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Number Six:
In 2003, videogames offended my ears. And I'm not just talking about the horrifying voices in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour. No, I'm talking about the universe, man. Well, kind of.
It gets me thinking, as I write this -- why the hell is the Gameboy still around? I remember, back before the insertcredit.com forums died earlier this year, Chris Kohler and Eric-Jon had been having a heated argument about the Gameboy Advance SP; Eric-Jon was upset that the machine had no headphone jack. Kohler insisted that you could buy a headphone jack for just 500 yen; Eric-Jon said you couldn't buy it in America. Kohler said he'd send Eric-Jon one of them. Eric-Jon said no need -- he was more upset with Nintendo's deciding to make the headphone jack an add-on than the fact that he couldn't buy it, period. Kohler said something rude about Eric-Jon's mother, and it got dangerous from there.
Months later, Eric-Jon and I were in Torrance's Game Land browsing used NES titles. Eric-Jon picked up Tengen's beautifully illegal port of Fantasy Zone and the Tradewest-published, Rareware-produced holy gem Solar Jetman, which, come to think of it, are similar in more ways than two. Vincent Diamante was with us, grooving to something groovy in the Saturn aisle, when his cellular phone rang, and it was for me. I love getting calls on other people's cellular phones.
It was Chris Kohler. He was calling me because I'd told him, a month earlier, to call that specific cell phone at eight on that specific Thursday night. The deal was that I'd told him I'd probably be in Torrance that night -- and this is odd because that was my first time in Torrance in six months. Chris Kohler said he, too, was in Torrance -- for the first time in his life -- with a friend who I had never met. I asked where he was, and he said he was in a car. I asked his precise location, and he gave it to me. I told him to turn left. He did, and he wound up in the parking lot of Game Land.
(Chris Kohler can attest that this is true -- and let's hope he does so, in the comments thread on this article! Really, I'm like Doc in "Back to the Future II" Western-Unioning letters to the Marty McFlys of the world. And my mother told me I had no talents. Too bad this is my only talent.)
So it was that soon, Chris Kohler and Eric-Jon Waugh were united at last. When entering the import game shop, Chris Kohler was suddenly filled with the idea to buy a Gameboy Advance SP headphone adapter, which he would then give to Eric-Jon when he (inevitably) saw him at E3 the next day. That Eric-Jon didn't own an SP made this a most interesting gift idea. One look in Eric-Jon's direction, however, and Kohler's idea fell flat.
The confrontation was something like an anti-confrontation. They seemed to get along a little more than halfway well. And I fell into a lapsing recollection of the months-ago debate, as good friend Doug Jones bought a copy of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for Gameboy Advance, a game Eric-Jon would soon review, complaining about the music's sucking, a review that Chris Kohler would ridicule on his personal website.
My thoughts are this -- what's the deal with music in handheld games? I remarked a long time ago, when Doug was playing Megaman and Bass on GBA, that "No one really cares about the music in portable games these days, not even the people making that music." I, for one, am more than content to turn the sound off on every portable game I partake of. There's just never anything to hold my attention; furthermore, I don't want to annoy people in public. And if I'm, say, on a train in Tokyo playing Dragon Quest III, chances are I'd rather be listening to some punk-rock via my CD player, anyway.
Before you call me a bastard, cold and unfeeling about the games I play when I'm playing them, hear me out: I want a game that makes me listen to the music. I want a game that forces me to plug in those headphones. As hinted at in an earlier entry, Final Fantasy VI would do this for me. Mother 2 already does. I want more games like Mother 2, and less games like Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, to which voices were added just because they had a whole hell of a lot of cartridge space left over.
Nintendo made the headphone jack optional on Gameboy Advance SP not because they're cheap bastards, as Eric-Jon might imply, and not because they're efficient spenders, as Chris Kohler would attest -- they made it optional because they know that no one ever really wants to listen to their portable music, anyway; they'd sell the headphone jack separately, in as many places as there are vending machines in Akihabara that sell Dr. Pepper.
Nintendo made mistakes in 2003, and most of them revolve around ignoring a problem, whether it's lousy music on Gameboy Advance games or the fact that Sony really, seriously, is going to produce a handheld system this coming year, and one with big software support and interesting specifications. If nothing else, it's very, really possible that the PSP, which may or may not function as an MP3 player in addition to a nuclear detonation device, will support games with music that I want to hear, and maybe voice-acting, too. The Japanese, who sometimes spend as much money on monthly cellular phone bills as some Americans spend on videogames in a year, will no doubt eat up this possibility to immerse themselves completely in something interesting while riding trains back and forth between boring places.
The Gameboy has lived as long as it has because, to date, no one system has been undoubtedly better than the Gameboy in all aspects. The Neo-Geo Pocket Color was a nice piece of kit, yeah -- and the damned thing even had Metal Slug! Still, to Joe(taro) Consumer(naka), what makes the NGPC the system to own?
The Game Gear, way back when, had a back-lit screen. It also had about one new game a month. The PC-Engine GT had laser-fine graphics and all the PC-Engine HU-Cards you could fit in your coat pocket, even Devil's Crush; it was also six hundred times the price of the Gameboy.
The WonderSwan (Color (Crystal)) was as thick as a credit card, had half of one good game and half a million games based on anime, and was remarkably technologically inferior to the Gameboy Color.
<Editor’s note: This is blatantly false, as the SwanCrystal nears the GBA in terms of 2D power. But tims will be tims.>
The GP32 can't succeed because Brandon Sheffield likes it, and he won't let anyone else like it, because then he wouldn't like it anymore.
The Nokia N-Gage causes sixth-degree palm burns to those who dare lift it.
The Gameboy is not without its weaknesses, however. Nintendo has had many years to make the Gameboy into what gamers really, honestly dream of holding in their hands. Gamers want four face buttons in addition to triggers. They want a damned back-lit screen. They want a damned bigger screen. Yes, bigger even than that of the GBA.
Some of them (uh . . . me?) want full-motion video, or polygons, and gadgets, and maybe even an option to directly connect the unit into a television for at-home play. Some gamers want a system that doesn't have to look ten years old when blown-up onto a television.
I want a system that's not backwards-compatible. Fuck backwards-compatibility, Jack -- or, well, fuck it in the traditional sense. I mean, if anything, enable me to play emulators. That'd be cool. I don't need to use the actual cartridges.
While Nintendo's release of most every Zelda game on one limited-edition disc late in this year makes it look like they're learning something, I, for one, find it not enough. That the disc excludes Zelda: A Link to the Past, because that game is currently still selling on Gameboy Advance -- to me, that's as big an indication of dumbassedness as the exclusion of the headphone adapter from the GBA SP. Behold:
Does Nintendo not realize that people playing A Link to the Past on their Gamecubes would be playing it on the Gamecube because they want to play it at home, and that the people who play it on their Gameboy Advances might, in all honesty, be playing outside the home, because they love that game enough to want to play it outside, and that excluding A Link to the Past from the compilation disc is doing nothing more than forcing people who already own the GBA cartridge to play the game on their Gameboy Player?
REALLY, NOW
Or do they leave the game off the compilation disc so that people wanting to play the game on their televisions again will buy both the GBA game and a Gameboy Player, throwing away another 10,000 yen Nintendo's way?
Is this good business? Not by exact definition. Is it crafty business? In a sick way. Again, is it good business? Not if it's sick, you sick bastard. Is it Japanese business? Kind of -- just . . . not enough of it.
If Japanese business really is war, Nintendo is like a hardened general suddenly afraid of losing his son in a raid on the enemy castle.
Meanwhile, Sony's building a god-damned Death Star, or a Hidden Fortress full of ninjas, depending on your film preference.
(And lord knows Sony has a lot of ninjas. I'll spare you the story about when I ran into some Sony PlayStation ninjas in an alley in Kabukicho; with a right hand full of imagawayaki and a left hand full of ice candy, I could do naught more than run. Remind me to tell it in detail later.)
The longtime Nintendo fan in me, as this year draws to a close, is offended less by Mario Kart Double Dash!!'s "childishness" and overuse of exclamatory punctuation, and more by its reliance on that "blue shell" gameplay that tips the balances unfairly in the favor of whoever's losing. If the real world worked that way, Nintendo, you'd no doubt be on top. Not saying games should imitate life or anything, though, just -- get real, here, for a second. Awaken, and rise, and open your eyes, or some shit like that. You don't need to make an MMORPG or something to get with "the program" -- hell if even I know what "The Program" is -- just, well, listen to the problems told by reason.
The mistakes Nintendo made in 2003, however, do not in the least completely overshadow the good things that came from them -- I love me some Donkey Konga, for example, enough to write you all a review of it at some point soon. It's just that there are a few glaring things sticking out that might make next year tragically interesting. What exactly will happen, I won't say anything about until next year. And for next year to begin, lord knows this year has to end. And for that to happen, the show right here must continue.
[next: number five: lord knows i love to jump]
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