There’s a good reason this logo gives me warm childhood memories.

Nintendo is the oldest company in gaming, and in many regards it really shows. Commonly referred to as “conservative” and “frugal”, much about Nintendo’s business strategy is slow to change. But how did some of their positions in the video game industry take root in the first place? This week, I shall attempt to examine Nintendo’s position as the “kid’s company” of the industry. This moniker is one that has earned Nintendo equal parts praise and insult. Since their breakout success in this industry with the Famicom/NES, Nintendo has hewed close to a specific target demographic and regularly rubbed up against attempts to stray further up the age brackets. One of the earliest and most popular examples of this is in the SNES build of Mortal Kombat where the blood effects were recolored to look like sweat.

It would probably make for a nice story to suggest that Nintendo’s affiliation with children’s games stems from their lead talent and their design choices. Shigeru Miyamoto does often seem to design games well suited for children, after all. Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokemon and founder of Game Freak, is another cornerstone of Nintendo software also aimed at a younger crowd. It might then follow that Nintendo aims for a younger gamer because its games and game creators are best suited for them. This, however, I find ignores how figures like Miyamoto and Tajiri got picked up by Nintendo in the first place. Looking for talent to further Nintendo’s new video games venture before the NES, then-president of the company Hiroshi Yamauchi chose Miyamoto for his raw creative abilities. This creativity would prove to lend itself well in a field where extreme limitations would demand a creative mind (as I wrote about previously). From those early days, of simpler contemporaries the likes of Pong and Colecovision, the NES would see the home console market boom and bring video games into the home and out of public spaces like bars or arcade halls. This, in turn, would expose a much younger crowd to gaming and give rise to the prime target demographic for a new and whimsical electronic toy. With the average age of gamers at the youngest it would ever be, Nintendo enjoyed massive success and formed a great deal of its franchises and strategies during this time throughout the life cycles of the NES and SNES. By then, firmly entrenched in their ways, Nintendo would seek out Game Freak founder Satoshi Tajiri and later buy majority control of his company. Yamauchi was brilliant at culling the necessary talent for the time and these men, among many others, proved to be the right talent at the right time.

Moving forward, in the twilight of Yamauchi’s tenure and after his company’s fall from pole position with the release of the Nintendo 64, Nintendo would show signs of wavering on their old strategies. With exclusive games that aimed at a decidedly older crowd, Nintendo would begin to question their position as a content creator and distributor primarily for the child demographic. Prominent examples include Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and most tellingly The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Later examples exist on the GameCube, a system that further tested the resolve of Nintendo’s strategies, but I think the development of Majora’s Mask marked a kind of “low point” (to say nothing of quality, as I adore the game) wherein Nintendo was willing to really test new waters. It may not seem like the most adult or extreme example of a game on a Nintendo platform, but to allow development of a mainline flagship title like Zelda to dabble in darker tones was a big move for them. The first title in the series not directed by Miyamoto, instead by the now-current series director Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo took a big risk on this entry in the franchise and in some regards it did not pay off. Though critically praised, Majora’s Mask would only hit sales numbers half as good as Ocarina of Time‘s. These steps may seem anemic, but small steps indicate big ideas bubbling under the surface at a company like Nintendo and it would take a great deal to shift them from their original trajectory.

Majora’s Mask marked an odd time for Nintendo, but not one that lasted very long.

As much as the N64 and GameCube may have tested Nintendo’s resolve, neither console’s lackluster performance would prove enough for Nintendo to give up on the younger markets. All along their console missteps, Nintendo’s handheld business had been booming ever since the original Game Boy and remained essentially unchallenged in their market space. Indeed the home of Pokemon would prove for Nintendo that their image as a kid’s game company was lucrative and foreseeably evergreen. Though the game industry has since begun catering to older and older gamers, with the average age now sitting somewhere in the mid thirties, Nintendo has found themselves as the only demonstrably dedicated child friendly console maker and game publisher. And with a name still synonymous with video games, they have a brand and legacy all too easily tapped into to appeal to parents of young children. Perhaps that legacy is a bit of a curse (something I will expand on later), but Nintendo has even cemented themselves as the console maker no one expects to push the technological limit. Once truer of their handheld division, as Gunpei Yokoi’s mantra of “lateral thinking with withered technology” is how he crafted success with the Game Boy, Nintendo has adhered the philosophy more completely to their home console designs of late.

I still feel like Nintendo’s home console strategy is very uncertain, but perhaps it is not any more so than the state of console gaming is uncertain. Many outside factors threaten to change both the handheld and console markets and it is Nintendo’s plight to navigate these changes as much as it is their competitor’s, though it should be interesting to see if a company as rigid as Nintendo is up to the challenge. Whatever the industry faces, Nintendo’s past as a hardware and software producer for children is as certain as it has been profitable.

What are your thoughts on Nintendo’s strategy? I never even mentioned the new 2DS, a move aimed squarely at children. Is this a course Nintendo can continue to chart or will they have to give in to their older fan’s demands if they hope to survive? But if the WiiU is any indication, Nintendo needs to pick a path and stick to it!

While the red ‘X’ from Monolith’s trailer looks almost exactly like the Xenogears logo, it almost certainly will not be a direct follow-on from that game.

Some Game Announcements For the Wii U, Finally

After months of stagnation on the Wii U front, Nintendo has at long last announced several future entries in the Wii U’s library through this week’s Nintendo Direct conference. A new game featuring Yoshi was announced, which is presented in the style of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, leading to the game media dubbing it as Yoshi’s Epic Yarn, which verily it probably is unless Nintendo decides to be contrary. A high definition re-release of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was also revealed and later confirmed to be called The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Reborn. While it has not been confirmed as such, the released media seems to indicate that it may be a full-blown remake as opposed to a HD port.

More surprising was the announcement of an Atlus led Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem crossover game, though it remains to be seen whether the issue of this union will prove equal to the sum of its parts. Finally, the next Monolith Soft game was showcased, the results of which look something approximating the world of Xenoblade being recreated in Square Enix’s Crystal Tools engine. The game is clearly the next installment in Monolith’s Xeno series, but what is currently unknown is the significance of the prominent red ‘X’ which was displayed at the end of the footage. It could simply denote the game’s connection to the Xeno series, or it could be the actual proper title of the project.

Content starved Wii U owners have understandably met these announcements with great enthusiasm, as did quality starved JRPG enthusiasts looking for novelty, yet this is not to say that these projects were not met with a certain measure of criticism. While The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Reborn‘s re-imagining of the original environments is utterly delightful, the game’s characters look frankly disgusting. Gone are the whimsical cell-shaded stylings of the original game characters, and in their place are hideous waxy manikins, making the characters look like horrid little plastic goblins. Meanwhile Monolith Soft’s Xeno project has led to some fans reacting with dismay to the fact that the developers have seemingly drank deep of the current-gen Kool-aid, which dictates that current-gen graphics may only be presented in tones of muted brown, grey, and green, so that while the game looks quite similar to its critically-acclaimed Wii predecessor, it nevertheless looks much less vibrant. At any rate, graphical qualms aside, the titles themselves are all exciting developments for core Wii U fans, and constitute a bold and promising direction for the platform going forward.

Not one’s first choice of imagery, but then one does as he must when working along side Mr. Pierson Stone.

Nintendo Steals From Wii U Owners

Nintendo has this habit of withholding fervently demanded features for the longest time, until at last relenting only to implement them in the worst possible fashion, as if to say: “See? What’s so great about having the internet/digital distribution/high definition graphics anyway?!“, and this Wiik the company has struck again. Since the launch of the Wii U many have despaired at the console’s lack of native Virtual Console support, as users were forced to access Virtual Console games through Wii compatibility mode, which involves a clunky interface and lack of Wii U Gamepad support. That is why many were excited when Nintendo this week announced that a Spring Wii U update would see the launch of native Virtual Console support for the system – though this sweet announcement turned into ash in one’s mouth upon hearing the proposed pricing structure of the games.

People who already own a library of Virtual Console titles on their Wiis will be forced to buy their games again if they wish for them to be properly supported by the Wii U. While never justifiable, this practice would be at least understandable if it was down to Nintendo’s typical incompetence when it comes to the running of their digital infrastructure, because if the company claimed to be unable to transfer Virtual Console releases due to a lack of user accounts then there would be few who would disbelieve them. Where Nintendo comes unstuck however, is in their offer to allow owners of a Virtual Console title on the Wii to re-purchase that title at a discounted price on the Wii U. The fact that Nintendo will be able to determine whether a user already owns the content pretty much proves that they could simply allow Wii U owners to have access to their previously purchased Virtual Console titles, yet refuse to do so on account of their preference for making Wii U owners purchase their content all over again. The situation would be functionally similar to an alternate bizzaro history wherein Sony demanded a couple of dollars for each PS1 game that an individual intended to use on their PS2. This is basically petty theft, and is equally obnoxious to any repugnant scam that EA might attempt to push.

NES titles may be repurchased for $1.00 as opposed to $4.99, while SNES games may be repurchased for $1.50 as opposed to $7.99, because there is no profit in allowing people free access to the content that they already own. The situation becomes even worse for PAL owners, as the experimental Wii U release of the Balloon Fight Virtual Console title has confirmed that Nintendo have opted to release the technically inferior PAL versions of games. The PAL television standard offers one hundred lines of extra resolution to its NTSC counterpart, yet in terms of gaming all that amounts to is one hundred lines of black letterboxing at the top and bottom of the screen, coupled with the fact that PAL titles [of the era] only support a fifty frames-per-second update while NTSC supports sixty, meaning that many NTSC games are sixteen percent faster and more fluid than their PAL counterparts [in games where slowdown is not an issue].

Finally, in relation another [unconnected] fraudulent deceit on Nintendo’s part, they have been forced to pull a television advertisement for the Wii U that was being broadcast in the UK, on account of the fact that it was misleading towards consumers. While many Wii U games allow users to play their software using the inbuilt LCD screen of the Wii U’s Gamepad, there are also a seemingly equal number of games which do not allow for this functionality. This is why the Advertising Standards Authority, when confronted with a Nintendo advertisement contending that the Wii U solved familial television disputes through the provision of off-screen play, ruled against Nintendo for misleading the public.

The Glee approach to creating music.

The Telltale Quack

Lusireaders will likely best remember Jonathan Coulton as the songwriter behind Still Alive and Want You Gone from Valve’s Portal series, but with eight studio albums to his name he is a fairly prolific geekcentric comedy-rock musician in his own right. This week an incensed Coulton took to the internet in order to draw attention to the fact that he has been made the victim of some of the most shockingly incompetent corporate theft on record. The American cultural sinkhole cum television program known as Glee has gormlessly stolen [without offer of credit or compensation] his 2006 cover version of Sir Mix-a-lot’s 1992 hit song, Baby Got Back, and has not only used it in an episode of the dreadful show, but has then also decided to sell the track on iTunes.

Coulton’s Baby Got Back licensed Mix-a-lot’s lyrics, yet the accompanying music and interpretation was all of his own making. Moreover, Coulton had even personalised the lyrics somewhat by changing the line “Mix-a-lot’s in trouble” to “Johnny C’s in trouble“, a line which Glee sloppily failed to alter when stealing Coulton’s work. Despite all this, it does not seem likely that Fox would be in breach of copyright if they had merely used their in-house ‘musicians’ to copy Coulton’s arrangement of the song, and so a livid Coulton was left with little other recourse than to take to the internet and call out Glee for its creatively moribund theft of another person’s creative property – yet he still had the sneaking suspicion that the show had done more than to simply copy his work.

“Well, they aired it, seemingly unchanged. And it’s now for sale in the US iTunes store. They also got in touch with my peeps to basically say that they’re within their legal rights to do this, and that I should be happy for the exposure (even though they do not credit me, and have not even publically acknowledged that it’s my version – so you know, it’s kind of SECRET exposure). While they appear not to be legally obligated to do any of these things, they did not apologize, offer to credit me, or offer to pay me, and indicated that this was their general policy in regards to covers of covers. It does not appear that I have a copyright claim, but I’m still investigating the possibility (which I consider likely) that they have used some or all of my audio.”

As it turns out there was to be yet another twist in this tale. Coulton has previously made available two different versions of the song; a normal version and a karaoke version – yet there is a distinctive element which both tracks share, and that is the quacking of a duck used to censor the word ‘fuck’ in the lyrics. Here is where things get interesting, the duck’s quack was actually part of one of the musical tracks within the mix, which is why it is also featured in the karaoke version of the song, and thus it would only be possible to stifle it so much before any further efforts would begin to degrade the quality of the music. Thus, after reading of Coulton’s claims that he was half-convinced that he could still hear the duck quacking in the Glee version of the song, several audio technicians set about digging through the audio-mix in search of the elusive mallard. Sure enough with a bit of work it was discovered that the ghostly echo of the quacking duck was still present in the Glee version of the song, indicating that the program did not simply copy Coulton’s arrangement of the piece, but rather had used his actual recording of the track in their awful show.

While knowing something for a fact and being able to prove that fact in a court of law are often seen to be two different things, discovery of artifacts peculiar to Coulton’s recording of the track do at least put him on strong footing with respect to pursuing his claims. That said, he would still do well to ponder the extent to which he considers it worthwhile pursuing the matter, as taking on a well-financed corporate entity is apt to cast a shadow over an individual’s every waking moment for the years that it will take for the saga to play out in court, leaving them a broken, if substantially wealthier, shell of a human being in its wake.

HERP A DERP DERP!

Today I’m going to talk to you about the difficulty of games. More specifically I’m going to talk to you about the fairness of difficulty in games, and the point at which we should draw the line between a good challenge and user-friendly game design.

It is not the intention of this editorial to critique and pass judgement on game’s like Devil May Cry 3 or Vagrant Story which make quite legitimate use of difficulty to offer a rewarding challenge, but rather to address games which take a dump on user-friendly game design in order to engender a false sense of difficulty.

None of us should be unfamiliar with excessively difficult games. I would wager that the vast majority of the Lusipurr.com Otaku readership would be intimately familiar with the NES era of gaming; for many of you playing Nintendo’s ugly grey box will have been one of your first formative experiences with gaming, while younger readers have probably at least tried their hand at some NES emulation; the point being readers will be familiar with the difficulty incumbent to poorly designed games. From Contra to Battletoads the NES era was replete with ball-acheingly  difficult games; many of which owed their difficulty to unfair or malicious game design, with a small but significant selection which would require the mongloid intuition of an idiot savant to complete without using cheats. The vast majority of us let this slide however; we were kids after all, and similarly the game industry was in its infancy. Lessons have to be learned before they can be taken on board, and thus the eventual gaming success stories had to stand on the shoulders of the INDUSTRY’S numerous failures.

That was then, and this is now. Circa 2011. We have every right to hold games to a loftier standard given the highly competitive nature of the current gaming climate, so now we must ask ourselves; to what extent are we willing to excuse unfair game design? This question does not lend itself to a straightforward answer.

It must be said that one of my biggest pet peeves are the constraints placed on the gamer’s ability to save their progress. The constraints on the saving of game data were likely necessary at one point, but technology has long since progressed beyond the point where a game’s refusal to allow players to save at will can be justified under most circumstances. Picture if you will any JRPG that you have played this generation which featured save points, now realize that their only functional role in games today is based on the game designer’s hope that at some point you will run into an enemy you cannot defeat and have a chunk of your game progress wiped out by being sent back to the game’s nearest arbitrarily designated save point. Or at least in theory this is how it’s intended to work, though as often as not it is life which intervenes, and RL commitments will at some juncture demand your attention, at which point you can either leave your game on pause for protracted periods of time (not recommended for the power hungry modern leviathans of gaming), or you can elect turn your console off, wiping various amounts of progress for any game arrogant and anachronistic enough to utilize a time greedy save-point design in their game.

DUUUUUURRRRR HERP?

Save points in modern gaming is a pet peeve of mine, yet more offensive by magnitudes is the willfully obtuse placement of save points so as to create an artificial impediment to progression by denying the gamer access to a save point when they need it most. A prime example of this is Final Fantasy III. I have played very little FFIII myself, yet I have heard profligate accounts of the lengthy final dungeon’s only save point being located at its entrance. Even in normal circumstances most would conclude that this is some profoundly mean-spirited arsehole game design, yet add to that the fact that FFIII is often held to be one of the hardest games in the series, and then you just have yourself a bad game.

But of course Final Fantasy III has no monopoly on purposefully belligerent game designs, one recent game which brought me no joy whatsoever was Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls was a hard game, and that’s OK. I had heard it was difficult, and I was expecting a game of difficult GAMEPLAY. The gameplay itself is challenging but decidedly fair, the game heightens its difficulty by frequently springing surprises on the player, yet this does not manifest in any unavoidable hazard being dropped into the player’s lap. I have no complaints regarding the gameplay de jour of Demon’s Souls, but rather the sticking point for me was the game design which prevented me from spending any of my souls (EXP) until my progression to some arbitrary point in the game that I never reached. Demon’s Souls is a game which goes out of its way to kill you, and yet its designers were so profoundly bastardly that they deny you character upgrade facilities in your initial starting hub. This is why I put down the game. This is why I’ll not by another. It was supposed to be a sadistic game, sure, but this initial roadblock to my progression was just too much. I can only loose my incredibly hard earned EXP so many times before I feel utterly sick to my stomach, and find myself in a foul mood for some hours. Some people will argue that this design decision adds to the old-school charm of the game, but I contend that it’s bad game design.

So far I have only broached instances which I believe to be relatively clear cut in their awful design, yet one other save system design which I am a trifle uncertain about is the use of a deliberately limiting save system in the survival horror era of the Resident Evil series. One is not able to save their games without first possessing a quantity of ink ribbons for the typewriter (save point), and like all commodities in those games they are a finite resource. This essentially means that gamers are only allowed a finite number of saves, somewhere in the order of between fifteen and twenty-five. This would not be a problem in an ideal world where entire days can be devoted to playing the game and saving at appropriate points, yet once again life is rarely so accommodating as to make way for these demanding fucking games.

I am not able to play Resident Evil games as I would other games, it is not really possible to effectively play the games in order to kill a half hour before having to be somewhere, as your limited amount of progression is probably not worth wasting an ink ribbon. There is a huge disincentive to sit-down and play Resident Evil when one has less than two solid hours (at a minimum) to dedicate towards it, this really makes it vastly more difficult to enjoy the games. Allow me to furnish you with an anecdote: several days ago I was playing Resident Evil (GC) and had progressed a little over my twenty or so minutes of play when Lusipurr told me to hop on Skype. This left me with something of a conundrum; do I go to a save point and waste an ink ribbon on a paltry twenty minutes of playtime, or do I just turn off my console and loose my progress. In the end there was only one choice :(.

HUR HUR DEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRP! 8)

Like I said before however, the Resident Evil save system is a feature That I am slightly ambiguous about. I dislike it wholeheartedly, I always have and I always will, yet how does one rubbish it in a game which is based almost exclusively around the concept of resource management? On the one hand it doesn’t seem unreasonable to treat saving the same as every other resource in the game, on the other hand a lifetime of gaming has taught me that it is never good game design when a particular feature makes you want to play a game less.

Finally, the survival horror genre is apt to demonstrate another area of ambiguity within game design; namely the fairness of enemy and hazard placement. In the majority of game genres one would expect every impediment to gamer progression to be sportingly crafted, if the player is playing the game right then every hazard should be avoidable. Not so the survival horror genre, which requires the implicit threat of the unexpected in order to maintain a frightening atmosphere. When the player is unexpectedly assailed from behind (don’t be gross!) then they receive a shock, when the player wanders through some high grass only to find themselves caught in a bear trap they receive a shock, these occasions are absolutely integral to maintaining the experience, yet each time they feel a little cheap and unpleasant seeing as it wasn’t a deficiency in our technique which led to us taking damage.

To what extent then is it desirable to have the player blindsided by unfair gameplay elements? Too little and you have a game like the superb Resident Evil 4, which categorically failed at being scary. Too much and you are left with a game that you put down in contempt; I was rather enjoying many elements of Alan Wake, yet its occasional random battle mechanic felt cheap, nasty and amateurish. Then of course you have games like Doom 3 which attempted to utilize cheap-scare monster closets to such an extent that they became banal and farcical. When you find yourself starting to enter rooms backwards because of the tangible gameplay advantage it provides, then that is a clear sign that there are far too enemy spawns placed behind you. Ultimately a game which loads up on assailing players with blindsides may well be harrowing, yet it precludes the player ever getting the full measure of enjoyment from the game’s combat system, and all but ensures their low sense of efficacy as gamers when making their way through the game. As for me, I think my sweetspot is somewhere in the vicinity of Silent Hill 2 and 3. Unique events are good, but they are a distraction from core gameplay.

At this point I should like to solicit reckons, as per usual I don’t know quite where to come down on many of these game design elements. Can the challenge of negotiating inconveniently placed save points ever justify the heavy demands it makes on your time and patience? Should resource conservation games compel players to ration their saves also? How frequently is it advisable or desirable to to burden players with unexpected hazards in order to establish and maintain a game’s atmosphere?

NEVER FORGET!

Was Mario the first furry?!

My earliest, and fondest, being of sitting with my dad on the couch playing Antarctic Adventure for the ColecoVision.  I remember hearing my dad say the title for the first time, but thinking the title was “Aunt” Arctic Adventure and the penguin was trying to make his way to his Aunt.  I was too young to know about the actual continent of Antarctica and the put two and two together.

USA #1 WHOOOOOOOOO!

So my question to you, my dearest of doves, is this: what fond memories do you have that involve retro games?  Tell me in the comments below!

Worry not though friends, I have been thoroughly vetted by one Mr S.P. Lusipurr to ensure that I harbour no anti-Lusipurrian ideas, and have been subsequently determined as clean (I shall be spared the great purge, how many of you can say the same?). And am thus well positioned to tirelessly espouse the Lusipurr.com company line, in the hopes that it facilitate and hasten our transition towards a worldwide absolute monarchy, free from the tyranny of waggle controls (HRH won’t stand for it!).

As far as pedigrees go, mine is a conventional one. I was thrust headlong into the world of console gaming one sunny Xmas morning, at the tender age of five (I think?), obtaining a NES replete with Zelda II and Super Mario Bros. A SNES was to follow, whereupon I would discover the joys of Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Turbo and Super Street Fighter II (with lashings of Champion Edition). While subsequent generations would see me furnished with a N64, PS1, PS2 and currently a PS3, PSP, DS, Wii and a broken 360.

My introduction to the world of JRPGs did not occur until the halcyon days of 1997, with the sublime Final Fantasy VII, owing to the fact that the shifty Japanese RPG development houses were too conceited and untrustworthy to trade their wares with PAL gamers until economic reality demanded otherwise. The PS1 was good to JRPG fans, allowing for developers to express concept art in ways which simply were not possible on the sprite based consoles. Squaresoft, as we well know, became quickly renowned for using this medium particularly well, creating sweeping flights of whimsy and imagination which would see their branding alone sufficient to imbue products with the status of compulsory purchase, long after they ceased to be worth playing.

These days I am more of a reformed JRPG fan following the industry’s decision to target their titles towards fans of the shitty game genre. Sadly this seems to be a microcosm of the game industry as a whole, and thus it falls to me gentle readers, to chronicle the demise of our beloved industry, so that future dystopian generations might pinpoint the moment that it all went horribly wrong (namely the retirement of the PS1). To this end I shall prosecute my duties with equal measures spite and glee.