| theRepublic said: @ noname2200 I wonder if you can help me understand something Malstrom wrote recently. His explanation for the success of MK Wii is that it is like Super MK. I'll quote myself from another thread. He says that Mario Kart Wii is more like Super Mario Kart than 64 or DD. I have no clue why he thinks this because he doesn't explain it. I would disagree with him, but I can't really argue because there is nothing to argue against. So I guess I'll just say he is wrong and leave it at that. It is as much evidence as he provides. He says that Mario Kart Wii had more content than DD, which is true. It has more content than any Mario Kart to date. He then claims that the NES/SNES games were based on content, but Super Mario Kart didn't have any more content than 64 or DD and I would say it had less. What I remember about games from that era is that there was not much content, but the games were really hard to make them play longer. You were forced to play the same thing over and over until you got it right. |
I remember what you're referring to, although he was actually quoting Mario Kart's creator, who stated that with the DS version he was looking back towards Super rather than 64/Advance etc. I haven't given it as much thought as I should, so I don't have an answer yet, but I think a good place to start would be in how Malstrom defines "content."
http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/email-how-can-malstrom-question-nintendo/
I think a main cause of the fire is because games industry doesn’t think they are in the content business. Rather, their context of content is different from the consumer. A publisher would think of content as in how many assets it needs. A developer would think of content as how long the game is. The customer thinks of content very different. To the customer, content is the richly textured world (and I don’t mean graphics here). There is much ‘innovation’, much ‘gameplay’, much ‘graphics’, much ‘gritty realism’, but the content isn’t there. Or, rather, the content is not enough to justify paying $50 to $60 for the game.
Let’s apply ‘richly textured world’ backwards through time. Each and every classic game is strikingly a ‘richly textured world’. Pac-Man, despite crude technology, is a richly textured world with the ghosts and all. Super Mario Brothers is a richly textured world. Super Mario Brothers 3 is often said to be a ‘better game’ than Super Mario World. Why? One reason might be that SMB3 is a richer textured world than SMW despite being 8-bit graphics. The early Mega Man games also were ‘richly textured worlds’. Sonic was a richly textured game. They had to be richly textured or else all those games I mentioned couldn’t have been made into numerous cartoons. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series are richly textured worlds. Who would deny Grand Theft Auto 3 as a richly textured world?
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On the Wii, I suspect the problem isn’t that there are no ‘hardcore’ games, but it is that the games have little content. What has been disastrous for the Wii Core Market is mistaking that customers want simple, uncomplicated games to mean that customers do not want richly textured worlds. To use a sci-fi analogy, it would be like hearing a complaint that sci-fi uses too much technobabble and is boring to interpret to mean that sci-fi should revolve around hot babes wearing leather, laser fights, and stunts. No! People want the rich worlds. They just don’t want the BS that comes with them.
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This is why series such as Mario and Zelda became so popular. There isn’t a Mario world in a game, rather, it is a game set in the Mario world, and they don’t have to be the same. Kart racing works just as well as a platformer. To those who follow the Zelda series, you wait for each new installment to see an expansion of that richly textured universe. You make timelines and try to fit it all together.
The point is that the richly textured universe came first and the games came second. The games were nothing more than how to experience this richly textured world in the best way possible. Unfortunately, suits get it backward and think of the universe being confined to the game so if it sells well enough it becomes ‘franchise’, and they can crank out games obeying a formula. Customers don’t’ see ‘franchise’. They just see kickass game world.
Unfortunately, I need to get to work, but when I come back I'll try to puzzle out his meaning a bit more.
