One thing that I absolutely hate is having to alt+tab in games, or having to play in windowed mode. I’d imagine that many other people probably feel the same way. This happens most often in MMOs, mainly because there’s often need to get to browser windows and media players during extended periods of unbroken play. Just because of the nature of the online game, I find myself sacrificing optimal brightness/contrast and graphical quality for the ability to quickly alt+tab. It’s more important to have information at the tips of my fingers than to have 5 trillion more shaders on my in-game fingertips.

This is why I can’t understand why more MMOs don’t have these same capabilities in-game. Even EQLive had a media player capable of playing mp3s, if rudimentary. EVE is capable of playing the same, and I know that there are several other games with similar capabilities, but what about the big players? There’s not the slightest semblance of a media player in EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft, and the former is one of the biggest resource hogs known to man. Alt+tabbing EQ2 is like playing russian roulette.

To the game’s credit, though, after logging back in recently I was pleasantly surprised with the addition of a browser window. Given the open source nature of the Gecko browser engine and the prevalence of the firefox browser, I’m completely at a loss for why in-game browsers don’t come standard in games. I don’t want to imply that it would be a walk in the park to add that kind of capability, but clearly the tools are there. Standards-compliant browser rendering engines are available, for free, to whomever wants to use them. My cell phone has a browser, why not my game?

Being a student of economics, I realize that specialization of programs independently of each other will result in better software (that is, if a game company writes their own browsers and mp3 players in game, they’re taking time away from developing features in the game, etc), but in a world where music and the web are two of the most important components of daily life (ipod, iphone anyone?), I hardly see the harm in providing these to gamers. Maybe the innovators behind xfire will expand their aim to the media/browsing world in the near future. At least that’s my hope.

I’ve been on something of a wii-frenzy lately. It’s the only current-gen console I own (and the only 4th-gen console I will ever own) and I’m trying to “keep up” with the console by playing through all of the headliner games. So far I’ve played through several, the most notable being Super Paper Mario and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. These two games are very well placed on the wii, their controls complement the capabilities of the wiimote (and in the case of Zelda, the nunchuck) very well, and the story and gameplay are most excellent. Another thing I’ve noticed, independent of the console itself, is that these two games (in particular) are very long.

Super Paper Mario, when it was all said and done, took about 17 hours to beat. Of course 17 hours isn’t really too great a time investment for someone with hundreds of days locked up in MMOs, but I don’t think anyone would disagree that for a console game aimed at a younger audience, 17 hours is about the threshold, at least as far as attention-span is concerned. The game was engaging, witty, and oh-so-loveable for the entire 17 hours, to the point where I didn’t even realize how long I’d been sitting in my chair playing. That, in my opinion, is a good measure of a game’s quality.

In Twilight Princess, however, I’ve already spent a good 35+ hours adventuring non-stop (my gameplay says 44 hours, but I’m not sure if it counts up while the game is paused, etc, so this is adjusted a bit) with the strategy guide. I mention the guide just because I’ll finish the game with every heart piece, poe, bug, and special item, so this may be a fairly bloated number. Just running through the temples and everything may be fairly shorter. Sitting down and playing for 5-6 hour sessions in Twilight Princess doesn’t seem weird at all. The game is so fluid and continuous that I hardly flinch when presented with a new series of temples to grind through at 2-3 hours each.

My conclusion, and the point of this article, doesn’t really have anything to do with these two games in particular. The reason I wrote this article is because I’m high on that feeling, the one you get after you beat a really long game. To me, it also feels a bit like the feeling you get when you loot a really freakin’ sick item in an MMO that you’ve been playing 40+ hours just to get. The thing that intrigues me, though, is which feeling is stronger? Which feeling has a more lasting effect? Maybe the answer to this seems obvious to a lot of people reading this. I wonder, however, how many people would continue raiding and playing MMO games full time if they realized that the feeling that comes from multiple days of raiding and the feeling that comes from playing through a single-player game are similar?

In an MMO, you are rewarded with a permanent upgrade to your character (permanent, at least, until the next expansion comes out). In a single-player game, you’re rewarded by being “released” from the game itself. You probably no longer have the urge to play as much. In addition, you’re rewarded socially to, in my opinion, a greater extent than you are in an MMO.

Think about it this way: when you hear people talk about EverQuest, or any MMO they’ve played in the past, there are many people who can relate, because there are many people who played. At the same time, even people who never breached level 20 in EverQuest are still able to talk nostalgically about the game, simply because playing and getting somewhere was an achievement in and of itself. Even if the person talking spent years raiding, they can still level with you on some topics: “omg jboots quest”. Here, so many years later, the newb is on the same level as the pro raider in terms of their endearment toward the game. In a single player, game, however, people can talk about their experiences with beating the game. It seems like there’s a far greater difference between someone who’s beat a game talking about it and someone who hasn’t. “dude, ocarina of time was so awesome, remember how hard the ganondorf fight was when we were little?”

Maybe part of it is that the likelihood of a person beating 10 single-player games is higher relative to the likelihood of a person playing an MMO for 10 times as long as it takes to beat a single-player game.

So, and this is the essence of this article, why would you spend the same amount of time achieving a marginal upgrade for your character when you can get the same social feeling from beating a game on your own? I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean that everyone shouldn’t. I’ve done both, and don’t regret either choice. It does give an interesting, new interpretation of time, though.

I went to a wedding this past week in Portland (then I drove to Seattle, because Seattle is awesome). During the long drive from Montana, I got to spend some quality time (or, at least, all the time that I wasn’t reading Harry Potter) with my Nintendo DS. It was nice to sit down and dig into some of the games I’ve bought but have only played topically thusfar.

The game I found myself playing most during the trip was Super Mario 64 DS. I loved the original game (if you’ve read the blog at all, you’ve probably been able to guess that), and spent way too much time playing it when I bought my Nintendo 64 way back when. Well, all of this talk lately about Super Mario Galaxy has gotten me pretty pumped for Mario games in general, and this one seemed like a good diversion for a long car ride. It definitely is.

The game itself is absolutely great on DS. It has all of the original graphics and levels (including some additional ones), and most of the textures have been updated to make a castle which is absolutely stunning on the small screen of the DS. The major change from the N64 version is that players start the game as Yoshi, and must get 8 stars in the castle in order to unlock Mario (who’s been tricked and kidnapped by Bowser). After unlocking Mario, players can switch between the two characters, and eventually unlock Luigi and Wario as well. Each has their own “specialty” moves, but the entire game could probably be beaten by Mario, as in the original.

The thing that really gets me about this game, though, is the fact that you’re playing a game specifically designed for the Nintendo 64’s 3-D control stick on the DS, which only has a four-directional control pad. Sure, you can whip out your DS wand and wiggle it around on the touch screen for sub-part, completely inaccurate (i’m not bitter) movement, but then you spend most of your time looking at the touchscreen instead of watching the gameplay. Even though the control pad is infuriating, it’s, in my opinion, the best control scheme available.

For the most part, the control pad is accurate, but for those who remember the way the camera works (or doesn’t), you can begin to see why the control scheme is infuriating. The camera will swivel to match the terrain of the level, switching the control subtly as it does, leaving the player a difficult task when negotiating turns with thin landings. Another downfall of this control scheme is that there’s barely any precision-adjustment; you press the up and right keys, and mario won’t nudge one direction, he’ll turn almost 90 degrees.

All in all, Super Mario 64 DS is still a great game, and it’s definitely possible to have fun with on the DS once you become acclimated to the controls. The fun that is taken away by controlling a 3-D entity with 2-D controls is not nearly enough to make this game “bad” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a constant reminder that just because you can put a great game on a new, smaller console doesn’t mean you should.