How many games do you need?

Every now and then I read an article that compares the ratings of games on various consoles. Usually, the analysis is something like: "almost one in four Wii games in 2008 were utter, utter crap". Which sounds pretty bad until you remember Sturgeon's Revelation.

But there's a deeper problem with this analysis: most people are at least somewhat picky about the games they buy. For instance, if you look at the best-selling Wii games on Amazon. While there are a few game rated less than 4 stars (Wii Play, Wii Music, Super Paper Mario, etc.), none are rated below 3 stars. Most of the best selling games are also critical successes and loved by customers. The percentage of Wii titles that are shovelware doesn't matter as long as there are enough good games to keep you happy.

Which brings us to the question of how many games does a console need in order to be worth the initial cost of the system? First, let's assume that going to a movie is the standard for measuring the price people are willing to pay for an hour of entertainment. In 2009, the average movie ticket price in the US was $7.50. It's probably $10 or more in Southern California where I live, but let's just go with the national average. By general rule-of-thumb, the average movie length is 120 minutes, so the standard hourly rate for entertainment would be around $3.25 an hour (or $5+ in LA).

Now the Wii currently costs $199 and includes both Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, which is a pretty amazing deal. Divide the cost by the standard entertainment rate, and it works out to about 61 hours required to break even (or less than 40 where I live). According to the Nintendo Channel, Wii Sports averages just under 38 hours of play per console connected to WiFi. Wii Sports Resort averaged almost 19 hours by December, 2009. That means the current bundle is already likely to be worth the cost without considering any other games.

But let's say you don't think you'll play the Wii Sports games that much. Super Smash Bros. Brawl very nearly makes up the initial cost of the Wii all by itself (75+ hours). Don't forget that each game adds to the total cost of ownership, which means the extra $50 adds another 15 hours or so to the break-even-time. I'd also have to guess that a significant percentage of Smash Bros. game time is in multiplayer, so you need to add in the cost of extra controllers. (This applies to the Wii Sport titles as well, by the way.) On the other hand, each hour spent on a multiplayer game is worth one hour times the number of players. Compare taking a family of four to a movie ($30 or more) to spending an evening playing the Wii. You only need to make that choice half a dozen times to break even.

I can also tell you that between Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy and Lego Star Wars, our family has easily recouped the total cost of our Wii setup. So the answer to how many games you need is as few as one, if the game is good enough.

But to go back to the original complaint with the Wii library, one of the reasons's there are so many bad games is because it's relatively cheap to develop and publish a title for the low-powered, widely-owned system. That means publishers are far more willing to take risks and green light more projects. But the flip side is also true: consumers can take a risk and buy unknown or marginal titles since the standard price of Wii games is $10 (or about an entertainment hour) cheaper than PS3 and 360 games. What's more, it takes a lot more to recoup the cost of the more expensive consoles (and potentially more expensive TVs and sound systems to go with them). In fairness, we probably need to shift the baseline from a regular movie ticket to an IMAX ticket ($3-$5 extra).

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Lego Star Wars was the game that prompted me to buy a Wii. I even bought the game before I bought the console.¹

The first video game I played was a home version of Pong. I don't remember much about it, but I do recall waiting for the TV to warm up so we could play a few games of Pong before Dukes of Hazard or some such came on. It's a simple game and after a few plays you are ready for something else. One of my friends had an Atari 2600 that got a lot more play from us since it had Breakout, Combat, Indy 500, and especially Space Invaders. I vividly remember spending entire afternoons trying out the various game modes of Space Invaders—the 2600 version had 112 including invisible enemies and moving shields.

Then a series of events pulled me away from home consoles for many years. We moved away, my parents got rid of our old TV and bought a Tandy 1000 SX home computer. So I missed out on the NES, the 16-bit consoles, the PlayStations, and the various other gaming systems that connect to a TV screen. Instead I played tons of PC games from Sopwith to IL-2 Sturmovik. As you might imagine, I also spent tons of time and money upgrading my computer so that I could play the latest PC games. It was sometime after I got married and before our son was born that I got burnt out and gave up on upgrading my PC. A few years later I picked up a Jakks Atari TV game out of nostalgia, but I figured I'd outgrown video games.

Time for a short history of video games digression. Video games exist in three distinct zones. The first is arcade games which reside in public locations such as bars, pizza parlors, movie theaters and, of course arcades. Second is home consoles, which are attached to family TVs in the living room or den. Lastly are computer games that played in the home office or den. As a result of these zones, each type of game has developed it's own distinct traits. Arcade games are bright, inviting, technically advanced, fast-paced, public, and unforgiving because they are designed to eat quarters. On the other end of the spectrum, computer games tend to be darker, complex, technically limited, contemplative, individual, and deep since they reside on the same machine that is used for word processing and spreadsheets. Home consoles sit between the extremes.

Initially, consoles were just cheaper versions of arcade machines that could be experienced in homes. But somewhere around the end of the Atari era and the beginning of the NES era, consoles began to assert a separate style of gameplay that was a little more relaxed than their arcade cousins. Donkey Kong did its best to kill you off in the first minute or two, but Super Mario Bros. gives you a lot more rope to keep playing. Console games could afford to offer a deeper experience without the pressure to cycle through players as there is at the arcade. On the other hand, they were restrained from becoming as complex as PC games since they relied on a public resource (the living room TV). Over time, console games drifted closer to the PC style as more gaming systems were attached to TVs in bedrooms and game rooms. By the time I started looking into consoles again, they were a far cry from the Atari I grew up with.

A few Christmases ago I visited my brother who has an Xbox 360 and a copy of Lego Star Wars, which he fired up between events. It looked fun so I asked to play and he handed me a second controller and I dropped in. We worked together for a while solving puzzles and beating up battle droids. Then he needed to go do something and dropped out for a while. As we played through the story, other family members (including non-gamers) sat around to watch the goofy cut scenes between levels. Gameplay is so accessible almost anyone can start playing (and make progress) moments after picking up the controller. In essence, the game was a lot like the family, living-room, arcade-style games from the Atari and NES eras.

When I first heard the concept of the game, I couldn't get my head around it. How do you make a game based on both Lego toys and Star Wars? I assumed there would be lots of building with bricks and that didn't seem to fit with the action-oriented movies. And the developers seem to agree since game uses Lego environments mostly for the sake of destruction. Pretty much everything that looks like it's built out of Legos can be destroyed. Besides being fun to smash up the environment, the game scatters studs (Lego currency) everywhere to be collected for buying bonus features and characters later. Building is included for solving puzzles, but it's somewhat abstract as you'll find a pile of bricks, hold a button and your character starts to assemble some useful object. (Often you can turn around and destroy it again, which is therapeutic.)

As for the movies, I've seen the original trilogy dozens of times and, as good as it is, I've gotten a little numb to the story. As for the prequels, they seem to take themselves too seriously and I actually fell asleep during the most recent one. Lego Star Wars manages to fix both issues at the same time. All the dialog-y bits are presented in pantomime cut-scenes that usually feature some sort of twist. For instance, the dramatic credit scene from Empire gets a gag where Luke's robotic hand jumps off his body and wanders around Thing-like. Then you get to play through all the action scenes which are greatly expanded from the movies. The game manages to capture the feel of the movie action sequence such as firing blasters at Stormtroopers while a droid works to open a blast door. Maybe not groundbreaking, but it feels just right.

After you finish a level in Story Mode, you unlock the option to play again in Free Play mode. In addition to using different characters, you can also find all sorts of hidden objects the second time around since different character classes are required to open up certain areas. There's just so much content and attention to detail it's hard to take it all in. Even in the overworld (Mos Eisley Cantina) you can easily amuse yourself getting into brawls, breaking up furniture, solving mini puzzles, and so on. By the way, get the Complete Saga version that includes levels from the first two games plus a few little extras.

By nature these games are cooperative. If you play alone, the computer takes over the other character, but it's not as fun. Either the computer will basically solve puzzles for you or will refuse to do their part causing you to switch from one character to another in a frantic attempt to do everything. After you've seen how to get through a section, it doesn't hurt to replay it on your own, but don't start off that way. Two player mode has it's own problems. Since there's only one camera, players can't wander where they please. It's not uncommon for one person to press ahead while the other wants to hang around and find secrets. Until one or the other caves in, this results in a frustrating fight for control of the camera that leaves both players stuck at the edge of the screen.

The other serious issue comes from the platforming elements. I don't know what it is about 3D platforming, but it's hard to judge jumps and the camera loves to move at the exact moment you need to pick a direction. Lego Star Wars exacerbates the problems by making the edges of the platforms mushy so you tend to slip to your doom when you get too close to a bottomless pit. If that weren't bad enough, you always respawn in the exact same spot and if you don't take action right away you'll fall in again and again. A stupid trick to play with a "friend" is to push them over a cliff and not move so they fall over and over. The computer loves to do that. (For an example of how to do this the right way, look at New Super Mario Bros. Wii.) Thankfully, death doesn't cost anything but studs, but this is a completely avoidable problem.

Another problem, especially for younger/less-experienced gamers, comes from the complex and layered nature of the levels. Often there will be a little hint that something is hidden behind a wall or a puzzle to be solved, but these are sometimes premature in Story Mode—they require characters that are unavailable. Even for me, it was sometimes hard to figure out what needed to be done to get through some levels. Particularly frustrating are the vehicle levels which seem to go on and on without giving any indication of how to proceed. In addition, they are the least cooperative sections of the game and even encourage competition.

And cooperation really makes this game special. It's a game that my son asks to play with me and then I get to be his hero by fighting off the bad guys and he gets to be the hero by finding the key to some puzzle or the direction to take next. And then my wife comes along and we switch to Wii bowling for a while.

Entertainment value: All 6 Star Wars DVDs edited by Steven Spielberg and a pile of Star Wars Lego sets.

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1 - The reason I bought it before a Wii was that I wanted to get a copy of "The Complete Saga" for my brother who only had Episodes I-III. Unfortunately, I didn't know that XBox game boxes are green and Wii boxes are white. So I returned the game and bought it again about a year later.

Why I'm glad I bought a Wii

Reading about Steve Yegge's problems with Fable II makes me appreciate my Wii just a bit more. To begin with, having to deal with games that need certain hardware to work was one of the reasons I've given up living on the cutting edge of PC gaming. It seems Microsoft can't make a break with its past when it develops the Xbox consoles. Some of my earliest, and not so happy, memories of computer gaming are scanning the small print on the side of a the game I'd really like to buy only to discover my computer doesn't have enough RAM or the right graphics card.

Now with the additions of the balance board, Wii Motion Plus and a storage solution, I'm sure hardware requirements on the Wii will get trickier in the near future. Nintendo seems to be taking it slow for the very purpose of making the additions smooth for game players rather than forcing changes.

Buying a Wii

Until last Christmas I was a PC gamer (if I had time for games at all). Originally, I figured a console was too expensive—especially since I already owned a PC. Since PC games are usually a few dollars cheaper and there's no additional hardware to buy, the choice was obvious. But over the years, I played fewer and fewer games. Part of the reason was that I got married and had a son. There just hasn't been as much on-my-own time as there was when I was single. But I also discovered the fatal flaws in my cheaper-is-better world view.

First, PC gamers are constantly upgrading. In the early days it was memory. Then CPUs needed to be upgraded as well. Then video cards. Plus you need joysticks and better mice and keyboards. All these things add up over time to match or exceed a console's startup cost. Then there are the wasted hours getting all the drivers and device settings working together.

Second, most games are awful. Saving a few dollars on a good game is fine, but too often I'd buy a game only to get bored with it a few days later. This is not an issue specific to the PC, obviously. Games are hard to perfect on any platform. But the PC has a unique issue that hasn't hit console games for the most part: patches. Theoretically, a game that isn't quite perfect can be released on the PC and a few weeks later, a patch to fix the small issues can be distributed. A surprising number of times, I'd get a game that included the patch on the disk with the rest of the game! (I have no idea why publisher do that. Just send us the patched game.) The result was a culture that viewed polish as less of a goal than publishing. Technically, there's no longer a reason console games wouldn't be patched. But for some reason they aren't.

Third, PC games are either solitary or remote. Sure, we'd organize LAN parties once in a while. But that carried it's own set of problems and frustrations. The computer is ideal for one person, but a console is geared toward people sitting around the TV playing together. A game that's kinda fun can become boring really quickly if there is no one to share it with. Since I want to maximize the time I have with family, I haven't had as much time for solitary games as I once did.

Now a few years ago, I visited one of my brothers who had a GameCube. We played a bit of Wario Ware Inc. and Super Monkey Ball, which are two of the oddest games I'd ever seen. There seemed to be wires everywhere and we had to sit close to the TV. But we had a pretty good time, so I put the idea of buying a used GameCube console in the back of my mind.

Last Christmas, we visited another brother in Hawaii. He has an Xbox 360 and plays Halo online. My son, who was 4 at the time, was interested in the game, but we didn't really want him watching that sort of thing, so we loaded Lego Star Wars. I don't know what it was about that strange combination, but we had a great time. Even watching other people play was a lot of fun somehow. Being able to grab a new controller and drop in or out at any time in coop mode really increased the fun factor as well. It was a revelation.

The Xbox 360 has wireless controllers, so there is no tangle of wires. The games look great and there isn't a huge install process for starting new games (compared to PC games). When my son went to bed, my brother and I played a few games of capture the flag with strangers online and it just worked. On the downside, more casual and family-oriented games are less common then on Nintendo systems. And the Xbox draws a lot of power, so it has an overheating issue. Further, it's really expensive.

Striking a balance between the GameCube and Xbox consoles (plus adding an innovative controller) is the Nintendo Wii. Sure the graphics fail to live up to an Xbox 360 and the price is higher than a used GameCube, but it had all the features I wanted. I was lucky enough to find a bundle at Costco early this summer. In the future, I plan on writing about the games I play on it.