Link took off the iron boots too soon. He needed those to walk on the upside down magnetic ledge… and over the molten lava below. Why did I do that? So stupid. Before I could even shake my Wiimote in frustration Zelda’s eternally-young savior was turned into elf tempura. Well, not really. The Twilight Princess hero let out a pitiful yelp. The screen went black. Link appeared at the room entrance, tights unsinged – but minus two hearts on his energy bar. That’s worse than falling into a bottomless pit, which takes off just one heart.
A greater part of my video game week has been spent falling in love with Zelda again, but I’ve been haunted by my other November column, on scary games. While I gave all the reasons why there has yet to be a truly frightening video game, some smart readers pointed out that we also aren’t really risking anything when we play. As in “Oh, there’s a big boss behind this door. Let me save real quick!” It made recognize a serious “flaw” in Nintendo’s latest adventure: if Zelda nemesis Gannon is such a bad-ass threat (and they mentioned someone else’s name, but we know he’s really behind this shit), why does Link keep waking up after a beat-down? Octoroks don’t come back after a sword swipe. Why should he? In other words, why don’t main game characters ever really die?
The most obvious reason is having one life is frustrating and demoralizing, just like in real life. It’s too much for most people to handle. One classic example is Capcom’s Mega Man, one of the most difficult games ever made for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The original game had insane jumps, damn-near impossible bosses and an “ending” that just led to more difficult levels. It had a sparse continue system, but it wouldn’t tell you how many were left: the continues would end without warning.
Worse, Mega Man had to be completed in one setting. In 1987, a handful of games gave out save passwords, 20 or so cryptic alphanumeric characters that would have Stephen Hawking begging for mercy. (More than once I lost hours of game progress because I couldn’t tell a Metroid “1” from a Metroid “l”.) Approxiamately one game had a built-in save feature: the first The Legend of Zelda. Being able to start a game and come back to it later was a luxury. Mega Man was one of the roughest examples of one life to live and masochists like myself loved to hate it (as they would Castlevania, Metroid and other teeth-gritting exercises). In modern terms, imagine the knuckle-busting Devil May Cry 3: Original Edition without a save option and you start to get the picture.
This is the second reason characters aren’t given one life: it’s easier than ever to implement a save function. As adventures got more complex and battery technology became cheaper, more games implemented save features. By the late ‘90s, publishers switched from saving on an internal cartridge battery to memory cards in the systems themselves. Today our consoles come with hard drives. Having a save feature became a given. “Sandbox” genre titles such as Grand Theft Auto III and Saint’s Row, of course, need a save function, but this is more for the amount of swag and minigames completed. The primary adventure hasn’t gotten much longer. Beating a classic like Metroid may take longer than completing the story arc of GTA III and similar games. The modern automatic save isn’t really there to hold your progress. It’s there to remember the SUV you stole last week.
The third reason is that gamers simply don’t want to invest a lot of time and risk losing it. For the modern gamer, sitting at a game console for ten hours straight isn’t a forethought, but an afterthought (“I can’t believe I played WoW all night!”). The structure of older games required people to plan their day around beating a particular game. It was a conscious choice: either “I’m playing a quick game of Rygar.” or “I’m going to beat that 20-hour sommamabitch today.” Creative gamers would come up with their own save option – leaving the console power on while turning the TV off – which would be ideal for sleep, work/chores and perhaps showering, but not so much for the family bill payer. (As an interesting sidenote, this week a Kotaku.com verified report found that the Playstation 3 took ten times the electric power as the Nintendo Wii. We can probably assume the original NES required a fraction of the Wii’s power.) Before Nintendo there were the Atari consoles which, with the exception of perhaps the computer-inspired XE, made Nintendo’s sparse continue systems seem downright merciful. Losing a few times often threw you back to the title screen – if there was a title screen.
Gamers playing the Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800, and the original Nintendo system, were also playing at the arcade. It’s easy to forget how intense playing a new arcade machine is: put money – not a credit card, but money you can actually feel – into a game, quickly determine the goal and the “plot” (more anal players would read the paltry kiosk directions first), and hang on for dear life. You fuck up, you lose your game. The console version, if there was one, would probably be an inaccurate, awful mess. If you wanted the true gaming experience, you had to learn it on the spot, and your money became a type of wager. (How long can you hold on?) In short, a game had risk. Compared to the arcade, playing a ruthless home game like Ninja Gaiden (the original) was just training for your next Aladdin’s Castle experience.
The final reason characters don’t die is totally our fault: we got old. In 2006, the Electronic Software Association puts the average gamer age between 30 and 33 years old. It’s fairly safe to say part of this group were the same gamers playing Genesis in the ‘90s and Nintendo and perhaps Atari in the ‘80s. We can also guess they have a busy job, hungry mortgages and hungrier kids (or at least child support). It’s easy to forget how much time you can dedicate to rejoining the Triforce when your main obligations are “Do your homework” and “Stay away from that bad crowd.”
Earlier this year, Capcom’s zombie hit Dead Rising almost caused a real riot when gamers discovered its less-than-forgiving save system, which, of course, was liberal compared to earlier hits like the punishing Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins. Gamers today aren’t wimps. But if the ESA is right, most gamers, even if they are dedicated to a title, can’t afford to lose the little bit of progress their characters have made with the little bit of time they had to play.
Perhaps Link shouldn’t die, but I do wish I felt a little more scared for his well being.
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Damon Brown writes about technology, sex and music, and is author of the Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Satellite Radio and the best-selling Pocket Idiot’s Guide to the iPod. Read his blog at www.damonbrown.net.
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