My 9-hour magnum opus epic rant on Nintendo

[RockyRan]

I've debated making this rant for a long time, each time on a new forum or place with a commenting system. I've said these little tidbits here and there, but I've never really articulated them all in one place, in one go. And it's really not that I think people ought to hear what I have to say. In a way I'm kind of doing this for myself, because sometimes you don't understand what you're thinking until you put it in words. So if any of this comes off as self-flattering in that I'm making an entire topic based on my sole viewpoints and that I expect people to care, I really don't intend it to be that way. However, should Dean or someone else want to move it somewhere else, you're perfectly welcome to.

 

First off, some history. The gaming experiences of my childhood, and in many ways the biggest points of my childhood in general, came from Nintendo consoles. Indeed, most of happiest, most vivid memories revolved around their products. I remember getting the SNES the first time and agreeing with my brother to not remove the plastic wrapping that the controllers came with to preserve them as long as possible, only to remove them that same afternoon. I can still remember the unique feeling of sheer excitement playing Super Mario 64 and everything related to the console. I remember playing all the wonderful games from each console and everything around them. Truth be told, you can't separate Nintendo from my childhood and come out with two different wholes. They're embedded into one another. But most recently I've fallen out of place with the developer, and at this point I think they produce some of the most retrograde, least inventive, safest, underwhelming most formulaic, and in many ways even generic games. Simply put, they've fallen far from the platform that I held them up to, and it's not just because of the silly "casual focus" notion, it's something deeper than that.

 

I vividly remember playing Ocarina of Time and being amazed not by the graphics, but by the sheer atmosphere in the game, even down to the details. I remember being impressed that the grass in Hyrule field was yellow rather than green, for it really threw me back to actual fields I see out in the country that aren't perfectly green and neatly cut unlike pretty much every other game I had played before then. I also remember nighttime as being probably the most atmospheric, relaxing and in some ways slightly unnerving environment. The cows mooing in the distance and the crickets quietly chirping in the background as I looked on from the top of Death Mountain down to Kakariko Village was incredibly compelling, instilling feelings that never before brought by a video game. The unnerving feeling came from the gravity of the adventure from the game, fighting Ganondorf and at first trying to beat him to the punch of getting the Stones, and then catching up to him getting the Medallions. It felt like a juxtaposition in a way, having the game's environments so peaceful and serene, even though you know there's grave danger. What I found most unsettling is that even as Adult Link the fields were still quiet, the crickets still chirped, the cows still mooed, even despite all the danger, death and destruction. It felt truly real to me, because if something of that magnitude happened in real life, the same thing would've happened. There wouldn't have been somber, ominous music playing in the background, or the sky turned blood red, or any of the other more superficial ways of expressing danger/destruction in video games. With Ocarina of Time, everything felt really raw and compelling, and such a thing was only possible in the N64, for back in the day that kind of atmosphere really could not have been acquired had Nintendo released a marginally-better SNES or anything of the sort.

 

I'm drawing all this from Ocarina of Time not as a way of going on a trip down memory lane, but because I want to communicate something that I really have a hard time communicating with others. Nintendo didn't push the technology back in the day just to make pretty graphics. Every time they pushed the tech it was always because of some fundamental gameplay mechanic or because it would really add a lot to the game's atmosphere. Nintendo pushed themselves in technology not to push polygons and call their games the shiniest. It was always linked to games, and they always pushed genres to their very limits. This is in high contrast to most other people pushing the tech these days. Engines get made, but games do not, or if games get made it's always a "tech demo" game that isn't compelling in its own right. Or rather, developers make the game to showcase the engine, not the other way around. Today's technology driven developers do push technology like Nintendo did back in the day, but they do it backwards in that they do it for the sake of the tech, whereas for Nintendo it was because they wanted to make a specific game around it.

 

That's my biggest problem with Nintendo today, in that this push in technology for the sake of gameplay simply isn't being made. We can argue motion sensing and 3D handhelds, but they're not what made Nintendo Nintendo back in the day for me. They're not using this technology to create games that resonated with people in a deeper level the same way Ocarina of Time resonated with me. What I described above? Nintendo hasn't created a single game that can capture that kind of experience since the day they announced the Wii. And by the time I had owned the Wii for two years after its release, I hadn't played a single game from them that had given that kind of experience. I did the previously-unthinkable and got a 360, my very first non-Nintendo console ever, in '08. My first game, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts&Bolts. An incredibly inventive game with a fantastic art direction that deeply resonated with my love of customization and seeing my own creations work within the rules of a game. It was the game that opened my eyes to everything else non-Nintendo related in a way. It was the "bridge". The series that I loved as a kid on the N64, with a truly inventive and technologically-impressive installment. Enough familiarity to make me feel at home, while at the same time being something that resonated with the tastes that I love. Despite having owned a Wii for several years and seeing through the GameCube through its last, almost completely inactive years, it felt like I was playing a true Nintendo game again for the first time in years.

 

That experience opened my eyes to the idea that the Nintendo-like experiences that I was after didn't even have to come from Nintendo. I moved on to the PC after I bought a semi-gaming laptop, and found myself playing the Orange Box with Half-Life 2, Portal and TF2 for the first time. Naturally, I was just as amazed by those experiences as I was with Nuts & Bolts, especially Portal. It was, in the classic Nintendo way, a game that took a technologically impressive concept and used it to further a game genre. I was both amazed at these games and disappointed at Nintendo for not doing the same. Or rather, for not doing what they did before.

 

I had actually considered buying a PS3 back when they were just announcing both it and the PS3, but just like for almost everyone else, Sony did the unbelievable and priced the console at a whopping $500/$600, completely out of my range. And (at the time) there was no way I was getting a 360, so I settled back to my familiar new Nintendo console. It can't be that bad, right? At worst it'll be something that I'll just keep in the shelf, collecting dust until a new, high-profile game came out for it so I could use it again (as I did with the GameCube). But the Wii signaled a change in Nintendo. No, not the "casual" movement everyone talks about, but the end of the "technology to push gameplay" notion that I described above. Twilight Princess, the one of two games I bought when I got the Wii, was horrendously formulaic, with trite gameplay, stale mechanics, un-inventive dungeon design, and above all, an appallingly boring dungeon crawl that constituted the entirety of the second half of the game, culminating in an incredibly disappointing "Ganon was behind it all" "twist", gaping plot holes, incredibly short dungeons and an unsatisfying ending. But above all, it didn't resonate with me on a deeper level at all, something that always used to happen with Nintendo games prior to this. It felt like a rehash in the most disappointing, underwhelming way. At the time I hadn't gotten a 360, nor had I acquired that semi-gaming laptop, but even despite having nothing to compare it against (that is, no other non-Nintendo games from non-Nintendo systems), I knew it was a stale formula. It was the first game that signaled to me that something was seriously missing.

 

Other exclusives came and went and Nintendo's first party games still felt the same. Super Mario Galaxy was a game that, while high quality, didn't push my imagination at all like before, and it wasn't in any way engaging. It wasn't at all like in Mario 64 where there was a wonderful, wonderful sense of exploration, or in Mario Sunshine where the tropical atmosphere was enjoyably rendered (even if the plot was garbage) to a tee along with the classic sense of wonder from Mario 64. Mario Galaxy had the inventive level design and creative worlds, but it felt "off". It was an above-average game, but it still played it safe. I played through it and I just felt like I was going through the motions. "Look, platform. I jump. I go there. I come here. I shake remote. Mario flies. Star Get. Next star." The linearity combined with the ease of the game made it underwhelming, even if artistically the game was interesting. Again, it didn't resonate with me. I was also incredibly hyped for Brawl and found the game to be boring. I actually thought it was due to the fact that I had played Melee for well over 1000 hours ever since I got it in '01, but much to me (and my brothers') surprise, shortly after playing a few boring rounds of Brawl, we played Melee and found the game quite a bit of fun. It turned out that the small changes in gravity and hitstun made for a far more boring experience. It wasn't a SLOWER experience, because if it was noticeably slower I would've noticed it, but it simply made it boring. But my bigggest problems with first party games weren't just that the games were linear or easy or slow. It was because for the first time, I started to feel that Nintendo games were starting to feel redundant. I started to feel the "sequel for the sake of sequel" formula, and I felt like the games made no effort to engage the player in any way, but rather make "a Zelda game", and "a Smash Bros game". It felt like they were just going through the motions of making sequels and nothing more because in the game itself it certainly felt like I was going through the motions and nothing more. Yes, the formula was there, but it truly lacked anything that engaged the player.

 

Shortly after playing those games I opened my "horizons" to the 360 and PC, and thus it made those first party games even more underwhelming for me, and that feeling still permeates through the games they have released since. In the summer of '09, Sony announced the PS3 slim for a smaller $300 price tag, and after a while I thought the previously-unthinkable: sell my Wii for a PS3. It felt weird, thinking of selling my Wii and for the first time playing through a console generation WITHOUT a Nintendo console. These games had always been part of my childhood and through all my years of gaming, but everything felt stale for the past few years and the experiences I was seeking were not to be found anywhere in their console. I decided to sell it off and buy a PS3, and to this day I have not regretted that decision once. In fact, I vastly prefer my PS3 to the 360 which I originally loved, simply because its games provide the experiences I hadn't seen before and several games resonated very well with my personal tastes.

 

With that said though, there's still a void left unfilled. The PS3, 360, and PC all provide games that are great, but very rarely do they provide Nintendo-like experiences from the days of yore. That is, the games that not only pushed technology, but pushed gameplay boundaries, pushed your imagination, and spoke to you on a deeper level than through mere video game entertainment. It turned out my initial experiences of Nuts & Bolts and Portal/TF2/HL2 weren't representative of all non-Nintendo AAA titles. Still, though, I've experienced many games (probably about once a year) that really take me back to those days when games gripped me on a deeper level. Demon's Souls, Minecraft, and Mirror's Edge are such games.

 

It's another reason why I take umbrage when people follow Nintendo with a Pavlovian love. Most recently, the announcement at a new Mario game for the 3DS. The overwhelmingly positive reaction at a mere announcement, despite having absolutely no details on the game, is what bothers me the most. The same applies to games like Kirby's Epic Yarn, DKC Returns, and above all, NSMBWii. I actually have played NSMBWii on a console that's not mine, and despite all the rave reviews I found it severely underwhelming, mostly because the game simply did nothing to change, invent, or push. It was literally any old Mario game with 4 players shoehorned in. It disappoints me that people love Nintendo in a vacuum, despite what any other developer does. Of course, there are people who who instinctively get excited about any Call of Duty as soon as it's announced, despite not having any detail, but those are the people I like to call "fanboys". For the strangest reason, a vast majority of people, even non-fanboys, act like fanboys around Nintendo. Relatively mediocre first party games get showered with glowing reviews and huge sales simply because of the character on the cover, and it deeply disappoints me to see people so easily pleased when I know fully well what they're capable of.

 

I know people think everything Nintendo did was wrong with the N64 and GameCube. The reason why they "failed" in the eyes of many was due to other factors unrelated to the actual quality of the games themselves (the stubbornness to stick with cartridges, the bad relations with 3rd parties, etc.), so I really don't think going back to creating engaging, creative, and technologically impressive games is automatically going to make them "fail". But alas, I don't see this happening, probably ever. Not just because there's more money in making non-gamer friendly games (I actually don't mind their focus on that at all), but mostly because "core" gamers simply have no standards when it comes to Nintendo. All people really want is a game with the characters they love and the formula they're familiar with. They don't want engaging, creative, and technologically impressive games that push boundaries of gameplay, and that is why I just don't think Nintendo's going to go back to making that kind of game.

 

I realize I'm probably alone in this, because pretty much everyone who grew up with Nintendo continues to pledge their loyalty to death for them. It's the kind of fandom I really don't understand. Banking on nostalgia with remakes and 2D platformers and games that do exactly what they did 10 years ago is just "filler" for me, and it's becoming increasingly infuriating to see not only Nintendo relying on this formula as a crutch, but seeing everyone else cheering them on. I want them to TRULY become the leaders of the industry once again, not just the industry's proverbial nostalgia lapdog who makes the most money because of that.

 

So there you have it. This is why I don't talk about Nintendo-related things very often (if not at all), because I can't distill everything I've said above into a couple of sentences on a random forum without sounding like a hater. I'm not a hater, I'm just a person who's both disappointed with Nintendo for not trying and angry at the audience for not caring if they try. I don't imagine many people agreeing with me, but I suppose at the very least I can put my thoughts of all this into one huge post.

[SomTervo]

Hater's gonna hate, bro.

 

 

 

I joke, that was a really nice peice there, Rocky. I can totally see where you're coming from in all aspects of your argument, I still get that feeling occasionally, though my nostalgia is about Sony as they were my equivalent to your Nintendo. But hey, Sony are still pretty great, which is surprising!

 

One point that I'd perhaps argue with however, is the ole 'rose tinted glasses' effect. It's even more significant when it's an experience from childhood, or pre-teenhood. Seeing as you're experiencing a lot for the first time, everything's a bit more poignant and exciting and fresh. It could be that you got this feeling from Ocarina of Time because you had never experienced anything like it- in your memory it might be more thought-provoking and beautiful than it actually is if you played it again. And that would mean that now if a game does something just as well or better, you might still feel nowhere near as impressed because it won't feel like the emotionally-resonant impressionistic view you'd get from a childhood memory- that will never actually reflect what the game was like in reality.

 

Still, it's entirely subjective, so I can't really argue.

 

If you're still looking for experiences like that today, I'd recommend Shadow of the Colossus? Very much like a Zelda game taken in a beautiful and compellingly artistic direction. The most thrilling bread 'n' butter gameplay, but in the most bizarre and beautiful of contexts. Shadow of the Colossus to me is what Ocarina of Time is to you it seems. Stuck with me forever, that game. Ico is amazing too, but I don't think it's anywhere near as innovative as SotC.

[P4: Gritty Reboot]

I see where you're coming from, Rocky, but I have to say, your criticisms of Nintendo are mostly based on taste. No one can really argue with you if you feel that Galaxy is "off," or that Twilight Princess had trite gameplay. I think the Galaxy games are some of the most inventive, compelling 3D gaming experiences out today, and in the same vein, I felt Twilight Princess was the best Zelda yet. All the same, here's to hoping we see more innovation out of the big N in years to come. Good read, thanks for sharing.

[WTF]

I think Kenshi's probably quite right about the rose-tinted glasses effect. With the exception of a few things, most of our first experiences tend to create the greatest impact on our consciousness. Nintendo obviously have changed but so have you and that probably has something to do with it.

 

I do though get where you're coming from despite not really being attached to any platform even in the past (well maybe the PC). As for loyalists for anything it's just a tribal mentality really. We all possess it to varying degrees in directions that we'd least expect, it's also partly due to upbringing. They're not going to see criticism because they're blinded by devotion.

 

As for the experiences you do describe, the major issue why it's harder to feel those experiences now is that some of it has already been experienced. A game can only involve you so much, once life and the world exceeds that it's harder for a game to impress you to the extent it once did.(Partly because truth is indeed sometimes far more stranger than fiction and fictional worlds).

 

I think that perhaps it is best to approach everything with zero to negative expectation and that way maybe something will bring back that old feeling again.

[excel_excel]

What P4warrior said. Basically taste and opinion. You may say Galaxy wasn't innovative or engaging but I found it innovative and extremely engaging. And the Mario 3DS game's excitement is based on the fact that its a fully 3D mario title made by the Galaxy team.

How can you be mad at people for being excited about that? Are you mad at people for getting excited about Naughty Dog making Uncharted for the NGP?

[excel_excel]

Relatively mediocre first party games get showered with glowing reviews and huge sales simply because of the character on the cover, and it deeply disappoints me to see people so easily pleased when I know fully well what they're capable of.

 

Or it maybe that they are great games themselves. Dragon Age 2 has gotten strong gaming site reviews, but outside of that the actual opinion of Dragon Age fans its looked on as a medicore experience. Mario Galaxy got rave reviews and hasn't had this supposed backlash.