Forget Shaking, Bring Back the Button: A Proposal to Nintendo

Hey Nintendo. How are ya.

Look, I’ve become pretty anti motion-controls. I bought into it in 2006, because let’s be honest: the Wii had remarkable potential. However, nearly my entire Wii library consists of games released in that year between November 2006 and November 2007. In 2008 I bought an Xbox 360 and never looked back.

I thought motion controls pretty much ran their course. But then the next year (2009) you upped the ante with Motion Plus. True 1:1 motion. Neat. Now such a thing still wasn’t enough to convince me motion controls were all that important or superior to the good old fashioned, reliable, tried and true, traditional controller. But then now I’ve played Skyward Sword for 7 hours and I’ve started to come around again.

Don’t celebrate just yet: I still think it’s shit. I would pay obscene amounts of money just to play a Zelda game without having to move. When I play a video game, I want to sit in my chair so long, and so still, that I start to fuse with it. But I would be a lot more on board if you weren’t going in completely the wrong direction with implementation.

You, Nintendo, on the other side of the coin, have become pretty anti traditional-controls. So much so that you write off anything a simple button press could do, with shaking. Shake the Wii remote to make Donkey Kong pound the ground! Shake the Wii remote to make Mario spin! Shake the Wii remote to make Link roll! Shake the Wii remote to do this, to do that!

Shaking isn’t a miracle of motion controls. Shaking does NOT add any value to gameplay. You know what adds value to gameplay? The fact that I can swing my sword around and Link does the same, and the direction in which I attack a Deku Baba actually makes a difference. That I can control the new Beetle item piloting it through the air by tilting the Wii remote, or get air with my Loftwing by flapping it. Hell, the fact that I don’t even need the sensor bar is pretty cool, despite the fact that now I need to constantly babysit the Wii Remote Plus’s calibration. (This. Sucks.)

Combining these admittedly awesome moves with a button press for everything else would be the perfect marriage between traditional and motion controls. But you don’t seem to want any of that. Screw cohesion.

My faith isn’t exactly reassured when I read this article last night where Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma basically says they could never go back to button control. That makes me sad not only as a Zelda fan, and former Nintendo fan (yes, former), but as a traditional gamer.

With you it’s motion controls all the way, or nothing. That’s a pretty dangerous position to take, Nintendo. The keyboard didn’t go away because of the mouse. We need all these technologies to come together, because together the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

You, Nintendo, should be the one company showing the rest how to achieve synergy.

Oracle of Sweetness

I previously ranted about Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, and now I return (after getting so thoroughly frustrated with Ages that I decided to forget about it for a while) to extol the virtues of its hotter and sexier sister, Oracle of Seasons.

I’m not exactly sure what was going on between the two of them, but the differences are striking on a very fundamental level. I don’t know that I’ve played another pair of games where it was so painfully obvious that completely different teams worked on each game.

For starters, the difficulty curve is MUCH gentler in Seasons, i.e. it doesn’t have you pulling your hair out halfway through the second bloody level. I’m not sure what it is, really; Seasons is just a joy to play. It could be that the game is so much more lush with color than Ages, with Ages seeming to be little more than a Super-Game-Boy-enhanced Game Boy game… Ages just feels dull and lifeless by comparison.

And as far as music goes, I’m thinking that either A) there were different musicians working on each game, or B) the same musician did both games, and did Seasons first, and then ran out of gas for Ages. Where in the case of Ages, there’s only a handful of songs I care to listen to outside of the game (with some of the tunes being downright grating), in Seasons there’s only a handful of songs that I don’t like. Some Seasons tunes I’d even describe as “beautiful” — it’s amazing what they were able to get out of what’s essentially decade-old sound hardware.

But most importantly, Seasons doesn’t seem to be chock full of brain-bustingly frustrating gameplay mechanics. I just finished off the sixth level, and not ONCE have I become exhausted trying to figure out a puzzle. Compare that with Ages, where that seemed to happen every five feet.

I’ll admit that I feel like I’m cheating, though. See, one particular item has made the journey through Seasons easier. Not significantly easier, not in the the-game-is-playing-itself sense, but I probably would’ve given up by now had I not gotten it so early in the game. That item is a ring that, when worn, gradually refills your life meter. It only refills a single heart every minute or so, but that single-heart refill has made a heck of a difference, particularly in boss battles, where — if I’m particularly close to biting it — I just walk around in the corner for a bit, and then I come back full-steam. Comes in handy when you’re fighting a Gohma look-alike whose trademark is grabbing you and beating you against the floor as if there’s candy inside.

I found it tedious to try to explore essentially two world maps in Ages – the past, and the present — so you’d think that having five maps to explore in Seasons (four seasons plus Subrosia) would be that much more tedious, but surprisingly it’s not. If you’re not familiar with the game, its hook is that you get this rod that, when swung from atop a stump, changes the season: spring becomes summer becomes fall becomes winter.

You’d think this would be overwhelming, since the main world map is pretty huge, and effectively that would mean that you’d have to explore it four times. But the map is sectioned off, and each section has its own default season going on; you can adjust the season within each section, via the aforementioned stump-rod-swinging, but crossing the boundaries between sections resets the season to that section’s default season. Effectively, it localizes the amount of per-season exploring to smaller sections of the map, which makes it much more manageable. And some sections don’t even have stumps, meaning you only have to look around in those sections once.

I’ll also admit to possibly being charmed by the nods to The Legend of Zelda (the first game) that Seasons makes; in particular, you come across guys that, after opening the door to their caves, either A) bribe you to keep their location secret, or B) charge you for busting open their door. And some levels (particularly the first one) have rooms that are structured similarly to rooms from Zelda – heck, the room that you get level 1′s item in is practically ripped right out of Zelda, and it makes me positively gleeful.

Not sure what else to say about it, really. Before I started re-playing it, I remembered liking it, in much the same way I remembered not liking Ages. And sure enough, nearly 10 years later, I once again don’t like Ages, and I once again do like Seasons.

In other news, Jay told me that Rare is porting Perfect Dark to XBLA, which made me all kinds of happy. You?