It basically seems like they’ve decided to remove the game itself and it’s now more of an editor instead which is kinda depressing since the first game was pretty fun even with flaws. It feels like Media Molecule just looked at the amount of levels created by users and assumed that because there is a large amount of content that this is the way to go without considering the QUALITY of those levels. Who cares if there are two million levels available if 99,999% of them are pure garbage? I’ve looked at the content and found maybe four or five levels that were actually interesting. Sure it felt like a nice bonus, but dumping the actual game in favor of this is crap is so goddamn disappointing. I thought that MAYBE we could have another quality 2D Platformer.Sorry for the emotional rant but it just feels so infuriating to have an entire industry with its head up its ass. After the success of NSMBW you could’ve thought that they would seriously reconsider just making a 60$ editor.
(I apologise for any eventual errors in writing, I’m not a native English speaker.)
It is Silicon Valley disease. Whether a company is in Silicon Valley or not, a certain mentality spreads everywhere because it is the ‘future of computers’. User Generated Content is something they all think is the ‘future’ because they are so focused about the technology aspects of it. “Look! Customers will create all this content for us!”
One of the reasons why Nintendo is going to keep having problems in the future is because the top executives wish Nintendo to “get married” with Silicon Valley and to have children with it. This is a frightening idea. Already, they have relocated themselves to Silicon Valley where they believe the geographical proximity means that Nintendo will absorb “Silicon Valley Genius” like a sponge when placed in water. They say it is to be closer to third party companies but seeing how Nintendo did fine before and how in this era of Internet technology making geographical proximity less important, I don’t buy it. Anyone relocating a business to California at this time is just plain stupid. Nintendo might as well open up offices in Greece as California is about to financially explode like Greece did. Businesses are fleeing that state for a reason.
The Wii has suffered such a sharp turn in momentum that defies the historical trend of momentum downturns. It simply wasn’t just some ‘uninteresting software’. Something poured water on the Wii flame. As dramatic of a shift it was, the effect is being overall hidden. It is that bad. Consider that the Wii had not just ‘good selling momentum’ but sheer ‘Revolution momentum’ something we have not seen in decades, a momentum that went beyond PS2’s best days. Also, consider that the 2d Mario successor, Mario 5, is the killer app of killer apps. It bounced the Wii back up more than any game could. Zelda couldn’t do that. Metroid couldn’t do that. Pikmin couldn’t do that. 3d Mario couldn’t do that. Only 2d Mario could have that impact. So sandwhiched between the best console momentum ever in the history of gaming with the successor to the strongest killer app in the history of gaming is the User Generated Content decline. As destructive as UGC is, its effects are still hidden due to being in between two very uncommon events.
My theory about the rot that is plaguing video game land, including Nintendo, is that game developers and computer developers strive to separate from the masses. It is like being weird for weirdness’s sake. It is like driving into Austin where the ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is people being eccentric for the sake of being eccentric.
How can any product hope to sell to the masses when the developers despise the masses? If a developer thinks he is some magical person and the masses are riff raff because they are not in magical Silicon Valley Land, why should we expect any software to be a hit with the masses? Much of Silicon Valley has become a bizarro world outside of the mainstream. Many of the people it attracts look down at the masses. This attitude correlates very well of the ‘Industry’ had of the Wii, that the ‘masses’ were “stupid”, were not “sophisticated”, that how dare they like that 2d Mario sidescroller, and that the Wii is a nightmare that must be destroyed. Sad to say, many of Nintendo’s game developers are cut from the same cloth. Want another 2d Mario? Try waiting twenty years because Nintendo developers don’t want to make it. But they would love to give you more 3d Mario. You cannot have too much 3d Mario! And Nintendo never followed through with the motion control software because it doesn’t “fit their vision”. Metroid Other M isn’t using it. Galaxy 1 and 2 didn’t do much that couldn’t have been done on a regular controller. Zelda may be using it but this isn’t saying much because Zelda has lost all cohesion that it can be a touch screen game with choo-choo trains.
Being around more game developers, I can tell you they are not members of the mainstream. So no wonder when they get ‘creative’ with a ‘vision’ their game only ends up becoming wildly eccentric. It is like they live their lives in a digital world and have lost connection to the real world. They don’t realize how eccentric they are because they are surrounded by like minded people. I’m not talking eccentric in terms of behavior but in the form of values. What game developers value in a game is definitely not what the masses value in a game.
User Generated Content is Silicon Valley group think. It is astonishing how, as if mind controlled, you see people like Will Wright proclaim how UGC is the be all and end all to all things when his game Spore, based on on UGC, was a massive disappointment. And aside from myself, do you ever hear anyone talk down User Generated Content? Do you ever hear anyone be even cynical about the so-called ‘UGC Revolution’? You don’t. Even though UGC has failed in massive amounts of fail, the failures of UGC are never brought up. Instead, we are told that “we need to try yet again” with UGC. Note how all the reports on Wii’s decline fail to mention Nintendo’s shift toward UGC. This is intentional.
These people are not living in reality. A UGC game is like paying for access to garbage.
Silicon Valley (and Hollywood) is *below* gaming. Companies like Apple were offshoots from gaming, Steve Jobs was a former Atari employee. Looking at Silicon Valley with awe and wonder is as destructive to gaming as game developers looking at Hollywood with awe and wonder. Gaming is different. And gaming obeys different values than Silicon Valley values.