Super Mario Galaxy: Good but Needs Improvement4
Matt posted in Games, Wii on December 24th, 2007

Super Mario Galaxy currently has a score of 97.3% on gamerankings, which is an average of all the reviews. For a while it was even higher and the number one rated game of all time. Currently, it’s 0.3% lower than the Ocarina of Time, which has reclaimed its gold medal. Is it deserving of this high praise? I don’t think so, and I’m going to devote a lot of words to win you over to my way of thinking.

Since I don’t want to be flamed for the rest of my life, let me preface this by saying I liked the game. I played through and got all 120 stars. There were a lot of cool things in it like gravity switching around, and they really did some cool stuff with small worlds and the like. Had I not liked it, I wouldn’t have gotten all 120 stars. I love platformers and few people are making pure platformers these days, so it was fun to finally play another good platformer. Having said that, I’m going to break the bad news to you. I’d give the game a 7.5 out of 10. Now before all of the Mario fans burn down my internet server, I’d say that my review scale (which perhaps I will use in the future, but it seems rare I get a chance to play a game these days or write on my site) is not biased towards the high end of the review spectrum like most game reviewer scales. If I see a game I’m excited about gets a 75% on gamerankings.com, I probably won’t even play the demo. That seems odd because the scale is essentially wasting half of its gradations. So, my personal scale is nice and linear. 7.5 is good on my scale, sort of like 1up, but the text of the their 7.5 reviews don’t seem to support that. If I had to convert it to a reviewer scale, I would need a complex formula and statistical analysis, but if you’re really twisting my arm, I suppose I’d guess it’d be about an 8.25 out of 10 in reviewer land.

Now as I said I liked the game and found a lot of things in it cool. I’m guessing one can read about those things at one of the numerous game review websites where the reviewers are so enamored with the game that they hope to carry Super Mario’s babies. Because I’m relatively long winded and not sure anyone’s actually going to read this to the end, I’m not going to waste words to sing the praises of the game that you’re probably familiar with. So, let me focus on the negatives despite that I think there are many positives - otherwise I wouldn’t have said it’s a good game.

First and foremost, the Wii specific aspects of it are really bad. Now, this is just my opinion, and I’m sure many disagree, but since this is my blog, I’m going to say what I think. Collecting star shards is no fun. I don’t really enjoy dragging a cursor over the screen. Sure, it’s not the main focus of the game, but if you want to unlock certain galaxies, you need a ton of star shards, so I found myself constantly dragging the cursor over the screen. Perhaps my sensor is a bad place, but I have to hold my arm up in order to point it at the screen. When you play for hours at a time, this can get really annoying, so I always dreaded collecting star shards. I also worked out a system where I could sit a certain place on my couch and prop my arm up with a pillow in order to keep pointing the cursor at the screen. Lazy? Perhaps, but I don’t play games to get exercise – I play them to relax.

The shake to spin mechanic was a terrible idea in my opinion. In the September issue of Game Developer magazine, Mick West wrote an excellent article on programming responsiveness. Although Galaxies does not suffer from the latency of pipelining the game logic, the lack of responsiveness is created by the time it takes to do a gesture. I think it probably takes at least a tenth of a second from when you set out to spin to when it actually spins just because you have to shake the controller back and forth before it registers. This is just completely unnecessary. Perhaps some of you can do it faster, but I can’t imagine anyone can do it as fast as pressing a button. So that aspect of it is frustrating especially when you are trying to do very time critical things like spinning at the apex of you jump in order to do a high jump. Getting that latency as small as possible is important. For example, try playing a game that’s running at 10 frames a second. It doesn’t feel very responsive, does it? That’s because it takes a tenth of a second for your input to be reflected. That’s normally why people like games to run at 60 frames per second rather than 10 or 20.

In addition, the camera is bad for platforming. Mark Cerny said the things to work out in pre-production are camera, character and controls, and those are really the three most important things in a game. For the most part, the camera is way too far back. This causes problems in several ways. Firstly, if you were to do your spin attack against a goomba, it often misses because you can’t accurately judge distance because the camera is so far back. There is a recharge timer on you spin attack, so missing your initial thrust gives the goomba the chance to hit you. Now, you are down to 2/3 hit points. Getting a coin gives you that hit point back. If there are no coins around, you can jump on the goomba to squash him and get a coin, but landing on his head is tricky because it’s difficult to see where you are going to land – again this is because the camera is really far back. There are many challenges that are made unnecessarily difficult because of the camera. There was one where the world was made out of cake (the cake is a lie) and moving floors with holes in them that would have been fun if the camera weren’t so terrible. I couldn’t see where I was going to land, and if you ended up in the wrong spot you fell to death. There is no camera control, so this only makes this problem worse. (You sometimes can change the camera to another preset angle with the dpad, but often that is disabled) Camera control would at least allow me the ability to put the camera in a better spot for the particular jump I’m trying to make.

Additionally, there are minigames that use the Wiimote poorly for a frustrating experience. The first example was Ray Surfing. You have to point the wiimote at the screen and twist to steer. This would have been 100 times better if you could just use the analog stick. There was a similar one where you used it like a giant joystick and had Mario roll around on a ball that was sort of like Monkeyball. This would have been better with the joystick too. The reason is because the joystick autocenters, which is quite helpful as well as you can easily see where its sensitivity starts and ends, whereas with these you never know how much you have to rotate it to get to the “max”. Some of the other annoying challenges use the Wii-mote pointer functionality in an unnecessary way. There’s one where you have to race someone with pull stars that was frustrating and seemed like it could have been accomplished easier just using the analog stick to select the pull star target. Perhaps not, but either way, it was frustrating and not too fun. Lastly there was a challenge where you use a pointer to determine the direction you’d blow a bubble with Mario in it around obstacles. That was frustrating too, and would have been much better just by using the analog stick to determine direction.

I’m of the opinion that the interface should not BE the game, but rather be the best way to control the game. The challenge in these minigames was created by the interface, not by the actual game design (although one could argue that the game design includes the interface). The interface creating the challenge seems like bad design. I would argue the wii-mote enables new opportunities that would work out worse without it – such as Wii Tennis. If a game would work out better with an analog stick, then why not use it? I think the developers of the poorly received PS3 game Lair are kicking themselves for not realizing that. I’m not trying to say that these minigames were as bad as Lair, but I think that they were poorly designed. As well, defining a completely new mode of interaction for each minigame or different mode can be very difficult for gamers to adjust to. Maybe I’m just terrible at games (which is probably true), but besides the fact I don’t care for sports, I have a lot of trouble playing sports games because the interface changes depending on whether you are on offense or defense. Granted, most of my sport game playing is from the Genesis/Super Nintendo era, and maybe this has changed now that controllers have 20 buttons on them, but I would always hover my finger over the button I had to press most. When possession of the ball changed, I would often forget that I should move my finger to another button and press something that I didn’t mean to. For example, I could go up to the net in a basketball game and pass the ball instead of shoot because my finger was over the button I was using to defense. You don’t need a radically different interface to do the minigames in Mario Galaxy – in fact, I would argue it would fit better if you keep the interface the same. In the games I work on, we deliberately try to keep the interface as close as possible throughout our regular games and our minigames in order to avoid that problem.

On top of these complaints, the game is far too unforgiving. Perhaps the reviewers weren’t frustrated by this because they play games for a living, but I unfortunately spend most of my time making them and not playing them. Here’s a good example. I tried to collect the 100 purple coins in the Honeycomb galaxy, and on my first attempt, I got hit by a boulder that knocked me into the black hole, killing me and erasing my purple coin count of 40 some coins. No matter, I thought. It didn’t take me that long. The next try, I collected 97 purple coins and was busy waggling to spin across the vines. You jump from one vine to the next, and I guess I did an in air spin because I was still waggling my Wii-mote from the previous vine (not realizing I dismounted), and somehow I managed to fall into the pit. I didn’t think it was possible, so I wasn’t being super careful, so that was really frustrating. Now, I didn’t mind getting the first 40 coins over again, but I had 97?!?! What game design purpose does that serve collecting the coins over again? Perhaps one would argue it adds to the challenge, but I play games for fun. I enjoy the individual challenges presented with finding and getting each coin, but doing them over again if I happen to fail is just plain frustrating and feels like a waste of my time. If someone wants to try to get all 100 coins in one life for the challenge of it, they are more than welcome to, but I don’t think it’s a good requirement because it will frustrate people like me. Unfortunately, for me, my story gets worse.

I have shaky hands. I’m not going to be a surgeon, but luckily, my career as a video game developer is doing fine. Now, I’ve previously complained about the problems inherent with the shake to spin, and so it just so happens there is a tricky platforming segment where there is honey that makes you walk slower on platforms with large gaps over the black hole. I did this successfully the time I got 97 coins, but I was getting sloppy because I was displeased at having to get them over again. When I tried again, I failed because the camera was really far, so I didn’t really line up my jump. I wasn’t being careful. Perhaps it was my fault, but it would have been an easy jump if the camera weren’t half a mile away. Now, I managed to fail this section at least five times in a row after that. Sometimes I would miss the platforms entirely because of the camera. As I kept failing this, I got more and more nervous for this section causing my hands to get less precise, and I’m not sure how this happened, but at least three of the times, I died because I accidentally triggered the spin attack while in air, thus killing my momentum and plummeting poor Mario into the dark abyss. The way I actually ended up passing this segment was I held the Wii-mote against my chest to ensure I wouldn’t shake it accidentally.

Now, one could blame my shaky hands for this. I know I’m not the only one with shaky hands. Additionally, many gamers like myself move the controller when doing tricky jumps or difficult sections. It’s almost an unconscious reflex. You want Mario to go the extra distance? Move the controller to give him a boost! It doesn’t have any effect, but try looking down at your hands when you game or watch a friend play. You might be surprised to notice the unconscious movement of the controller. I’m guessing this might be more common than you think. So, whatever the reason was, Mario’s spin air attack thing was triggered incorrectly at least three times causing me to feel cheated by the controls.

I would argue that most of the time, when a gamer feels cheated, they are right. People (non-game developers especially) don’t really take into account the point of video games. The point of video games is to entertain. Any time someone feels cheated, they aren’t being entertained. Even if the game is playing fair, and the user moved the camera away from a bad guy and got shot in the back, the gamer still feels like it was a cheap shot even though it was the gamer’s input that caused the bad guy to go off the screen. It’s the game developer’s job to program the characters that aren’t controlled by the player to create a fun experience. That includes designing them to not make the player feels cheated. So, for example, if an enemy is off screen, it should try and get on screen before shooting. Alternately, it can give indication that it’s firing from off screen by showing a targeting reticle or something along those lines.

Additionally, no one likes to do the same thing over and over again. Here’s a good example from my own career. On Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, I did the boss fight on level 8, Dayni Moon. Now, this boss fight was a lot of hard work, and I coded several different stages as well as I did some tech work in order to get a large amount of animated corn in a virtual cornfield that stretched as far back as the camera could see (well, maybe not QUITE that far). In the shipped game, there were no checkpoints between the stages of the boss fight. Putting them in would have been nontrivial, and when I was working on this, I was short on time. Perhaps that’s not a good excuse, but to be honest, I wanted people to play the boss for a while because I spent so much time on it as well as I thought it was really neat from a technical standpoint, so I figured it’d be okay. Unfortunately, the final balancing wasn’t as thoroughly tested as we would have liked, and it turned out that final stage of the boss was really tough especially if you didn’t have certain weapons. The result was when I asked people how they liked the game, most people mentioned that boss was too hard, and they were sick of replaying the fight over and over. It hurts to hear that because that was what I was most proud of in the entire game, but perhaps if we had more carefully balanced the numbers and added those checkpoints, people would have remembered it as one of their favorite sections of the game! Perhaps not, but my point still stands – no one likes to repeat the same thing over and over again.

I think that this frustration caused by the challenges presented as well as the controls make it accessible to a smaller audience. Perhaps accessible isn’t the right word, so let me explain what I mean. Most game designers (or at least the successful ones) want to entertain as many people as they can. This makes financial sense because you will sell more games as well as is more fulfilling as a game developer. In order to do that, you want to make everyone who wants to play the game, have the ability to get enjoyment out of it without giving up in frustration. A game that frequently frustrates people will make them less likely to want to play the game, which means less purchases as well as less people to entertain. So, in order to make a game more accessible, you want to ensure that everyone who wants to play the game won’t give up out of frustration. Certainly, this may not be possible, but you want to minimize all frustrations.

There are niche titles that don’t try to appeal to everyone. These can be successful, but by definition don’t have the widespread acclaim or massive sales that games that target being accessible to everyone can have. Have you heard of Steel Battalion? If you don’t recognize the name, you probably heard of the mech game for Xbox that was $200 and came with an enormous controller. This is an example of a niche game, but also proves to be a good example of a game that goes out of its way to be particularly inaccessible. Now, I’m a peripheral whore. I own every crazy peripheral they make. I own light guns, dance mats, drums, robotic operating buddies, both Resident Evil 4 chainsaw controllers as well as the katana PS2 controller. Because of this, I had to buy Steel Battalion. I invested $200 on the game, so I wanted to like it. I read through the 40 page instruction manual with a fervent vigor. I was a bit confused because of the sheer amount of controls presented. I expected it to be difficult, but I couldn’t wrap my head around all the information contained in the instruction manual. (They printed an 8.5″ x 11″ size book for this too. This isn’t 40 tiny pages in a booklet that fits in the jewel case) I assumed there would be an in game tutorial because with a system this complex, they’d have to give you some training. I popped the disc in my Xbox, assembled the massive controller and hoped for the best. I was presented with a picture of a dude who I guess was supposed to be the instructor. I was presented with a text conversation with no voiceovers. He said he was my teacher, and I’d be starting the training program. Good I thought! I certainly need it. Then he informed me that the base was under attack, and my very foolish character volunteered to pilot a VT (vertical tank – their name for mechs in the game) with no training whatsoever. I failed the first mission a couple of times, which deletes your save because your character dies, but that didn’t matter because I had no progress to speak of. I finally sort of got the hang of the game and beat the training level and the next level or two. I was playing the third or fourth level, and it was a complex mission. I was doing pretty well or so I thought until my mech ran out of batteries. I didn’t even know my mech RAN on batteries. I knew it ran on fuel and the fuel consumption varied based on what gear you were in. Apparently the VTs don’t have automatic transmissions. Perhaps it was an optional, but the government wouldn’t pay the extra dough for it Now, besides the gear you are in, the fuel consumption also varies based on the gas pedal as well as a dash/stabilize pedal, which consumes 1.5 times the fuel that it does when you aren’t pressing it. I knew all of this but nothing of a battery. Well, I knew you could buy a boom box to listen to in the cockpit, and I’m pretty sure you had to buy batteries for that, but I didn’t know anything about my mech running out of batteries. My mech was stuck in the middle of a battle unable to do anything at all because of the battery problem. I eventually bailed out (which one of my friends found the most enjoyable part of the game) and tried again. I was defeated in battle and the game deleted my save file because my character died, so I had to start over. When purchasing the game, I was aware of this “feature”, but I assumed that they’d either make it difficult to die, or give me more time to eject. Perhaps it took me too long to realize my mech was exploding, but I would think for a mechanic that unforgiving they would have made it painfully obvious that I needed to eject and given me enough time to do so. Anyway, I was pretty pissed. I didn’t get the hang of the game yet, and I was already forced to start over. I figured I’d try and beat the system and figure out another way to back up my save. I tried to copy it to a memory card, but the way it works is that it creates “title data” and no specific game saves, and you can’t copy the title data to a memory card. So, I figured I’d mod my Xbox and then use the homebrew programs to copy the data right off my hard drive. There were other reasons I wanted to mod my Xbox, (have you heard of Metal Wolf Chaos?) so I figured I might as well. I’ve had a modded Xbox, but I haven’t been interested in going back and playing Steel Battalion, but I hope I will at some point in order to get my money’s worth.

I think a good design rule of thumb is if someone wants to play your game, you should make it accessible to them. I really wanted to play Steel Battalion, and I really wanted to like it. The designers however did not cater to the portion of the audience that is perhaps not as good at games or not as patient with the sim aspects of the game. Getting back to Mario, the designers didn’t do a lot of things to make it accessible to a wider audience – one who has less tolerance for repeating sections over or perhaps one less interested in unforgiving challenges.

Maybe the only game that is accessible to everyone is Tic Tac Toe. Even if games cannot be universally acceptable, many designers are trying to make their games more accessible through various design decisions. Plenty of games do dynamic difficulty adjustment. Many games including ones that I’ve worked on actually adjust the difficulty based on how many times the player dies. This makes the game accessible to a larger audience than just the hardcore gamers. Rubber banding the enemies in racing games is another example of this. In a similar vein, I was thinking how some great games (such as Half Life 2) actually try to be accessible to people with disabilities. I believe they have an option to subtitle all sound effects for the hard of hearing, which can be important because often gameplay is communicated with audio cues. For example in a horror game, a ghost may be behind you, which could be communicated by footsteps or scary noises that a deaf player would miss out on. 1up wrote an interesting article on disabled gamers and the problems they face.

Certainly, not every game can work for people with disabilities, but subtitling is an easy thing for developers to do and helps it be more accessible to people who are deaf. The December issue of Game Developer magazine has a good article called “The Accessibility Game” about making games for people with various impairments. I’m not saying that Mario should make the game playable by the blind, but rather that accessibility is a spectrum and the more inclusive you are of various abilities and disabilities, the larger your audience is.

Another thing that accessible games try to do when you get stuck is presenting dynamic help messages in order to make it more accessible. Ratchet and Clank and Kameo are both examples of games that featured this. Kameo offered an option for how soon they would present the help messages if they thought you were stuck. This is a great way to help stuck players out when they can’t guess what the designer was thinking. Nintendo seems like they haven’t advanced in terms of game design from the Nintendo 64 days. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I gave up Twilight Princess after two hours. The reason for this is because I felt like I was playing the old game of guess what the designer is thinking. I don’t think people enjoy that game, and I think that’s why the adventure game genre is dead. Previously, I was mourning their loss, but then I played the new Sam and Max games and realized that’s why adventure games haven’t been missed. I talk about Zelda in my earlier post, Wii-actions and Wii-views (although that pun seemed so clever a year ago, I’m ashamed of it now).

Super Mario Galaxy had a similar example, although I’m ashamed to admit in hindsight, I probably should have been able to figure out (unlike the Zelda example). Now, skip to the end of this paragraph if you don’t want a solution to a puzzle that’s probably pretty obvious to people other than me. In the Freezeflame Galaxy, the fireflower was introduced. It was on a side path, and I killed some enemies with it. That was pretty cool except for the shake to throw a fireball was annoying. I went back to the main path and there were some pillars with platforms on top, an up arrow and a pole that was close to them. Judging from the up arrow, it was obvious that I had to go up. So, I went up to the top of the pole and tried to jump with a spin in order to land on the platforms on top of the pillars. I could probably succeed in doing this one out of five times. I think the times that I made it, I was aided by a potential glitch because I hit the ceiling, which was liquid hot magma, bounce off with reverse gravity and landed back on the platform. Now, I realized that this probably wasn’t the “right” solution, but maybe it was just a hard jump, and I could have made it had I not hit the ceiling. I jumped around and I couldn’t reach anything although I noticed there was land on the ceiling that seemed to be where the level progressed. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get there. (I found an easier way to get up there and reverse the gravity by wall jumping between the pillars) Now, that was a total glitch, but the solution was more obvious to me at the time than the actual solution, which I found later. As it turns out, there was a little box that I was supposed to light on fire similar to Zelda and the tiki torches. Perhaps I didn’t realize it because I was thinking like the old school Mario games where fireballs were only used for attacking. Perhaps I’m just dumb. Perhaps the art was bad because it didn’t look like something you could light on fire. Regardless of the cause, it sure would have been nice had they made this puzzle more accessible to me with some dynamic hint system. I did however figure it out in a later level where I was presented with a fireflower and the same little box. I would have kicked myself if that where physically possible because I instantly made the connection this time.

This leads me to my next point. Nintendo seems to approach the development of this game similar to a Nintendo 64 title when there have been many advancements in game development since then. Here’s a good example. Super Mario Galaxy continues with the antiquated notion of lives. Pretty much all games these days let you keep trying when you fail with infinite lives. In Mario Galaxy, if you lose all your lives, not only do you lose the progress in the level you are working on, but you are forced back to the main menu for some unknown reason. You have to then press A + B at the main menu, select your save game and navigate in the hub world back to the level you are working on. I have no idea why they implemented it this way. Certainly this is one of my smaller gripes to be sure, but it’s mystifying that they’d make it so inconvenient when you lose all your lives. Also, there is no autosave, which is just bizarre. It prompts you to save all the time rather than background saving whenever you make any progress. I also can’t understand this decision. In “The Incredibles”, we realized 3 or so days before gold that we didn’t have an autosave. Although that game is not in the same caliber as Super Mario Galaxy, I threw together an autosave system at the last minute really quickly, and was horrified that it wouldn’t pass the technical requirements (of which there are a ton for saving), but we didn’t have any problems. If I can throw together an autosave system in less than a day, you’d think that Nintendo first party could manage to support it in one of their flagship titles. Again, it doesn’t make or break the game, but it seems like a silly oversight, especially when this game has probably been in development for many years.

Continuing along the lines of Nintendo is stuck in the 64 days, there’s very, very, very little voice over. Why?!?! WHY?!?! I could understand they didn’t have the memory to do that on the Nintendo 64, but the Wii has a full DVD for audio. Many large role playing epics have come last generation out that fit on one DVD with tons of recorded dialog. There’s so little dialog in Mario, I can’t imagine space was a consideration. They recorded a few noises and words for some of the characters, but I can’t imagine why they didn’t record all the lines. Speaking of, I’m sick of the silent protagonist. I’m not the only one because Rick Luebbers, a designer at Surreal wrote a blog post about it, but for whatever reason, Midway took it down. I understand that you are supposed to fill the role of the player character, but for one thing, I enjoy being able to choose what to say. Sure, it’s not the same as being able to say whatever I can imagine, but it’s a passable substitute until natural language processing improves. Mass Effect has a good dialog system, and it really increases the immersion. Even if I don’t get a choice in my character’s dialog, I wouldn’t feel like I’m playing a mute. Not having a character speak seems like they aren’t really in that world because everyone I know reacts to speaking with a response. It’s especially bad when they draw attention to it. (”You’re the silent type, aren’t you?”) Perhaps other people snicker at that, but it only frustrates me more when they draw attention to the fact that my character can’t speak. I don’t think I can illustrate how silly not having the main character speak is better than this video, Zelda: A Heart for a Hero.

Another really annoying thing about this game and most Nintendo first party games in general is the inability to speed up text boxes. The text slowly scrolls out as if someone were reading them. There is no voice to go along with them. Normally the text is fairly worthless as well. I really don’t care you are the famous “Bill Board”, and yes I’ve heard of you. I’ve heard of you the last 10 times you’ve introduced yourself in very slow to appear text. The way games should do speaking and conversation is like they did it in Jade Empire. The voice starts and the text shows immediately. If you have already heard the line before or if it’s uninteresting, you can read ahead and skip it before it completes. I think this is the best way to do it because you don’t have to listen to the line over again if you are like me when playing RPGs and talk to people over and over to try and get more information out of them. Nintendo’s solution seems like the worst of both worlds. There’s no voice AND you have to wait until you can get all the information.I guess that perhaps the best conclusion to draw from this is that had the game come out 10 years ago, it would have been absolutely amazing. It seems like they are blazing their own trail forward based on what worked for them in the past while ignoring advancements made in other games. Perhaps that’s why Miyamoto has never heard of the Ratchet and Clank series? When I was at Heavy Iron, everyone was talking about how good Ratchet and Clank was, so I played the games in order to find out what they were doing right. It turned out I loved the games (and got to work on them myself), but I’ve played other games I didn’t particularly care for just as reference in order to try and understand what people like about them. For example, I didn’t really care for God of War. After finishing it, I thought it was okay, but there were other games I’d rather play that I’d enjoy more. After playing it, I learned perhaps why the game was appealing to others, and with that knowledge, I hope to do my job better. Perhaps that’s something Nintendo is missing. What would have made an amazing Nintendo 64 game is missing advances in accessibility that I feel the industry has made since. Gamers’ sensibilities have adapted to these modernizations, which makes old games and old feeling games hard to play. Here’s a good example. I was super excited to play the Mega Man Anniversary Collection. I remember loving Mega Man growing up and the games being amazing. When I played it, I didn’t get very far before getting the game over screen. My Mega-enthusiasm was not satiated until I played for quite a while and never managed to beat a robot master thus getting a password to record some forward progress. I even tried a later Mega Man game for Playstation that made when game length was a measure of content not difficulty, and even that was difficult and required repeating large sections of levels. So, my Mega-thirst did not feel quenched, but I gave up. I’m definitely not going to revisit that game unless there’s some awesome cheat codes for it. Perhaps although I was still thirsty for mega-action, perhaps I did receive a dose of the cure for my Mega Man bug. I had forgotten that a staple of the Mega-series was an unforgiving difficulty and that I had the most fun playing NES games with my Game Genie.

Perhaps I’m not in a position to critique a game that will probably outsell every game I’ve worked on at this point in my career. It certainly has better reviews than any game I’ve worked on and anyone else for that matter who didn’t work on the Ocarina of Time. While both of those may be true, neither means that the game was flawless – that the game couldn’t be better. Perhaps people are willing to overlook the flaws for the time being, but if Nintendo continues their trend of not keeping up with the rest of the video game developers, perhaps they won’t always be so successful.