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.

Three Days Later…

I admit there were a few knee-jerk reactions in my reaction post to the Wii U, but every one of those raw thoughts are still going through my head.

I’ve mostly forgotten about the Wii U already, though. Instead, I continue to be pumped about the games that are coming out in the next two years. In a few days, Duke Nukem Forever is out in North America. It was already out on store shelves two days ago internationally, and unfortunately it’s receiving pretty unanimous negative reviews. I decided today to no longer let that get to me. I want to enjoy it, but a lot of opinions have me questioning my pre-order. Oh well, I never expected it to be awesome, but I’m still excited to play it. I don’t know; I’ll post back here later this week with my thoughts on it.

I’m a pretty forgiving person (usually; see: Wii U, haha), so my review will likely be positive.

Rage has been pushed back a month. I really want this game, but I never considered pre-ordering it. I still don’t. I’m short on money as it is, and it was already too close to Skyrim. Now it’s even closer. The wackiest part is they’re both Bethesda products. I don’t blame any company not wanting to go against Skyrim (I have no evidence, but I suspect Mass Effect 3 and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, among others, were delayed for that reason), but despite Bethesda owning both Skyrim and Rage, most gamers can still only buy one of those first. They must be confident.

Of course, Skyrim: the only thing I’m probably the most excited about this year (and that’s even counting Zelda, of which I’m most a fan of). The footage from E3 was incredible. Probably the most interesting thing I saw was how they’re incorporating Fallout 3-style perk trees, which are in the form of constellations. Wild!

(“Wild” is a word I’ve been saying a lot this week).

I haven’t kept up with any information on Skyward Sword. I almost don’t want to. I know it’s coming out this holiday, and I think I’ll let my knowledge remain with that fact only. To be blunt, at this point Zelda is about the only tether left that’s connecting me to Nintendo. I think I’ll keep that tether in as best condition as I can ;)

“Three days later” is a pretty vague Simpsons reference.

Majora’s DICK

Apparently continuing in my quest to play frustrating black-sheep Zelda games, I bought the Zelda collector’s edition for GameCube a couple of weeks ago — y’know, the one that has A Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and a demo of Wind Waker on it. I bought it mostly because it’s an extremely rare disc — so, I got it for the “hey, check me out, I’ve got this” factor — but also because I hadn’t played Majora’s Mask since it came out, and thus, I’d forgotten most of it, plus I have an HDTV now, and component cables for my Wii, which means — via the Wii’s backwards compatibility — I’m able to play it in progressive scan. What I did retain about Majora’s Mask, though, was the overall impression of not being too fond of it.

I should really listen to my memory when it tells me something like that. Because there tends to be a reason.

I knew there was a 3-day time limit that felt rather limiting, that there were a ton of masks to collect, that there was a highly-detailed and (actually, rather deeply) scripted town of people, and that there were variations of the same dull annoying song for every area outside of the main town.

What I’ve re-discovered goes something like this.

The biggest problem that strikes to the very core of the game is the fear that nothing you do will “stick” — that is, that when you do something, it’ll stay done after you restart the 3-day period. It’s in this way that you’re never quite sure whether you’re accomplishing anything. And, obviously, since there’s a time limit at all, odds are high that eventually time will run out when you’re in the middle of doing something — say, part of the way into beating a rather difficult dungeon — and you’ll be forced to start all over. And start all over, you will — many, many times — since a full day in the game is only like 20 minutes or an hour or something. (Fortunately, there’s an ocarina song you can play — one which doesn’t show up in your list of ocarina songs in the pause menu, I might add — that can slow down time to something manageable for beating dungeons.)

Fortunately, the one thing guaranteed to stick is the items you collect, which tends to make it that much easier to get back up to speed if you’re resuming a dungeon. But it’s a small consolation, since all of the doors re-lock themselves, keys go back into their chests, everything switched on switches back off, and all enemies you’ve defeated — including mini-bosses – come back to life. Don’t know if the bosses come back to life or not, because I’ve never bothered to completely trek back through a dungeon I’ve already completed. Presumably they don’t, because you collect their “remains” after beating them.

The second biggest problem is the framerate, and — to be more specific — the mushy effect that that has on control. It uses the Ocarina of Time engine, which was developed smartly to lock the framerate low (~20fps), because Nintendo realized how much an inconsistent framerate can rip you right out of the game, and that even a bad framerate is good if it’s consistently bad. But there’s areas where they’re just pushing this engine too hard, particularly in the main town, where structures and people can bring the game down to a slideshow. It’s mostly just aesthetic, except for instances where character movements between frames can kill you – like BOSS FIGHTS – where control can get so mushy that you might as well try playing with your nose.

The game comes up with some rather annoying things for you to do, too. One that comes to mind is transporting a large explosive (called a powder keg) from the Goron village back a couple of areas to blow open the caved-in entrance to the Goron race track. (Admittedly, this might not be something that you have to do to beat the game, but I did it anyway.) You transport it not by putting it in Link’s cavernous behind-the-shield area, but by carrying it over your head. The annoying part is that, on the way, there are many many sharply-inclined slopes that you can only get up by doing the rolling Goron move… and of course, you can’t be carrying the keg and rolling at the same time, which means you have to first throw the keg up onto the ledge in front of you, roll up the slope, pick the keg back up, and keep going.

The main annoyance comes in the form of touching your pinkie toe against the bottom millimeter of one of these slopes, which causes you to drop the keg and slide downwards a bit… and yet, you can’t throw the keg very far, which means you have to get as close to the slope as possible just to ensure that the keg will land on the ledge above you. Invariably what ends up happening is that you repeatedly get too close to the slope, drop the keg, and slide. Oh, and by the way, the keg is ticking down to explosion this whole time, and the timer on the keg doesn’t give you a whole lot of leeway for these sort of screwups. If the keg blows early, you have to go back and get another one, and do it all over. At least you don’t have to pay for them.

Another irritation is when the game has you collect seven Zora eggs: three of them are guarded in a self-contained area by humongous sea serpents, and the other four are guarded in another self-contained area by hot pirate chicks. You collect an egg by putting it in a bottle, and at the time, I had two. So I got into the sea serpent area, by swapping a-pic-I’d-taken-of-a-pirate-chick for a sea horse, which was able to lead me through the murky waters on the way there. I killed the sea serpents, after figuring out that the only way to kill them is to stand on the edge of their holes (close enough to stay on the ledge, but not so close that they can grab you and chew on you for a bit) and do a move that the game didn’t tell me you could do (which means I figured out how to do something required by accident, which is always a gameplay red flag).

I only had two bottles, so I collected two eggs, went and deposited them, and went back towards the sea serpents (which I knew I’d have to kill again, since they — like all enemies — respawn when you leave the area). This was annoying enough, because I think that the game should have either A) found a way to keep me out of that area altogether until I had the required 3 bottles, or B) dropped in a character that would have warned me that I’d need 3 bottles in there. But no, this wasn’t the least annoying thing… turns out, that sea horse that helped you get into the area stays inside after you leave, which means once you leave, you can’t get back in. This meant that there was one egg trapped inside that I had no way of getting. The only way to fix it was to restart the 3-day period.

More irritation ensued when I realized that someone had told me of a place I could get another bottle — “from the beavers on top of the waterfall” — but I could tell that, in order to get up there, I’d need the hookshot. Nevermind that the only way I could tell that was from playing other Zelda games and recognizing hookshot-able terrain (otherwise, I would’ve just stayed stuck, having no other hints from the game to go on). But where was the hookshot? Game didn’t tell me that either. So I went wandering in the place with the hot chick pirates, and it turned out that the hookshot was in there. Remember how I said that the pirates’ place had four Zora eggs? I still only had two bottles, which meant that I would’ve had to make two trips to get all of the stupid eggs.

As I predicted, though, the hookshot got me up to the beavers, and they had an irritating swimming game for me to complete… and then after I did, they made me do it AGAIN before they’d give me the fricking bottle! Ok, time out here people, there’s fully two things wrong with that situation: 1) I don’t think a game should make you complete mini-games in order to progress in the main quest, whether it would just make things more convenient or if it’s required, and 2) the prize shouldn’t come after being forced to do the same annoying thing TWICE! Ocarina of Time would’ve given me the bottle the first time, and then told me that there’d be a better prize if I wanted to do it again (likely a piece of heart).

Third bottle in hand, though, I went back to the sea serpents, got those three eggs, went back to the pirates, got three more eggs, and of course went back again for the final egg. This whole process gets you a new ocarina song, which then allows you to get into the third dungeon. THANK FRICKING GOD that ocarina songs stick, or I would’ve hung up the controller (or maybe thrown, through a wall) right then and there. And don’t even get me started about the third dungeon boss… even 8 1/2 years later, not even really remembering what the boss was or how you fought it, I remembered it pissing me off… and, again, there’s a reason.

So why do I keep playing it? I haven’t a bloody clue. Maybe it’s the lack of fresh games on my plate. Maybe it’s because I’m an angry, angry person that enjoys torturing myself with bullshit gameplay. Will I finish it? You bet your shiny pink posterior I will… I’m not about to let this game win after all I’ve put up with so far.

Oracle of Bullshit

I bought both of the Zelda: Oracle games when they came out several years back. There was Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, and having not played them since I originally got them, I wondered why I never remembered Oracle of Ages very fondly. I just started playing back through it again, and boy do I fucking remember now.

Having just finished the third dungeon, I’m seeing a recurring trend: the game requiring you to do things that it doesn’t give you a single God-damned clue about.

Everything was going pretty well until the second dungeon. I got massively massively stuck in a room containing only two things of interest: a red block that you couldn’t do anything with, and a floor tile that was a different color from the rest of the floor tiles. That’s it, no hint, no nothing, all bullshit.

Now it’s standard knowledge in Zelda games that in each dungeon you get an item, and you use that item over and over in creative new ways until the completion of the dungeon — and you probably end up using it on the boss too. The item you get in the second dungeon is Roc’s Feather, which of course allows you to jump.

I jumped up and down on that God-damned tile a million and a half times, and not a single fucking thing happened. It’s not until I died from falling through the holes in the floor (I thought maybe, by some shitty gameplay mechanic, something different would happen if I fell into a particular one) — which took me back to the beginning of the dungeon, allowing me access to a different room that contained another suspicious floor tile — that I discovered what I was supposed to do by accident: it turns out that yes, you do indeed use Roc’s Feather to activate the tile… but you have to jump from a different tile and land on the tile. It doesn’t work if you’re standing on the tile and just jump in place. So, when you do that, the tile changes color — red, blue, and yellow are the colors. So I went back to the room previously mentioned, jumped onto the suspicious tile until it turned red, and boom! The doors opened, and I finally got to proceed.

Next example: I find gay-ass Tingle floating around in a balloon (that I’m pretty sure is inflated by his ass, because that’s where it’s attached), because I got a tip from one of the townsfolk that he was the guy to see about getting a sea chart. Except the tip wasn’t anywhere near that direct, all I got was “I bet that crazy guy has a sea chart”, and not only was Tingle not nearby (making the “that crazy guy” part pretty ambiguous, since he wasn’t, like, right there), the game hadn’t exactly gone out of its way to let you know he was even in the game (I’d only happened to see him while doing some off-the-beaten-path exploring), and the only way I figured that he was the guy was because of previous games in which he was crazy and possessed charts.

So like I said, I found Tingle, and a boxer-kangaroo helped me get up to the ledge he was floating over… except I couldn’t figure out how to get up to him. Following standard Zelda teachings, I tried using the kangaroo to beat him down — since the kangaroo was sort-of an item, and I’d just gotten him — but the kangaroo couldn’t reach him. Similarly to the floor tile debacle, I went through my whole flipping inventory, trying everything, and nothing worked. After about 20 minutes of fucking around, I decided to try jumping and slashing my sword, and poof! That worked. Tingle fell on his ass, but still thanked me anyway and gave me a sea chart.

Next example: in the third dungeon, there’s these four crystal things in four separate rooms. The goal is to slash each of them, and then one room in the dungeon falls down to the floor below it, and you can do more stuff. Yeah, it’s been done — think Eagle’s Tower in Link’s Awakening. The first three crystals were a piece of cake, but the fourth one I spent over a half hour on, again going through my whole inventory. The crystal was positioned like this:

||||||||||
| o H
|—HHHH

In the above highly-artistic diagram, “|” are impenetrable room walls, “H” are immovable blocks, “o” is the crystal, and “-” is a fence… y’know, the kind you can throw things over, but you can’t jump over. Now previously, I was able to walk straight up to all of the crystals, and I destroyed them by slashing them with my sword, so I figured that that’s what I had to do to get this one too. But I couldn’t jump into there, I couldn’t push the blocks, this room was on the top floor in the dungeon (meaning I couldn’t fall into there from a room above this one), and I couldn’t bomb through the room walls from adjacent rooms either (which yes, I know it’s unlikely that Zelda games after the first one have bombable walls that aren’t marked, but I tried anyway).

The item I got in this particular dungeon was the seed shooter (think Ocarina of Time slingshot, except it’s a gun). I tried following the usual Zelda requirement of using-the-item-that-I-got-in-the-dungeon, but as you can see, I couldn’t get an angle where I could shoot at the crystal. Except, as it turns out, I could… as it turns out, you can fire the seed shooter diagonally. So I fired it so that it ricocheted off of the wall, hitting the crystal and shattering it.

Now what’s the main problem in all three of these examples? NO. FUCKING. HINTS.

In other Zelda games, if the level designers decide to be “creative”, and come up with something you’ll probably never fucking figure out, they throw you a bone. In the case of the floor tile, they should have made it so that jumping up and down on the tile would activate it, because nowhere in any Zelda game I’ve played (and I’ve played very nearly all of them) did something happen differently when indirectly interacting with something. You’re always slashing, pushing, lifting, blowing up, etc. directly the object in question. As for sword-jumping, that’s the sort of thing that other Zelda games would have told you that you could do, such as via some villager saying something like “did you know you can jump and slash your sword to hit high-up things?” Same thing with diagonal firing, except maybe via the “you got the seed shooter!” text… but that one was particularly obscure since everything in the Game Boy and Game Boy Color Zelda games operates in four directions only.

And when I say “hints”, I don’t necessarily mean being directly told the things you can do. In other Zelda games, they’d set up the environment so that you could figure something out just by observing. In the diagram above, they could’ve done something really really simple that would’ve saved so much fucking headache: just put a little X on the wall where the seed would ricochet:

||||||||||
x o H
|—HHHH

They could’ve put an identical little X somewhere else in the dungeon, one that you could hit from a straight vertical or horizontal aim, maybe popping out some rupees when hit. That would have taught me that things happen when you shoot those little X’s. Then, when encountering this X, I would’ve thought “hmmm, things happen when I shoot those… but it’s at a diagonal angle. I wonder if I can shoot diagonally…” Then the seed would’ve bounced off of the X, hit the crystal, and I would’ve said “Oooh, neat! I didn’t expect it to do that! But not only did it accomplish exactly what I wanted, I’ve now learned a new skill!“

Those moments I’ve come to call “Zelda Moments”, where something happens outside of your mental box that opens it up. Other Zelda games string these skills together masterfully, each one mere baby steps from the previous one, until they’ve built up to a level that’s strikingly innovative.

In short: If the game is going to teach me something, I don’t want to learn via frustration and exhaustion. I want to learn via curiosity and playfulness.

I know that Capcom did the Oracle games, not Nintendo, and in gameplay mechanics like these, it shows. I’m not saying that Nintendo is infallible, or that “Miyamoto magic” would’ve prevented such things… but it does seem like Nintendo has a much better handle on what makes a game go smoothly. Admittedly, on the grand scale, these kinds of oversights are few and far between… but they’re so mind-blowingly glaring as to overshadow everything else.

So why do I continue playing this bullshit game? Erm, dunno. Let’s go with “masochism”.