Is NSMB Wii worthy of the title Game Of The Year?

[Final-Fan]

cAPSLOCK said:
Only problem is it IS a limited artform. Video games are an artform limited by purpose (the purpose being to PLAY the game). Every art form is limited by purpose, my copy of the movie "Bringing Out the Dead" has yet to pop out of the DVD player and give me a handjob.

I mean compare MGS4 to a movie with the same overall rating. Can you honestly say the storytelling is even in the same league? On the same planet? I sat down and watched a good chunk of the game and even a guy who is a huge MGS fan (the guy playing) laughed through 99% of it. "NO! MARRY ME!"

Video game writing is a horrible joke. I mean it is not just bad but it is so godawful horrible that skipping cinematics is the common practice among gamers.

There's a reason that video game stories suck. Stories are a passive artform.

Cutscenes if anything detract from a game.

A game is meant to be played, right? Why is there a part of the game where control is taken away from you and the direction of the story is ripped from your hands? How many cutscenes have you seen where the dude you've been controlling for the last 3 hours did something stupid you'd never do in a million years?

The best story telling in games in my experience hasn't been in what was told, but rather what wasn't told.  A great example is Bioshock. The fate of Rapture is largely left to the imagination. You see point A (the welcome to Rapture video on the way down) and point B (Rapture in present game time) but what lies in between is largely left to the imagination.

Another game that revolutionized story telling in games is Half Life 1. Control is never taken away from you (minus being carried off, but you can still look around).  Think about how much of that game is told to you in story, and how much is conveyed visually, or through "I heard X" "There's rumors of Y" or through gameplay.

When you bring up musicals, keep in mind that musicals almost universally have dancing going on at the same time (Paint your Wagon being the only acception I can think of) but even when dancing isn't going on the song is being conveyed visually. Imagine if every time a song started up in a musical the screen went black and the song just rolled and then the movie continued again after. That's basically what a cutscene is to a game, a blackout.

I would rather the setting (which I am moving around in) be the story, let the action (which I'm a part of) be the story, let the gameplay (which I control) be the story.  The cutscene rips you out of the setting, out of the action, and takes control away from you.

I think that your point about musicals versus games with cutscenes is way off base.  Some games, like Mario, do just fine with hardly any cutscenes at all.  But others use them heavily to enhance the game experience.  And that's what it's about in my opinion:  enhancing the game experience.  It's okay for Mario to be given a simple goal like "princess kidnapped, go save her (by running a giant gauntlet of nearly nonsensical obstacles)."  But Nathan Drake's goals need a little bit more structure and narrative.  

That's what cutscenes are supposed to do, I think -- deliver that narrative and structure when it can't be delivered during pure gameplay.  Lots of cutscenes have things going on that would be hard to show the gamer in gameplay, or have an action sequence that would be too hard or boring to fit into the game and make people play through, etc.  It enhances the game experience by bridging the gap between playable areas and giving the player a sensible narrative connecting them and keeping him interested in the character's exploits.  

If you want to come back with, "Well, they shouldn't try to tell a story that they can't deliver in pure gameplay", you have a right to that opinion.  But I think that that's unfairly restrictive.  

And this also, I think, accounts for a lot of the 'lower standards' you see in game storytelling -- it's not the focus in many cases, just a support.