only demo on display that could be released as a game today. It’s the Dual-Screen version of the brilliant GBA pomo game, with all mini-games so far being controlled with the stylus. Some of them are truly fantastic, though as Miyamoto said you’d have to play them to fully catch my drift — what about dragging coins into a wallet, catching fish in a net or cutting flying vegetables with quick stylus-stabs?
A Developer's View On DS
I always say the best way to see everything at E3 is staying home, reading articles and watching videos on the net. So while I was busy writing pages for the Dutch ‘Official PlayStation Magazine’ — yeah I do that too — a Nintendo Watch informant who’s not attending the show sent me his opinion on the Dual-Screen handheld. This ‘Dr. Suna’ is actually a portable games developer himself, too busy with some interesting projects to fly over to LA but apparently not too busy to write in.
“At their E3 press conference yesterday Nintendo showed the Nintendo DS for the first time. Dual Screen? Developer System? Whatever you call it, all has been revealed and everyone has an opinion about it, myself included.
“Looking at the press conference via the webcast I noticed Nintendo seems truly excited about the device and has convinced a fair amount of developers and publishers as well. This actually surprised me, as with the DS I get the same feeling I got when ‘connectivity’ was all Nintendo talked about. And we all know how that turned out. Maybe I’m wrong this time, maybe I’m not.
“Don’t get me wrong, I actually love the ideas behind the machine. The touch-screen for example has got me really excited — I lost lots of valuable sleep last night thinking of all the possibilities. Even though this type of interface has been around for ages on PDAs it has never been used for a pure bred gaming machine. A good analogy is EyeToy. Webcams have been around for over a decade but it took a bright mind at SCEE’s Team London to turn it into the most accessible videogame experience yet. Expect good things from the touch-screen interface.
“The wireless capabilities are great as well. While the obvious star is the Wi-Fi compatibility, I think one little sentence from the speech Reggie gave during the press conference points to a very important factor in the success of the unit in Japan: “DS will even connect for you, springing to life from sleep mode once you’re in range of someone else.” Who remembers the Lovegety from the late nineties? I think we’re going to see a lot of similar applications for DS.
“As for the two screens, I basically see it as a necessity to prevent you from obscuring the playing area while using the touch-screen — I don’t think there is a real need for having two screens at all. I also think that this will be one of the problems Nintendo will be facing when courting developers and publishers. I imagine they’ll require developers to use the two screens, while a lot of developers will just want to make a port of or sequel to an existing game. This will result in half-assed attempts like a lot of the connectivity features on GameCube, and possibly in developers flocking to the PSP.
“Another problem for Nintendo could be the 3D performance of the DS. Based off of the movies released on the internet so far I’d say that the 3D performance is comparable to that of the original PlayStation. While I think Nintendo, referring to the successor of the GameCube, is right in stating that people are not interested in just graphical enhancements, I also think it’s completely different in the handheld market. There the 3D revolution has not happened yet, and the DS will be compared to the PSP because of that. Maybe they should have put the money for the second screen in a dedicated 3D processor instead.
“Ultimately I don’t expect the DS to be around as long as the Game Boy has. I give it a couple of years, producing at least ten must-have titles and ending up as the Dreamcast of the portables — a misunderstood machine loved by hardcore game players and ignored by the mass market consumer.”
Do you have a unique viewpoint on DS or another Nintendo subject? Please write in.
The Wi-Fi Difference
The first time I went to E3 was in 1999. That year’s Nintendo press conference was presented by Howard Lincoln and Peter Main, two executives who were there from Nintendo of America’s very beginnings.
These guys were brilliant the way I remember the press conference, everything obviously being new and magical. Lincoln had a sharp sense of humour, and you just wanted to trust the guy, while Main came accross as a true entertainer.
I sort of miss these days. I don’t think Nintendo can present itself as well without Lincoln and Main. I mean, Satoru Iwata is smart and somewhat charming, but he’s not the strongest speaker in the world — at least in English. George Harrisson does just fine, but he comes accross too business-like for an entertainment company executive.
This year the press conference was headed by a new face, brand new Vice President of Sales & Marketing Reggie Fils-Aime. I like the way he made clear Nintendo finally decided on its new direction and how the company means business this time, but instead of entertaining he was tough and actually a tad scary — or maybe I should say ‘determined’. Really, there were no laughts until Shigeru Miyamoto entered the stage with his sword and shield.
Fils-Aime had one great one-liner though, and it was about the Dual-Screen’s support of Wi-Fi technology. He said: “It’s not on-line. It’s no-line.”
It’s a great way of putting it, instantly making clear why wireless is the best thing about Nintendo DS — especially in combination with the touch-screen. It’s because wireless is a way better invention than broadband and also perfect for the broad consumer market. It’s perfect for videogames.
If you don’t have a wireless hotspot in your home you can just play with others within a hundred feet. You don’t have to play over the internet, it’s optional. But if you do own a hotspot, and they’re getting dirt cheap these days, you could obviously use it for your DS. All this could and should work automatically — Apple’s Airport shows how well Wi-Fi can be done.
What’s interesting is the DS could be the cheapest Wi-Fi appliance ever. It could even boost the sales of wireless hotspots. And even if they don’t, they’ll be everywhere within a couple of years anyway.
So, I guess you could say I’m pretty excited about Dual-Screen, though I feel the machine itself looks a tiny bit clunky. The design doesn’t really win me over, though I like the material it’s made of. I also also wonder whether DS will really be released this year. The hardware has yet to be finalized, it has no final name, price or release date, and there’s only a handful of real games — even ‘Metroid Prime: Hunters’, which looks pretty cool, is just a multiplayer demo.
Anyway, I have yet to play any of the DS demonstration software, but it’s the next thing on my list. Guess I should get back to work here, then.
The E3 Hype Dynamic
As the annual E3 trade show and the Nintendo press conference draw nigh, it’s easy to get caught up in pre-show hype about what will or won’t be shown. Actually I’m sort of annoyed at the way some journalists in the know talk about non-disclosable information. Or maybe I’m just jealous because apparently I’m not quite there yet.
For example, Peer Schneider of ‘IGN’ said on his site’s message boards: “With all the talk about how baffling and strange the DS may seem to all of us, it’s easy to forget that the system’s true measure lies in the game lineup. Having an inkling of what games are being shown at E3 next week, I can now confidently state that I’ll be buying the system the day it comes out.”
His colleague Matt Casamassina makes it even worse. He’s been posting about an unannounced game — apparently he’s looking forward to it as much as he’s anticipating ‘Resident Evil 4’ and ‘Metroid Prime 2’. But of course he can’t say what it is. He’s turned an entire topic into some sort of guessing game where he obviously can’t say who’s right, if anyone.
I don’t see what this does except creating unrealistic hype causing hardcore fans to be disappointed in the end and making Peer and Matt feel interesting. The thing is, they don’t have to do this because they’re nice guys and they work at the world’s biggest entertainment website. They’re already quite interesting.
It’s an interesting dynamic. For years Nintendo’s been using E3 as a milestone to show how their software and hardware line-up is doing. However, I’ve been in this industry for eight years now, and every year I’ve seen how journalists got both better sources and better ways to spread the news. So we know a lot more now, and the fans too.
Eight years ago we wouldn’t have heard about a follow-up to ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’ until E3. It’d have been a major surprise. This year, if the sequel fails to show, fans will be sorely disappointed. Weeks before last year’s E3 Nintendo announced games like ‘Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes’ — some fans were quite angry that there were no surprises left for the show itself. Well, except for ‘Pac-Man Vs.’, which was a stupid idea of course.
This year, people wonder whether it’s wise that Nintendo has shown screen grabs of ‘Paper Mario 2’ and ‘Metroid Prime 2’ already. Will the company have enough surprises left to make it worthwhile watching a webcast of the press conference? This is why these fans cling to Peer and Matt’s comments. There’s more this year’s E3 press conference, right?
It’s easy to look at this stuff from the hardcore fan’s perspective. But in the end E3 is not for hardcore fans. Nintendo hopes major newspapers that attend the show will write about their games. Nintendo hopes CNN will do an item.
Remember, too, that it’s just a games company. It wants to sell games, and the average player buys only a handful of games each year. Nintendo doesn’t have to announce ten surprise games to capture this audience’s imagination. These average players haven’t heard of E3. E3 is where Toys ‘R’ Us representatives go to start deciding how many copies of ‘Metroid Prime 2’ they should order.
Last year Nintendo had a less than stellar E3, but last fall was a major high point for GameCube sales. In 2002 Nintendo had a brilliant E3 — they showed ‘Metroid Prime’, ‘Super Mario Sunshine’ and ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’ — but Metroid and Mario sales were below expectations and Zelda did not even get released that year.
My bottom line is E3 doesn’t say much. So if you’re smart, you shouldn’t get hyped too much and enjoy the event and its coverage. I know I will have a hell of a time at the show — and I’ll try to write up a couple of reports while I’m there, too.
Zoonami, Wideload, Tetsuya Mizuguchi
The internet is a funny place. Last week when British development studio Zoonami announced its first project, I read people’s comments before I even saw the game. So I knew that after years of hype about the studio founded by ‘GoldenEye 007’ director Martin Hollis, Zoonami’s first sign of life was somehow underwhelming. In fact, the general consensus was something like “Oh my, I really hope ‘Funkydilla’ is not their only game”.
I had considered writing about Zoonami a couple of weeks ago, when Matt of ‘IGN’ wrote about the company in his site’s mail section. He mentioned Hollis and his team could be working on not just one, but two projects.
This struck me as awkward because Zoonami was, according to the studio’s website, just seven members strong. I wondered how they could do even one major game, the unknown genre title ‘Game Zero’ that’s been hyped beyond proportions — especially for a game we know absolutely nothing about.
Well, apparently Zoonami is indeed doing multiple projects, and it indeed has seven core staff members, but it’s developing games with a new working method that’s quite interesting and could be trend setting: Zoonami mainly works with contractors on a project-to-project basis.
So while just two core employees might do the main design of a game, a whole army of contracters might do graphics, sound and programming. Very efficient, because when a game is done you can pick just the best guys for your next game, or not at all if you’re unable to sell your concept to a publisher. This is actually quite similar to how movie production houses work.
Actually, while reading IGN’s interview with Martin Hollis I started thinking the Zoonami project that disappointed so many people might actually be pretty cool — a small game with an interesting vision and addictive gameplay.
In Hollis’s words: “We have an incubator system where we consider original ideas we have — this year we had about 50 — and we got a load of hurdles where we try to narrow the field. Funkydilla was one of the few original game ideas that cleared all of the hurdles. And it was bloody good fun.”
While screenshots look uninteresting, the game concept sounds like a music game with the cleaning element that made ‘Tetris’ brilliant: “There are a bunch of instruments in the piece of music and rows appear on the screen gradually over time, each row for one instrument. If you play the notes on the row correctly the row is eliminated and if you don’t it remains on the screen. So in this way the screen fills up with music for you to play. If you’re too slow the screen fills up and it’s game over.”
The vision I’m talking about is pretty intriguing: “Our vision is that this is a template for a franchise and you could make a load of games out of it. We’re looking for a publisher that’s got the sales and marketing and distribution, that has experience handling external licensing, and maybe that has experience with music licensing or links with the music industry. With the right partner I think we can help to make the music genre bigger than the film-to-game genre.”
While this sort of sheds doubt on how well Zoonami is doing selling its original games to publishers, I think I agree with Hollis on the music genre. Obviously there’s an opportunity in music albums coming with a music game as a free extra to win out on illegal downloads, for example.
I said Zoonami’s way of working could be trend setting. In fact, it’s already happening. Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian just started a new studio, Wideload Games.
Wideload, too, follows the principles of a movie production company, with a small internal team to focus on “game ideas, engine technology and game prototypes”, to then “assemble a team of independent talent” to put the game into production. In contrast to Zoonami, though, Wideload seems to be working on much larger projects, their first project being an action game using the ‘Halo’ engine, to be released in 2005
Also, apparently Tetsuya Mizuguchi of ‘Rez’ fame is doing the same with his new company, although in his particular case he also lends his expertise to other developers as a gameplay consultant of sorts. So it seems like a new age of game development might finally be upon us, in which games start where they should: at the desk of game design experts.
Zelda Game Design Talk
Something completely different: my take on the game design of ‘The Legend of Zelda’. On the most basic level this is a game in which the player is presented with a game world to interact with. The goal is symbolic growth through new ways to interact with the game world. In other words: collecting and using new items.
The great thing about action-adventures like Zelda is designers can always come up with new obstacles and abilities to overcome them. A random thought: wouldn’t it be nice if the game would show Link’s symbolic growth with the character getting slightly more mature after each incremental item upgrade?
Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the hurdles the series has to overcome. My girlfriend, the archetypical non-gamer, has recently completed ‘A Link to the Past’. It was her first game of this type and it took her quite a while — according to the credits, she died more than 300 times.
This reminded me of just how complex games have become and how the experts tend to forget this. My girlfriend had to take a huge leap before she got comfortable with the game mechanics and understood the type of thinking the puzzles require. Attacking a one-hit enemy or bombing a wall are basics I’ve been taking for granted, but they form a major hurdle for newcomers.
Somehow this got me going about something that annoys me. It comes down to this: when I acquire a new object, I experiment with its uses. I suddenly remember a lot of places where I can do something new. For example swinging from one side of a hole in the ground to the other with a handy rope. These are peak moments in each Zelda game.
My problem is the next time I want to reach the other side of the hole, I have to once again choose my rope from the menu, switch to target view, target, and swing. The second and third time I can handle this. The fourth or fifth time it becomes a bit of an annoyance. The sixth or seventh time I start to theorize: I already solved this puzzle, right? So why can’t the game throw the rope for me now? Or at least let me use a context-sensitive button?
‘The Wind Waker’ had a game balance problem. The creators seemingly skipped some some previously planned dungeons, using the collecting of Triforce parts as filler material. It’s not hard to fix this problem in the next episode — Nintendo could make the game more compact, or obviously fill it with more content.
To solve my problem Eiji Aonuma and his team have to take a bigger risk. Starting with ‘Ocarina of Time’ for Nintendo 64 the series has been bogged down by constantly having players re-invent the wheel with already-solved puzzles. But knowing the way people think, these players probably got attached to this.
The problem of novices having trouble getting into modern games even if they really want to is of course much bigger. Both Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto have made it clear that they know this problem exists — at the same time comforting and worrying. Comforting because they’re apparently still in touch with their potential audience, and worrying because I wouldn’t want my beloved Zelda series to change. Well, not too much anyway.
Game Boy Evolution And Two GameCube Next Teams?
Time for something new: a rumour report by way of a Nintendo Watch informant. Obviously this informant has no track record so far, so you’ll have to take his word that it could actually come from trusted sources pretty close to Nintendo.
On the new Game Boy, ‘The Star Child’ writes: “The working title is Game Boy Evolution. Current designs are flip-tops with backlit screens similar to GBA SP, though it’ll use GameCube-style tiny DVD’s. Graphics should be slightly more powerful than that seen on the Sega Dreamcast. Bluetooth technology will be built-in. Apparently, the new system will be compatible with previous Game Boy games, which will be downloaded to the system through a device similar to a hard drive. My source tells me a rumour column in an American games magazine will soon publish more on this.”
The thing with specs like this is anyone could come up with them. They sound like Nintendo’s well-judged answer to PlayStation Portable. One thing I can’t see happening is inclusion of a Bluetooth chip — not after WaveBird and the supposed 802.11 support of the Dual-Screen handheld.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Nintendo mentions ‘Game Boy Evolution’ at the coming E3 trade show, which they might want to do in an effort to prove that the DS is not the new GBA.
My informant continues on GameCube Next. Apparently two separate hardware development teams are working on Nintendo’s next console, both co-operating with various external resources: “Two versions of the console is unlikely. I’d guess Nintendo is waiting to see which version best fits their need. Coming up are the specs for both versions supposedly in development.”
GameCube Next Version 1
- 2.7 GHz PowerPC G5 Processor
- 512 MB RAM (128 of that dedicated to video, 64 dedicated to sound)
- 600 MHz Graphics Chip
- Built-in 15 GB Hard Drive
GameCube Next Version 2
- Dual 1.8 GHz IBM G5 PowerPC Processors
- 256 DDR Main Memory (64 of that dedicated to sound, a new 7.1 surround technology which will run at a quality of 196 KHz)
- 128 MB GDDR3 Video Memory
- 500 MHz Core ATI Graphics Chip (16 Pixel Pipe, 220 Million Transistors)
- Built-in 15 GB Hard Drive
“The inclusion of a hard drive in both models is of course interesting because the Xbox recently had its plans for a hard drive removed and there is no intention to have one in Sony’s PlayStation 3. Furthermore the new surround technology could point to Factor 5 no longer being on board.”
The same goes here: anyone could come up with this — and there’s actually at least one hole in the specs. The PowerPC processor is referred to as ‘G5’, but G5 is an Apple brand: this particular chip usually goes by the name of ‘PowerPC 970’. Of note here is that my informant at least once mentions G5 as a code name for the console itself, which isn’t too strange as GameCube Next will be Nintendo’s fifth TV console system.
Hopefully I’ll soon be able to prove these specs right or wrong. If you have more information on Nintendo’s next generation consoles suitable for publication on Nintendo Watch, please let me know.
Silicon Knights And More
From my perspective Nintendo Watch is currently still in an experimental start-up phase of sorts. I’d like to be up to speed around the E3 trade show and until then I’m sort of figuring out what works and what doesn’t — and how to have fun doing it. One thing I know is I want to continue doing news recaps like this, even if my opinion doesn’t add too much to other sites’ reporting.
- The big news is of course Silicon Knights and Nintendo parting ways. The press statement says: “Nintendo and Silicon Knights have reached an agreement allowing Silicon Knights to pursue its vision of videogame entertainment with other companies.” If you read my previous piece on the Canadian studio you’ll know this pretty much leaves me cold, though I’m not fond of Nintendo’s output shrinking even further with developments like this. My take on what happened is Silicon Knights pitching their next big game and Nintendo deeming it too expensive and risky in a ‘your past games didn’t sell that well’ kind of way.
- Meanwhile ‘Game Informer’ magazine published the first images of ‘Metroid Prime 2’ and obviously somebody scanned them and put them online. My friend and colleague Vincent Leeuw wrote a nice analysis but to be honest these scans are of poor quality and don’t show much. One thing I’ve learned is to not judge a game by a couple of grabs, though as many have commented a split-screen battle mode should not be all there is to the game’s multiplayer option.
- The truly exciting story comes third. I’m obviously talking about the Japanese sources claiming that Nintendo will be showcasing thirty Dual-Screen games at E3, a month from now. The rumour doesn’t tell how many will be playable nor does it mention whether they’re all first party. This makes me think of a point I’ve been wanting to make for some time: in my opinion one of Nintendo’s motifs for introducing this ‘third pillar’ would be the ability to keep producing games at a reasonable budget, still making hefty profits like in the old days. Nintendo is always talking about limiting its focus on technology and a platform like DS gives it a good excuse to actually do so. Following the PSP’s example with a high-specs GBA2 would skyrocket the average game cost, and this way Nintendo can stick to the medium-specs DS and low-specs GBA for now. And it’d allow Nintendo to churn out thirty games in time for the E3 presentation too!
- It’s that time of year: E3 game lists are popping up like crazy. Annoyingly some, like the list on ‘Nintendojo’, take speculative liberties by including games such as ‘Kid Icarus’, ‘Golden Sun’, ‘Mario 128’ and ‘Pilotwings’. A prediction: none of these titles will be showcased. It puzzles me why a site chooses to print such wishfull thinking. I mean, people will be disappointed! Nintendojo forgets to mention ‘Yoshi’s Story’ though — pretty likely to show as the fifth ‘Super Mario Advance’.
- While I’m busy making predictions: the SETA-developed realistic golfing sim ‘Legend of Golfer’ will definitely not be released in the west.
- Finally, in an unrelated note that’s not really a news story I recently got to check out ‘Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles’ and while the play mechanics mainly got me excited about ‘Four Swords Adventure’, I was once again surprised at the brilliant graphics in just a handful of GameCube games. In the case of Final Fantasy, with its imaginative art assets, the contrast is even greater — with a special note for ugly third party ports. I can see how a port of a PlayStation game won’t look as good as a native GameCube game, but it still stuns me just how big the difference can be.