Kids today are spoiled. In my day we didn't have these fancy hard drives and memory cards. We wrote down passwords and we were just fine with that.
Have you ever heard those stories from your grandparents about how candy used to only cost a nickel, or about how they had to walk three miles in the snow and back to go to school and they liked it? I think that is where we are at right now with video games. Us twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, we are the old men in the gaming community. Sure, there are actual old men who play videogames, but you don’t hear them complaining about “the good old days” when they got one save slot and they were happy with it because it was the best they could get.
Kids today don’t know what it was like back then. If you pulled out an NES they’d wonder where the joystick and shoulder buttons are, and why all the dialogue is delivered through text. They’d start playing and ask, “where’s the tutorial? How am I going to learn how to play?” They don’t know how good they have it, or at least how good they think they have it.
When did a ten hour game become short? Barring the exception of RPGs, did you ever play an NES or SNES game that took over ten hours to beat? I was in a mood a few days ago so I sat down and played Megaman X2, start to finish. I wouldn’t be remiss in saying that I probably had more fun playing that game than I have had in a the last few months playing most other games (sole exception: Psychonauts). I tore through the whole thing in under three hours and I loved it.
Jeremy Parish has been touching on this fact in his blog and I think I’m starting to agree. Shorter games are not worse for it. In fact, they can be much better. I’m in college, and I have a good amount of free time, but I have much more busy time. Between classes, studying, work, and the various campus organizations I’m involved with, and PGC on top of all that, I don’t always have the time to sit down and make headway into a twenty hour game; and if I do, the case is often that I am neglecting one of those previously mentioned commitments.
I was luke-warm on the DS until E3 this year. I went into the show thinking what lots of people are thinking, there are no excellent games on this system. That all changed at E3. The DS is becoming something of a bastion for games done the way they used to be, the way us “old timers” like it. Many of the experiences available for the system at E3 could be played in short bursts, but also possessed something that made them infinitely replayable. Kirby: Canvas Curse is the first true example of this phenomenon. I can pick it up and play it for ten minutes, make some headway into the overall progress of the game, and then put it down and come back later. I can get two rounds of Meteos done in the same amount of time. Those ten minutes aren’t even enough time for me to boot up a console game, wait for it to load, and get something done in it.
Look on the horizon for the DS and you will see this trend continuing. Some of the most exciting games for the DS have a decidedly “old school” vibe to them. New Super Mario Bros builds on the gameplay established back on the NES. Nanostray hearkens back to classic arcade shooters like Gradius and 1942. Phoenix Wright shares tons in common with the old Lucasarts adventure games like Sam & Max and Monkey Island. There are also some totally new games that fit this “pick up and play” attitude the system is developing. Trauma Center is a totally new concept, and the missions are short enough to be played on a quick train ride across town. It’s hard to even call Nintendogs and Electroplankton “games” by the standard definition. Both can be played and heavily enjoyed for even just five minutes, yet contain no goals to accomplish.
Perhaps this is what Nintendo is thinking when they say they are reaching out to a new audience with the DS. This market does not have time to collect 500 jingos, tribals, bafmodads, or anything else for that matter. They don’t have time to sit through a twenty minute cut-scene before a boss fight. They’ve got fifteen minutes of their lunch break left to have some fun, and they need a much more instantly gratifying game.
