Home for a couple weeks? Looking for a game to play?
Well, why not try and get in on Assasin’s Creed, one of the most popular franchises on the Xbox360?
Oh, maybe because it sucks.
First of all, boring. I mean, I don’t want to simplify what was obviously someone’s hard work by explaining away the story as the Matrix but with old-timey assassination instead of running around in leather coats. But it’s the Matrix with old-timey assassination instead of running around in leather coats. And imagine if you will, a Matrix video game where you not only play in the Matrix and beat the hell out of people and fly, but also a game in which you do things outside of the Matrix, such as walk around in a laboratory and push a button in order to hear your character lament, “Man. I can’t even change clothes!”
I give you: Assassin’s Creed.
This isn’t to say that the game has no redeeming qualities. It might be pretty great. It might be, like most things hanging on shockingly white walls in art museums, too subtle and too time-consuming for me to really enjoy. But come on. I don’t want a whole bizarre plot where there’s the past and the future and nothing is as it seems and we are dealing with memory and computer simulation and a scientist who is pushing things just a little too far. Sometimes I just want to wake up and not put on legitimate pants for a few hours, and it would be nice to have a videogame that allows me to do so without learning about things like Eagle Vision and how Eagle Vision related to being synched up with a past-life version of myself.
Enter: Mario Kart Wii.
This is the first Wii game I’ve played in a while. And with good reason. As fun as the Wii can be, it’s got to be the least fun console ever made for solo gaming. As much fun as it is to do something goofy amongst friends, it feels silly to slash at your TV in order to make a small elf man attack a goblin with a sword. Not silly in a good way, either. Silly in a way where you’re setting yourself up for a series of nightmares involving a webcam secretly installed in your apartment that is activated when you move your coffee table to the side of the room in order to make enough space for serious swordsmanship. Trust me on this one.
Mario Kart Wii has somewhat the same problem. It plays just like all the other Mario Karts, except that you tilt the remote from side to side in order to turn. Which is fine. I get it. And there’s a fun factor there. There’s also a factor, though, called the lap factor, which is the factor involved in me just wanting to set my hands in my lap and play a game without moving around so much.
I know, it’s a petty complaint. How taxing is it to just tilt your hands a little?
Consider this, though. In the last three or four days I drove around 845 miles (thanks, Google maps!) in a real, human car. This is not a ton of effort, really. You’re seated in what would be considered a comfortable chair in most situations. You have climate control. And it’s not like turning the wheel requires a tremendous physical effort, at least since I upgraded from a Grand Am and into the world of automobiles with fully-functional power steering.
So why, after all the driving, would I feel exhausted? Tired. Wiped out just a little bit. And also, why after doing that would I want to relax by playing a game that simulates, well, driving?
The first is a pretty simple answer. Because you have to pay attention the whole time. You can zone out, but not nearly the way you can when you’re at home, right? I mean, clearly some of you are doing it on the road because no matter where I’ve been, there’s someone driving 10 MPH below the limit in the left lane with a turn signal on and a dumb bumper sticker. But you SHOULDN’T.
It’s the only answer I have, the attention.
The second, though, isn’t really a complicated answer. The reason I would play Mario Kart to decompress after a long drive is because playing Mario Kart isn’t like driving at all. It’s fantasy driving. It’s driving with colorful characters on the road, a dinosaur man, a fat Italian plumber and his evil counterpart, a baby. A fucking baby! Instead of Dodge Durango, Chevy Suburban, Subaru, Subaru, Volvo, Ford Truck. Whoop. De. Shit.
Not to mention that the way I’m free to drive is very different. Need to get by someone? Ram them off the goddamn road. Fall into an endless crevice? Don’t worry, a friendly cloud fisherman will rescue you. In my regular driving, I can’t even drive up a runaway truck ramp without causing a big to-do, let alone a ramp that accelerates me to speeds dangerous to human health and directly into an active volcano.
And finally, it’s fun because it’s an idealized version of driving, a version where people are all of a mindset where they’re trying to get from one point to another as quickly as possible. No fucking around with stupid stoplights, no waiting for a dumb iPhone nav to try and convince me to drive over a pedestrian bridge, none of that crap. Just hit the gas and don’t let up. If you can physically make a turn, then you’ve established the speed limit.
Which brings us to the problem central to the Wii. If those are the things that are most fun about Mario Kart, and if the physical act of driving is actually quite boring, why did you spend so much time simulating the physical act of driving when it’s the gameplay that makes this all worthwhile?
The tracks? Cool, fun. But only about half of them are legitimately new tracks. The rest are revamps from the various Mario Kart iterations, so fans of the series aren’t getting a lot of new road here.
The characters? Fine. But how much difference is there between Bowser and Donkey Kong anyway? And is anyone really going through the game and selecting different racers for different courses? Are there psychopaths out there doing this stuff? I mean, I’ve been writing about a game that’s 5 years old for the last twenty minutes, and even I find that to be insane and wasteful behavior.
My question is why they didn’t make the Wii with an option to turn the motion-sensing off. Why couldn’t I go into a menu and say I just wanted to play regular-style? It’s really not that much to ask.
There is an answer, however, and the answer is that when the Wii came out Nintendo needed us to buy into motion sensing as the next big thing. It’s what they had and no one else did. It’s why your parents probably have a Wii in their house. People can be made to understand how amazing it is that you move a wand and make things happen, much more than they can be made to understand the technical achievement of, say, Skyrim.
What bothers me, though, and what bothers me about the Wii U, is that instead of creating games where the motion is an integral and desirable part of the gameplay, Nintendo is making the same games they did before, but now you control them differently. It’s hard to ignore in Mario Kart, especially when playing with a familiar character on a familiar course while wearing a familiar pair of sweats that you just now realized may have been in rotation when you played the LAST Mario Kart before this one.
I’m not a purist in any sense of the word, gaming or otherwise. So if someone wants to throw in a magic wand or an extra screen or a lifesize sex doll in order to make a game work, I’ll give it a whirl. Lord knows it’s not my first time with two of those three items, a puzzle I’ll leave mysterious for everyone. But I think what I’d like to see, what was really pointed out by Mario Kart Wii, is a game that I can’t imagine playing any other way. A motion-control game where the movement is not only such an essential part of the game, but an essential part of the FUN, that I am awed that someone managed to create it, and furthermore feel excited to move the coffee table to the other side of the room.
-Pete is a staff writer for helpfulsnowman.com and is a recognized expert at experiencing media about 5 years after everyone else. You can follow him wherever twitters are sold. And ask him about the Shield.