And what a messy melt down it is.
Remember when I said how games like Mario Galaxy were liked because of its graphics and music? Now, many people emailed me saying, “No, I like the game because of the gameplay. Graphics and music were not the main factor.” That is true for you. Games like Mario Galaxy do have a polished gameplay as most of Nintendo games do. However, to much of our hardcore friends, all they see is the production values. This is why I think it is easy to predict that if Mario Galaxy 2 does not have full orchestra music (but keeps everything else the same), these characters are going to go nuclear.
What is a hardcore? The hardcore is continually angry, as only a self-important man can be, with his games, his friends, his website and to the business of gaming. The hardcore is an infantile world view. At the core of a hardcore is the spoiled child- miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, dictating and useless. Hardcore is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
Casamassina is now editor in general of IGN, not just the Nintendo section. IGN has had the benefit of being a go-to site of Nintendo gamers (unlike say Gamespot or 1up). Normally, it doesn’t make any sense that the editor in general to attack and blame many of IGN’s viewers. But it does make sense if one is hardcore with visions of self-importance.
It makes sense why no gamer, any gamer, would want all games to be ‘samey’. There is no longer any differentiation between PC games and consoles games, sadly. There is no differentiation between the consoles themselves… aside from the Wii. You would think a gamer would want consoles to be different and to do different things. If you landed from Mars, you would have to conclude that these hardcore want all consoles to be identical. Personally, I want PC gaming to be different from console gaming. I wish all three consoles did things differently from one another. Gaming would be more diverse, more interesting.
Let’s go through this sad melt-down:
With all due respect to Miyamoto, a proven gaming genius and innovator, that’s just lazy. Either that, or Nintendo has gone off the deep end in its dogged pursuit of the business bottom line. This is not a two-man garage developer which works on games after its kids go to bed. It’s a multi-billion dollar corporation with thousands of employees, many of whom have helped shape the very industry as we know it. A cash behemoth with unrivaled game-making experience. That it might even ponder recycling a character for one its most beloved and lucrative franchises so that it might save time, money, or whatever, seems ludicrous. That it actually did so is unbelievable.
But it is now a two-man garage developer. In disruption, it is often that small companies disrupt larger companies. Larger companies with their larger budgets, polished corporate environment, and all are actually liabilities to innovation. All that money is what Christenson would say is ‘bad money’.
So the question becomes how can a big corporation become disruptive? The answer generally has been to separate a piece of the company, starve it of cash, and try to recreate the environment of those two garage developers. This is how Nintendo came up with games like “Brain Age” with Iwata telling a few developers that they have little money and only a few months to make a game. As Iwata recalled the event, they began to protest but then stopped themselves because they realized they had better stop wasting time to meet the deadline! So the idea of a ‘multi-billion dollar corporation with thousands of employees’ is quite fatal.
The “Game Industry” has grown considerably since twenty years ago. Are games more imaginative, innovative, and interesting now that the “Game Industry” has more money? No. As you can see, much of that employee size and tons of money is suffocating innovation. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.
It’s not an isolated incident or I’d have no column. Nintendo has been cutting costs and taking shortcuts ever since it launched Wii. Not unanimously, of course — it still goes all out now and again and delivers unequaled traditional experiences like Super Mario Galaxy, one of my favorite games of all time. It has the artistic quality and the technical knowhow to push Wii harder than any other company. But often, either to save time or money, to keep smaller teams or simply because it just couldn’t care less, it doesn’t bother.
Why not praise Galaxy for its gameplay? Who plays games for their ‘artistic quality and technical knowhow’? What consumer experience includes “zOMG, the polygons!”?
I think what is triggering Casamassina’s meltdown is Super Mario Brothers 5 being a huge hit. Note how all this venom is coming at poor Super Mario Brothers 5 after we are getting feedback on its sales. If he was so angry, why not write this column earlier? Why not warn us, the lowly and stupid consumer, about Super Mario Brothers 5 being ‘lazy’ before the game came out?
I believe there was a template already written in Casamassina and other hardcore heads when Wii sales slid down and Nintendo made their price cut. The template was that the “Casual Bubble is over. Nintendo should have catered to the hardcore.” They were expecting Mario 5 not to do too well.
We’re likely going to have another hardcore meltdown when Galaxy 2 doesn’t perform as well as Galaxy 1 (very probable scenario) or when Galaxy 2 doesn’t have orchestrated music or something else.
Let’s travel backward. The Wii remote is an outstanding piece of technology that has transformed the way many of us play games and Nintendo deserves full credit for having the foresight to disengage itself from the system wars and try something completely new. Obviously, the choice paid off. I covered the Big N through the evolution of N64, GameCube and finally Wii and I remember all the decisions and comments made by the company’s executive staff. Wii exists today because Nintendo is brilliant, but also because the company saw rising development costs, time and resources and didn’t want any part of it. Smart business move. But for players who do value cutting-edge graphics and audio — there are millions of us, by the way; we’re not a niche, as six million copies sold of Modern Warfare 2 in November show — it’s a slap in the face and a clear case of the bottom line taking precedence.
The bold is only one half of the puzzle. More specifically it is the wrong half.
Anyone who covered or remembered the Atari, NES, and 16-bit Eras will easily see what is going on. Those eras, especially the Atari and NES eras, created new gamers for life. It makes sense why Nintendo is making games that resemble many of those in that era.
If it is true of what Casamassina says, that he has covered and paid attention to Nintendo executives statements, then why the hell am I doing the job these ‘game journalists’ are supposed to be doing in covering the Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption? The executives wouldn’t shut up about those terms. You would think there would have been some curiosity on their part.
Wii is a more powerful GameCube. It won’t play high-definition titles. Laughably, it won’t even output in Dolby Digital surround sound — a feat PlayStation 2 accomplished nine years ago — because the hardware includes only a stereo component. Nintendo created a console that it could manufacture cheaply and sell at a reduced price, which is an honorable pursuit. The side effect to this, however, is that because Wii is incapable of competing technically with its competitors, players have granted Nintendo unofficial license to coast by with a wealth of games whose presentations journey backward and not forward in time; a generational reprieve from even trying.
Casamassina continues his meltdown here. Anyone covering N64 and Gamecube knows that the company’s fortunes were in decline doing exactly what Casamassina says. This generation began with analysts predicting Nintendo to leave the console business entirely. If Nintendo had kept doing what they were doing, they might have. I can’t understand why anyone would fault a company for changing its strategy after the last decade showed only decline.
We all praise Nintendo for returning gameplay and not graphical pop to the forefront. Since their conception, games have been designed to be fun first and everything else second. Nintendo seems to realize that more than any other developer in the world, which is why some of its presentational shortcomings are usually overshadowed by welcomed over-compensations in control and design. But make no mistake: Wii Sports is also the product of Nintendo’s bottom line and, yes, even laziness to some degree. The developer could have achieved a similarly simple, accessible visual style with considerably more detail, but it chose not to. Wii Sports dons a crisp, clean look, but is otherwise decidedly generic, static, and frankly, archaic. Nintendo spent less time, energy and money on the graphics because it had a winning hook to fall back on, which was of course the new motion controls. Why, though, should innovation come at the expense of presentation? Because it’s easier and cheaper.
What Casamassina said in the bold is a bald face lie. Casamassina was the most vocal critic of the Revolution not having HD. Four years ago, he said this:
Videogames are technology-driven and yet Nintendo continues to dismiss new, important technologies. It’s unfathomable. It’s like a painter throwing away his paintbrushes because they are too expensive. I mean, I’ve tried to understand this approach, but I don’t think it can be understood. No matter how you look at it, it makes no sense.
Nintendo’s public excuse here will of course be that it is investing in new technology: just a different kind. It will say that graphics have reached a saturation point, which they haven’t. (That’s such public relations garbage. Until I can boot up a game that perfectly recreates reality so that the game world is indistinguishable from the real, graphics have not reached a saturation point.) It will say that gamers will understand everything when they see the new “revolutionary” controller. And you know, that might actually be true. The device might be the best thing ever. But with Nintendo, why does it always come down to an either/or decision? In this case, we either get high-definition games, or we get a weird, new controller. Why does a major sacrifice always have to made in order to innovate? Why can’t we have both? It’s such an off-the-wall approach to appeasing consumers. Imagine if Toyota came out and said, “Well, our new Camry will have a revolutionary new steering wheel, but because we’re emphasizing this new wheel, we’ve cut down on horsepower by 300 percent.” It’d be a disaster. And still, this is how Nintendo works, and everyone just accepts it.
This quote above, four years old, illustrates that this recent Casamassina column lacks any integrity of a central point. It is emotional meltdown. Casamassina cannot even be honest about what he said when the Revolution came out. Contrast this to a writer like Fahey who admits that he, and many others, did not see the DS coming.
Expend less energy, cut costs and somehow make more money anyway. Sadly, save for only a few epic hardcore titles like the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy, this mantra of sorts has been the Nintendo way through Wii’s lifecycle so far. I wish it weren’t so, but I can point to a dozen examples, from actual games to outdated models that it clings to only (so far as I can tell) because it remains reluctant to change.
Does Casamassina not read any of the Iwata Asks interviews? Nintendo developers have admitted they re-use things from game to game as far back as the NES. You can really sense this with games like Kid Icarus and Metroid. I thought it was funny how Konami re-used Gradius sounds in Contra. If Casamassina was transported back in time, he would think classics that reused a sound or something like Contra or Metroid to be ‘lazy’ (and there were Casamassinas back then, they were computer gamers. But that hardcore gaming vanished and the new gaming took over so history never recorded what they said).
There’s Wii Play. It doesn’t host a single experience that isn’t playable for free and probably better as an iPhone app. It’s a collection of lazily constructed mini-games, some of which aren’t even enjoyable — a simple technical demo of the Wii remote. And Nintendo struck gold with the title because it packaged it with a controller. It is the best-selling “game” this generation.
Wii Play is awesome! The pool and tanks are tons of fun. I also like the target shooting. If Wii Play wasn’t fun, people wouldn’t have bought it regardless if it came with a controller or not.
Hell, the game that came bundled with the Atari 2600, Combat, resembles Tanks. Why the venom at these cute little games? I really hope to get a sequel to Tanks! That game is fun, fun, fun!
What about more traditional software like, say, Animal Crossing: City Folk? The series has long been a fan favorite for its relatively non-linear, free-form gameplay. When Nintendo first announced that it was working on a new Animal Crossing game, Wii owners like me automatically imagined the possibilities. A much grander city to explore. Online play. Perhaps Nintendo would even create some kind of epic massively multiplayer experience. Nope. City Folk shipped as an all-too-familiar cross between the previously released GameCube and DS efforts. No real innovations. No presentational leaps despite Wii’s added horsepower. Still fun but certainly aged and undeniably lazy.
Nintendo will never make a MMORPG because that would make the company into a service orientated company rather than a product orientated company. A service orientated company would require hiring tons of new people to maintain and watch over the game. Blizzard, for example, exploded in size after WoW came out.
The reason why Animal Crossing: City Folk didn’t have a radical make-over was the same reason why Mario 5 wasn’t a radical make-over, graphically, from NSMB DS. And this reason is because the DS versions of those Wii games sold TONS. You do not fix what is not broken. I imagine the next Animal Crossing game will be much different due to the disappointing sales of City Folk.
Casamassina seeing only a conspiracy of serving the bottom line is silly.
It’s ironic because it is precisely the hardcore Nintendo fan who is most influenced by the company’s changed practices. With the rare exception — a morsel of food for the starving — we are not getting the titles we want because Nintendo has hit upon a winning formula, which is to make quicker, cost-efficient software, sit back and then reap the rewards. The expanded audience doesn’t read every word about the next title in the Legend of Zelda franchise. It doesn’t care if New Super Mario Bros. isn’t as beautiful as it could and should be. We do. And yet many of us defend Nintendo even when its motives benefit the business, not the players. We celebrate its monthly sales victories and then we re-play Super Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, and Smash Bros. while we sift through Nintendo’s cash-ins on the way to its next big thing.
How does Casamassina know that the Expanded Audience isn’t online and reading about the Wii games? How does he know that they are defending Nintendo’s business strategy because their strategy includes themselves? I’m a visible example of someone defending Nintendo’s strategy because it includes me. There are many others as well in the same boat.
Maybe the Expanded Audience isn’t as dumb as some people think.
Above: A Fitting Metaphor
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