Day 89: Switching

I'm definitely going to finish this gaming history tonight. Getting it done.

So this current generation of home videogame consoles is the eight generation. The uniformity between the latest Sony and Microsoft systems is as great as it has ever been. The costs of entry into the market, and therefore the price of failure, is so high at the moment that both companies have played it extremely safe this cycle, with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (nomenclature) sharing similar technical specifications, feature sets, and design language. Both have excellent controllers, sturdy and precise, with the only key difference being that the PlayStation's thumbsticks are, as ever, symmetrically placed, where Microsoft's left stick is pushed northwards, trading places with the D-pad. Meh.

There are exclusives on each console, but most mainstream games come out on both machines, looking and playing virtually identically. With development costs rising exponentially for modern games, and players split equally between the two platforms, publishers are loath to cut out half their audience with an exclusive release.

What I've seen with your eyes

The one major attempt at a shakeup came from Sony's experimentation with virtual reality. With a couple of expensive VR devices coming out recently on PC, and then Google Cardboard and a raft of entry-level alternatives at the bottom end of the spectrum, it looked a year or two ago like virtual reality was finally becoming a, erm, reality. Sony's PSVR was designed to sit somewhere in the middle of the pack, less expensive than the kits on PC, but more involved than the phone-style glasses.

But though everyone who experiences VR comes away impressed, the technology, and the games, aren't quite there yet. The headsets are all clunky, with too many wires. The games are mostly novelties, breathtaking for five minutes, empty after a few hours. The problem with looking through the eyes of a virtual character who leaps and spins through space, as you sit stationary on your chair, is that it induces revolting motion sickness. The most expensive VR kits come with sensors that you set up around a play-space so that you can actually move around with your character - but then your character is limited to only the moves you can pull off, in a metre or so squared arena in your room.

The thrill of doing even this, of course, is still genuine, but the fact is that none of the units have sold enough this generation, PSVR included. Perhaps VR needs a Nintendo to slice away the air of nerdiness and bring out something cheap and accessible to push the tech into the mainstream. Google Cardboard did it with hardware, but there were no killer apps (titles worth buying the platform for) to back it up. VR is still looking for its Wii casing, and its Wii Sports to set the whole thing alight.

Beating yourself

Speaking of Nintendo, while a kind of equilibrium, and even stagnation, has been reached by Sony and Microsoft this generation, the big N have been characteristically unpredictable over the last seven years.

They followed up their Wii with something they were calling a Wii U. Was it an add-on for the Wii? An upgrade? A new system entirely? Consumers weren't sure. Nintendo did a terrible job of explaining the concept, right from its initial announcement, and the thing never took off.

The Wii U was, in fact, a brand new console. It was HD, finally, roughly on par in specs with the PS3 and Xbox 360 (though years too late), and its unique feature was that it came with a gamepad, a big chunky controller that had a second screen built into the middle of it, with touch-controls and a gyroscope. But you could also use your old Wiimotes with the Wii U. And it was backwards-compatible with your old Wii games. And you could buy traditional controllers for it as well.

There was no clear message, no clear concept, when compared to the Wii. You felt that Nintendo had been wrestling with the question of whether to hold onto the Wii brand or move away from it. With whether to continue to court the Wii's casual audience, or attempt to win back the "hardcore" gamer.

The final device saw them grasping backwards with one arm to the safety of the Wii, and reaching forwards with the other for a new gimmick with which to repeat the Wii's success. And in the end they got a firm hold of neither, and fell between the cracks.

The Wii U was the worst selling mainstream Nintendo console since their nascent rise before the NES. After shifting 101.63 million Wii's, the Wii U couldn't even hit a paltry 14 million sales.

Golden age

And yet, while the hardware was tanking, Nintendo's software divisions were quietly putting out some of their best ever work. Not that they've ever exactly had a bad period, but their first-party releases on the Wii U felt like they were coming from a studio at the top of their game. Super Mario 3D World was an absolute riot, mixing elements of the 64 and Galaxy titles with mechanics from the NES and SNES-era games, introducing four-play multiplayer, taking game design cues from Japanese poetry, and generally just bursting with colour and vigour and warmth.

Mario Kart 8 won many "game of year" awards when it was released in 2014. New IP Splatoon was Nintendo's way of taking the ultra-macho first-person shooter and turning it into an approachable yet devious team game. And Mario Maker gave players the opportunity to design their own Mario levels, if nothing else proving how difficult that truly is.

Couple these with some great exclusives from other developers - Yoshi and Donkey Kong games, and best-in-show RPG Xenoblade Chronicles X - and you ended up with a system that, yes, was confusing and somewhat fiddly, but also was markedly cheaper than the competition, and arguably had a handful of games that were better than any handful of games you could take from those rival consoles.

I picked one up second-hand, and never regretted it. I might even have clocked more hours on it than on my PS4.

The wild

Mind you, a lot of that was down to Zelda.

Oh man. Zelda.

So, as I mentioned, Zelda titles had fallen into a slump over the past decade. While Mario had gone from strength to strength, his stablemate was not faring so well. Essentially, the Zelda formula had not evolved since 1998's Ocarina of Time. Majora's Mask, released a year or two after Ocarina, remixed the same art assets into a tale that was darker, more sombre, and rightly adored. Wind Waker then introduced that fresh visual style I talked about. Twilight Princess, four years later, after backlash in some quarters over Wind Waker looking too childish (idiots), retreated into rehashing Ocarina, very much to its detriment. By now what had once been innovative gameplay had ossified into something rigid and constricting. And then Skyward Sword, for the Wii, was filled with motion-control gimmicks, with twee sidekicks, with areas and enemies reused over and over to artificially draw out the play time. It was a small, bitty game, constantly wrenching control away from the player for interminable tutorial cut-scenes explaining game rules, where once the series had thrust a sword in your hand and told you to have at it. The wonder was gone. The mystery was gone. The team behind it - and this I would say was Nintendo at their worst - felt insular, eating out off past glories, refusing to look around at what the wider industry was achieving, and where it was going - namely, into open-world games.

So when the new Zelda was announced, before I got a Wii U, I could barely be bothered to watch the trailer for it. I thought I was done with that rubbish.

But then... hang on. Here was longtime producer Eiji Aonuma discussing how they were throwing out all their templates and starting afresh, with that very first Legend of Zelda for the NES as their guiding light. They wanted to refocus on adventure and exploration, to give players freedom to approach scenarios from any angle, in any order, rather than presenting them with linear sequences to be worked through in the one correct manner. Skyward Sword had been like a fairground ride where you were strapped into a cart; in this new game the team wanted to get you lost in the woods. It would be open-world, huge and expansive. Aonuma showed a clip, and it looked incredible.

Just when you think you're out, eh...?

The game, when it was eventually released, was appositely subtitled Breath of the Wild, and, oh boy, was it good. Really, really good. Like, insanely good. Like, everything I'd ever wanted from a Zelda game good. Like, my dreams as a kid sat staring longingly at the illustrations in the NES Zelda instruction manual now brought vividly to life good. It was good.

Contemporary, invigorating, exhilarating, bizarre, it drew from outside itself, taking tropes and concepts from many other popular games, improving upon them, adding things no one had thought of, lashing it together into a world that felt fully-formed like nothing else I had played.

It was as if this giant beast within the heart of the franchise that had been slumbering for years had finally awoken, finally stretched and pushed outside its safe bounds, finally gone back on the prowl. As if it had looked at what the rest of the industry had been doing while it was sleeping and said, Guys, that is not how you make an open-world game. This is how you make an open-world game.

It also felt specifically designed for me. I do not play games to get lost in stat sheets and upgrade trees. I play to climb mountains and creep through forests, to stand by ponds in the rain, watching frogs leaping, listening to the splash of raindrops, feeling very much there, very much alive, very much at peace.

Breath of the Wild had upgrades, a robust combat system, reams of side quests - but it also had fireflies to collect at dusk, villagers to pester, horses to tame, fields of swaying grass through which to ride, the music swelling, the land rolling endlessly before you, intrigue and adventure and the unknown waiting out there to be seen, to be touched, to be felt.

This Zelda, more than anything else, has reaffirmed that whatever else I move on to, however old I get, there will always be a place in my heart for videogames. Long live Nintendo. Long live Zelda. Long live Link.

And that is why I'm buying myself Nintendo's brand new, and already more successful than Wii U, hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, tomorrow. I don't plan to do much gaming any more - maybe writing all this nonsense was a way to get it down and out of my head - but when I do game, I'd like to do it on Switch, with a company for whom that magical flame we all hold in childhood has not altogether been extinguished.

My eyes have gone funny now. It's way too late, once again. But I think I'm done with this. Hurrah. See you tomorrow.

Day 88: Gestures

Carrying right along from yesterday, then.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had achieved a kind of parity. None of this for Nintendo, however. They had looked at the state of the industry, including what had happened to their once most dangerous competitors Sega, and had decided there wasn't room in the arena of the games market for three behemoths. On top of this, they saw the arms race for graphical fidelity as costly, and ultimately of less importance to consumers than the need for interesting experiences. And so, not for the first time in their history, they took a crazy gamble.

Their next console was called the Wii. The what? The Wii. You sure? Yes, Nintendo said. It's like "we", like playing together. But the odd spelling makes it independent of any nationality or language. The two lowercase "i"s look like little people stood beside each other. It's nice. Get used to it.

And everyone went "riiiight".

The Wii was laughably underpowered next to the PS3 and 360. In fact it would turn out to be little more than a reskinned Gamecube. It had no movie playback, few multimedia features. And, most radically, it did away with traditional control methods, asking players to instead point "Wiimotes" that looked like baby's first TV remotes at their screens, shaking and swinging and gesturing to perform actions. To play tennis you swung the Wiimote like a racket. To shoot you aimed at the TV and pulled the trigger on the bottom. To fly an aeroplane you held the remote flat and waggled for pitch, roll and yaw. 

It is difficult to state how outlandish this all seemed to the gaming press, and to entrenched gamers, at the time. Ramping up processing power with each console cycle was just what you did. Consumers all now owned 1080p HD displays, surely, and they wanted a games console that could make the most of them. And joypads had been essentially the same for aeons - perhaps waggling a remote would work for little minigames, but you couldn't control any serious game accurately with such a device. It was a gimmick.

Go your own way

It turned out Nintendo didn't care. They were not aiming for the gaming demographic. Their key audience was: everybody else. They took what was, it must be said, very rudimentary motion technology, and an outdated games console, and packaged it together under a clear brand, and made it approachable and friendly and fun.

They advertised to kids who wanted new and novel toys. To families who would crowd around Nan as she tried her hand at virtual bowling on Christmas Day. To housewives who wanted to get in shape with Wii Fit and its accompanying balance board. To dads who could rock out to Guitar Hero. 

In a way that sounds horribly cynical, and there was an element of manipulating new markets. But from the top of the company down Nintendo also genuinely seemed to believe in the concept of using technology, rather than being used by it, to help people live more meaningful lives. They focused on play and connection. On intertwining gaming with the everyday. On games not as a means to zone out, but to become more present. Nintendo argued that videogames were for everyone. The system just had to be non-threatening enough. The technological jargon had to be peeled away. And the price had to be right.

Nail. Head. Hit. With design language cues taken from Apple, and an affordable price point, Nintendo shifted Wiis in their millions. 101.63 million, to be precise, comfortably the best-selling console of the generation.

Yes, the thing was somewhat throwaway, by its very nature. Units were played for holidays, shown off to guests for a few weeks, then left to gather dust. Plastic peripherals were dumped in boxes under beds. Third-parties spewed out a deluge of execrable minigame collections, with tacky motion controls, to be gobbled up by the less discerning mainstream masses (say what you will about gamers and their penchant for dude-shooters, but they're a savvy bunch, and competition has ensured that dude-shooting quality has gone right up. No such luck in the Wii party-game market).

And, yes, speaking as a card-holding gamer, the Wii's more traditional fare, such as Mario Galaxy (sublime), two Zelda titles (the formula beginning to grow long in the tooth, not staying current as was stablemate Mario), Metroid, Mario Kart and Smash Bros. games, the ultra-Japanese, manga-inspired No More Heroes, and cult-classic RPG Xenoblade Chronicles - these games were few and far between, overwhelmed by twee tat like Petz Sports: Dog Playground, and it was tough to look at the blurry textures and blocky worlds, to look down at the silly plastic sticks in your hands, the tangle of wires connecting everything up behind your TV, the mess of "friends codes" needed to play online, and then to look across at Sony and Microsoft, so slick and sensible and futuristic over there, and not sigh heavily.

But then maybe that's all the point. The Wii was not made for me, although it had a few games to keep me quiet. It was made for people who don't know what framerates are, who don't notice a lack of anti-aliasing, or care about native resolution. It was made for people who were just people, and who, Nintendo felt, still deserved to play games. It was an experiment, an experience, an inclusive, riotous laugh, and there is not one thing wrong with that.

- - -

Hmm, and I think that's already enough brain-spewing for today. Maybe I'll go over the Wii's successor, and the current Sony and Microsoft consoles, and the state of the industry, tomorrow, and then talk about why I think the Switch is such a canny, well-positioned console when I get one.

I was planning to do a sort of diary of my time completing my half-finished games before I traded them in for a Switch, but this history of home consoles thing has run on far too long. I have been playing through those games though, promise. And in fact, I'm off to do some more of that now before bed. 

Toodles.