It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: nintendo

Day 128: ds

June 19, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Everyone and their mother seems to have a DS nowadays. I bought a used DS back when they were fat, and then upgraded to a DS Lite on the day they released. I considered, ever briefly, upgrading again to a DSi, but the new feature set wasn’t compelling enough.

I also don’t play my DS as much as I used it. The height of my DS use was back in Pittsburgh, when I rode the bus to and from work each day. It offered me a goodly hour plus each day when I was doing nothing but sitting on a bus. If I had owned my iPhone then, I would have certainly listened to a lot more podcasts.

Instead, I played my DS a lot. Now that I carpool with Katie, there’s not much other time during the day for me to play. At home, I’d usually prefer to play on my consoles or PC, and there’s not much time at work to break out the DS. I end up playing every once in a while in bed or just randomly lying around, and on vacations/trips. It’s become only partially a portable game player, and it’s lost a bit of my recreational time to random iPhone games I’ve started playing (Flight Control, anyone?).

This got me wondering: tons of people have DSs (I’m pretty sure a hearty majority of everyone who works at EA owns at least one), but when do they play them? Do they face the dilemma that I do, where there isn’t really a good time during the day to play them? Do they take public transportation more? Do they just make time during the day?

Maybe just owning a DS is enough. Or, maybe, I just need to ride the bus aimlessly for an hour each day.

Day 12: everyone’s a gamer (part 2) + Oscar recap

February 23, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’ll continue on the gaming front in a bit, but first a short Oscar recap.  How did I do in my pool?  Decent, but not great.  In a relatively upset-free year (except perhaps the coup of the night in Documentary Short), I made two mistakes: predicting an upset in Best Supporting Actress and underestimating the momentum of Milk.  And when you miss three biggies like Original Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress, it’s hard to end up in the pool elite.

On another note, this year was probably one of the most entertaining Oscars I’ve watched in a long while.  Hugh Jackman was a terrific host and sang and danced multiple times.  The opening number was entertaining, Anne Hathaway was a sexy Nixon, and we got one of the best acceptance speeches of all time.  I also thought that the presentations of the acting awards was refreshing and nice, giving a bit of time to each of the nominees.  It finally felt like it was actually an honor to just be nominated.

OK, enough of that.  Continuing from yesterday’s post…

Second, new gamers have to go through a difficulty ramp that us veterans have all but forgotten: basic controls.  Give a 360 or PS3 controller to someone who’s never touched one before and it’s easy to see the fear in their eyes.  In addition to the dozen inputs on the front, there are four “trigger” controls that they probably wouldn’t have even found on their own!  Oh, and that central glowing thing is a button too!  And you can push down on the joysticks!

While it’s easy to scoff at local newsmen and politicians on TV when they say, “Oh, I haven’t played anything since Pac Man,” it’s hard to jump into today’s gaming.

If, that is, we define gaming as playing on a console.  A console that isn’t the Wii.  Because it ends up being not that hard when your son or boyfriend or nephew hands you a Wiimote and tells you that to play tennis, all you have to do is swing the controller like a tennis racket.  It’s not that hard when all you have to do is use that mouse and keyboard that you use all day at work to click on a few gems and move them around.

The Wii completely broke down one of the major barriers for entry into gaming today.  Suddenly, anyone could pick up a controller and start playing a game; you didn’t have to be familiar with the conventions that the game industry had been developing for the past 20 years.

Overnight, Nintendo essentially exposed the secret that everyone is a gamer.  This isn’t to say that the Wii is infallible; it has many disadvantages when compared to other consoles and the PC.  However, it is nothing short of truly revolutionary.  In a few short years, it has greatly transformed both the game industry and the game-buying population around the world.

And…scene.  Here are some more games for you to waste your time on:

Day 11: everyone’s a gamer (part 1)

February 22, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Chances are, you’ve played a video game.  If you’re one of my college friends, you almost certainly knew someone else with a console and played a random game at one time or another.  Or perhaps you have a DS on which you play something from time to time.  Or you enjoy the odd game of Peggle on your computer every now and again.  Or you occupy yourself in the spare minute while waiting for a bus by trying to beat you Snake high score on your phone.

Or, and here’s what I want to talk about today, someone sends you a link to a random flash game online and you spend a few minutes clicking on John McCain’s head or hitting the QWOP keys in frustration or something similar.

The industry has, of course, labeled this group as “casual gamers” – gamers who don’t necessary purchase gaming hardware and will play short bursts of things on their mobile devices or PCs.  Companies have also started to publish more casual games on the Wii as well, due to its continued popularity among people who haven’t been playing games for the past 10 years or so.

How did this happen?  How did a term not really even in use 5 years ago become a central tenet of most companies’ forward-looking plans?  The simple answer is that Nintendo took the small potatoes that casual gaming brought in on a collection of websites and turned it into big money with the Wii and DS.

The more complex answer is that everyone’s a gamer – they just might not know it yet.  All it takes to tip a person is two things: entertainment value and (as I mentioned in a previous post) difficulty.

A person who hasn’t played games before has to think that the entertainment value they get out of playing a game is going to be more valuable to them than the other things they could do with a similar amount of time.  This makes finding the right initial game for that person critical.  An action-oriented paintball-shooting sports fan with little patience for deep strategy is going to get easily bored with a deep RPG system.  Likewise, a strategic chess player who dislikes action movies is probably going to be disoriented and frustrated with an intense FPS.  This is where casual games help bridge the gap.  A new gamer is rarely going to plop down $300 before they can even play one game, so free or cheap online and downloadable games provide an easy way for them to find out what they like.  The production values are usually lower, sure, but the design and intent is all there.  It’s a great litmus test.

This is getting longer than anticipated, so I’ll continue tomorrow, along with some Oscar talk, probably.  In the meantime, enjoy this short list of online games I like:

  • The entire GROW series – cute artwork and fun with a touch of skill
  • I’m a sucker for Escape games, and 3wish adventures is good first escape game, with the Submachine series being a more challenging follow-up.
  • For those that remember You Don’t Know Jack, I need hardly explain.  For those that don’t, imagine getting to be in a new and well-written game show episode from the comfort of your computer, for free!

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