Game People

What to do when your portable is ruling the waves, your consoles are selling faster than you can produce them and there is this little Gameboy brand waiting in the wings? These are tough times for Nintendo Corp.

But hang in there Mr Nintendo, for we have seen the future and there is hope! A weary traveller called in not more that 2 days ago, full of news from a distant time. Here is his foretelling of what Nintendo did next.

Wii-bird: He told of the return of the grand-daddy of controllers. This time not only wire free but now is fully packed out with multi-directional rumble.

Not only that, he said, but it also comes with a built in charger that plugs into the USB port on the back of your Wii. So no more scurrying around for batteries.

Wii-player: He whispered of using his DS to play Game Boy Advance (GBA) games on his TV. Simply pop in your old GBA cart into the DS and follow the on screen advice to connect wirelessly to the Wii-player channe, and away you go! You can then play those classic GBA titles using your DS as a controller with the action super large on your TV.

Not only that, he said, but you can play GBA games that used the link cable for mulitplayer, against your friends via the Wii Connect 24.

Wii-board: He spoke of a full querty keyboard for the Wii. Complete with holster for the Wii-mote to provide wireless typing fun!

Not only that, he said, but it also has built in game controls for a quick switch of context between movement and typing, for any major MMO’s that may show up on the Wii sometime soon.

Wii-boy: He sang with joy about the original Gameboy Virtual Console. For just 100 points, you can buy a packs of original Gameboy games and play them in all their pixelated green/grey full screen glory.

Not only that, he said, but you can play Gameboy Colour titles too, and take advantage of any Super Gameboy features on the cartridge.

Mii-stats: He talked of a new Mii statistics channel to provide graphs and statistics of your Mii’s progress through the games it has played.

Not only that, he said, but this also enables your Mii’s stats to travel with them to other Wii’s, thus enabling comparisons and competition between your friends.

Phew! Well there you have it, the honest to gospel truth. Well that’s what he said anyhow.

Andy Robertson

The GameCube pad was an instant hit with me. No previous controller fitted as snugly in my hot little mitts. The buttons were where I wanted them, the sticks were responsive and distinctive, and the analogue triggers worked like a dream.

One thing was holding it back however, a little black cable tethered it to the cube. The stage was set for the grand-daddy of Nintendo controllers, the WaveBird. Once held untethered, all else felt cumbersome and tied down. (A similar experience to the first hold of the Wii-mote/nunchuck.)

The WaveBird continued Nintendo’s use of AA, rather than proprietary, batteries and still managed to last a good 100 hours. It supported up to 16 simultaneously players (if you could find a game and enough friends).

But now the Wii has arrived, are its days numbered? Not at all, it is in fact seeing a resurgence of both its popularity and its usefulness. Not only can you use it to play all those classic GameCube games, but it even works with NES, SNES and N64 virtual console titles.

Of course, it does have to compete with the Virtual Console (VC) controller. But for me there’s no competition. The WaveBird not only plays more VC titles, but also continues to support GameCube games. And critically, it’s not tethered to a dangling Wii-mote.

The WaveBird has seen great fluctuations in price over its turbulent life. I recently put together the following list that shows the little fella’s popularity reflected in its price (in my local and on-line retailers):

• GameCube Launch Price £34.99 (Electronics Boutique)
• Mid GameCube £27.99
• Late GameCube £22.99 (Game)
• End of Gamecube life £5.99 (WH Smiths Sale)
• Wii Launch £17.99 (Play.com)
• Post Christmas price £24.99 (Amazon.co.uk)

I think we will see this price increase as its popularity goes up, and availability goes down. So it could well be a good time to buy into some of that WaveBird stock.

Let’s end by quoting from the IGN 9.5 review:

Nintendo’s wireless WaveBird controller is my father. It owns me — there is no doubting that. From the moment I first used it, I knew I would have to worship it for the rest of my life. Really, you’ve read our review — you know we love this thing.

— Update (12th March 2007) —

Thanks for all the feedback. That’s made interesting reading. If you are still after a Wavebird, and beat the escalating ebay prices, Amazon now have them for £17.98 and Play have them for £17.99.

Andy Robertson

In the first of our blog exchange program here is a review of 8BitHero. Their review of us is found here.

8BitHero is an up and coming blog headed up by Kerri Sharp (aspiring games journo/designer/DJ) and Craig Langridge (hopeful video game translator/localizer).
The Brighton based team provide a window on all that is new and happening in the gaming world. In addition key articles pepper the left hand bar, providing in depth opinion to go alongside you helping of news.

Going from strength to strength since October 06, long ay they continue. The question just remains, which one is 8bit and which is the hero.

In 2001, Tim Smit started a country garden project with a difference. Inspired by the fascinating story of plants’ importance to man, he set about creating an environment where people could again explore:

man’s relationship with and dependence upon plants

Often acclaimed for its giant conservatory biomes, the Eden Project removed the usual boundaries and borders that kept the public away from the plants. Instead they provided enticing winding paths amoungst the undergrowth.

Art and information encouraged people to touch, smell and experience the plants in their natural habitats. For them, the problems this introduced was worth the results. They believed that a big part of enjoying and preserving something was to be invovled and connected to it.

We don’t have all the answers, we don’t want to tell others what to think; what we do is invite people to explore their world afresh

All very well, but what has this got to do with games? After a recent visit to the Eden Project, it struck me that this vision has much in common with Nintendo’s hopes for the Wii.

The previous boundaries, like complicated controllers and complex games, that kept many people away from games have now been replaced by friendly wii-remote. Games that took hours to learn have given way to games that anyone of any age can pick up and play.

For Nintendo, the cost of compromising on complexity was worth it, if it meant bringing games to a wider audience. Their Wii (we as in us) monicer, highlights their beleif that we best enjoy games when everyone gets invovled. Not only are there more players, but our play interaction and mechanic benefits from the variety of perspectives.

Like the Eden Project, they are helping people explore man’s relationship with games.

Nintendo has created the most inviting, inclusive video game system to date. Thanks to our unique controller, anyone of any age or skill level can pick up and play games on the Wii console.

And as Tim Smit was surprised by the success of his project, Nintendo also look like they might exceed even their own dreams of playing being believing.

Andy Robertson

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), those “charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable”, seem to have gotten into the spirit of the Wii with a jovial FCC id for the Wii-mote. As was picked up by The Inquirer, and now pictured on a UK Wii (right), it reads:

FCC ID:POO-WC45

Coincidence or is this a chink in the po-faced armour of the powers that be.

The day arrived, and I meandered into Game to collect the Wii. I was surprised to find a queue of people doing the same. When I collected my DS pre-order the store was empty. Shows how much Nintendo has risen in the UK populace psyches in the last couple of years.

I went for Wii-play, a nun-chuck and Zelda. All in it cost me £272.96, not the cheapest console I’ve brought.

I got it home and unpacked it. The package was top notch, real ‘ipod’ class. It really does seem like they have either hired the people apple use for their branding and packaging. With no reason to rush, the console was out of the box and hooked up in about 30 minutes.

It connected to my netgear wireless router with no problem, and performed some system updates. I only needed to turn to the manual when trying to ’sync’ my second wii-mote, you need to press a button in the SD slot on the console as well as the button in the battery bay of the remote.

Using the Wii was even better than I had expected. The little buzz each time you hit a button and the audio plings singing from the remote really do make it feel like a new era of gaming.

Wii-sports lived up to the hype and I was quickly playing some tennis with my Jo. And true to form, I also managed to thwak Thom (1) who happened to be in the wrong place for a cross court smash! No broken windows or TV’s yet though!

Creating Mii’s provided more entertainment, and we now have the whole family running around the plaza!

With a create packaging and build quality, great elevator background music, and the awsome packed in wii-sports any fears I had are allayed. I just need for my freinds to get their now (and some proper online games)!

Between the wish and the thing life lies waiting. How much of human life is lost in waiting?

I was worried about getting overkill in the run up to the UK launch, but my gamer-tank still seems to have enough fuel in it for a few more days.

My very own Wii-to-be is, this instant, sat in my local Game waiting to be collected on Friday. I even have a little time off work to go collect it.

If you checked my gamer card you would discover my age and appreciate my playing down of the whole collecting console on launch day. But basically I am as excited as a kid before Christmas.

My fears about the wii are:

• It won’t get my friends and family playing.
• The control will feel loose and spongy.
• They won’t release Parasol Stars on the virtual console.

My hopes about the wii are:

• That it will be graphically cleverer than the Gamecube.
• That all my friends will get one too.
• That my kids and wife will like it and spend hours sculpting their Mii’s.
• That there will be many long evenings and late night game-experience sessions for all.

Sid Meier is often quoted regarding his stance towards an enjoyable game dynamic. For him, the play needs:

“an understandable and enjoyable stream of decisions.”

Reading a recent interview I was reminded again of the wisdom of this statement, proven not least by an impressive catalogue of well recieved games.

However, I am not so sure it needed to keep him within the turn-based genre typical of the majority of his games. It is possible to engage the play with decisions within a real-time interacting environment.

Back in the day, when Civilisation was a twinkling in Meier’s eye, a little game on the original Gameboy introduced a decision based puzzle game that captured the imagination of many gamers. Together with Nintendo Tennis and Super Mario Land, this formed one part of a killer trilogy in the early days of the platform.

Nintendo’s excellent repackaged and updated version for the DS provides a modern rendering of Meier’s gaming vision, all be it in a very different way. The ever descending blocks provide the player with a stready stream of decision-encounters. Extended play uncovers ever increasing nuances to each decision. As a game deveops each decision affects the other as the simple play mechanic takes hold.

The experience and enjoyment of the game grows as the player needs to learn how to make wiser and quicker decisions. They find themselves honing their ability on many levels to imrpove their chances of survival:

Dead brick technique: How efficiently they can deal with bricks that don’t fit anywhere. They correct decision being the spot where they will case the least dissruption, and hopfully play with the next few bricks to cancel out any detrimental affect.

Start-tris: Key in the mutli-player mode. How quickly can they set-up and trigger a four row clear (tetris), and put the other player on the back foot. This demands both a tidy and quick use of blocks.

Clean up play: How quickly can you elliminate broken lines, after missplaced or dead bricks.

Look ahead: How efficient is their brick management, considering the bricks that are flagged up in the preview tiles.

These together with the already documented, back-to-back and t-spin moves make for a dynamic play experience, that gives Meier’s decision gaming a whole new meaning.

It is a key element of game design to define how best to imerse the player’s experience in the game world. The best interfaces dissapear as the player feels they are just interacting with the game environment. This enables the player to suspend their disbeleif and become emersed in the game.

A willing suspension of disbelief that accompanies a first-person simulation enables the person who participates to feel what it would be like to have greater personal power. - Brena Laurel

This obviously has echoes of the interface that Nintendo are trying to achieve with the wii. How often have we heard about the key turning moment in Metroid, that felt so solid and emersive.

Merely opening doors requires such a wide range of interactions it’s practically thrilling…It feels great. Exactly like opening a door!

It’s almost as if Nintendo have Laurel on staff, as their design echoes her desire to reach my hands right through the screen and do what I want to do.

There is an interesting case we can discuss in relation to user interface in the recent Yoshi’s Island DS. A key aspect of the game is the ability to throw Yoshi’s eggs across the two screens of the DS. The designers have obviously looked at Yoshi Touch and Go on the DS which had a similar play-mechanic. However they have decided to present this interaction differnetly.

In Yoshi Touch and Go the space between the two screens on the DS did not exist in the game world. This had the benefit of eliminating any dead space that could not be seen bewteen the two screens. However it made it notoriously hard to fire an egg across the screens. You effectively needed to aim a little higher than it appeared to land the shot.

In Yoshi’s Island DS the space between the two screens on the DS is preserved. Although this does mean there is some play area that cannot be seen by the player, you can aim an egg normally.

For me this delivers a much more imersive experience, as I am not jarred out of the game world to make my egg go where i tell it. This far outweighs the dead space between screens, as I can still see this space by looking up or down within the game. As put much more concisley by Howard Rheingold:

That part of a computer game that makes the user step outside the game world, that doesn’t help the user to participate in the pleasure of the game, but acts as a tool for talking to the program — that’s where distance comes in.

This approach has now been proven with good sales success of Yoshi’s Island DS:

We’re very pleased with the performance of Yoshi’s Island DS. DS is becoming a real showcase for great platform games.

This is not an easy cash-in follow up, that would come later with Bubble Memories and Symphony. Rainbow Islands is a full reimagining of its forbears play mechanic with rainbows replacing bubbles.

The game allowed itself a denser and initially more awkward control scheme. Rainbows could be both walked along and broken over enemies, which meant a new player would often struggle just getting around the screen. The experience was not dissimilar to the first few outings with Gran Tourismo, spend pulling unintentional donuts around the track.

Like the driving game, with time the simplicity and single minded design of the control mechanism wins out. The player realises that it works this way for a reason, primarily to give them a more open and flexible play experience. After a while many of the familar bubble techniques can be performed with the rainbows and the player can deftly traverse the playfield.

Once this play scheme is proven to be a success Taito have then taken a leaf out of Nintendo’s book and turned their attention to replay-ability. Unseen in the playfield are levels of interaction that, once unearthed, make repeated plays essential to obtain a truely high score.

Bonuses: In addition to bonus items awarded for each kill, the player soon discovers that each level is litterally strewn with hidden items that can be unearthed by dropping rainbows at ground level.

Power-ups: Much like bubble Bobble, there was a whole world of causal pipes delivering a complex hierarchy of power-ups.

Diamonds: The final stroke of genious, playing to the strength of their theme was the ability to collect rainbow coloured diamonds. Moreso once the player realises that the colours awarded can be controlled by a carefully placed kill, and that collecting them in order was the only way to finish the game proper.

These add up to a rich play experience, much as the levels of tuning and driving does in Gran Tourismo. And the genius of it all is that they exist in the background of the play, tempting mini-achievements that can be drawn on at will, but never intrude on the main mechanic of rotund-ex-dragon-hero and his rainbow.

The simplest games can generate complex experiences. So goes the rhetoric behind Halo:

‘find a play mechanic that is enjoyable and then provide a context in which the player has reason to experience this multiple times’

However, long before Halo’s release in 2002, two little dinosaurs were proving the validity of this concept in the fixed screen platform game Bubble Bobble.

The main experience currency of the game was bob and bub’s bubble play. Their main interaction with the game world was by blowing, nundging, jumping on and finally poping bubbles. This simple mechanic enabled them to capture and kill enemies, ride air currents, climb walls and trigger chain reactions. Once understood this made even most basic levels offered interesting space to play and experiment with these moves.

Power-ups: The purity of this dynamic was always repsected even when offering enhancements to these abilities. A limited set of power-ups, much like the restricted weapon set in better modern games, altered the play without breaking it. A yellow sweet meant you could blow more bubbles, a purple sweet mean you could blow them further across the screen and a blue sweet increased their velocity. All the time the focus remained on the action of player and bubble.

Scoring: The scoring system again focused the action back on the player and bubble. Points were awareded for careful popping of multiple enemy bubbles, for jumping on bubbles, for popping bubbles. This meant that even the time between levels became playable, as the players would use different techniques to rack up a few extar points.

Levels: The clean levels, viewed in one screen, quickly became familiar. So much so that strategies could be planned when away from the game ready for the next session. Repeated play also revealed another aspect of these environments, the air currents that could carry your bubbles around. This opened up new possibilities for quick completion by craftly postioned chain of bubbles.

Collectables: In addition to all this, there was then the causal system of collectable items. Your action of dealing with bubbles and enemies triggers a string of power-ups. The realisation that you affect the game on this again makes the detail of how you perform your basic moves all the more important.

The play experience of these two little dinasaurs turns out to be no accident. The joy of a chain reaction, or the perfect bubble jump, or wall climb, or multiplier kill has all been intended from the outset. Evrything that may inhibit this experience has been cleared from its path, while features to enhance and focus the play have been carefully introduced.

‘Wait wait, my controls aren’t inverted, where’s the options’, a refrain commonly heard amongst gamers. The invert check box has become pretty much statutory for any first person shooter of the last five years. This little incongruous setting enables you to press down to look up or vi ca versa.

We can imagine the day that the feature was first discovered by users, possibly in SNES Starfox, and a whole section of the gaming public suddenly raised their game. Once discovered there was no going back for these gamers, it became so engrained in their playing psyche that any game without it became almost unplayable.

Now the debate rages as to which makes more sense “up is down, down is up” or “up is up, down is down”. While much of the rhetoric of these discussions is based on which makes more sense instinctively, we suggest that this is more a question of consciousness and interaction.

The question is where does the player put their consciousness in relation to the controller. What part of their body is the joypad controlling, their arm, their head; and how is this control translated to that body part.

Behind: If the player feels they are controlling movement from behind their head with joypad , they are likely to find an inverted control scheme works best for them. Pulling back on their stick therefore tilts their head up and should move the play field up.

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In front: If the player feels they are controlling movement in front of their head, they are likely to find a non-inverted control scheme works best for them. Pulling back on their stick therefore pulls their head down from the front and should move the play field down.

There are many things that can affect where the player subconsciously locates themselves. It could be that an extroverted player is used to interacting in an open and forthright manner may feel they were controlling the game world from in front of themselves. Similarly an introverted player who is more reserved and withdrawn may feel they were controlling the game from a safe distance behind themselves. It could also be that those used to scientific work were used to manipulating theories in their heads and therefore controlling environments from behind themselves. Similarly, those used to artistic work may be more used to working with material in front of themselves.

These hypotheses are now becoming muddied, or maybe just more complex, by the introduction of different control schemes. Interactions now involve more than a simple thumb movement. Touch and gesture are being introduced to provide players with more imersive experiences. This inevitably affects where the player positions themselves in relation to the action on screen.

Although these control schemes are still in their youthful exuberant stage and will take some time to mature, they seem to have the general affect of pulling the player’s consciousness forward, into the game. If this is true, we would expect to see a trend away from inverted control schemes as the player increasingly considers themselves as part of what is going on in the game environment.