The last Zelda game I played was “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past” for the old Super Nintendo Entertainment System.  In my mind, to this day it is one of the best videogames of all time.  Sixteen years later, I finally pick up my second Zelda title, “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” for the Nintendo Wii.  Filled with trepidation and nostalgia, I set off on my journey with Link.

The game opens slowly, letting you delve into the character of Link through the eyes of the other villagers.  You get to see that he is a good man, well-respected, and beloved by the people and children of his village.  He is a hard worker and a simple person at heart.  The story slowly draws you in and after some settling in, I found myself enjoying the pace – but only after the second time I played the introduction and realized that it’s no Mario Galaxy.

After a slow and meaningful introduction into Link’s character, I was intrigued by the first puzzles it presented to me – how to obtain a slingshot so he can play with the kids.  This wasn’t just a “gather some money” kind of quest.  There were a few problems to solve in the interim:

The shopkeeper won’t sell me anything because she is depressed about her cat.
The cat won’t come home because he’s busy trying to catch a fish in the stream.
The lady who has a fishing rod won’t give it to me because she is preoccupied with a missing baby basket.
The monkey won’t give up the stolen basket because he is beyond my reach.

It took a while to solve the problem that was presented to me.  But through some clever plot device, I was introduced to the idea of using a Hawk to aid me.

Somewhere, an old puzzle-solving voice (long disused by all the twitch-gaming I’ve grown accustomed to) spoke up: “Use hawk on monkey.”

As the story unfolded, I explored my first real dungeon.  And as I started making my way around the dungeon, every room opened up to me like yet another series of puzzles that I needed to solve.  The game slowly but surely showed me a vocabulary with interacting with the world around me.  And as puzzle after puzzle unfolded before me, a familiar sensation of experimentation, discovery and achievement filled my heart as puzzle after puzzle was solved.  But what stopped me was the vocabulary of how I was solving puzzles.

That puzzle-solving voice kept speaking:
“Use lantern on torch.”
“Use boomerang on bomb.”
“Use boomerang on bomb then wall.”
“Stand on spiderweb.  Use latern on spiderweb.”

Each room was a new puzzle and to solve each puzzle I had to understand the proper vocabulary to manipulate the puzzle.  Unlike other videogames where the solution is readily apparent with pushing levels, blocks and crates, I found myself seriously wondering what I was doing wrong to get the dungeon key from its treasure box.  But once the solution clicked in my head, the familiar satisfaction of its realization resounded in my mind.  It reminded me of the old “point and click” adventure games that I loved when I was a child.  The puzzle-solving voice reemerged from its long hiatus from this disused genre.

The games I loved the most were the ones that really made you think.  Games like King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, and even Yahtzee Croshaw’s Adventure Game Studio stories were among the games I most revered.  For the most part I had wondered why the genre died off with the advent of 3D gaming.

There have been many attempts at reviving the “point and click” adventure genre, and some have been met with acclaim and success, but nothing has sparked the same commanding presence the genre once had in the industry.  Also the genre was never able to overcome it’s resounding flaw: many of the puzzles and solutions were either too obvious or convoluted beyond reasonable logic.  So once “point and click” adventures got replaced with first-person “point and click” headshots, it spelled the end of the adventure game.  Instant gratification replaced long thought processes and solutions.

Or did it?

The challenge that I was met with in the first few hours of Twilight Princess narrative and puzzles made me question that assumption of that gamers always need instant gratification.  The first dungeon presented me with challenging and well thought-out puzzles mixed that almost made me lo0k for an online walkthrough just to get by.   And the story’s pacing was slow, but it was meant for you to get into the pace of a rustic village and get to know the silent yet steadfast character of our hero – something you don’t see much of in many of our FMV-loaded JRPGs of the day.

Twilight Princess revived a hopeful spark in me that the principles of the old adventure games have not been lost but evolved into something new.  I am looking forward to more of this already masterful work and seeing if my hopes are fulfilled by the promise of Zelda – the Twilight Princess.

I’m a little late coming into the current generation of videogames.  Between being recently married and having two children within the span of 5 years, my life has a gamer somewhat stalled out.  Now, having a vivacious and polite three and a half year old, (and with gracious consideration by my wife) we have gotten a Wii.  My son has been all about Wii Sports with boxing and bowling.  But we really didn’t get the full experience of the Wii until we played our first major game for the system:

I have to hand it to the marketing people at Nintendo.  Despite my son never playing a Mario game in his life, he could not avert his eyes from the brightly colored box of Mario taking flight into the cosmos.  He simply wanted to play that game.  And despite the fact of my wife being a videogame-virgin, she still knew Mario’s reputation of being family-friendly and fun for kids.  We agreed to take the game that evening and play it the next day.

When I got home from work, I found my wife jumping up and down, frantically waving the Wii controller, and yelping at Mario who was gleefully bouncing across the TV screen.  My son was cheering her on.  She yelled out, “How do you beat a fire-breating octopus???“  But before I could speak, she finished off the boss with a few well-placed spins.  After catching her breath, she explained to me how our son really wanted her to start playing it and told me that she had finished the first couple of sections of Mario Galaxy all by herself before I had even gotten home.

My wife doesn’t play videogames.  She has never played a Mario game, much less a 3D Mario game.  Even I missed out on Mario 64 and the Gamecube Marios.  Yet here was my non-gamer wife playing Mario Galaxy and beating level after level as the steady progression of difficulty climbed and she was slowly trained into perfectly timed jumps and spins.

I would call from work and I’d hear my wife and son playing in the background for “just one more star.”  And when my three year and a half old accidentally deleted her 87-star progression, she was mildly disappointed, but this was quickly dashed away from the opportunity to play the game over again and with greater skill and precision than the first time she played.

Everything about the game has a level of polish and detail that astounded me as for the first-time I was watching two new gamers being made.  The catchy tunes would quickly find their way into your humming or whistling in idle moments.  The visual style was so captivating that I would chuckle as I heard my wife cooing at the cute Lumas who sped across the castle and giggling at feeding the hungry ones.

But what I found most astounding was the gameplay itself – rediscovering its sheer simplicity.

Mario at its heart is a very simple game of timing jumps and spins.  Yet the sheer variety of this interaction is not lost in Mario Galaxy with its incredible wide variety of worlds, gravities, and camera angles – which may distract at first, but quickly become a unique challenge of rule variations and delightful visual distractions.  But the challenges were never so drawn out that it would frustrate the player – long enough to provide a challenge, but short enough that it enticed the “just one more” factor of addictiveness.

It then dawned on me that Mario Galaxy blends the strengths of both hardcore games and casual games.  It is a perfect amalgamation of the genres.

There is an elegant simplicity in the rules of the game.  The strength of gameplay is in learning its variations and unique applications to increasingly complex situations.  The levels are never too long.  And the challenge builds gradually as you learn and incorporate more skills.  The variety of gameplay allows the player to choose levels that cater to their strengths while allowing them to revisit weak skill sets at a later time once they’ve grown.  And there are great mini-game distractions.

And as I watched this magnum-opus unfold before my eyes in watching my son cheer on my videogame-virgin wife, I remembered what it was that I loved so much in videogames.  When everything just comes together in a harmony of sounds, sights and interactions, the game no longer is a game.  The game becomes a means of transporting you to another world of wonders and possibilities.  The game loses itself and becomes…

PURE MAGIC.

Super Mario Galaxy - Pure Magic

One has to wonder how difficult it is for a small development company to compete with the “big boys” who have practically unlimited money and resources.  But from personal experience, I’ve seen small teams of developers outdo even large-scale corporations.  Small team developers have the ability to innovate and create new technologies and techniques with less overhead.  They have less to lose and so much more to gain through their hard work.

In the words of Jeff Tunnel:

A “band” of five great game makers supported by a world wide contractor market and readily available low cost technology can make an incredibly great game. They just need passion and creativity, and they can kick the ass of any of the big companies.

Both Aquaria and World of Goo were created by a team of two guys working on their home computers.

Ultimately, it boils down to talent, ingenuity and guts.