Types of Gaming

I had a lot of fun with the game playing session today, especially with Dance Dance Revolution. Although I was really horrible at it, I found it more fun than most other games there because it involved music and of course, the player’s complete physical involvement in the game. This physical aspect can be said about the Wii as well, but I just did not find Wario Ware very interesting after the initial excitement of this new concept of gaming. People still could not keep their eyes off it as it was the center of attention for most of the gaming session. I think this is because the Wii’s concept of gaming is so natural and easy to learn. I remember the first time I tried video games a long time ago. I think it was Super Mario for the Super Nintendo. I kept moving the controller itself in a jumping motion when I made Mario jump. After some cousins telling me not to do this, I had to force myself just to press whatever controls needed and not do everything Mario was doing. But this natural way of playing that I had is exactly what the Wii uses and is what pulls everyone in. The same set of games on the Wii were also on the gameboy advanced, but I think most people found that boring because of the traditional controls.

When I played the Wii, the time went much faster as compared to when we played other games like clouds for example. Clouds is the exact opposite of Wii in some ways because it is so unnatural and complicated. All the controls are placed at weird places on the keyboard and there were no instructions whatsoever. Some of us finally figured out how to do certain things like move clouds around but it took a while.

Yet another thing that made the Wii more interesting was that each individual game within the Wario Ware set was timed. The tasks were often easy to do in these games but the challenge was to do it before time ran out. The other games, however, were not timed outright but definitely required one to do actions within a certain time. For example, you had to orient the shape appropriately before it reaches the bottom in tetris. You had to make certain steps at the right time according to the arrows in DDR. You had to make certain turns on time and move around the environment fast enough to avoid the ghosts in pac man. After each level usually, the environment gets faster which means you have to be faster as well. This type of gaming involving time contrasts with gaming that give you all the time in the world. In Clouds, for example, you had quite a bit of free time to fly around and look for clouds or land.