61 Frames Per Second : wii play

Shigeru Miyamoto and Blasphemy, A Match Made in Heaven

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Every time I think of the happy American families playing Wii Play and Wii Sports, I smile a little inside. I love it that everyone’s playing videogames. It means there will be more of them. I have to laugh a little too, particularly when USA Today or some other milquetoast news outlet does a write up on Nintendo’s family friendliness. Nintendogs! Well we can all enjoy that right? Sure we can.

In another world, Nintendo wouldn’t have stayed in business in the United States past 1984. Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros. would be their only legacy in the land of the free. One day that year, I imagine the following dialogue took place between Mr. Miyamoto and Nameless Nintendo of America Head:

NNOAH: “"Hey Shigeru, I hear ya gots the latest follow up to Donkey Kong ready! Whatcha got to make us rich, kid?"

Shigeru Miyamoto: “It’s a maze game! We’re going to make some of that proverbial Pac-man cash!”

NNOAH: “Genius! Tell me more.”

SM: “I call it Devil World! You play as a little dinosaur in hell. You push a crucifix around hell to collect dots. Satan sits at the top of the screen, clapping his hands.”

NNOAH: “…”

SM: “I already have an arcade in Oklahoma interested in buying cabinets and…”

NNOAH: “Shut up.”

SM: “But…”

NNOAH: “Shut up. Before you destroy us all!”

Can you imagine the ruckus Devil World would have caused? Satanic imagery in videogames! The blasphemy! The horror. God fearing Americans across the land would have called for Miyamoto’s blood. Donkey Kong machines would have been burned. Mario would never have become the icon he is, his good, mustachioed name sullied by sinful association.

I had completely forgotten Devil World existed until last week, hence the post. The game’s innocuous; its derivative play is a great example of Miyamoto’s growing pains as a designer. I’d never really thought about how strange it is, though. I can’t confirm this, but I’d bet good money that this game had something to do with Nintendo of America’s censorship policies in the 80s. They did refuse to have crosses in games, after all.

Related links:

Great Moments in Design: Kuribo's Shoe Rising
Wii Music: A Rare Miss For Miyamoto?
Shigeru Miyamoto, the Heartbreak...Man
Videogame, Non-Game, Old Game, New Game: The Miyamoto Rule

Cross-Atlantic Buzz!

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

Relentless Software’s Buzz games are multi-stage quiz challenges modeled after television game shows, right down to the snarky announcer. Players compete for points in multiple rounds, each one revolving around a different gimmick for rewarding or punishing correct and incorrect answers. The thing about Buzz is that it’s always been big in Europe, but not so much over here in the States. The series debuted in the UK back in October 2005 with Buzz!: The Music Quiz and it saw three sequels before hitting North America in October 2007. The PS3 debut, Buzz! Quiz TV, featuring both user-created quizzes and online play, is Sony’s most focused attempt to establish the series in America. When I approached the new American Culture Quiz Pack expansion, I wondered: how does the ‘American angle’ come out in a game so firmly rooted in its British origins? Is American trivia the key to Buzz’s potential cross-continental success?

The allure of a game show is, after all, rooted in the American Pop Dream. When television first proliferated as an entertainment medium during the 1950s, quiz shows were some of the biggest attention-grabbers. All of a sudden, Joey Everyman could stand in front of a camera, answer some trivia questions and go home several thousand dollars richer. Fame and fortune; just what every American wants. Buzz’s rewards are, admittedly, lower. In the absence of Fabulous Cash Prizes, you get bragging rights over how much smarter you are than your friends, relatives or faceless entities you connect to via the PlayStation Network. So it’s no surprise we Americans prefer the immediate thrills of dart-throwing in Wii Play to the challenge of Buzz’s quiz show. Let’s face it folks: thinking is an awful lot of work.

Hard work at that. As my fiancée and I crossed wits in a series of matches, I learned quickly that I know surprisingly little about American Culture. I don’t think I’m alone either. How many of you readers out there really know who created Jell-O? Or any specific state mottos outside of your own and New Hampshire’s (hint: title of Die Hard 4)? The American Culture Quiz Pack is made up of five-hundred questions, five-hundred disparate bits of trivia, culled from the collective history and geographical makeup of fifty states, that are bound to stump anyone who isn’t a full-fledged US historian. Even my fiancée, with her PhD in American Studies, got more wrong than she did right. (She trounced me easily enough, but that’s nothing new in our relationship.)

Like a rear view mirror, our country is bigger than it first appears when filtered through Buzz. The minutia of culture, pop and proper, ends up far deeper than you expect it to be. That’s the American angle in Buzz. Will it capture an expanded American audience? Probably not.

WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out

John Constantine — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Nintendo has been on my mind over the past few days. Not as a corporation in the business of making video games. More like a singular anthropomorphic entity. This is how Nintendo exists in my head these days, so when I see them making business decisions, my psychosis interprets those decisions as being made by an individual. You know, as an affront against me personally. For example, I look at the abject madness that is Skip’s Captain Rainbow and then I remember that it will never come out in the US. Sure, WarioWare comes out, but do we get Mother 3? Tingle’s Rosy Rupee Land, a game that’s actually available in English? Nintendo doesn’t bring their weird games here, so Captain Rainbow, with its legion of obscure, z-list Nintendo characters, will flounder away on an island nation half the world away. Nintendo does things like this to spite me. Like my first experiences with WiiWare this past weekend.

On Saturday morning, I decided that, given my overwhelmingly positive experiences with original content on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade in recent weeks, it was time to give WiiWare’s offerings a shot. I loaded twenty dollars worth of Wii points onto my account and went to download Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People and David Braben’s Lost Winds. I was then promptly informed that there was not enough space on my Wii to download either title. My Wii does not get frequent use, so this was the first time I had to “clean out my fridge”. At first, I figured I would back up my Virtual Console titles to the SD Card I purchased two years back, but after fifteen minutes and only backing up five VC classics, it hit me that backing up everything was going to take up most of the day. I had to delete most everything to make space for just two WiiWare titles. It took over half an hour before I could even play them. Strong Bad and Lost Winds turned out to be okay, fun but fairly insubstantial after spending five hours total to complete both. The whole experience was, for lack of a better word, annoying.

When things like this happen between Nintendo I start to feel like the Big N is an ex-girlfriend with whom I had a messy break up but am now trying to be friends with. We're polite to one another and able to be at social functions at the same time but there's a smoldering bubble of bitterness under the pleasant small talk. Sometimes that bitterness boils to the surface.

“Well, if you would broaden your horizons we'd still be together! Try Wii Play or try not downloading so many things!”

"Well, maybe if you didn't start making such subpar software, maybe if you actually released your more interesting games in a language I can understand, and actually kept your word sometimes, I wouldn't have had to leave! Why don’t you support USB hard drives!"

“I don’t even know why I bother talking to you!”

“Go make another crappy Zelda or some Brain Training crap!”

*Door slams*

Okay, well, maybe that got a little weird. WiiWare is a chore to use and needs better games. Probably could have just said that.

Related articles:

Where is Wii's Disaster: Day of Crisis?
Trailer Review: Captain Rainbow
Many Colors in the Hardcore Rainbow
This Week in Shrieking Annoyances
Quickies: Homestar Ruiner
Whatcha Playing: Lost Winds