#oneaday Day 756: Video games like they used to be

Around the same time Sony is doing its best to completely murder the traditions and culture surrounding video games, and Xbox continues to implode, Nintendo has gone and put out multiple games that feel… almost out of their own time. And I mean that in a very complimentary way; both Star Fox (released on the 25th of last month) and Rhythm Paradise Groove (released yesterday, also known as Rhythm Heaven Groove if you're American) feel like games from at least two hardware generations ago, and that's absolutely a good thing.

The two games are very different experiences, but the one thing they have in common is that they respect your time in the way that titles from, say, the PlayStation 2 era did. You can do a complete playthrough of Star Fox in under an hour, and Rhythm Paradise Groove consists entirely of self-contained sequences that are no more than two or three minutes, tops. You can blast through all the "content" both games have in a relatively short space of time, but their longevity comes from their replay value: Star Fox for the pursuit of "medals" by attaining specific scores on each level while ensuring all your computer-controlled companions survive, and Rhythm Paradise Groove for attaining "Amazing" and "Perfect" ratings on each stage.

I'm growing increasingly fond of games that aren't a huge commitment to play; games that you can just pick up and enjoy whenever you feel like it, without feeling that strange sense of "guilt" many of us have if we already have a "big game" on the go and start something else that is likely to take more than 40 hours to get through. I'm not just talking about bite-sized arcade-style games, either; the other night I started playing Soul Blazer on Super NES, and I know that's relatively short in the grand scheme of RPGs, so I'm looking forward to finally making my way through the whole thing; something I've been meaning to do for ages.

I like a good long game to get my teeth into now and again, you know that — but I won't lie; there are times when I start something that I think is going to be relatively light and breezy, see it has an endless skill tree and various numbers to grind up very slowly in the name of increasing my poison damage by 0.1%, and just think "oh no, this is going to take ages, isn't it?" There are a significant number of games that have been released over the course of the last 10-15 years or so that would have really benefited from just scaling back, like, a lot, and providing a much more focused experience. They usually don't because they have to justify their massive budgets and thousands of people working on them — plus, unfortunately, there is a subculture among capital-G Gamers™ who complain any time something comes out with what they perceive as "not enough content".

It's unfortunate that so many developers have listened to the people who whine in Steam forums about games being "abandoned" because they haven't had an update in the last three weeks (protip: sometimes those games are finished) or that they need to see a "roadmap" of "new content" coming down the pipeline. I always feel the exact opposite to this; if I see a game that has a lengthy roadmap — particularly if that roadmap involves copious amounts of DLC — I lose a lot of interest in that game. Sometimes I will return to it later to see if there's some sort of "complete" edition available, but most of the time I will just shrug my shoulders and go and play a game that is actually finished instead, rather than spending valuable time playing something that I know is probably going to change and expand in the time it takes me to beat it.

I like both Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove because they are both finished games, and seeing everything they have to offer is within relatively easy reach. Both will require some practice and some actual playing skill to see all that stuff, but neither of them feel like they're going to be commitments with hour counts that number into the three digits just to see the credits roll.

I suspect Star Fox might see some updates to its multiplayer mode if it proves popular, but as a single-player experience, it is completely self-contained and does everything it needs to. Rhythm Paradise Groove I suspect will just stand as it is — it didn't even need an update when I put the cartridge in for the first time earlier, which is always a very welcome sight these days.

I hope we see more games like this. Nintendo seems to be quite keen on them right now, and I'm not complaining when they are as good as Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove are — and speaking of which, I'll have more to say about the latter over on MoeGamer when I've played a bit more of it. For now, I'll just say "cha, cha, cha, bom bom" and leave it at that…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 275: The quantum shift in engagement with games

I have been rewatching a lot of some of my favourite YouTube videos recently: the back catalogue of Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, who was a big inspiration to me back when I started doing YouTube things. Throughout his various runs of his show Classic Game Room, Mark primarily focused on what we today describe as "retro games" — meaning, in his instance, pretty much anything from PS2 backwards, though primarily focusing on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles such as the NES, SNES and Mega Drive.

One thing that strikes me any time I either go back and explore games from this era either by myself or when I do it vicariously through a show like Classic Game Room is that the way we engage with video games has fundamentally changed at some point. I don't mean the way we interact with them — though control schemes have, of course, become more refined as time has gone on and "best practice" has become established — but rather what we consider to be a "worthwhile" experience.

For many years, the majority of my gaming has focused on long-form games like role-playing games and visual novels. This started back in the PlayStation era, where I discovered Final Fantasy VII for the first time and promptly started devouring pretty much every RPG I could get my hands on. But it wasn't always that way; when I think back to the time I spent playing games on the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and Super NES, the games were (typically by necessity, as a result of their technology) more short-form, immediate experiences. And, back then, I derived just as much value from those as I did the longer-form stuff I started playing with the PlayStation.

Okay, I do recall my sessions on the Atari 8-bit often involving booting up one game, playing for a bit, then loading something else up, playing that for a bit and so on — like most early home computer owners, we had a big disk box full of pirated games, so I wasn't exactly short on choices — but I also feel like it was a lot easier to become engaged and invested in something simpler, shorter and less narrative-focused. I'd spend a lot of time playing Super Mario World, Starwing and SimCity on my SNES, for example; while one might argue both Super Mario World and SimCity are each in their way "long form" games of a sort, they're a different breed to your average RPG, and neither focus on an unfolding story; they use nothing but their mechanics to keep you engaged, and SimCity in particular flat-out just doesn't have an end.

These days, I feel like I'm easily falling into… I don't know if I want to call it a "trap" as such, so let's call it a "routine" instead… where I tend to focus on one "big" game at a time, and that "big" game is something with a lengthy storyline. Over the last couple of months, I spent 120 hours playing through Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and its expansion Future Connected, for example. And that's the main thing I played during that period; I had the odd diversion for a few bits and bobs along the way, but for the most part, I was focused on that one game.

There's value in those shorter games, though, and finally fixing up my retro consoles with Everdrive units and equivalents (as well as all the stuff I work on for the day job with Evercade) is really helping me rediscover that, as there's a definite magic to playing on the classic hardware that emulation still just doesn't quite capture perfectly. (Mostly the scrolling. Real hardware scrolling is flawless; emulation still has just enough tiny hiccups, even on a powerful system, to remind you that it's not quite perfect.)

Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 was a real pleasure to finally explore, as previously discussed, and I've always had a very soft spot for Tetrisphere. I had a pretty limited library of SNES games back in the day — Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, Starwing, SimCity and Zelda — so there's a lot to discover on SNES. And when my Mega Everdrive Pro arrives for the Mega Drive hopefully later this week there's a whole other library of 16-bit goodness to play with, too.

The danger, of course, is giving yourself too much choice, which can lead to the dreaded Analysis Paralysis, which in turn leads to enjoying nothing at all. But I've got a nice expanse of time between having finished Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition coming out later this month. So I intend to make good use of that time to explore some short-form fun.

And finish Soul Blazer. I'm already halfway through that, and that's sort of a Big Game, but also kind of not. I'm enjoying it a lot, either way, so I will probably try and bash that out before Xenoblade X day on the 20th. That and I finished Tokyo Dark: Remembrance today, too. I'm doing well!

Anyway, for now, bed. Perhaps with a little bit of 16-bit action before that…

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2485: The Value of Short Experiences

You know me, dear reader, I love getting my teeth into a meaty RPG as much as the next man — assuming the next man is as much of a loser as I am — but sometimes it's nice to cleanse the palate with something shorter. Perhaps even something that you can finish in a single sitting.

I thought this with Outlast and its DLC, which I played recently, and I've also thought it with the visual novel Negligee, which I'm going to do a writeup for on MoeGamer later this week. I also think it whenever I play games that are friendly to bite-size sessions, like arcade-style games where the emphasis is on getting better at a short, sharp experience rather than slogging your way through hundreds of levels.

There seems to be something of an assumption among many people online these days that a game somehow lacks value if its developers don't "support" it post-release with regular updates. Now, in some cases, this makes sense — massively multiplayer games like Final Fantasy XIV would grow stale quickly if they didn't get an injection of new stuff to do now and then, for example — but in others, particularly games that are heavily story-based, there's a great deal of value in simply drawing a line under it, saying "that's it" and calling it finished.

This clamouring for constant updates is particularly pronounced in the mobile game sector, where a lot of games seem to have designs on being "massively multiplayer" experiences anyway, even when they involve little to no actual player interaction. Google Play and App Store reviewers (and, to a marginally lesser extent, Steam reviewers) will get seriously whiny if even the dumbest of timewasters doesn't have regular updates with new levels or seasonal events or whatever — and even worse if the experience costs "too much" for what they perceive the mythical money-to-hours ratio is supposed to be — and it always bothers me a bit. Are they seriously saying that they don't want that game to ever end, that they'll be happy doing nothing but flicking birds at pigs or matching candy sweets forever? I can't imagine feeling that way. I need new and interesting things to do on a fairly regular basis; while my longstanding love affair with Final Fantasy XIV would seem to run counter to this statement, that game does at least reinvent itself with new stuff every so often, and I play other things alongside it anyway.

Back to the original point, though: there is a great deal of value in shorter experiences that forego bloat and filler in favour of a concise but still enjoyable experience. Not everything needs to be a 50+ hour epic, at least partly because no-one has time to play all the 50+ hour epics that are already out there, let alone a new one.

Outlast would have got exhausting and tiresome if it was any longer than it was — the main game was already skating on that boundary by the time I finished it; I much preferred the snappier DLC — and Negligee tells the story it wants to tell in less than an hour, albeit with eleven different endings to encourage replays. A game that provides an enjoyable experience without taking over your whole life is something to be celebrated, particularly when you're waiting for the next exciting thing to come over the horizon as I am right now with the imminent Final Fantasy XV. And I for one am glad that there are plenty of developers out there who don't feel the need to add unnecessary bloat to their games for the sake of an artificially inflated playtime, or a set of Achievements, or simply because the ever-whiny general public insists that £15 is "too much" for a game that is over in two hours.

Short game developers, I salute you, and you'll always have my business in that awkward period just before a big release! 🙂