What do YOU think? Beauty in simplicity
Posted on February 25, 2011 by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features
I’m an English kind of guy. I know my grammar, I know my punctuation, I know my spelling, and I use it all to the best of my ability, but no matter how many English classes you take, there’s one lesson you can only learn from experience: Beauty lies in simplicity. When you’re writing an essay, for instance, you will have the greatest chance at a quality piece by combing out every single unnecessary word that’s stowed around in all the nooks and crannies of the paper and leaving your reader with the simplest, most concise and effective iteration of your thoughts possible. After writing countless articles both for NE and other outlets, I can tell you with certainty that this advice holds true for any writing you will do.
Recently, I’ve found that this rule applies not only to my writing, but to the games I play as well. In playing Mario Sports Mix the past couple of days (review forthcoming!), I’ve noticed how much it has helped my enjoyment of the game that it is controlled in traditional “2-button” fashion, Wiimote held sideways. Likewise, New Super Mario Bros. is a game I just love to play, in part because of how simple it is to control. It’s not just Nintendo, though; Team-17’s Worms: Battle Islands is a two-button game, and I love that game as well. The more I think about it, the more I see a correlation. I don’t think I can think of a single Wiimote-held-sideways game that I don’t enjoy!
On the other end of the spectrum, though, are games like Call of Duty. Literally every button on a Wiimote+Nunchuck combo is used when playing that game, and additional gestures have to be mapped to motions because of its complexity. Grenade, sprint, shoot, crouch, aim; and that’s not even taking into account that sometimes a single button is used for multiple actions! Now, I’m not saying I have any trouble playing these games, and I happen to like quite a few of them, but compared to much simpler games, these just seem way too overly complex. Like metal music, or Lady Gaga’s outfits.
Seriously, what are you wearing?
A lot of people would argue with me and say that games like Call of Duty or Super Street Fighter IV need that many buttons in order to be playable. I guess that’s true in some respect, but that’s only a product of where the industry has gone in the past few years. I once hacked my Wii and threw the homebrew channel on there (it’s long gone now; didn’t really have much a use), and one of the games I could download was Wolfenstein 3D. I sort of figured “Why not?” and got it. Guess what? It was a two button game, and I truly thought it was much more fun to play than any of these modern shooters that we see every day. There was no sprint, no crazy cinematic experiences, and even no aiming up and down; just pure, untampered with gameplay. And my goodness, was that fun.
I guess the real bottom line here is the balance of accessibility of controls vs. complexity of controls. Some people like their game controls to be super complex; I’m not one of those people. I prefer very simple controls with a very deep and complex level design. Fighting games don’t usually appeal to me for that very reason: Controls are often very complex, and level design is usually fairly bland, whereas a game like Zelda tends to have pretty simple controls with very deep and complex levels. Same with Mario, same with Mario Kart, and same with Metroid. Perhaps it’s just Nintendo that’s really good at making things accessible, yet deep at the same time? I’m not sure, but a lot of other developers struggle with that I think, and we get a lot of games that use every button on a 360 or PS3 or Wiimote+Nunchuck controller as the result of it. Not my thing personally, but perhaps you feel differently.
But seriously, do we really need control sticks that are also buttons?
