been playing a lot of Wii games right now. Some common blunders I didn't expect from 22nd generation games made by the largest companies of the world:
What Public Is This Designed For Again
Epic Mickey has little text boxes that explain how to do things. Like, every 30 seconds. The experienced player will press A to close them and then do what he knew to do all along. The novice player will try to do the fucking move and fail because he doesn't know you need to fucking press A to close the text box AND THEN do the fucking move BECAUSE everyone in game development is an idiot.
I don't know what kind of gamer is supposed to enjoy NSMBWii's multiplayer mode. Because most of my experience with it was trying to carefully coax my girlfriend across sequences of jumps while trying not to die.
The Meter Of Pointlessness
Epic Mickey has two meters that measure your paint and thinner levels. This is important because you can only use them about four times and then have to recharge by hitting, well, PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING IN THE GAME. Why not give the player infinite ammo if you're going to hide full-recharge items every ten steps?
Forget Good Ideas
Remember how Donkey Kong Country wouldn't repeat the same kind of secret twice? And how single bananas were always a hint to some secret? Yeah, neither of those happens in DKC Returns. Instead we have...
Special Things Are All Around Us
DKC Returns - HEY let's add flowers that give an item with a stomp. And let's have like FIFTY of them per level. And VERY FEW OF THEM have secret items so the players have to stomp EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FLOWER IN THE GAME to find them all. Aren't we fucking clever.
STREAMLINE THIS FUCKER
Super Paper Mario and Bowser's Inside Story both try to improve a winning formula by removing equippable items. OH HEY SUDDENLY EVERY SIDE PATH IS COMPLETELY USELESS AND THE PLAYER HAS NO MOTIVATION TO DO ANYTHING BUT FINISH THE GAME AS QUICK AS POSSIBLE.
Troll The Player: Or, Designers With A Sense Of Humor Are The Worst Thing
Super Paper Mario has a set of three nondescript blocks at a dead end. To find out what you have to do, you need to go back to the village and talk to a NPC. This NPC won't give you the solution to the puzzle until you say "please" FIVE TIMES, by TYPING IT ON THE SCREEN KEYBOARD. Oh and the solution is that you have to headbutt the blocks, TWENTY TIMES, in a certain order that the NPC asks you to WRITE DOWN.
Luckily, the next dungeon is filled with copies of that NPC you can kill for a mere cost of a hundred experience points.
The Gimmick That Destroys All Game-Balancing Elements
Sonic And The Secret Rings has a few levels where the objective is "Don't die". It also has a few levels where your objective is to "Race the goddamn ghost", which -also- means you can't die as the ghost will run way ahead of you. It -also- has time attack levels where, if you die, your time doesn't reset. Now you have about 40% of the levels in the game where you can't win without going at them in a single run, destroying the whole purpose of checkpoints and whatever.
DKC Returns has exactly the same problem with mine cart levels and the like, where checkpoints suddenly stop appearing and it's pointless to have extra health as any hit is instant death.
