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 148: Switch Impressions

I've had my Nintendo Switch for a couple of months now, I've lived with it and played with it and rubbed the sheen of novelty fully off its plastic exterior. What are my impressions?

I love it. Adore it. It's where I do all my gaming now. I've settled into the groove of a casual, yet discerning, gamer over recent years, a groove in which I'm entirely comfortable. And the Switch fits this perfectly.

I know a fair amount about games, I stay au fait with the industry, and when I play I am alert and thoughtful and curious. But I do not play a lot. I'm not addicted. I don't game every second of the day, play right through the nights, wired on energy drinks and sugary snacks, have the constant bags under the eyes of a hardcore gamer. I don't consume games voraciously and unthinkingly.

I work a physically demanding job, with early starts and late finishes. I write this blog every day. At the moment I'm helping my joiner friend set up trade shows on my days away from the pub. I read books. I watch good films. I take photographs. I meditate, I try to bring myself into the present moment as much as possible, try to be mindful, to pay attention to my life as it is happening, even when my life is painful or boring or difficult.

I have plenty to occupy me, is what I'm saying, and my gaming habits have to fit around this. There was a time when I was depressed and out of work and my acne was really bad, and I would play World of Warcraft with my friend from uni for eight or so hours every day. More recently when I was drinking too much and smoking too much and not writing, I would use games like junk food, buying bright alluring new titles like a fat kid let loose in a snack shop. I'd binge on the openings to games as a way to distract me from my unhappiness and loneliness, play until that wore off - usually after the first hour or so - and then grow bored and stop playing and go back to being miserable until the next New Thing came along.

But these days I'm hiding from less, allowing myself less to use drugs or videogames or the like to self-medicate when I'm unhappy. I'm not attempting to game the pain away.

I still like games, I still like having them in my life, but they're like photography now - something I can do here and there, when there's time, and not get too obsessed over.

So the Switch is great for me. I've got only a handful of games - Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey, Hollow Knight that I've recently downloaded, Mario Kart for multiplayer - and when I get the chance I'll have a little play on one of them.

Breath of the Wild is great for days off, for running around a big open world fighting monsters and collecting apples and climbing mountains. It's like a warm bath. I completed it on Wii U, and now on Switch I'm picking through it slowly, finding it easy, poking about every nook and cranny, turning over every stone, letting my brain go slack while I glide off into the wilderness. It's fantastic.

Mario Odyssey is a decoction of fun, and scales beautifully. You can play for two minutes or two hours, and it's pretty much the same experience, just stretched. You run around in levels that are large playgrounds, and in every direction you find something bouncy or squishy or colourful or surprising with which to play. Maybe there's a bird flapping around with something shimmering in its wings, so you scramble up trees and leap at it to catch whatever it's got. Maybe there are girders hanging above empty space, so you jump across them as they crumble in order to reach the shiny reward at the end. Or you play maracas with Día de los Muertos skeletons in an Aztec desert. Or you twang up tightropes above a cartoon city. Or possess the body of a gloopy lava enemy and use its residual heat to warm a pot of stew for the race of animated forks who inhabit the level. I think it's important in life to keep an element of childlike wonder, to work to retain that simple joy we find from the world around us, from pulling and twisting and running and jumping, and Mario provides this better than any other game. Long may he reign.

Hollow Knight is exacting and frustrating and scary and glorious. It asks you to descend deeper and deeper into forgotten catacombs in which you become terrifyingly lost, and to push onwards until you map the space and overcome obstacles and emerge victorious. It is a difficult game, with bosses that force you up against your own failure, huge monsters with powerful attacks that crush you time and time again, with sometimes long, frustrating slogs from the checkpoint back to where you died, and it's like the game, in that Dark Souls tradition, is shoving your weakness and lack of skill in your face, saying, Look, you are not good enough - but saying it with zero attitude or malice, simply stating the fact, a Zen master hard and implacable, presenting you with the problem, offering you the chance to, in the parlance of the form, git gud. You watch your anger spewing out of you as that screaming demon smashes you apart for the fiftieth time, you watch the toddler within you wailing, sobbing that it's not fair, and you think... wait - it is fair. It just is what it is. This is the game. What do you want? Mummy to come and make it better? A bottle, something to slurp, a hand to pat your head and swaddle you in blankets. You're an adult now. No one is coming to save you. So breathe out that anger. Analyse what went wrong. Try again. Watch for the enemy's attack patterns. Let familiarity drain fear from the encounter. Practice, train, try, try, try. Git gud. And eventually you'll land that finishing blow, right into the boss's skull, and blood will rupture in torrents, and the corpse will crash to the ground, and you'll stand there tall and mighty, master of this arena, knowing it was all you. No one gave you this to pacify you. You earned it. You overcame. It is a good feeling.

Mario Kart I have not played much of, fifteen hours or so, but it is foolproof multiplayer fun. Staying in a hotel room with Steve the night before an early morning set-up, we lay on our beds clutching our respective Switches and spent a couple of hours with the game's battle mode, collecting coins and popping each other's balloons (they are not euphemisms!!!), and it was like being thirteen again and having a sleepover, and it was brilliant. Also I won four out of five tournaments, so therefore Mario Kart must be a Very Good Game.

It's mega late now, after a gruelling Saturday close at the pub, so I'll stop there, and tomorrow I'll discuss the Switch as a piece of hardware, and its strengths and weaknesses. Nice.

Day 97: Moons

In work for 8am this morning for a delivery that didn't turn up till nearly 10. Busy lunch with theatre matinee. Spent all afternoon taking pictures for social media, staying an hour after my shift to get them done, then feeling at the end that I'd done a bad job. Don't like anything that comes out of me right now.

Got the bus home, tried to stay awake, fell asleep in my clothes face down on my bed, woke up at 11, ate cheese sandwiches, drank a cup of tea, watched rubbish on YouTube. Kept starting stuff and getting a few seconds in and closing it again. Restless and antsy, yet lethargic and drained at the same time. Pick up a book to try to do something worthwhile, can't make it through two sentences before flinging it down. Put on an easy video, but despise it within seconds. Nothing works. Passing time hurts. But don't want to sleep, either.

Ended up making evening disappear with Always Sunny on Netflix while playing Mario on my Switch in portable mode in my hands. Got about thirty power moons but already can't remember a single one.

But feel a bit better now. Will try to sleep.

Being depressed sucks.

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 84: Plumbers

I'm just going to continue waffling about games here, because I started yesterday and it's all in my head now and I want to get it out. Feel absolutely free to tune out for a few posts, if you want.

So yesterday I was talking about the birth of videogames, and how the gaming industry boomed in the 70s and early 80s, and then crashed monumentally. The industry by 1985 was like that newly-hatched monster at the end of Studio Ghibli's film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: an enormous beast rearing up to take over the world, but not being able to support its own weight, and collapsing back into itself.

Maybe that image is in my head because it was Nintendo, a company very like Studio Ghibli in its focus on the importance of childlike wonder, that would emerge during this period of turmoil to nurture gaming's nascent form and ultimately transform it into the shape in which it still exists to this day.

Great ape

Nintendo had started life as a trading card company in the late 1800s, transitioning into a toy manufacturer in the 1960s, and by the 70s were focusing on the burgeoning arcade gaming scene.

They achieved some success with arcade games in Japan, but America proved a tougher nut to crack, and by 1981 they were stuck with a heap of arcade cabinets for their mediocre shooter Radar Scope that they were unable to sell, and were teetering on the verge of financial collapse. Their president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tasked a young apprentice designer with converting the wasted Radar Scope cabinets into a new game. That young designer's name was Shigeru Miyamoto, and the game he rapidly came up with was called Donkey Kong.

One of the earliest platform games (a genre involving running and jumping between platforms), Donkey Kong was an immediate and sensational success, and helped reverse the fortunes of the ailing Nintendo. It also introduced the world to its protagonist, a portly Italian carpenter named Jumpman. You might know him, however, by his name in the American translation: Mario. He would go on to become the most recognisable videogame character in the world, and the face of the industry for decades to come.

Nintendo, harnessing the game design genius of Miyamoto, continued to find success in the arcades, through sequels to Donkey Kong, and then a two-player game involved Mario, now a plumber, and his brother Luigi, leaping about the sewers of New York jumping on the heads of turtles and crabs. This game was called Mario Bros.

Entertainment systems

Buoyed by profits from these titles, it was to the home console market that Nintendo now turned. They released their Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan in 1983. It included ports of their arcade hits, and sold well. But then the North American videogame market crashed, and the industry appeared doomed.

Nintendo, however, simply refused to let this happen. Retailers in the US were loathe to stock consoles on their shelves, believing they wouldn't sell, so Nintendo redesigned the Famicom into a Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, threw in a light-gun and toy robot peripheral, and convinced retailers that this all made for a product sufficiently removed from the consoles that had gone before. Not even a console, in fact, but an "entertainment system". The wave of the future.

And where a glut of knock-off, low-quality games had flooded the market and confused consumers of the earlier consoles, Nintendo set in place a practice, since becoming commonplace, of licensing third-parties to produce games for their system. They stamped these games with their "seal of quality", minimising choice while maintaining worth.

And lastly, bundled with the NES, they gave away Miyamoto's follow-up to Mario Bros. This new game was something not available in the arcades, taking the platforming concept and expanding it into a continuous adventure from left to right, a journey, through varied, interesting levels, with power-ups and collectables and hidden areas. They called the game Super Mario Bros., and it was nothing short of a revelation.

It brought together previous concepts and theories and encapsulated them, galvanised them, into something greater than had ever gone before, with elegant game design, perfectly precise controls, but also a focus on character, narrative, and structure. Mario's new world, the Mushroom Kingdom, was a place surreal yet strangely archetypal. Goombas, Koopa turtles, fire flowers, warp pipes - it was as if this stuff had arrived fully formed, from some other dimension; as if it had, somehow, always existed. You could plonk your friend, your neighbour, your nan, down in front of Super Mario Bros., and they would all instinctively and instantly get it. They would understand what they had to do, and why they had to do it, and they would love it.

Thanks to Nintendo, and Mario, and Miyamoto, videogames had finally arrived.