Day 228: Leaping and rolling forever

My friend messaged me earlier. He wanted me to know that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released 20 years ago today.

That makes my head spin.

I can remember pouring over previews in N64 Magazine for months before the game came out, scanning screenshots for any new information, sitting and daydreaming about the magical lands and the wild adventures that were waiting for me. One of my friends had read that if you put all of the levels from Mario 64 next to each other they still wouldn’t be as large as the play area in Zelda, which was one joined area rather than individual levels, not a set of challenges, but a living, breathing world. There was a mountain you could climb, with rock people living inside. There was a forest with a musical instrument hidden deep in its mazes. Villages in which you could play little games and buy swords and shields in shops. There was a castle, Hyrule Castle, and within that castle was Princess Zelda, and she was waiting for you to find her, because she had something to tell you that you needed to know...

My mind was alive, swirling, with the excitement and possibility. I couldn’t wait.

And then the game was delayed. And the months that stretched ahead felt interminable.

And then it was delayed again. Nintendo games were always delayed. I could tell that this was an immutable law of the universe: the things that you desired most had to be earned. Waiting was earning. The delay was necessary; the best game in the world would take time. I had to wait.

But I couldn’t wait.

My friends and I would spend rainy playtimes in the school library leafing through old magazine articles.

The day a new issue of N64 Magazine came out was a mini Christmas in itself: convince your mum she needed to do the shopping, go with her down to Tesco and leap out of the car and skip to the magazine racks at the front of the shop. You mum couldn’t be trusted herself, she’d pick up N64 Pro Magazine, or, worse, Official Nintendo Magazine (bleurgh). But you knew what was what. You’d see the inimitable, and starkly named, N64 Magazine peeking from the bottom rack, and you’d grab for it, and spend the rest of the shop - the only shop that you didn’t fight your mum for sugary cereals or Sunny D - browsing the pages, looking for any info you could find on the soon-to-be-released Zelda.

And in this way most of a year passed. Finally, the game could be delayed no longer. It had a new title, Ocarina of Time (what was an ocarina? What did it mean?), and it was coming out at Christmas. The perfect time. The last few months, my friends and I barely spoke of anything else.

And then a Saturday in December, and we were spending the day cruising about town, as we always did. A number 3 bus to the Moor, look in Virgin Megastore, get a bacon and sausage bap the size of a human head from the Great Big Sandwich Shop, and then to the top floor of Debenhams to the Electronics Boutique to peruse the video games.

And halfway up the last escalator I saw it. They had a display cabinet with an N64 hooked up inside, and on the screen was…

It was there. They had it. They had Zelda.

The noise I made at that moment, my friend will swear even today, was not a noise he had ever heard before, or has ever heard since.

We stayed in Debenhams for hours that day. I remember there were two older boys playing on the cabinet as we arrived, and they were discussing the similarities with the previous Zelda game, which had been only 2D, on the Super Nintendo. These boys struck me as impossibly old, and impossibly wise. We stood behind them and I said things about the game to my friends (“Look, that’s what they call z-targeting!”) hoping to impress the older boys.

Eventually the boys moved off, and it was our turn. I’m not sure if there was any argument about who would take control. I assume my friends decided that some battles just weren’t worth fighting.

So we crowded around the cabinet, and my friends crowded around me, and I clasped my hands around the controller, and we dove into Hyrule.

We watched Link shudder in nightmares. Saw visions of a dark rider and a muffled princess on a storm-drenched night. We awoke in Kokiri Forest, and went to play in a secluded woodland realm. We found rupees in tall grass, under rocks. We squeezed and crawled through a tiny passage and into a hidden maze, and we found our very first sword. We hacked down more grass, chopped at signposts, and found enough rupees to buy a shield. We went to meet a giant tree, the guardian of the forest, and he ushered us inside him to defeat the evil that was poisoning him from within.

And we went all the way through that first dungeon, lighting torches, firing slingshots, stepping on switches, burning cobwebs, fighting horrific monsters. And we came out the other side, and learned more about the story, and set off on the long journey to Hyrule Castle, to deliver the guardian spirit’s message to the princess of destiny…

And finally someone checked their Casio watch and saw that we had been there all afternoon, and we were going to be late home. We reluctantly left Link plodding through Hyrule Field, and we descended back into the cold night air, with the Christmas lights above us, the shops all lit up, the magic of the game we had just played alive in our hearts.

… And that day was 20 years ago today. 

I am 33 now. But as I boot up the N64 emulator on my modern PC, and run a downloaded Ocarina of Time ROM (it's not piracy; I still own the original cart somewhere)... as I listen to that gentle, bittersweet midi theme take flight... as I load a new save file, and watch Link shudder in his troubled dreams once again - suddenly I am 13 again, and it all is fresh, all magical, and I am reminded that the stories, the games that really mattered to us in our childhoods, they stay with us, they are not forgotten - that somewhere deep inside this depressed and cynical man is a small space where a young boy in a green tunic with tufts of ginger hair leaps and rolls and yells HIYYYAAA into the darkness, now and forever afterwards.

Thanks, Ocarina, for everything.

...... 

Music? Well, it's got to be the Ocarina of Time soundtrack, right? Sure. Oh, boy, I feel funny. 

Day 149: Switch impressions (cont.)

I'm just home from a leaving do for a colleague from work, beautiful bar filled with beautiful people dancing and drinking and becoming angels in the lambent light. I skulked home to write my blog post about videogames, as is my wont.

So yesterday I ran through my gaming habits and the titles I've been playing on my Nintendo Switch. Now for the hardware itself...

I couldn't imagine a better console for the type of gaming I do these days. After a long shift I can play it for twenty minutes in bed. I can play it in the passenger seat of Steve’s van while he drives us to some exhibition centre at some ungodly hour of the morning. On my days off I can drop the Switch into its dock and play it in higher resolution, with the Pro Controller, on my TV, sat languorously slumped in my chair.

It is an elegant, robust piece of kit. It exudes style, unlike recent Nintendo products that have felt like cheap plastic tat. The lines and curves are still playful, yet seriously so; it feels expensive, exquisite, carefully manufactured.

At heart the Switch is a rugged tablet, housed in reassuringly thick plastic. The screen is a capacitive touchscreen, like phones and tablets, and unlike Nintendo’s previous Wii U and 3DS, which used far cheaper and clunkier resistive touchscreens. Its resolution is 720p, which is lower than most phones, but absolutely high enough for gaming. Nintendo’s approach here is for more colour and complexity in their game worlds, running at lower resolution to maintain smooth frame-rates and extend battery life, and it is the correct choice. At 1080p the games would have to pare back their textures and effects to such a degree to get the experience playable that it wouldn’t be worth it. The display is bright and clear, and games look fantastic in portable mode; it all works a treat.

But so what’s the difference between the Switch and a small tablet or large phone, apart from access to all Nintendo’s proprietary software, including its exclusive games? Well have you ever tried playing properly involved games on a phone? Not puzzle games, casual games, things where you prod lazily at the screen and wait while your villagers harvest more minerals or your garden grows. Complex 3D environments that you must navigate, real-time combat systems with nuance and depth?

It’s a mess. Poking a finger at a flat panel with no feedback is not a recipe for control. Think of how many mistakes you make while typing a sentence on Whatsapp. Imagine if every one of those mistakes resulted in the death of your playable character. The margin for error is too high, and there’s not enough variety in what you can do.

Nothing beats physical controls. Buttons and joysticks. So with the Switch you get two halves of a physical controller that slot onto each side of the tablet, turning it into something more akin to a very high-tech Gameboy. The Joy-Cons, as the controls are called, can be slid off and held independently of the unit and of each other, with the screen balanced on its kickstand, on a tray table or a kitchen counter or whatever you’ve got nearby. And best of all they can be turned 90 degrees and each held as a tiny rudimentary controller in themselves, giving you access to two-player multiplayer wherever you go.

The Joycons look lovely, elegant little boutique items, and they’re nice and clicky, and the joysticks are good. They’re not up to the standard of a proper controller, and, yes, you can’t get round the fact they’re a little cramped - but compared to other portable console controls they’re in a league of their own.

And when you’re by your TV it doesn’t matter, because you drop the Switch into its dock, with AC adapter and HDMI lead, and it becomes a home console, played over your TV, using the Pro Controller, which I prefer to the Sony PS4 controller, and like about as much as the Xbox One offering.

The Switch is underpowered as a home console next to the PS4 and Xbox One, certainly so compared to a £1500+ PC, but the parity feels closer than between the Wii and PS3. And anyway, the Switch is a different beast. I’ve got my PS4 for the two or three major releases (the games industry calls them triple-A games, like Hollywood blockbusters, your Call of Duties and Grand Theft Autos et al) each year that I’m not too overcome with boredom to actually play, and for all the more interesting indie and lower-rung titles the Switch is more than up to the task. And of course there are the Nintendo games, Zelda and Mario and the like, that you can only get on the Switch, so the question of comparable power is moot.

So yes. I love my Switch. Nintendo need to really push the indie angle for the machine to continue to be a success - their own release schedule is too sparse, and too beholden to established franchises. If they threw a load of money into new IPs I’d be over the moon, but the prospect of yet another Mario Tennis and Mario Golf and Mario Party and Mario Screams into the Void for Twenty Hours Straight doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement.

I want every worthwhile indie game to come to Switch, as soon as possible after its release on Steam, and I want the larger studios to dedicate teams specifically to Switch development, to create titles faster and cheaper than triple-A, with more focus on experimentation and unique mechanics than on ray-tracing water reflections at 4k resolutions on the supercharged Xbox One X.

And I want Nintendo’s back catalogue of SNES and N64 and Gamecube games to come out on the Switch’s eShop, or even as freebies for subscribers to the online service. At the moment we’ve got a handful of NES games from three-and-a-bit decades ago, that don’t even play well on the Joycon’s little buttons (and they’ve mapped the controls for Super Mario Bros. 3 wrong for the Pro Controller, which you can’t grapple sideways like you could the original NES pad). I want Super Metroid and I want Metroid Prime and I want them now!

But in honesty there are ten or fifteen beautiful looking indie games I’ve already got my eye on for a download when I’ve played through what I’ve got - Celeste and Golf Story and Thimbleweed Park and Night in the Woods and Stardew Valley and Sonic Mania and Axiom Verge, and on…

And I’m going to be playing Breath of Wild until I’m 90 anyway, so screw it.

Day 130: Junk food

Ohhhh buddy. I have been wiped out today. I don’t even know why. I’ve just got so little energy of late. I had a good day yesterday and used up my energy, and today I had none left. I played Zelda in bed. I roamed through quiet snowfields and over desolate mountains, I found ruins of temples, I cooked potions, I crept around monster camps and battled the monsters and picked up the doo-dads they dropped.

I watched a few episodes of Orange is the New Black, which show I’ve never got round to watching before. I thought it was good. I liked the world building of the prison as an environment, I liked the characters. The balance of cynicism and positivity, of feel-good comedy and sense of peril, is not easy to get right, and it looks like they have done here, mostly.

Umm. I read some Naomi Klein. I watched a video on game design by a guy I like on YouTube. The algorithms on YouTube incentivise video makers to put out continuous low quality content, to splurge out list features and clickbait nonsense about why x franchise has failed and y piece of media will not live up to the hype, and it’s just so much white noise, so much shite, clogging our ears and eyes and brains, everyone yelling louder to make themselves heard over the din, which increases the din, so everyone yells even louder…

And so when you find people putting out difficult, complex, reasoned stuff on YouTube, and you know they’re not making much money but they’re doing it anyway, it’s such a breath of fresh air. Videos that takes months to create, say something worth saying, and yet get a fraction of the views of the crap that everyone else is tossing off twice a day. That stuff is precious. It’s worth celebrating, worth being grateful for, because there are so many factors encouraging the creators to not do it that way. 

It’s like everyone within that sphere is saying how you can get rich by selling ultra-processed junk food, how that's the only viable way to make money, yet a few people would still rather stay poor yet cook meals that are worth eating. And that is good. People like that are good.

OK, I'm done, I'm gonna go pass out. Noight noight.

Day 99: Spaghetti

Quick one tonight. Still feeling pretty low, but trying to see that as natural, as just the way of things. Fran's friend Genna was over today, the three of us ate veggie sausages for breakfast and watched Netflix, then Genna and I talked about game design and filmmaking while Fran showered, and afterwards we walked Mish in Meersbrook Park, sat atop the hill looking down at the city arrayed below, then we went home and Fran and Genna coloured a page from one of those adult colouring books (though Buffy the Vampire Slayer-themed, so "adult" there is a relative term), and I went upstairs to write/sneakily play Switch. After Genna got a taxi to the station Fran and I sat downstairs and watched The Good Place, and I played Switch, and we ate spaghetti, and the sun went down and the sky turned a deep sapphire blue and the dog rested his head in Fran's lap and I collected mushrooms from under trees in Zelda and everything was at peace.

Fran is brushing her teeth now, taking Mish down the street. We're going to watch something in bed, get a nice early night.

This is alright, isn't it? This is how people live. I'm trying, trying to see that this is so.

Day 94: Still

Back from work, massaging my hamstrings that are stretched tight from long bar shifts, sitting in the front room with Jiggs, watching him play Zelda. Another crappy microwave meal for tea, then chocolate and a cuppa afterwards. I still feel low, broken, like whole areas of my brain are closed off. Can't talk to my friends or family who want to say nice things to me, ask if I'm all right. I appreciate the love, I'm grateful, but I can't deal with it now. I don't have the energy to respond. Depression is the breakdown of the mechanisms of love, and it's painful, actually kind of gross, to be offered love and to not be able to receive it. To not have anywhere for it to go.

So I'm sorry, it might seem rude but it is not rude. I just need to sit here drinking tea and staying very still. The depression can't get me if I stay very still.

I'm low, but it's OK. Everything is as it should be. Everything is the only way it can be. Everything is.

There's no point wishing it wasn't so. Feeling I've been doing so well and I shouldn't be right back here again. That it's not fair. That it's a sign of weakness or failure on my part. I don't get to choose how my mental health plays out.

So I'm going slowly, treading lightly, not pushing myself too hard. Drinking my tea, lounging in my chair, watching Jiggs explore the vast and mysterious land of Hyrule. He's just defeated the boss of the first divine beast, after half an hour of trying. We literally cheered and fist-bumped when the creature finally fell. Now he's exploring the lands surrounding Zora's domain, collecting snails from river beds, cooking up dishes to increase his stamina, looking for the hidden headpiece to complete the Zora armour set. And I'm watching, losing myself in his adventure, feeling ... OK.

Long shift tomorrow. Long shift, and beer training to give to the staff. But then I have a day off.

I can make it to then.

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.

Day 86: Spliffs

Much coffee is required today. I'm not in work, thankfully, but I'm so tired from yesterday. I turned off my alarm at seven and slept until ten, because I'd only had about four hours, and I was destroyed. Not going to be hard on myself. I can focus on how I've failed to get up early this once, and let the word failure reverberate around my skull, or I can think about how I've succeeded five times, and how much better that is than any week in recent memory- and then I can get back to business.

So, I'm talking gaming history. After Nintendo's unassailable reign in the 8-bit era of the NES (the number of bits handled by a console's processor used to be a rough pointer to its overall power, though with modern machines this is mostly meaningless), and after the gruelling fight for dominance between Nintendo and Sega in the 16-bit era of the SNES and Mega Drive, the next console cycle would see the lines of power redrawn dramatically.

A new contender

Nintendo had been developing a CD add-on for their SNES with Sony, but after the relationship between the two companies crumbled Sony refocused their efforts into a standalone console that they would release themselves, termed the PlayStation.

Based on 32-bit architecture, with games running off CD-ROMs, the PlayStation was to be epoch-defining. It was released in Japan at the end of 1994, then a year later in the rest of the world. Nintendo's next console was still a couple of years away, and so it was to Sega, and their new 32-bit system, the Saturn, that Sony initially took the fight.

Sony gained the upper hand even before the PlayStation's US release. They undercut the price of the Saturn by $100. And Sega's problems just ran from there. The Saturn was rushed to market, and had too few games. Its architecture was more complicated to develop for than the PlayStation, and Sega were still pushing 2D games, where Sony had more fully embraced the move to 3D. And on top of this Sega were still putting resources and attention into their existing Mega Drive and its add-ons, confusing consumers, where Sony were free to push one simple message: PlayStation.

Ravers

But there was something more fundamental at work, something that would ultimately seal Sega's fate and kill off the Saturn for good. Sega still saw gaming as appealing to a version of a teenage boy that didn't really exist, the type of surly kid epitomised by Edward Furlong's John Connor in Terminator 2. This was the image that many people pictured when they thought of a gamer.

Sony, however, adroitly judged that the culture was in flux. They saw that many twenty- and thirtysomethings were using their early adulthood as a kind of prolonged adolescence, working jobs they didn't care about and spending their earnings on rave nights, pub sessions, recreational drugs, and, yes, videogames.

Sony went for the jugulars of these disaffected kidults. They sponsored club nights. They brought in electronic acts such as Orbital and the Chemical Brothers to perform on and produce their games' soundtracks. They handed out PlayStation-branded cards at festivals that were perforated along lines to make for slips in which to dispose of chewing gum - or, perhaps, not that Sony knew anything of this, to be rolled into roaches for spliffs.

The quintessential PlayStation gamer was not John Connor, but Simon Pegg's character Tim Bisley from his zeitgeist-capturing sitcom Spaced. Tim would not have looked right playing Nintendo or Sega games. He watched cult horror movies. Read graphic novels. Listened to underground dance music. Went skateboarding. Smoked joints. And when he sat up for marathon gaming sessions to unfurl his brain after taking too much cheap speed, the controller he clutched in his hands belonged to Sony's PlayStation.

The 90s and 00s saw the rise of nerd culture, and nerd identity, as something that tied to, and in some areas even subsumed, other subcultures like those of film buffs, record-collectors, and stoners - and not only were Sony poised to capitalise on this, they even had an instrumental hand in its development.

The PlayStation was home to an enormous library of diverse titles like the horror-themed Resident Evil, the fighting game Tekken, car-based Ridge Racer, RPG-to-rule-them-all Final Fantasy VII, crime-em-up Grand Theft Auto, rhythm-music game PaRappa the Rapper, and temples-n-tits extravaganza Tomb Raider, starring the perpetually back-strained Lara Croft. Sony had created an institution, and with each of their consoles since they have done little to deviate from the strategy implemented by the first PlayStation.

Yet, as I said before, I was always more of a Nintendo kid. The Nintendo 64, apparently twice as powerful as the 32-bit PlayStation, launched in Japan midway through 1996, and then over here in March 1997.

To the moon and back

In many ways Nintendo made more mistakes with the hardware than Sega. It was an esoteric machine, again difficult for developers to get to grips with. The external design was clunky and cheap and toy-like. Nintendo stuck with the more expensive cartridge format for game storage, when the rest of the industry was moving to CDs. Carts had the advantage of almost non-existent loading times (original PlayStation owners will remember the uniquitous creaking door animations that masked the loading of the next room every time you opened a door in Resident Evil), but CDs could hold far more image and audio data. PlayStation games had full voice-acting, and lavish pre-rendered backdrops, where N64 games had to resort to horribly compressed audio, and more basic textures that were rendered on-the-fly by the machine. And Nintendo still charged exorbitant licensing fees to studios, which forced up the costs of the games even further, and didn't exactly incentivise developers to jump ship from Sony.

But Nintendo did have that 64-bit processor, more powerful, as they liked to proclaim, than the computer that sent man to the moon. And they did have Shigeru Miyamoto. And they did had Mario.

One reason the N64 launched so late, in fact, was so that Miyamoto and his team could take another year perfecting Super Mario 64. And the system's controller, with its central joystick, had been built with Mario in mind.

The wait was worth it. Few developers understood how to make games work in 3D before Mario 64. Few, to be honest, have got it as right since. Mario 64 was a marvel to see running, and it was more of a marvel to play. I remember seeing a display cabinet connected to the game in Beatties model shop when I was in town with my mum, then standing in frozen awe in front of this new devilry while my mum left to do the shopping, returned, and finally had to drag me away. I was 26 at the time. I wasn't. I was 11 or something. 

The N64 was the first home console I owned new. The first time I had been involved during the period when games were being released, when the future of the machine wasn't set, when you could buy games magazines and read the previews and dream about what the upcoming games would be like. It was magical.

Chief among the objects of my dreams was the new Zelda. I'd scour every issue of N64 magazine for more news of when it was coming, what it would be like. I'd stare into blurry screenshots printed on the pages and imagine the adventures that awaited me.

Finally, in Christmas 1998, it arrived, and translated the formula of past Zelda titles into 3D as successfully as Mario 64 had done with the platformer. Subtitled Ocarina of Time, its world of sweeping vistas and tranquil towns and ancient dungeons felt so vivid, so dynamic, so alive. It might still be my favourite ever videogame.

Bop the world

Sony sold three times as many consoles in this era as Nintendo, had a games library nearly ten times the size, and helped define what it meant to be a gamer for years to come. Yet the N64 was an important system. It showed the world more confidently than any of its competition how 3D games should be made. It was the home of multiplayer, with four controller ports to the PlayStation's two, and great four-player games like Rare's Goldeneye 007, one of the slickest and most solid first-person shooters of all time, and Nintendo's own Lylat Wars, Mario Kart, Mario Party, and Super Smash Bros.

But more than this, what Nintendo at their best could do was appeal to something fundamental inside us. PlayStation was for adults, sure, hip and sophisticated, but the N64, when they got it right, was for that part of us that exists before sophistication, that part that looks out at the world with fresh eyes of wonder and joy.

The pleasure of playing Mario 64 was the pleasure of being a child, or maybe a Zen master, delighting in things for being precisely what they are. Run through the grass. Leap over the blocks. Head down, arms out, charging forwards. Everything is worth clambering on, poking, twisting, pulling. Bop the world, for the sheer sake of it. We're all going to die. Before then: have fun.

We all have this person deep inside us, and it is to this person that Nintendo, more than any game studio, is able to speak. There should always be enough space inside us to appreciate the inherent glee of the universe. There should always be space for Nintendo.

Day 85: War!

Mangmangmang. That's the noise you make when you've been up since seven writing and walking to town and working a crazy Tramlines Saturday shift and walking home and eating soup for tea and nodding off at your desk and then desperately trying to get a blog on the history of videogames done before you pass out.

I'm seriously too tired to write properly, but I'll do what I can do.

Where were we? Umm. The NES had taken over the world and Nintendo had brought the gaming industry back from the brink of collapse, thanks to some canny marketing and the talents of their wonderful designers, among them the young Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong.

Heyday

So. The NES continued its reign through the late 80s. Super Mario Bros. 3 (the second had been a naff re-skinning of an unrelated title) was a reinforcement and amplification of everything that had made the first unique, with chunkier and more vibrant pixel art, expansive level design, varied enemies and power-ups, and a world map that you traversed between levels, further grounding the sense of journey and belonging.

Then the Legend of Zelda was for the thrill of exploration what Mario had been for the thrill of movement: a capturing of its essence in gaming form. You played as an unassuming lad named Link - it always elicits a sigh and rolling of the eyes when an outsider refers to the playable character of the series as Zelda: the protagonist is Link; Zelda is the princess. As Link you explored labyrinths and collected items and battled monsters. The game was an example of a style of game called role-playing games, or RPGs - although Zelda was iconoclastic enough, like most Nintendo output, to transcend genre. (If you want an RPG on the NES bound by the tropes of the genre, then look to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest or Mother.)

So going into the 90s Nintendo were untouchable. There was competition from other consoles, Sega's Master System and a couple of machines from Atari, but these were but flies that the NES laughed and swatted away. They had the market wrapped up tight. But they were also developing an arrogance they have ever since struggled to shake off.

Developers had to pay an expensive licensing fee for the privilege of releasing their games on the NES, and Nintendo forced draconian restrictions upon them, such as only allowing each developer to release three games per year. As I've said, these moves were designed to keep a deluge of low-quality software from drowning customers in choice, but it rankled developers nonetheless, though there was little they could do about it.

War!

But then came Sega's new console, their Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in the US). It was decidedly more powerful than the NES, and managed to steal both developers and players from Nintendo. Sega's approach was to release arcade-style games - meaning games originally designed for the cut-throat arcades, where peacocking cabinets all vied for attention and the goal was to wow players upfront, usually with action-oriented gameplay and impressive visuals, to convince them to part with their coins in a pay-per-game format, as opposed to the more slow-burn, measured approach that was afforded on home consoles where the player had already paid and attention was guaranteed.

The NES had been moving away from arcade experiences, but Sega focused heavily on the fast and frenetic approach, as well as marketing themselves as the "cool" choice for sullen teens, going so far as to mock Nintendo's family-friendly image. Nintendo were careful to censor violence on their console, acting as moral arbiters, but Sega were more relaxed, claiming to have more of an adult focus ("adult", of course, as it has done throughout gaming's history, really meaning "for 13-year-old boys").

The Mega Drive did strong business in the US and Europe. Then Nintendo responded with their successor to the NES, the Super NES, or SNES, a year after the Mega Drive had been released. Competition between these two comparable systems through the first half of the 90s would come to be known as the "console wars", a paradigm that has stuck, and been repeated, with a revolving collection of companies, through every console cycle since.

The Mega Drive had the violence and the visceral allure, and it had Sega's new mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog - a spiky-haired spinning blue hedgehog who starred in games that played like Mario platformers on amphetamines.

But Nintendo had the portly plumber himself, who didn't need to speak in precision-engineered teen parlance or wear Michael Jackson-like trainers to win over fans, because he had Super Mario World, one of the greatest games ever made. Mind you, the Sonic games were pretty great as well. But Nintendo had Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Mario Kart, and F Zero, and Star Fox. But Sega had a line of sports games, and shooting games, and thrilling arcade ports, and a much larger pool of available titles in general.

It was a close thing. For my part in the war, I mostly played an independent observer. My parents had always had zero interest in games, we didn't own a PC until we got my grandma's old one years later, and there was never enough money at Christmas or on birthdays to pay for something as extravagant as a home console. Most of my friends had Mega Drives, and I would spend all my available time in their bedrooms playing them. But a few friends had Nintendo systems, and I was more drawn to the worlds of Mario and Zelda and Star Fox, often only from snatched glimpses of gameplay, or even from pouring over instruction manuals sat leaning against beds while the friends collected together all their toys so we could make our action figures fight each other in the garden all afternoon. I felt an affinity with Nintendo, I guess, that I didn't with Sega. I was always more excited by the gestalt experiences and aesthetics of games than the actual skill structures - even now I'll drive up high in GTA and stand looking out at the city spread far below me in preference to beating my high score or winning shootouts online or whatever - and in this regard Nintendo were always the company for me.

I can't tell what words are coming out of my brain anymore, so I need to stop, and I'll continue tomorrow - wherein we'll see how a soured deal over a CD add-on for the SNES led to a complete upheaval in the power-structure of the industry, because the company developing this add-on was Sony, and, spurned by Nintendo, they would take their product away and turn it into their own competing console by the name of the PlayStation...

Day 69: Hammers

Well-hell-hello!

Is that a cool introduction? I think it's pretty neat. I'm going to say that at the beginning of every post from now on. It's going to be my thing.

Yeah, so, hey. I went to a coffee shop today and I tried doing some writing prompts, but nothing was coming out. My brain was all goopy and sluggish. But that's OK. That's all good in the pud. (I'm going to start saying that as well. Man, I'm like a Youtube content provider right now.)

Remember what I wrote about saying yes to reality and not being so hard on myself? About self-hatred being a Chinese finger trap? I mean it was the day before yesterday, I hope you remember. If not then you need to get your memory checked out! Do some brain training, my friend.

Well anyway, I'm going to do that. Uhh, be kind to myself. Not the brain training. It's you who needs the brain training. I bet you've even forgotten what we're talking about. It's worse than we thought! And where are your trousers? Wait, you don't even wear trousers. Your legs were amputated after that crash last year. It was a really traumatic experience. I can't believe you don't remember!

Boy, you can tell I'm tired, can't you? I waffle when I'm tired.

So, then, I'll waffle. But what I won't do is hate myself. That's important. I'm letting the fact I wasn't creative today be OK. I'm sitting down here on my tush and I'm doing a blog post anyway. And I'm feeling proud of that.

It's been a cycle of mine for so long to have a day or two of productivity, and then the first day it doesn't flow I throw my hands in the air and curse the heaves and yell that, see, I knew I wasn't cut out for this, I knew I couldn't sustain any creative endeavour.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because then the anger and frustration chases the creativity away further, which of course makes me more angry and frustrated, which makes it even harder to do anything the next day, and I get myself in such a tizz I have to walk away from it all and go and get drunk for a month.

It's like finding a beautiful deer has wandered into my clearing for me to photograph. But as soon as I start trying to get it to pose I spook it and it runs. Then I shout at it to come back, which makes it run even further.

And then I go and get drunk.

But not anymore. 69 days, by the way. That's huge. Shout-out to the number 69. Every thirteen-year-old school kid's favourite number. I reckon it's time you stopped tittering about it though. You're a grown-up. You don't have any legs. Be serious for once in your life!

But yes. I have managed to blog every day for this challenge. But the thing with the creativity has remained the same. I've stumbled into doing a Lovecraftian horror parody or a dumb film script or some writing prompts, stuff I've really enjoyed, stuff I desperately want to be doing -- but as soon as I realise what I'm doing I get self-conscious, that old negative voice starts going, "Ooh, look at him, trying to write, thinking he can write. Doing a little film script, are you? A little short story, huh?" And suddenly nothing will come. And I have to just write placeholder posts (like this), until my shadow-self eventually gets bored and wanders off, and creativity sprouts again.

It's like fighting Dark Link in the Water Temple in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Halfway through the dungeon you come across an evil mirror version of yourself that attacks when you attack, blocks when you block, gets angry at Navi's constant hint intrusions when you get angry at Navi's constant hint intrusions (little Ocarina of Time joke for you there. I know Ocarina is your favourite ever game. Though I bet you'd forgotten.).

The trick, with Dark Link, is to un-equip your sword and whack him over the head with a big hammer. Which, now I think about it, seems a somewhat confused message...

Maybe the point is that you can't defeat your own shadow with a frontal assault. Maybe you win through doing something unexpected, you win through yielding.

Maybe you don't force that deer of creativity back to your woods. You just create a lovely glade and plant the flowers and hope that the deer wanders back of its own accord.

And then you whack it over the head with a big hammer.

I don't know, I feel like hammers should be in there somewhere, otherwise I'm kinda reaching with that analogy.

But anyway, I'm going to go get a good night's sleep, give that timid deer the space and time and love it needs, and see what tomorrow brings. I just hope I'm not still in the Water Temple. That place really sucks.

I've been ya boy, Robbie P., and this is me signing off. If you've enjoyed what you've read, please remember to like, comment and subscribe, and I'll see you next time, Internets. Kablamo!

That's how I sign off now. I'm going to do it every post. You'll see.

Day 64: Like frogs in the rain

Yet another hot one. The heat was a wall, it had a physicality, it pressed up against you and lay across you and forced you downwards. I sat in a chair out on the patio with my back against the kitchen door, completely still, and I raised my arm to turn the page of my book and already I was sweating.

But it was good. Good to have a day off, good to read, good to just do nothing. I came in when the temperature became too oppressive and I wrote a little and played the new Zelda and waited for Fran.

I love the new Zelda, Breath of the Wild. The subtitle is apposite. The game engenders adventure and exploration better than almost anything else I've played. I love creeping through forests seeing what there is to see, and then a rainstorm sets in and raindrops plop down through the leaves and everything is wet and sounds are muffled and the frogs come out and you can catch the frogs. I love riding my horse through open fields with the wind rustling the grass and a few delicate notes from the main theme are introduced into the score and you want more but there isn't more and you ride and ride and the land passes beneath you. I love climbing up as high as I can get and looking out at the vast landscape splayed below, seeing sleepy towns nestled in the distance, rivers, mysterious rock formations, and thinking that it all is out there, all alive, and you are above it for a moment, removed, looking in -- and then you leap and pull your paraglider and you soar downwards wanting to find the moment when you enter that world you were just above but you cannot, it is one long moment and it is always now and you are gliding and then you are touching ground and you are back inside the great roving thing of life and you are off running to your next fabulous adventure.

So that was my afternoon before Fran arrived. When she turned up, having shaken off her hangover, we went to the shop and bought ingredients for Mexican wraps and then came home and napped together and made the food and ate the food, and then came upstairs with bowls of Vienetta and good strong Yorkshire tea and watched the 100 on Amazon Video and lounged in bed. The survivors of the 100 had to defend their new home from the Grounders by bombing a bridge and Fran kept rising onto her knees and putting her hands between her legs and clutching pillows because she was too anxious about whether Raven would die and what would happen between Clarke and Finn and who would make it through.

The series is trash. It's young-adult, post-Hunger Games silliness, dumb and formulaic, but it's also great. Sometimes you just want to switch off and sip Yorkshire tea and lie in bed with your girlfriend watching silly television, you know?

So that's what I'm going back to do. Good night.