I really liked Luigi’s Mansion. This article reminded me of one of its joys: you could suck up anything with the vacuum cleaner! Curtains, tablecloths, cobwebs... There was even a poster somewhere that you could almost suck up, but then it would snap back into position with a spooky Boo warning.

I’m so sick of props that look so realistic until you touch them. How many times have you tried to interact with a game’s world only to find that everything seems to be made of granite and nailed to the floor? Or, how many times have you found a game world to be so extraordinarily charming in its interactivity, when fully responsive environments in games tend to focus on being elaborately boring (Shenmue) or over-the-top destructible (Mercenaries)?

This makes me kind of sad because it seems like the developers didn’t realize they were making a Wii game. With Metroid Prime: Hunters (for DS), the developers knew they had to keep controls simple, colors bright, and silhouettes distinctive, and they created a deep and engaging game from there. Likewise, if it’s hard to push any buttons other than A and B while aiming, the devs should have had the game focus on those two actions (say, jump and shoot) rather than try and stuff a PC FPS onto the Wii Remote. (Then again, what do the Nunchuk buttons do? Those are pretty accessible.)

In addition, it seems like they tried to make the graphics look like a 360 game, which anybody could have told you is a fool’s errand on Wii. In fact... everything about it sounds like they made a last-gen game by trying to make a PS3 or 360 game on a platform that is, by the narrow standards of PS3 and 360, last-gen. Of course, Wii has its own tricks up its sleeve that make it a great console, different strengths and weaknesses to set it apart from the competition, but it sounds like the devs didn’t capitalize on them.

Even capitalizing on the weaknesses could have been a bonus! By simplifying graphics and controls—to avoid direct comparisons to PS3 or 360 games that this game would lose—they could have found space to innovate in new and exciting ways. Dammit!

That’s right! A “hands-on impressions” article should never give your impressions of a game after briefly having your hands on it. In fact, you should even adjust your opinions based on promises from the developer. Preview articles should assume the default position of laudatory without massive, robust evidence to the contrary. What were you thinking, Edge?

My brother and I always refer to a scarecrow as a “plot-block.” Like, if a random guard tells me I can’t enter a certain area, “awww, I’ve been plot-blocked!” (Of course, it’s always weird to see one random guard blocking a major intersection for a lengthy period of time, but that’s game logic for you.)

There was a wonderful scene early in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door where you’re walking down a street to an important plaza, and a Toad girl shouts at you not to move, because she’s lost her contact lens. Then, no matter what direction you move in, you’ll step on her contact lens. After that, she’ll demand you buy her something specific (I don’t remember what it was), and until then, she’ll keep blocking your path. Go to the store where they sell that item, and... they’re closed! It was funny because it was like the developers were admitting, yeah, it’s a plot-block, so we thought we’d at least make it creative.

Yeah, but the thing is that movies and books that are meant to “persuade” tend to be bad as well. Even Michael Moore has said as much; if you start with the “agenda,” you’re finished. It’s no coincidence that his most contemplative movie (Bowling for Columbine) also garnered the most praise.

Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, wrote in 1992 that she was frustrated that her work was always taken to be “about” something:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/reviews/lessing-language.html

“I wrote a story, 'The Fifth Child,' which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. ... But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, 'Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,' you tend to get baffled stares.”

That short sentence—“had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem, I would have written a pamphlet”—has always stuck with me for its honesty. George Orwell was a Socialist sympathizer, but that didn’t stop him from writing the greatest, most savage critiques and satires of the movement ever made. You can write a polemic or a story, because a polemic is limited from the start.

I can think of one exception, which is Traffic (spoiler alert, I guess). (Here’s some spoiler space so that you can stop reading, if you want. Stop reading...) That movie really did end with a grand speech expressing a position, which is exactly what I learned not to do on day one of my first screenwriting class. What made it work, though—the exception that the filmmaker managed to crawl through—was that the film managed to claim the moral space to do so, first. It’s awful to sit through; it’s one, long, brutal look at the horrors of drug war. Nothing is idealized, not drugs, not cops, not users, and not crusading politicians. It’s a lengthy trek through the mud, and only through that kind of honesty could the movie afford to express a position like that (specifically, that the drug war can’t continue as such). It wouldn’t have worked if the movie had played anybody up as a hero or a defender of justice. If the movie had not let you hit bottom along with the characters, it wouldn’t have been convincing.

That kind of principle could be put to work in a videogame. For a simple example, I remember having a lot of fun with “The Redistricting Game” and then feeling really dirty because I now knew just how gerrymandering worked and why it’s so bad. But, for the most part, I think Portnow is right. To misquote Doris Lessing, if I wanted to make a game about AIDS or the Palestinian problem, I would have made it in Flash. A full release requires a bit more... artistry, which means that real world makes for wonderful inspiration but can’t be a prefabricated story. I wouldn’t like to see games that are like those crusading lawyer shows on TV, but if games tried harder to bring us out of our own perspectives and see the world in a different way, that would make me very happy.