WILL Talks GAMES: Top 5 "Everyone Games"

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
This article is long.  And I mean reaaaaaally long.  Proceed with caution!

Video games, love 'em or hate 'em, are only continuing to evolve and prosper as an entertainment medium – there's no denying that.  Every year, North America nets about $28 billion annually from the development and sales of games; that's a lot of income, and a resultant heap of available jobs.  Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, on its first day of release, grossed $500 million in sales revenue in the U.S. alone – this video game outsold every Harry Potter movie's American theatre lifespan in one day, and only missed Titanic's first-day sales by about $150 million.  If that doesn't convince you gaming is an huge part of our economy, I don't know what will – that's only one game, after all. Imagine all the titles released by Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft, Capcom, Konami, and so many more developers, including independently-made games.  The video game industry, in its simplest perspective, really is a beautiful thing.

 

A great representation of Canadian gaming stats. Kinda cool, huh?
The image is courtesy of The Globe and Mail.

Games are awesome and just add on one more thing to make America (not so much with Canada, but still quite a bit) the economic powerhouse that it is.  Games aren't for everyone, though, right?  Not everyone likes to read a book, not everyone likes movies or sports, and, therefore, not everyone can enjoy sitting down and playing a video game – that's fine! To each their own, right?  However, if I'm to analyze the gaming scene the same as every other medium, I would have to argue that nobody can dislike every video game.  Just like with a book or a movie, even if you aren't a bookworm or a movie buff, there are still books you've read that you've enjoyed, and likewise with movies.  I think video games are no different.
The steep incline that software has evolved along provides a profound level of depth and possibilities in a video game; they can instill emotions, make you feel a certain way, and engross you like never before.  I honestly think that there are games that appeal to an incredibly wide audience – I call them "Everyone Games."  That's not to say every single person will enjoy the games I list – definitely not.  From a lot of the games I've played through, I've noticed that some games have a narrowed demographic that they aim at (Fallout: New Vegas, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Valkyria Chronicles), but then there are other games that I feel reach out to a wider demographic. The games I'm listing aren't shallow time-wasters, either (Jetpack Joyride, 4 Pics 1 Word); software I'm listing are legitimately engaging gamer-kind of games that even the most casual of video game players should be able to appreciate and enjoy. There are only five of them that immediately came to mind for me, so games like this are hard to come by.
Let's begin.

5.
Animal Crossing (GCN)

A game that can cater to a wide audience needs three main dynamics in its design: a comprehensive GUI (graphical user interface), easy but deep gameplay, and an overall visual environment that's just ... really cool.  Animal Crossing nails this perfectly.

Bright, colorful, and all there is for GUI is a clock - simple!

It's a great game and, without talking about all of its technical history (it started out on the Nintendo 64), it still stands as a fantastic little game with lots of appeal.  The game revolves around a human character – that's you – who is on a train to move into a village and start a new life away from home.  Oddly enough, though, everyone living in the town you move to are ... animals.  Kangaroos, frogs, chickens, alligtors, gorillas, penguins, cats, there are a lot of different animals available to live in your town.

The main premise of the game revolves around, well, whatever you want.  Seriously, there's no set goal to Mario, Zelda or even The Sims.  There are loans and debts you can pay off on the house you buy to allow for the purchasing of new expansions to make your house bigger, but other than that, you have completely free reign in this world of critters.  You can run errands for your fellow villagers, go hunting for buried treasure, go shopping, send letters and presents to your buddies, or just engage in idle chitchat with the animals – they say funny things from time to time and sometimes even make up little games to play with prizes in mind.  Or, if you're feeling lazy, you can spend the whole day just fishing in peace and quiet.

So why does the game have such a wide appeal?  Well, it meets the criteria of what can spread interest: it has a simple, user-friendly interface, doesn't have any element of challenge for potentially frustrating the player, and exploring the villages is fun.  What really helps shoot this game into being an awesome Everyone Game, however, lies in two crucial things: the game's theme reflects a "second life," and the world is constantly changing to allow for new content to discover.

Awwwwww!

A game that recreates life in a positive, escapist manner is a huge point of interest for people of all ages.  Who wouldn't want to be completely engrossed in an experience that you feel is so much better than your own life at that time?  Animal Crossing is a relaxing video game, which may confuse some people because games are usually a test of skill.  This one really isn't, though – it's what you make of it.  A core value and purpose that this game is designed around is the ability to zone out and wind down in a harmless, stress-free world very much unlike the cynical world we really live in.  The game is also one of the first in history to utilize a real-time clock in its game.  As you play through Animal Crossing, events are taking place in a 1:1 scale of time: the clock bell rings every hour, letters take a day or two to send, and your fellow villagers all get tired at night and have their own bedtimes that you'll learn to schedule yourself around, should you choose to.  A game like this is hard to come by, and it's rare that they come around and provide such an engaging, real, and wholesome experience.

4.
Minecraft (PC)

...And you can explore all of it.

This game is a lot easier to describe, since I know many people reading this have either heard of Minecraft or even played it themselves. This piece of software isn't necessarily as relaxing as Animal Crossing, but what it lacks in being therapeutic and comforting, it gains in being action-packed and far more involving. Minecraft is a Java-based PC game developed by this guy from Sweden who goes by the tagname Notch. He just got bored one day and created this really simple game where the entire world was made of blocks, and you as the player could extract these blocks that make up the world and then place them back in any arrangement you like. Picture being in a giant world made completely of Lego, the main concept of Minecraft is much like that.

However, you aren't alone in this world, and half of the other things living in this blocky locale want you dead. Zombies, skeletons, giant spiders, and other fearsome creatures will rise from the woodwork of the world each night and try everything they can to murder your poor blocky self. But have no fear! The game is open-world and very much a sandbox style of game ("sandbox" being a gaming term for "you can go anywhere and do anything you want"), and with the ability to manipulate the block-based world at your fingertips, the only thing limiting you from combating these creatures are your swift wits. You can dig yourself a little hole and hide away from the monsters until day breaks like a little sissy, but, if you're really ambitious and creative, you break down some trees and build yourself a little shelter so the monsters can't get you. The game simply drops you into this massive world without instruction or direction, so the key mood conveyed in Minecraft is advancement into the unknown and, most importantly, hardy survival.

Someone made this castle in Minecraft. This blows my mind.

The game is called Minecraft because that's pretty much the two large features of the game: you extract blocks from the world to use as resources to craft bigger and better objects. For example, say you've just started the game and you start in a forest. Your first instinct might be to click around and see what happens. When you try, you'll realize you can punch the trees. Continue punching the trees, and raw wood will fall out of them. Now you can craft planks out of the wood, and with those planks you can also make sticks. Use sticks in combination with the planks you've made and you can make tools such as swords and pickaxes. It's all about experimenting with different materials you find to figure out what you can craft; what's important, what isn't, and what keeps you alive.

I can't even begin to scratch the surface of the game, but it's appealing in the same ways Animal Crossing is, despite being completely different games: the interface and features of the game are easy to learn and understand, and the world is huge and randomly-generated each time you start a new game, making the game fun to explore. It's an age-old scenario brought to life before your eyes: you're stranded in the wilderness with nothing to take with you, so how do you survive? That's the beauty of Minecraft: you're not playing through some overblown story or doing anything terribly complicated, you just have to survive. An easy concept that can be interpreted and approached in so many different ways, and with that freedom and lack of dedication to the game itself makes a game like this very interesting, appealing, and incredibly addictive (ironic, I know).

3.
Scribblenauts Unlimited (WiiU/PC)

One of the most timeless forms of entertainment I can think of are games related to language and words.  Hangman, Pictionary, Charades, and so many more are ancient games that are simple to the point of common knowledge and yet complex at the same time.  Scribblenauts Unlimited is a recently released title, and it's essentially a word association exercise brought to life in the form of a creative, unique, and often hilarious video game.

I Really wish I knew why a wooden plank and a rock
are getting married in this picture....Yep, only in Scribblenauts.

 The story of the game is rather standard: a boy named Maxwell who grew up in a family of 41 siblings.  He was given a magic notebook where anything he wrote would materialize into a real-world object, and, though he could've used this notebook for good, he was kind of a selfish jerk with it.  One day, he came across a hungry homeless man, and as a joke Maxwell used his notebook to give him a rotten apple.  The old man, secretly being a sorcerer, gets angry at the spoiled boy and casts a curse on his sister, Lily, turning her to stone.  The only way to lift the curse is to take control of Maxwell as the main character in the game and collect magical objects called starites by helping people solve their own problems with the help of his magic notebook.  Yeah, it's a pretty shallow, kid-friendly storyline, but it's not hurting the game in any way.

The game's main mechanic uses Maxwell's notebook to summon real-world objects to solve people's problems.  And this isn't a matter of you being given a list of objects you can create; you are the creator.  With the game being on PC and Wii U, you use your computer's keyboard or an on-screen keyboard displayed on the Wii U's touch-screen controller to input the word, and whatever you type in becomes an asset in the game itself.  It's an amazing mechanic and the game was specifically coded to support literally tens of thousands of objects. It's truly a unique blend of a puzzle and platforming game.

I don't understand what's happening...but I love it.

 The game's main appeals come from its cute, simplistic art style, and from its easy-to-understand gameplay. Let's say you're walking through the city and you come across a guy who's hungry.  He mentions he has quite the sweet tooth and, using these clues, you, the player, can use the notebook to create an object that fits what he wants; this takes directly from the logical appeal of a wordplay game like Charades or Pictionary.  The great part about this game is it's not overly difficult if you can understand the clues, because there are multiple answers for every puzzle, making everyone's experiences unique.  For that example puzzle I put together, the answer could be "ice cream" or "cookie." Hell, you could write "giant churro" or "cinnamon milkshake" and still solve the puzzle, if you wanna think outside the box or be funny.  The game becomes more engaging as the player learns to be more and more creative in figuring out puzzles, and sometimes things can get pretty silly.  The puzzles you over-think and mess up on are probably gonna be your favourite parts in the game due to how ridiculous a simple problem can become.

I would recommend this game to anyone. It's fun playing alone, it's even more fun in groups, and there's not really any reason for anyone to dislike a game with such a traditionally entertaining, player-driven concept.

2.
Mario Party 2 (N64/Wii)

A big part of my childhood right here, Guys – tread carefully!

This game really is what it sounds like: it's a Mario game, and it's a party game.  It's Mario Party – the second one, to be specific.  If there's ever been a game that's both a blast to play with friends and a game that will make you hate your friends, it's this one.  I can't count how many times I've gotten friends and relatives together to play Mario Party and how much fun we've all had from playing this multiplayer classic from almost 15 years ago.

The screen follows each player as they perform on
their turns - don't worry, there's a map so you can
always see the full board.

The basic premise of Mario Party is, at its core, it's a virtual board game.  This makes the entire concept of the game rather easy to put into perspective for audiences of all ages.  Much like with Scribblenauts, Mario Party takes a modern, software-based attempt at emulating a classic human pastime.  People love word games that test their knowledge of the language they speak, and people equally enjoy spending a rainy evening playing a board game.  Mario Party is about collecting coins in various ways in order to buy stars.  The average game of Mario Party lasts 20 rounds, so the player with the most stars by the end of 20 rounds wins.  Players roll a die to move along a game board where many spaces are placed to help their progress toward the shiny celestial objects, or to foil their efforts.  There are also items you can buy at shops placed throughout the board you can use at the start of your turn to help out: mushrooms to grant you multiple dice to roll with at the beginning of your turn, keys that can open gates for shortcuts on the board, or magic lamps that can transport you straight to a star space.

This all sounds like a pretty basic board game.  Why couldn't Nintendo have just released a physical board game of Mario Party, rather than releasing a video game for it?  Well, Mario Party's main attraction is exactly what its exclusivity as a video game offers: at the end of each round, players must participate in a mini-game to compete for coin rewards.  On top of the competition of messing with players to race for coins and stars on the board, players must go head-to-head in a video game setting where you can participate in many different matches, such as bobsled races, battle royales with tanks, or something really creative and weird like timed puzzles.  Each mini-game has this bizarre atmosphere of a game show like Wipeout, and it really fits the cheesy, over-the-top world of Mario.

Playing many different games one after another can be stressful.
That's why these screens explain the rules of each game and
the controls for how to play - and yep, even a practice round if you need it!

The game is never dragging on or feeling the same because of this constant shifting of tasks to perform.  There are over 30 different mini-games to play, and not one experience is going to feel the same.  Animations and rounds move fast as to not bore people, and the music and visual effects are charming and hold your attention. The concept of a board game is brought to life and built even further with this series of games.  Though there are nine different Mario Party games from Nintendo now, Mario Party 2 on the N64 was the best one, and it's available for purchase as a downloadable app on the Wii's Virtual Console for only 1,000 Wii Points.  Go pick it up, grab some buddies to play with, and have a blast with that familiar sort of competitive feeling you all know and love when you're racing neck-and-neck for the Boardwalk property in Monopoly.

1.
Persona 3 Portable (PSP)

The title screen alone – look at that style and confidence in the art!

Visual novels are a growing fad in the gaming industry. They're simple to create from a technological standpoint, they give writers the elbow room to flex their narrative muscles in an interactive medium, and they really easy to pick up and play on the go.  A visual novel, like any book, can entrance and captivate anyone if they sit down and appreciate what they're reading. Aside from iPhone apps, I feel the mainstream gaming industry, specially independent developers, could move toward this genre for moderate success.  I present to you my favourite visual novel I've played through to date: Persona 3 for the Playstation Portable.

The story is centred in Tokyo, Japan, where a group of high school kids living in the same dorm fight against evil creatures called Shadows (really creative, I know) with these magical beings they control called Personas, which manifest a physical form based on one's personality and life choices. This group of freedom fighters, known as S.E.E.S. and disguised as a school club, are fighting to end the "Dark Hour," a time every day where existence freezes and the world becomes a Hell-like realm that houses the shadows.  All that being explained, S.E.E.S. aims to eradicate the shadows that could endanger innocent people, and, more importantly, keep the monsters from arising outside of the Dark Hour.

Visual Novel gameplay is a point-and-click interface, where
you instantly interact with points of interest. Boring? No: efficient.

The main protagonist (that's you) is a transfer student to the school S.E.E.S. attends, and upon being temporarily located to their dorm due to a lodging mix-up, you realize  you have the potential to summon a Persona and, therefore, are recruited to be a part of their club.  The focus of the game is to clear the world of shadows by going to their nest (subtly named "Tartarus") and save the world from the epidemic of evil black monsters while also juggling school life and social commitments you participate in during the day.
A stylish ring of commands on the left, your characters' remaining health on the right...for overall appeal, this game does suffer a bit from complicated GUI, I'll admit.

Characters in Persona 3 are in-depth and fully explored at the leisure of the player who chooses to socialize with them.  Don't like Junpei, the goofy, lazy guy who acts rather vain and never takes anything seriously?  That's fine – aside from advancing the story itself, you don't have to spend any time interacting with his character during the game.  Want to explore the character of the mysterious Shinji who doesn't like talking to other people?  Go ahead and invest yourself into finding out more about him. Who you talk to and truly explore relations with is all up to you.  This level of freedom and choice is what drives Persona 3 as a fun game, pushing the boundaries of narrative past a simple concrete path; it's a "pick-your-own-adventure" novel executed perfectly.

A stylish ring of commands on the left, your characters' remaining
health on the right...for overall appeal, this game does suffer a bit
from complicated GUI, I'll admit.

While the daytime sections of the game are based around reading and partaking in the story, the nighttime sections of the game are probably more exciting.  If you want to fight the shadows that night during the Dark Hour, prepare for a Dungeon-Crawling experience strewn with RPG battles.  As you scale the 200-plus floors of Tartarus, you and three of your hardy dorm mates will have to combat the monsters toe to toe.  These means of battling are done through a traditional, turn-based battle system based around inflicting damage on opponents through any strategic combination of attacks, spells, and ailments.  Every fight is less like a real fight and more like a game plan you have to co-ordinate, as you control not only your own character, but the AI and fighting styles of your other team members.

Like with any good book, there's not much I can say as opposed to why you should read/play Persona 3.  Though I find this to be a game with wide appeal because of its format, there's not much to describe about what there is to like.  If you like the sound of the story or the gameplay, try it.  If not, I can't be against you for it.  It's got a pretty simple interface that's easy to catch on to, it has a stylish, modern aesthetic in everything about its visual design, and it presents many important themes in life through its narrative: independence, leadership, responsibility, hope, dreams, life, and even tackles the difficult human question of death and what it means to us.  Keep in mind all these themes are explored in an exaggerated, supernatural light, but are explored no less – fantasy and fiction don't make its literary strengths any less valid, in my opinion.


IN CLOSING:

Games all have different ways of being good or appealing, so I'm hoping this list doesn't come off as the be-all and end-all of video games - these are by no means my favorite games, and they aren't the "best" video games. There's no such thing as "best" games, much like how it's impossible to pinpoint the perfect movie or book. It's all a matter of preference, and if you, the reader, aren't inclined to enjoying a simple but deep game, then you're completely entitled to that opinion. Some people enjoy complex games, and some people enjoy shallow games, there's really no right answer here. Like I've said in the beginning of this article, you may even be reading this knowing that you really don't like video games to begin with, and that's fine too; it's for that reason that this blog isn't purely relating to gaming.

These five games I've listed, however, are games I feel could transition people into appreciating video games in their own ways: they aren't complicated, nor were they revolutionary to the evolution of games as a whole.  These games aren't maliciously pretentious like Journey or Limbo with their "See? Video games are art and should be deeply loved" message.  I feel these games encompass both a "hardcore" and " casual" package. While game concepts like Mario Party 2's and Minecraft's are simplistic and focus on one main idea to explore, they are complex and engaging in their overall experiences.  They are essentially "hardcore gamer" games executed to feel "casual," widening their appeal.  At least, this is what I feel.  Alas, I suppose I'm not a qualified video game theorist and have no active weight in my opinion.

Or maybe we're all fully-qualified theorists strictly because we aren't.  Think about it.