We're waist deep in the gauntlet of heavy hitting fall releases, and frankly, there are just not enough hours in the day to put together a lengthy and well-informed take on everything, not when there's life outside of games to deal with as well. I'm not interested in forcing myself through the gigantic amount of new releases out there just to be first to the table with a full take. It seems like the gaming equivalent of gorging at a really nice all-you-can-eat buffet until you simply can't take another bite. While I may be American, this sort of approach does not seem like the most enjoyable way to play through the massive fall slate. I'll have impressions of everything as I get through it on my twitter feed as it seems to be the most appropriate place for you to find those, but I'm moving at my own pace.
Despite brand new and shiny AAA releases all around me, my defense mechanism to the massive release shock is that I'm retreating to the most fun games I can find, both new and old. I've dipped my toes into the much-hyped waters of Fable II and Fallout 3 but neither have compelled me in the least to invest more time than I already have thus far. I'm playing both Mother games for an upcoming reality check and in the run up to the just-released English patch for Mother 3, but what I find myself getting the most lost in the last few weeks are the simple and engrossing WiiWare games in the Art Style series.
These games take a simple mechanic, dress it up with a minimalist presentation and throw it to the wolves at a very low price. Some are original games and some are carried over from Nintendo's Japan-only GBA attempt at this, but the basic theme is consistent. While the Nintendo of today is rigidly defined in the minds of fans and haters alike as the ultimate "safe developer," making games to a uniformly high standard and rarely taking any risks with formulas that have been proven to work time and time again, the Art Style games hearken back to a time before there were defined formulas for success and set expectations to iterate and build on. Sure, the first few years of Famicom/NES development at Nintendo did yield the powerhouse franchises like SMB, Zelda, and Metroid, but they weren't alone. That early era also yielded off-center games like Clu Clu Land, Wrecking Crew, and Stack Up. Obviously not all of those "off-center" games were successes or even good, but without safe formulas, the only way to find what would work was to try everything. In that early era, Super Mario Bros. was just as big a risk as anything else, and Metroid only succeeded in America.
There have been two Art Style released thus far, with a third coming to the Wii Shop today, but I've already lost an absurd amount of time to Cubello. Cubello itself is a simple 3D puzzle game, though it's one that's bound to test your brain as it's covering pretty new ground, at least when spatial cognition is so domain-specific. In fact, I haven't played a new puzzle game this year that comes close to this game, regardless of the retro spirit. Even the aesthetics of the game feel at home in that early era. The graphics, music, and creepy synthesized voice of the game invoke the retro-futurism of those 80s Nintendo titles pretty strongly, and I had to finish the game before I found that the music was not written by Hip Tanaka. The game was simple and easy to grasp, yet it grasped me and I couldn't put it down. Whether or not the third Art Style game is any good I won't know until I take it on tonight, but that's the whole point of being allowed to fail as Cubello has already justified the entire Art Style initiative on its own.
It's a pretty wonderful perk of the no-rules digital download era when Nintendo is on the top of the world and they can afford to do nothing, they're still able to be bold and take risks. I am not the only one to take notice of the great benefits gamers have gotten from this expansion into console digital downloads, but the benefits have mounted and become indispensible faster than I could possibly imagine. From allowing a legend to prove why some designs are timeless, to reclaiming the lost glory of the arcade, to giving a stage for the greatest garage developers the world has to offer, to allowing Nintendo to get its groove back, this is the story of 2008 and I don't want to turn back.
