“Wii Sports” was the first video game my mom played after obsessing, years earlier, over “Tetris” on the original, green-tinted Game Boy. It was the first time we’d shared a game experience together since then.
According to Nintendo, the upcoming “Mario Kart Wii” should allow us to have another. In a press release late yesterday touting sales of “Super Smash Bros. Brawl,” Nintendo classified “Wii Sports” and the next “Mario Kart” as a new type of kind of experience: “bridge games.”
“Bridge games,” reads the release, “let video game novices and veterans play and have fun together.”
A few weeks ago, “BioShock”’s Ken Levine called “Wii Bowling” “the ultimate gateway drug.”
But is it? Bridging casual and hardcore gamers implies each is approaching a game from opposite directions — but having fun on a common ground. That doesn’t mean the “novice” will ever end up crossing to the other side. “Gateway games” and “bridge games” may not be one and the same.
Nintendo’s announced definition of a “bridge” game isn’t necessarily Wii specific, either. Does a “bridge” game mean another player has to be a part of the action? I had several friends watch me play through “Resident Evil,“ simply because the game was so immersive, even to a viewer. They never played it, but they experienced it.
So far, the gameplay of “bridge games” falls on the simpler side. Could Nintendo make a “bridge game” out of “Pikmin”? And how would you make a more accessible version of “The Legend of Zelda?” without scaring off the hardcore?
Do they need to?
March 18th, 2008 at 9:28 am
How strange. A few years ago I was talking with some friends about games that both casual and hardcore gamers can both enjoy (THPS, Madden) and how it was hard to have a conversation with a casual gamer without them saying, “dude, [x game] WAS AWESOME!” about every game that was brought up. I called them bridge games and my friends said that was a stupid term and that I was looking too deeply into it. I knew I was just making crap up, dammit.
Anyway, I guess Nintendo did make a good bridge game that didn’t scare off the hardcore with Mario Galaxy. I loved how the levels were broken up into small bits and the controls were made so simple, but it was still challenging enough to keep me from getting bored.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Zelda DS is one hell of a streamlined Zelda and still pleased the hardcore.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Most of Nintendo’s core titles have been bridge games for many years, in the sense that they have deveopped a certain gameplay paradigm that includes “training levels”, the slow introduction of gameplay mechanics and button controls, and tertiary goals for those times when one gets stuck at a certain point during the main adventure. From Mario to Zelda to Metroid (just three of the biggest examples) all employ these methods. This iused to extend to third parties too, back when Nintendo was closely involved with developers and would require them to add elements and tweak parameters in order to get the seal of approval. Many people are caught up on these new terms, but I think it’s merely putting a name to things that Nintendo has been doing for a long time. Where it gets murky is when so many developpers try to jump on the band wagon and release 3 or 4 mini-game collections. And when journalists occasionally start making it into something it isn’t.