The Pretentious Gamer

An Almost Ephemeral Autumn – an installation in Madrid. (via DesignBoom)

TGC‘s Flower, anyone?

Nice job done by Intuition Games on this one: GRAY.

You play as a lone person trying to stem the tide of a riot. There is no context given – only black and white to indicate disagreeing opinions.

The game begins with you as a lone dissenter among a raging sea of “white” opinions. If you don’t push against the tide, it carries you along with it.

The game states the goal as bringing as many people as possible to the side of peace. To do that entails entering abstract rhythm matching games for each rioter you attempt to convince. I found it simple but nuanced. Verbally shotgunning a rioter won’t convince anybody – you have to wait; listen.

As your words spread through the crowd you gain more and more converts to your cause, but ultimately you find that swaying the opinions of the masses results in simply a mass reversal and more violence and rioting – your converts put down their placards and take up torches once again. You change colors again and again to promote peace, but the situation escalates nonetheless.

Finally you become gray, your words lose their impact. You can’t convince anyone, because you yourself aren’t convinced of anything anymore.

That’s my take on it, at least. Kudos to Intuition.

I love this.

I still am in disbelief that they are letting Warren Spector do this.

A recent NYTimes article addresses Epic Mickey and what it means for Disney’s characters.

Keeping cartoon characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy. While Mickey remains a superstar in many homes, particularly overseas, his static nature has resulted in a generation of Americans – the ones that grew up with Nickelodeon and Pixar – that knows him, but may not love him. Domestic sales in particular have declined: of his $5 billion in merchandise sales in 2009, less than 20 percent will come from the United States.

“There’s a distinct risk of alienating your core consumer when you tweak a sacred character, but at this point it’s a risk they have to take,” said Matt Britton, the managing partner of Mr. Youth, a New York brand consultant firm.

Nintendo, Miyamoto, take note! Capcom, take note! “Keeping … characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy.” Mario and Link are not sacred! Megaman is not sacred! Give us something new, something relevant! These characters and franchises are sorely in need of some new ideas.

They’re still fun, but they’re safe, guarded. They aren’t moving games forward.

Right now Nintendo is caught between taking advantage of nostalgia (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) and presumably finding the best direction for the next big Mario and Zelda productions. If I were them, I would be pushing for a major reimagination.

Just some quick notes on this great modern point-and-click adventure game. The narrative is characterized by simple, nonverbal communication – it is a quiet, contemplative game that lacks much in the way of exposition. The most of that happens to take place in the main character’s head, through his memories and feelings expressing universal, archetypal stories.

Gameplay feels a bit limiting at times, with limited control of character movement and action – but puzzles work out to be quite rewarding.

The real star of the show is the art; contrast between sharp, rich textures and pencil sketches, minimal animation that is full of personality, and true originality in bringing this strange world to life. See for yourself…

Kudos to the developers.

Not like it matters, considering the enormous pile of cash the big N has reeled in since the launch of the Wii, but Iwata has stated that Wii software isn’t so hot these days, and sales are down. Refreshing honesty!

Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata has admitted that sales of the Wii console have stalled, in part due to a lack of must-have software.

The company released data yesterday that showed sales of the home console were down over 40 per cent in the six months to the end of September 2009, with 5.75 million Wii’s sold worldwide, compared to 10 million the previous year.

“Wii has stalled,” Iwata told a press conference, reports Andriasang. “We were unable to continually release strong software, and let the nice mood cool. We were unable to show a new game to become ‘the next thing.’ In the game market, once you‚Äôve lost the momentum, it takes time to recover,” he offered.

“With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time,” he said. “We decided that it would be difficult to sell enough to recover from the poor performance of the first half of the year.

However, Iwata was upbeat about forecasts for the full-year, with expectations the company can sell 20 million consoles by the end of March 2010.

“In order to reach it [the 20 million units target], we will have to move quite a large quantity, but it’s a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning.”

Preening for the press? They’ll be fine, but the Wii is reaching critical mass and should be on its way out, for sure. I’d be surprised if they reach that 20 mil mark. They already lowered it from 26 mil.

One unfortunate thing is the fact that it once again comes down to third party support. N64, GC was the same story – for the most part, the only people making money on Wii and DS is Nintendo. It’s a shame that cycle still hasn’t been broken, not even close.

This isn’t exactly a sad story per se – overall the Wii is obviously an ENORMOUS commercial success; Nintendo is still rolling in dough. However its still a story of unfulfilled potential for quality software and the user experience. Hopefully their next step will involve taking their pile of cash and cooking up something inspiring. I’d say this next round they won’t be taking any lead on input innovation… Microsoft seems to be in front there. The question is – where’s the innovation on output?