It appears that not everyone was shocked, angered and totally screwed by Nintendo’s announcement that Wii Motion Plus, a more accurate add-on to the Wiimote is on the way. Alain Corre, Ubisoft’s executive director, is thrilled, especially with regard to the upcoming hack-and-shoot Red Steel 2:

It was a great announcement, what [Nintendo] showed [in its press conference], because it’s true that on Red Steel it’s the typical product that will appreciate the new device.

Red Steel 2 has been in development for many months now, and this new device will help us be even more precise in what we do with the product.

I understand that Corre is a suit, not a game developer, but if anything that’s just another facet that was missed in the earlier Game Informer article. Are developers now being ordered from on high to start their control schemes from scratch, in this case was it a decision by developers to incorporate the add-on?

And now I’m curious — did Corre and the Red Steel team know about this before?

UPDATE: I Googled around a bit and it seems that Stephen Totilo, a games journo whom I respect, also doesn’t have quite the same story as Game Informer. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime told Totilo that developers got notice “slightly” ahead of the gaming public. A commenter also notes that Wii Sports Resort, the box-in title with Wii Motion Plus, won’t be out for until the spring, so there’s no reason a developer who talked to Game Informer should ominously warn that we won’t see third-party titles using the technology for 6 to 9 months. That’s just a matter of Nintendo showcasing it’s own product first — nothing new.

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I got a little excited during my compulsory Kotaku read this evening, thinking there was some quality enterprise journalism coming from some of the press at this year’s E3.

The story, from Game Informer, is about how developers were uninformed that Nintendo was creating an attachment to the Wiimote that increases precision and reduces lag time. Bet someone working on a game with, say, swordplay, would’ve liked to know that beforehand.

Great story idea, but disappointing in execution. No named sources, nothing on the record, not even a specific number of developers that make the factual basis for the story. (How many is “several?” Three? Three Hundred?) I also take issue with this paragraph, which wades out of factual territory and into unfounded speculation:

It looks as though Nintendo’s making what could already be a tough sell even tougher. One of the Wii’s strengths is that it streamlines the process of getting into games. Imagine the confusion that gaming neophytes will face when they’re told they’ll have to buy an additional gizmo to make the controller function the way it says it does on the Wii’s box. Couple that with a limited selection of games—with little third-party support at first—and the waters get even murkier.

I don’t entirely blame the reporter for this. Games journalism has a tendency — which I’ve mentioned before — to adhere to lower journalistic standards than reporters covering other topics. You can almost see the journalist in this case having a few casual conversations and spinning it into an article. Without individual voices, and with statements like “the general feeling was one of annoyance and betrayal,” readers are led to believe that any and all developers are pissed about Nintendo’s secrecy. I mentioned Star Wars: The Force Unleashed in my opening paragraph, but I can’t say with certainty that the developers of that game would’ve liked to include the new peripheral.

Could this be something developers don’t want to go on the record about? Maybe, but if so, that needs to be articulated in the article. Fear of retribution for bashing the Big N? Now that’s a piece of news.

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More from the series that grows as I critique games way later than everyone else.

My girlfriend, falling asleep as I played the opening stages of Bully: Scholarship Edition for the Wii, somewhat facetiously asked me, “What is the constructive value of this game?”

A natural response, I thought, one that falls lockstep with other criticisms by people who haven’t actually played the game. You read the title, you see some punching and coarse language, you find out it’s by the same people who brought you Grand Theft Auto and you figure it can’t be anything redeeming.

Others have defended the game against these assumptions, so I won’t. But I will say that Bully attempts to be constructive by offering a view of teenage life through the lens of a GTA-style dog-eat-dog world, and while I applaud that concept, there’s so much lacking in execution that it’s hard to defend the game outright.

Bully’s lead character is Jimmy Hopkins, a disgruntled teen who gets dumped at a boarding school by his aloof mother and sniveling stepdad. Despite his troubled past, Jimmy seems to have a better head on his shoulders than the rest of Bullworth Academy, which is full of stereotypical jocks, preps, geeks and greasers. The faculty isn’t any better.

The opportunity is ripe to create a bustling system of alliances and betrayals, where each action causes a ripple effect of consequences throughout the system. Bully takes you partway there, offering a “respect” system similar to GTA: San Andreas (help a nerd and the jocks will be more likely to attack you on sight), but it doesn’t get any deeper than superficial aggression.

This failure is further compounded by the game’s physical world. There’s a school, and beyond its borders is a town, but rather than treat life outside Bullworth like a forbidden hideaway, you’re basically thrown out there to find new adventures the minute you get situated (Chapter 2, to be exact. And to be fair I’ve played no further.).

All of this comes at the expense of fleshing out the academy itself. The pool is empty, the football field is lifeless and the only accessible rooms in the Boys Dorm are your own and a small, underpopulated lounge. There’s no organized recess and no lunchtime to fool around in. You have a schedule — two classes a day and bedtime before 1 a.m. — but there are no long-term consequences for refusing to follow it. You can court females, but unlike real life, the rest of the student body doesn’t seem to take interest. Instead of keeping the game concentrated on the microcosms of the schoolyard, the developers spread it out, or in other words, watered it down.

The result is a game that plays more like Grand Theft Auto, for worse. In GTA, the world is static; your actions have limited weight on the world at large, but that’s OK, because like any big city, most people don’t matter. School is different. Everything happens under a microscope.

Because Bully seems so fixated on mapping itself onto GTA’s existing construct, I can’t help but think the developers phoned this one in. I don’t purport to know much about programming engines and the technicalities of development, but it does appear that Rockstar took whatever they built with the GTA series and tried to apply it as best they could to a high school drama. It should have been the other way around.

I thought of lecturing my girlfriend on the unique way that video games model and look at the world. Bully, I would say, has the potential to be constructive by detailing the social underbelly of student life in Anytown, USA. Instead, I just let her fall asleep.

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I suppose it was only a matter of time.

But for the record, here’s how I called it last April.

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Part of a series that is doomed to increase as I get to talking about games way later than everyone else

When Super Mario Galaxy first arrived in my mailbox, I played it for a few hours and put it away, only stabbing at a star here or there before retreating to Mass Effect, Virtual Console or anything that wasn’t Super Mario Galaxy.

It pains me to play this game. I tried rationalizing this with all sorts of silly theories — I’m into more mature content, I like games with more of a plot, it’s too much like the last Mario games — but really, it’s all just a pack of lies.

What was actually going on was my refusal to admit the truth, that the childlike whimsy I once felt while playing Mario games is gone from my soul and will henceforth return only as nostalgia. I spent all my boyish wonder on Mario 64, went into boyish wonderdebt at Super Mario Sunshine, and now that Galaxy has dropped, I’m so far in the hole Mario’s going to have to jump out of the TV set to dazzle my spirits.

The frustrating part is, I can’t figure out if Galaxy simply isn’t wonderous enough or if part of me has changed. On one hand, I remember every star in Mario 64 being a tangible accomplishment, as if a small mountain was climbed each time Mario popped out of a painting victorious. But those were the days of all-nighters and weekend binges. The weekends had that special quality. When the school week ended, gaming began because it was cold outside and Nintendo 64 was a box of magic.

Certainly I’ve heard about little kids enjoying this game more than a Disneyland Character Breakfast, but do adults who grew up on Mario feel the same way? I’m not sure — the critics are all praising the game for it’s fine, distilled platformery. Those that do talk about the game’s whimsy and fancy and reckless abandon, well, I wonder if they really mean it, or if they haven’t admitted the truth themselves.

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First, a wag of the finger to Kotaku for forgetting their roots in a post on the upcoming Contra 4 for Nintendo DS. Any Contra nerd worth their salt would know that Mad Dog and Scorpion are not “new merc characters,” nor are they simply “names of really bad alcoholic beverages.” In fact, they are nicknames for the original game’s heroes, Bill and Lance, who are entirely seperate characters in the coming sequel. Shame on you Kotaku, for not drawing attention to this discrepancy. Also, I can’t post about Contra without mentioning that I have beaten both the NES and Arcade Contras with no extra lives code and no continues. I believe a w00t is in order.

This next bit is more pressing. I did not realize that Nintendo and Sony do not license games that have an Adults Only rating. I learned this when reading about the ESRB’s decision to rate Manhunt 2 AO.

I’m all for keeping games like Manhunt 2 out of the hands of minors, but that doesn’t mean those games shouldn’t be available at all. If it means putting games up on some high covered shelf out of kids’ eyesight or distributing online only, so be it — at least it’s in the publishers’ hands whether they want to clean up a game for a Mature rating. For all the arguments the games industry puts forth about the need to defend their creative expression, I’m shocked that it’s the game companies themselves doing the censoring.

Finally, I’ve hit a rut with GameFly — a sort of spin on the classic lament of people with day jobs who have too many games to play and not enough time. I’m maybe a third of the way through Super Paper Mario, and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 just arrived. In addition, there’s the two games I kept after renting them, Oblivion and Trauma Center. I want to play the games I’m renting so I can ship them back out and feel I’m getting my money’s worth, but the last thing I want is to make gaming a chore. I suppose I’ll go back to my old strategy of digging up classic games, finding interesting PC experiments and flicking at my rentals with an occasional prolonged console binge.

Perhaps I’ll start with a Contra speed run.

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Today, I’m putting away my Gamecube, and that’s a really sucky thing to do. I had previously left the Cube in my half bedroom/gamer pit along with the 360, and had placed the Wii out in the communal TV room, but with several single-player games to tend to, the Wii and I need a little more alone time. There’s only room for 2 consoles in this room, so my beloved indigo box must go.

I know I’m not the first to lament a dependable console replaced by a newer, backwards compatible one, but I figure this small eulogy is due. That said, I’d like to share a story with which those who know me are already familiar.

–

Back in college, I had lit some incense in my room, atop my TV, prior to one of our house parties, and had stupidly left it unattended. Dumber still, my reluctance to buy a proper stand for such occasions meant I was relying on a junk piece of styrofoam to hold up this flaming scent stick. It had never been a problem before, but you can imagine what happened.

My housemate’s then-girlfriend tapped me on the shoulder and told me the smoke alarm was going off upstars. I bounded up to my room to find the air saturated with thick black smoke, the alarm screaming in dismay, the smell of burnt plastic overwhelming. I sensed a couple people behind me, but they retreated when they saw the source of the problem: My TV, and my Gamecube below it, were on fire.

It’s hard to say what went through my head at that moment, but something compelled me to attack the problem the same way I would handle a birthday cake. With a series of quick puffs, I (miraculously?) extinguished the flames. The fire burned a hole in the TV straight through to its inner workings, and the right front side of my Cube seemed completely melted; the Animal Crossing memory card in the second slot was dripping plastic.

Sitting on the floor of my room, a black haze around me, I then did what any other gamer would do: I flicked on the Cube’s power and turned on the TV. I have never been so happy to see Samus Aran. Later on, after some serious filing and cutting of molten plastic, every input and card slot on the console was in full working order. I’ve retold this story several times for those who inquired about my Burnt Cube, and no one has ever assumed that the fourth controller and second memory slot are functional.

Obviously, there’s no chance of selling this Gamecube, and I can’t really give it away without forfeiting my games, controllers and memory cards, so it’s just going to sit in the closet, but it won’t be forgotten. If the Wii ever breaks down — and who knows, certainly the early wrist straps didn’t cut the mustard — I know my Cube will be ready for action. In an age of Red Rings of Death, of recalls and re-releases, of patches and updates, of extra costs for warrantees that are honored all too often, that’s all a gamer can really ask for.

Newman, Wii, Humour | No Comments »

I’m just going to come out and say it. Trauma Center: Second Opinion for the Wii is a next-gen Casual Game of the truest kind.

In fact, it’s not that different from Diner Dash, the seminal casual game from GameLab. The game starts off slow, with computer assistance that basically makes it impossible to lose. And like Diner Dash, you have a fairly straightforward set of goals that become complicated by the need to multitask in a finite amount of time. In one game, you’re a waitress who has to seat customers, take orders, deliver food and clean up. In the other, you’re a surgeon who has to suture wounds, attack harmful bugs and pump the patient with antibiotics.

Neither game strays far from this formula. They get harder because there are more tasks to perform in less time. On a level by level basis, they follow the same arc. In Trauma Center, you start by cleaning an area and making an incisiion — simple enough — but things get hectic as the patient’s health falls and more cutting and suturing demands the player’s attention. When it’s all over, there’s a cool off period for finishing up the routine parts of the surgery. A level of Diner Dash also starts simply, with empty tables and waiting customers. As more people show up the action intensifies, building until the customers stop showing. The rest is a matter of sastisfying the last few people before closing up shop.

Trauma Center has been both criticized and hailed for being difficult, but Diner Dash is no picnic in its later levels either. Both games eventually require the player to enter a zen-like state of pointing and clicking. When the mission is done, both games serve the player with an evaluation sheet with a score and ranking of their performance.

Certainly, Trauma Center departs a bit from the mold. The mere fact that there are more tools to master than simple pointing and clicking adds a layer of complexity. That’s why I personally enjoy the game so much; I do enough mouseplay when I’m browsing the Internet, but this is entirely different. It’s funny how the Wii is subjecting all gamers to an unfamiliar control scheme — I can imagine the typical 45 year old housewife casual audience having the same experience playing games with a mouse.

Ultimately, this is not the hardcore immersive Wii game that people have been waiting for. But it is the kind of casual single-player experience for which the Wii was designed. It even appeals to the non-gamers that Nintendo really wants to reach. As proof, I brought the game to my parents’ house, and they love it.

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…because I can!

Really though, this is kind of stupid.

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Sorry for the pun.

Anyway, my buddy Scotto has asked me a few times why I haven’t been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii. Here’s my theory:

The short answer is that the motion control sucks. One would hope that stabbing the remote, or swinging it in a circle or slicing backhand would perform those actions on screen. Instead, to do those actions you must shake the remote (doesn’t really matter how) while holding some combination of other buttons. It’s an example of the Wii’s buttons being used as a crutch for the unrefined motion sensing.

You see this in other games too. SSX Blur allows players to switch to the analog stick to move instead of twisting the remote, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance lets players mash a button when their arms get tired from swinging. The developers are basically acknowledging that the remote is a gimmick, and once you’re through with it, you’re welcome to fall back on the old standard of buttons and sticks. Cheap.

The funny thing is that in Zelda, I’d rather be playing on a Gamecube controller. Nintendo, being the first party and all, doesn’t let you, even though practically the same game was released for the older system as well. Essentially they’re saying, “Look, this is the new technology, and if you’re not happy with it you should have bought the Gamecube version to begin with.”

You see the conflict now? I want buttons as crutches, but I don’t like the message it sends about Wii-as-gimmick. The potential solution is basically what we’ve been waiting for anyway: controls that surpass the abilities of traditional gamepads. A Wii motion should never be analogous to a button press. I should be able to perform one gesture on the remote for every two or three button combo on the gamepad. It should be so intuitive that it’s just easier for me to do so. That way, I’ll never even consider switching back.

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