Bridge games
March 20, 2008
The first link in yesterday’s big post went to a press release, “Super Smash Bros. Brawl Smashes Nintendo Sales Records.” Toward the bottom, Nintendo talked about their future plans:
Mario Kart Wii launches April 27 with the Wii Wheel™, which lets players drive their speedy karts with the intuitive feel of a wireless steering wheel. It’s another “bridge” game like Wii Sports™ that lets video game novices and veterans play and have fun together.
I had glossed over the term “bridge game”, but Patrick Klepek seized on it in a post on MTV Multiplayer.
A few weeks ago, “BioShock”‘s Ken Levine called “Wii Bowling” “the ultimate gateway drug.”
But is it? Bridging casual and hardcore gamers implies each is approaching a game from opposite directions — but having fun on a common ground. That doesn’t mean the “novice” will ever end up crossing to the other side. “Gateway games” and “bridge games” may not be one and the same.
I can’t speak broadly, but my own experience bears out that Wii Sports is more of a bridge game than a gateway game. I’ve gotten a few of my non-gamer friends to try it and Wii Play, but they didn’t show any interest in, say, Super Mario Galaxy.
So far, the gameplay of “bridge games” falls on the simpler side. Could Nintendo make a “bridge game” out of “Pikmin”? And how would you make a more accessible version of “The Legend of Zelda” without scaring off the hardcore?
Do they need to?
I haven’t played Phantom Hourglass yet, but based on what I’ve read it walked the line between accessible and hardcore fairly well — although it did seem like some reviewers cut the game some slack because the controls were so innovative. I’ll have to play the game myself before forming an opinion on the feasibility of a “bridge” Zelda.
Right now it’s Klepek’s last question that has me scratching my head. Does Nintendo need to make their major franchises more accessible?
At first I was tempted to answer yes. We who are willing to spend dozens of hours plowing through an adventure game are an increasingly irrelevant slice of the pie. If Nintendo’s business strategy is to iterate on their major franchises, I thought, they’re going to need to cast a wider net and interest the more casual gamers.
After further reflection, though, I’ve changed my mind. I think the fact that Nintendo recognizes a casual/hardcore dichotomy at all bodes well for the serious gamer. Even with their quest for universal appeal, we’ll still have games like the casual Nintendogs on one side and the hardcore Metroid Prime 3 on the other. In other words, if there are bridge games, there has to be something on each side to connect. If Nintendo wants to put Mario Kart Wii in the middle for all of us to play together, I’m okay with that.
According to the Zeldapedia wiki, “Shigeru Miyamoto has stated that Twilight Princess will be ‘without a doubt, the last Zelda game as you know it in its present form.’ This indicates that the Zelda series may receive a major user interface overhaul in order to take proper advantage of Wii.”
I initially thought Miyamoto’s quote was a death knell for the Zelda series. It sounded like they were planning for some drastic, disfiguring change — perhaps in the name of accessibility — that would enrage the longtime fans. Now I’m a bit more optimistic that Zeldapedia is right.
(I really hope they are, too — it’d be awesome to integrate the tilt sensor and accelerometer like the swordfighting minigame in WarioWare: Smooth Moves.)
3 comments
According to a recent interview on the Aussie videogame show Good Game (http://tinyurl.com/37jc86), Will Wright mentions how some of the best works in whatever medium are ones which appeal to many different people: Young, old, and I suppose with the upcoming Spore, casual and hardcore. An example of this, let’s say in the realm of music for example, are the Beatles. Perhaps a reason for their wide appeal is the quality of their music.
by JV Andres on March 21, 2008 at 9:46 am #
Hey, thanks for coming by, JV. This is great; lots of familiar names from The Brainy Gamer. :)
I think both you and Wright have a point. There is certainly a correlation between popularity and quality, and works that are of high caliber will naturally appeal to many people.
On the other hand, I think you’ll agree that there’s a lot of popular tripe as well — Dan Brown’s interminable series of thriller novels comes to mind for me, and everyone seems to have a pop artist they love to hate. In other words, being popular is not in and of itself a mark of quality.
Of course, the inverse is also true; unpopularity is not necessarily an indication of poor quality. To continue the analogy, Ulysses is a famously inacessible novel, and not widely read outside outside of the literary community, but it’s also considered one of the finest works of literature in the English language. In video game terms, we might call it a “hardcore” book. :)
Anyway, I think there’s space for accessible games with broad appeal as well as less accessible, perhaps less popular games. My hope is that Nintendo, and companies like it, will not fall back on only producing the former type; and I think their recognition of the need for “bridge” titles is a good sign for the continuation of both.
by Dan Bruno on March 21, 2008 at 10:45 am #
It’ll throw hardcore gamers off, but I’d love to see Nintendo take their core franchises and completely re-invent them with the Wii in mind. Super Mario Galaxy was a nice crack at it, but like you said, most casual players weren’t engaged in the same way they were with Wii Sports. Is there a way to provide that level of accessibility without completely sacrificing depth? I’m not sure, but I’d like to see them try.
by Patrick Klepek on March 24, 2008 at 3:46 pm #