Article: Why Nintendo is always ‘doomed’

[Garcian Smith]

bardicverse said:
Garcian, I'm not sure where you're getting all this from. Zelda was considered a very long game, far more time than they could with Missile Command or Centipede. Yes, I agree, the arcades were about high scores. Think about what you are saying. You are suggesting that Tapper was more of a "core" game than Metroid.

Do you know the reason why "save games" came into play? Power outages. The developers saw that longer games are hard to start over again from the beginning, and a power surge or hardware glitch could undo severe progress. Imagine getting ready to fight Gannon in Death Mountain and then suddenly there's a split-second brownout in town. Those 4-5 hours you invested in getting that far are now gone. I do find it interesting how you translate save games into a "casual friendly" tool. To give you an idea, just from personal experience - my family were all gamers back in the days of arcades and Atari 2600. By the NES, only my dad would play, and that was Mario Bros and duck hunt. Everyone in the family backed out of gaming because it became more time consuming than they cared for. Games got longer, more involved than the simplistic design of Pac Man.

If people were complaining about the NES, it was because the games got harder, not because they got "casualized". Arcades were simple levels, like one of my favorites, Phoenix. They just got faster and harder. It was purely hand-eye coordination basics - the faster you could react, the further you could get. Even games that had stories in the arcades were simple reflex - think back to Dragon's Lair. Complete story, but all you had to do was follow the screen prompt to move in the right direction.

Your go from point a to b doesn't apply to many games on the NES, but Zelda being a prime one of those. The path wasnt clearly defined, and you didnt have to do most of the levels in order (tho it made it more difficult). Metroid was like this too. In fact, I can apply your argument only to side scrollers, where you couldn't even GO back to where you were (Super Mario Bros).

You seem to have a very different recollection, but it could be the location too. By some of your language, I would assume you're over in northern Europe. In New York City, entertainment culture changes rapidly, so the view on this side of the pond could have been different from your side.

 

Just because a game is long doesn't mean it's not "casual." The Sims is the epitome of a "casual game," and you can play a single game of that longer than many "hardcore" games. What made Zelda appeal to the expanded audience - and a trait that it shares with The Sims - is that it's accessible, and that it's easy to fit into casual play schedules. The latter is largely due to the save system, while the former owes itself to the NES' simple control scheme and the fact that combat only requires a couple of buttons that each do the same thing.

The "high score = hardcore" phenomenon is by no means universal, true. The "hardcore" nature of arcade games stems largely from the competitive culture surrounding them at the time - though their largely inaccessible nature, by way of their high-score-oriented achievement mentality and long required play sessions, also plays a large part. Tapper had no such connotations.

The notion that save games came into existence due to power outages, rather than as a disruptive market strategy designed to reel in new gamers, is also ridiculous, and doesn't give nearly enough credit to Nintendo's inventive marketing. I don't know what would lead you to believe that, as the latter assertion seems far more logical and far more in line with Nintendo's business strategies at the time.

Re, the anecdotal evidence concerning your family: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

People were complaining about NES games' difficulty - relative to arcade games? Care to point me to some such accounts, or are you just pulling all of this out of your ass?

"Going from point A to point B" was a simplistic description, but if you want to play semantics, what I meant to say was that the new NES games were progression-based, as opposed to achievement-based. That is to say, they still had achievements, but the achievements involved reaching a certain point of progression, as opposed to the more arbitrary achievement of beating your high score or what-have-you.

I don't know where you got that I'm European - I've lived in the mid-Atlantic US my entire life. I don't think that our experiences would be that different.