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Cut the Cord Already

Posted January 23rd 2005 by Jared Thomas.

In gaming editorials, there are a very few wells that most everyone draws upon when discussing gaming in general. Games getting more mainstream, games getting more advanced, games offering more freedom; it's pretty much a convention of the most obvious concepts imaginable. I read them all the time on one site or another, and I even wrote one myself to apply to be staff here at N-Philes. Whether we're just uncreative or it's actually a very barren field we're trying to farm here, who knows. That's not even the point. The point is I've read quite a few of those articles about games offering more freedom, either on gaming sites or in everyday nerdly conversation. The conversation usually goes something like:

"Hey remember when we only walked left to right and now we can walk in three dimensions?"

"Yeah! Remember when we couldn't hurt civilians and now we can?"

"Yeah! Remember hypercolor t-shirts??"

"... yes I do remember that."

So anyway, I'm not contesting that. If that's what you thought this editorial was about, you're dead wrong, and lacking in clairvoyance. Adventure games in particular offer more freedom now than ever. I'd rather not dwell on this point what with just writing about how often it's overdwelled on, but just let it be said that we're living in an age where there are games which have almost no virtue other than a sense of overwhelming freedom in a digital world, and not only are they well received, but they sometimes even win PS2 Game of the Year...

So here's what I'm wondering: what's the deal with this whole trade-off I've been noticing? We've been sucking up this concept of doing whatever we want, but meanwhile we're losing the challenge of actually doing things with that freedom.

Yep, it's another broad generalization gaming editorial. We've talked about games getting bigger, we've talked about games getting more accessible, now we're talking about games, (particularly adventure games) getting dumber. Dumb as hell. Slow bus dumb.

It all occured to me while I was watching Toonami, Cartoon Network's weekday action cartoon segment and my weekday action cartoon-watching segment. Every once in awhile they review popular video games and rate them in accordance with their obvious bias for all things Nintendo. So Tom, the hip robot host, is reviewing Mario Sunshine and he's giving the pros and cons and other details on the title. Then all of a sudden he remarks about how Mario Sunshine is a bit hard towards the end, but it's okay because all Mario games are hard. Now see, I found it funny that he said that, because really, not all Mario games are hard. One in particular pops to mind almost immediately: MARIO SUNSHINE.

This game is not hard. It's one of the easiest games I've ever played in my life, and while I have godlike prowess in the realm of virtual adventuring, I still know difficult from easy. Mario Sunshine's level of easiness falls somewhere between the first round of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and a drunken sorority girl. I had to take breaks from playing Sunshine to do laundry and clean my room and complete other real-life tasks to balance out the video-game tasks and add some length and challenge to the gameplay and avoid feeling like I wasted my money by beating the game in a weekend. You need less Shines to reach Bowser as you needed Stars for the same goal in Mario64, and on the whole most Shines are easier to get than their Star counterparts. And if that wasn't enough, you also have a robot on your back constantly telling you how to solve every moderately-challenging puzzle in the game whether you wanted his input or not. The game was reduced to grunt work. If you had a thousand monkeys with a thousand Gamecubes playing Sunshine, you wouldn't even hand out the last monkey his controller before one of the others already beat the game. Now I know what you're thinking, and no I couldn't find all the blue coins in the game to get every Shine. But that's not difficulty. It's not challenging my puzzle-solving skills or my hand-eye coordination, it's challenging my patience in walking around a level before I get bored and boot up a strategy guide, or better yet turn off the game and do something else.

So all in all, Mario Sunshine was a game that was incredibly easy to beat, and there's no two ways about it. But the really chilling thing is not that a Mario game could stoop to toddler-level simplicity, but that Mario isn't alone in this. Nearly every adventure game on the market nowadays has become reduced to reading instructions given by virtual entities and then carrying them out.

Now take this into account: a few years back I bought an NES in order to relive the good old times with the original Zelda series, before Nintendo decided to re-release these games on the GBA and make my investment worthless. I popped the original Legend of Zelda cartridge in my NES, named my game file "Link" and got ready for swashbuckling. Any old-school Zelda fans will know what I was greeted with: no introduction, no plot-building, no instruction... no nothing. Just me in the middle of a desert without weapons or direction. There's a cave nearby, so I ran to it to get free of the incredible void of purpose I was feeling at the moment, and found a wise man inside. Wise and helpful though he looked, he didn't tell me where the first dungeon was. He didn't even vaguely point me in the right direction like a lazy Wal-Mart employee. He just handed me a sword and sent me on my merry way.

Flash forward to the third-dimensional versions of Link's adventures, and what do you get? In Ocarina you start up with the simple chore of meeting the Deku Tree, with several villagers reminding you what do and how to do it as you run around. Throughout the game you're given instruction towards your next goal after each one you accomplish, and a mentor at your side every step of the way to offer some wisdom or nag you to do what you were already told to do. Now at first I wasn't annoyed, but sometime around Majora's Mask when Tatl did all the talking for me, or Wind Waker where that damn boat asserted himself as my boss, it started to really irk me, the question of just who was the brains of the operation. I'd like to think I was, but it was a hard argument to make when I basically just hacked and slashed until I was told what I should hack and slash next.

All across the board, games are dumbing themselves down to compensate for the huge worlds and vast freedom they offer. I feel like a kid who was left free to wander around the house, and yet once I was let outside to explore the outdoors, I had to have a nanny hold my hand every step of the way. If you look at the modern videogame, you're treated like an infant from nearly the very start. It's just step-by-step.

1. Initial tutorial to show you how to use all the moves you have in the game.

2. Instruction on your first objective.

3. First objective, with full instruction on how to complete said objective.

4. Twelve-minute FMV moving the story along after completion of first objective, while giving instruction on next objective, and possibly a new tutorial if you learned any moves or gained any items in the completion of the objective.

The only challenge is actually carrying out what you're told to carry out, and with modern day game-saving, it means you have nearly infinite lives to do everything, with very little penalty for getting a Game Over. It's not only ridiculous that my gaming experiences are so often micromanaged to the point that I basically push the button I'm told to push when I'm told to push it to move the plot along, it's also incredibly frustrating. In a time when we're looking for the next fix to give us what we conceive as ultimate virtual freedom, why are we so willing to sacrifice the one essential freedom of gaming, which is to actually play the game ourselves? Do gorgeous extended FMV cutscenes make up for the fact that we barely do a damn thing between them? A hobby that was once relished by geeks for its mental challenge and escapism has been reduced to a hobby relished by anyone, anywhere, purely for the escapism. It makes me wonder whether more jocks and assorted morons are getting into gaming because it's so much more accessible, or if they're making my games more accessible to lure the jocks and morons into the scene.

There are a few gems such as Ninja Gaiden, but even Ninja Gaiden, which is one of the hardest games of this generation, is still only a moderately difficult game by universal standards. I was able to fudge my way through most of the bosses and ambushes and got relatively far in the game by only now and again playing it at a friend's house. Hell, I have games that I owned for my Genesis and NES that I never even beat. There are games of old that will give you the same play time as today's games that are padded with hours of cutscenes, conversations, and unnecessary back-and-forth running with nothing to them but challenging situations to overcome. The Adventure of Link, Metroid, Megaman, Toki (I just now got the "going ape spit" tagline, hey that's funny), Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels, and so on. It's no wonder the retro gaming trend is swelling alongside the casual gamer trend. Gamers who have been on the scene for decades are finding less and less to play in a mainstream world dominated by dumbed-down games for jocks.

I suppose the only solution is a bittersweet migration to obscure titles, settling for a minority of the releases now that "gamers" have become the minority of the gaming market. Hopefully us Nintendophiles won't have to wait too long before their favorite series come around and challenge them once again. After so much conditioning it's almost a scary concept to be left alone again, but I for one look forward to a future where I can play Mario, Zelda, or Metroid without being told what to do next.

At least not before I break down and ask for a hint.

Posted in: Features