Playing with (Tablet) Power!!

(I wrote this shortly after E3 2012, and although I'm less enthusiastic about this idea today, I still think this is a strategy that Nintendo should have - and still could - consider.)

For the last few years, there's been no end to the talk about Nintendo floundering position in the handheld gaming space. Smartphones and apps stores have been gobbling up the market for casual portable games - a market that Nintendo helped create with the DS - and now we're left to wonder how they can reclaim their dominance. "Build a phone!" some have cried. "Put games in the app stores!" others say. But I've realized in the last couple months that they are both wrong, and so was Nintendo when they released the 3DS.

They should have made a tablet!

You may think I'm crazy, but hear me out. Nintendo knows how to make incredible, touch-only games, and they've been doing so years on the DS. The Legend of Zelda games "Phantom Hourglass" and "Spirit Tracks" are not only great video games, but neither requires a physical button to play. I'm sure they could just as easily adapt games like Mario, Metroid, and Pokemon in a similar manner, so the lack of physical controls is a non-issue.

But why a tablet? Simple: parents are looking for a cheap tablet for their kids to play on. I've had several coworkers in the last year ask me about tablets, and their reason is always their kids. They don't want to give up their phone or personal iPad, and the 3DS just isn't what kids today want. They want something that can play Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, and all the other casual games that are so popular these days. More often than not, I recommend something like the Kindle Fire or the Nook, but imagine if Nintendo had a tablet in the same vein. They could OWN this market.

It may be too late to capitalize on this opening, but then again, who knows. The Nintendo brand is still strong with consumers, and if they move quickly (released in time for Holiday 2013?) there just might be a chance to reclaim the portable gaming throne.

Save the Colossi: Same Name, New Meaning

Wow! I almost forgot I had this thing lying around. Look at all the dust that's collected!

When I started this blog oh so many years ago, I chose the name "Save the Colossi" for a couple a reasons. Primarily, I wanted to pay tribute to the Playstation 2 game "Shadow of the Colossus", which was not only a landmark and influential title for the system, but easily one of the best videogames I'd played for any platform. Perhaps more importantly though, the name was catchy and available. At the time, I was inspired by writers like Jeremy Parish, Leigh Alexander, and Michael Abbott over at The Brainy Gamer, and I hoped to contribute to their always insightful conversations.

But as you can see from my archive, I never quite lived up to those grand ambitions.

The last few years have seen me playing far fewer games than I did in my high school years and even on into my early 20s. With the exception of the Wii, I basically sat out of this generation of videogame consoles, spending more time on iPhone games or classics on the Wii's Virtual Console than anything else. And here we are on the brink of a new generation of systems - and one short week after E3, the biggest gaming event of the year - and yet I remain relatively ambivalent about the whole prospect. I'll probably purchase Nintendo's latest console and handheld at some point in the next six months, but even they have failed to inspire me in the last couple years.

Which brings us back to names and their meaning. At this point in time, the "Big 3" videogame console makers  - Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony - all feel like they're becoming the lumbering colossi of the Playstation 2 game. They're institutions, almost too big to fail, but a little upstart could easily take any one of them down (or, life forbid, all three!) which tenacity and a few precisely targeted attacks. What's more, these threats are already banging on the gates. Any day, Apple could unveil some Trojan horse living room device and swiftly conquer the console space with a legion of iOS games and rabid fans. Similarly, Android-based consoles like the OUYA or the Gamestick could have similar success, thanks to cheaper games and a far more affordable console; you could buy five OUYAs for the price of an XBOX One. And let's not forget that Valve, who created the PC game platform of choice among gamers, are planning to release "Steam Boxes" in the not to distant future.

And the game makers aren't helping matters either. Budgets for gamers during the PS3/XBOX 360 generation skyrocketed, and the coming generation only looks to exacerbate this issue. Game studios are spending the same kind of money movie studios throw around to create Summer blockbusters like the Avengers, and the budgets just aren't sustainable. The stakes are just getting too high. Every "AAA" videogame has to be a success, and those that aren't risk bankrupting even the largest developers. The "hardcore" videogame market is already diminishing, and this upward budgetary trend threatens to topple the entire house of cards.

Videogame journalist Ben Kuchera wrote a few months ago "people asking if ... we're going to have another crash ... [is] like standing in the wreckage and wondering if the plane will be okay." As a fan of videogames, I really hope this is not the case, and that we aren't headed for another 80s-style crash, but I have to admit that the signs may be around us. Maybe it won't be a drastic implosion, a la the Atari era, but I can definitely see the market steadily decreasing in significance. Perhaps this is the start of a new Renaissance, or it could be that the worst happens and the industry never quite recovers.  Whatever happens, my heart is back in the game, so to speak, and my goal moving forward is to observe and to write.

I am but one person, but I also know that I am not alone. Together, perhaps we can stop our favored past time from stepping over the precipice.

Perhaps we can save the Colossi... from themselves.

Majora: Party of Two

I've been spending the last month playing The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask as part of the Brainy Gamer's Vintage Game Club. Although I have not been as big of a contributor on the forums as I would have liked, playing through this oft-neglected Nintendo 64 game has really been enlightening. This will be the first of hopefully several posts on my experiences with the game.

I originally played through The Legend of Zelda when it was originally released on the Nintendo 64 back in 2000, so my recent trip back to the land of Termina was somewhat familiar. Not only could I vaguely remember the setting, people, and tasks from the game, but my surroundings as I played were very reminiscent of those when I was 13, even if they weren't quite the same themselves. Sure, I was playing the game on the Wii instead of the Nintendo 64 and with a Gamecube controller, but overall the experience was largely the same as it was and has been for the last decade: in my room, on my bed, playing games by myself.

That all changed when my girlfriend came back from work.

She had known for a while that I was a gamer, but she had never been around when I was playing games, aside from a few casual games on my iPod Touch. I started to turn off the Wii because I didn't figure she'd be interested in watching me play, not being a gamer herself, but to my surprise she took great interest in the game.

Naturally, at first she didn't quite understand the game. I was bombarded with questions regarding what I was doing and what was going on. "What are those green bloby guys?" "Why are you following those monkeys?" "Why are you cutting all those plants?" This was only natural I suppose: she not only missed the introductory segment of the game, but she wasn't well-versed in the language of Zelda and videogames in general. I half-expected her to grow frustrated and leave me to my playing, since to someone unfamiliar with the language of videogames, watching someone play can be an exercise in tedium and torture. To mmy surprise though, she stuck around and not only watched me as I played, but began actively participating in my adventure.

It started out small, with commands like "grab that heart!" and "kill that plant!", but the longer she was around me, the more involved she got with her participation. She'd let me know when I was beginning to run low on hearts, as often in an intense battle I would ignore those icons at the top of the screen. She'd provide commentary on events in the game, such as expressing sadness when the giant Goron protecting Snowhead fell to his apparent death (a thought that would have never occurred to me otherwise). What's more, she actually helped me progress in the game several times by suggesting actions that hadn't crossed my mind. For instance, while working on the Wedding Couple side quest, I got stumped after the postman delivered his letter to Kafei. I rushed back to Anju, but she was no help. I was about ready to give up on the quest for a while until my girlfriend finally suggested that I go into the door that Kafei entered.

"I've tried that before," I said. "It's locked."

"Just try it again."

Unconvinced, I went to the door, positive that it wouldn't open. Imagine my astonishment when the door was now in fact unlocked, and I was able to progress forward in the quest.

"You give up too easy," she informed me.

And perhaps she's right, but perhaps the issue in situations like these isn't simply that we as gamers sometimes need that second pair of eyes to help analyze in-game problems. I can think of many instances in my past when I've grown so frustrated with a puzzle in a game that I simply give up for a time or resort to walkthroughs via sites like GameFAQs. Our hobby is often thought of as a solitary past time, and although there are multiplayer and co-op games out there, the majority of players - I would wager - are playing their games alone. Nintendo made an effort with Super Mario Galaxy to add multiplayer components to a largely single player game, and perhaps I'll see whether this effort was successful now that I have a dedicated co-pilot. I've found it interesting though that there are ways for non-players to actively participate in games like Majora's Mask that are only designed with one player in mind.

Not only that, but adventuring through Termina this time was infinitely more fun this time because I had a companion to travel with me.