Why I Moved Past Nintendo (And Maybe Why You Did Too): Part I

It was roughly a year ago when I sold both my Wii and Nintendo DS and picked up an Xbox 360 and eventually a PS2. Selling both systems was surprisingly easy, considering I’ve never sold a game system before. Though I’m not as steeped in owning Nintendo consoles as some of you, (my gaming roots are found in PC gaming) ever since I got my first Nintendo systems, I was always enthralled by them in one way or another. Smash Bros. is to this day my favorite franchise of all time, I still hold the Zelda series in high esteem, and I’ve probably put more hours in the Pokemon Gameboy RPGs than any person that will read this. And even though I’m not the biggest fan of Mario’s or Samus’ adventures, when I do find a game of theirs I enjoy, I enjoy them thoroughly. Hell, you’d be hard pressed to find any Nintendo franchise, that I’ve played, that I can’t stand. In contrast, I have no notable past with Nintendo’s rival companies, Sony and Microsoft. In fact, I have a fair amount of apathy or disdain for some of their primary franchises. Yet I became disenchanted with Nintendo’s system and software to the point where I was practically gleeful to sell their latest hardware offerings. And reading other Nintendo fan sites, I’m not alone in my negative feelings. What happened to me, or Nintendo, that caused my opinion to change so drastically? I’ll try to trace what Nintendo did to alienate me, specifically, since that’s the only thing I can really do. Hopefully, it will shed some light on the reason why Nintendo fans at large are shying away at large. Maybe, you will see something in here that will make you think, “Yeah! That bugs me too!” At large, this is all just a semi-organized manifesto on gaming at large and why Nintendo is becoming a polarizing gaming company.

The way I see it, there are three areas where I take issue with Nintendo: software, hardware, and gaming philosophy. Kind of broad, but I’ll explain one by one in depth.

The first area is software, or the games, if you prefer that term. We all play video games for different reasons. Different games meet us on different levels. Every game developer has to sit down and ask himself or herself: “How do I want my game to engage the player?” There’s obviously mixes of focus, but in my observation they generally break down into four categories.

The first possible focus of a game is on the personal experience of the player. These games tend to focus on engrossing a player in an atmosphere. They can be story-centric; they focus on taking the player out of the real world and putting them in a virtual world for an adventure or story, like a book or a movie. These are the Bioshocks, the Zeldas, the Metal Gear Solids, of the gaming world.

The second possible focus of a game focuses on the competitive nature of the player. These games tend to focus on multiplayer environments or they can emphasize high scores. They can range from tactical to twitch, moody to flashy, the atmosphere isn’t very important for these games. Their focus is bringing out the competitor in the player, even if it’s a friendly cooperative competition, like in a sport or a card game. For example, Halo, Smash Bros., SOCOM, and Starcraft are all good examples of games with this focus.

The third possible focus is simple relaxation. Some people just want to unwind with games. Maybe your parents play Solitaire or Minesweeper on the PC, maybe your sister enjoys Endless Ocean or Animal Crossing, or maybe even you enjoy Tetris or Virtual Chess. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a method of relaxation and decompression from your day at work/school/whatever. Some people watch TV, some people read a book, others play Brain Age.

The fourth possible focus is the hardest to quantify, perhaps because it seems unique to games. Due to a lack of a better term eluding me at the moment, I’ll define it as fun mechanics. You’ve all played a game and found some specific gimmick, some minor thing, that you just did repeatedly over and over for no reason other than it entertained you. Maybe you had fun jumping on Goomba’s heads over and over in a Mario platformer, maybe you just swung around the city as Spiderman in the Spidey games, maybe you liked the spiffy arm in Bionic Commando, or maybe you enjoyed transforming enemies into chickens in Rachet and Clank, who knows? There are entire games based around just amusing concepts like those.

Now that I’ve quantified games and why we enjoy them, my main issue with Nintendo software is now much clearer. The first two game types I mentioned are being crippled on Nintendo’s consoles, and the last two are getting way too much attention by comparison. The story and atmospheric intensive games are simply not being encouraged by Nintendo, either inwardly in their own development teams, or outwardly through encouraging other developers. The depth on the X360 and PS3 just plain beat the Wii in this area. There’s really no arguing it since none of Nintendo’s franchise have this focus anymore, except Fire Emblem. Zelda, the one I cited in the examples, used to be a good mix between this atmosphere-centered gaming and the last mechanic-centered gaming. But Nintendo has fallen into a rut, becoming more and more dependent on merely using the boomerang and bombs to compel the gamer to buy it rather than building interesting fairy tale worlds.

The second game type is harder to argue, but I can simply win the argument by bringing out a brand name that everyone now associates with inferior multiplayer features: Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Nintendo has limited all competitive gaming to local multiplayer only or crippled online modes. By cutting out an unbelievable amount of possibilities for the competitive-focused gamer, Nintendo has seriously hurt their competitiveness with other platforms in that realm.

As for why Nintendo is strong in the last two, the answer should be obvious. The casual phenomenon is almost exclusively in the latter two categories, their main franchises are repetitious and relying on mechanics alone to win over players, and the hardware of both the Wii and DS focus on bringing new possibilities for unique game mechanics. If you, as a gamer, play games for the last two focuses, Nintendo is a perfect fit for you. I, however, am mainly focused on the first two types of games. That’s why Nintendo’s software is so very unpalatable to me.

Next time, we’ll go further into my beefs with Nintendo. Stay tuned. Or don’t, ’cause it’ll probably be two months before I put together another one.