The Alienation Effect? Part 1

So, today's malarkey comes from an old post I never finished up on my (not very developed) 1up blog. About a year ago, I finished a play-through of Super Paper Mario with my wife, and a few things occurred to me during and after that experience that I thought I'd discuss here.

So, my wife is not a huge video game fan. Certainly she enjoys them. And damn, is she ever good at some of them. She worked up perfect 100% ratings on every single level in Yoshi's Island back when that was a "current game," which really is no mean feat. The Mario All-Stars saves left over from her junior high years tell the tale of a person who once racked up some 70 (!) extra lives in between levels of Super Mario Bros. 2 before finishing the game. When asked about Super Mario World, she nonchalantly claims not to remember having gotten very far in it, yet one of her saves from that game preserves a completely (yes, 100%) unlocked world map. She's been all the way through A Link to the Past and gathered every item, even the ones you don't need and have to really look for. All four bottles! Everything. I just mean that she doesn't lack for skill, and when she starts a game, she finishes it—all the way. But I think the angle she comes at video games from must be a bit different from mine.

Ugh, now that's going to sound like an awful pun. The thing is that she just doesn't always react well to real 3D games. When The Wind Waker came out, she gamely played along with me up to the Forsaken Fortress, where of course, after countless moblin run-ins, she swore off Zelda games forever, until I played past that and let her try her hand at the Forest Haven. She found the little interior area around the Deku Tree completely disorienting, and at that point her patience really did run out. Fair enough. For someone who's never really adjusted to 3D games, that is a confusing, monotonous area, filled as it is with water, branches, lily pads, floating lights--not the easiest place for getting your 3D sea legs.

"3D sea legs." What does that remind me of? Oh yes! It reminds me that my wife has played and loved Escape from Monkey Island, as well as Grim Fandango and Eternal Darkness, and she's perfectly adept at those games. She's also pretty good at Grand Theft Auto III, and she sort of likes that one. Maybe the problem lies in the constant (and sometimes drastic) shifts along the height axis in games like The Wind Waker? I mean, it is true that Eternal Darkness, Escape from Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango work from a fixed perspective, so that might explain those, but what about GTA3? Maybe the driving is intuitive.

Anyway, I'm on the other side of the spectrum. I'll play almost anything if I have the right console/hardware and enough time (guess which of those is more problematic). I was playing King's Quest II with my mom when I was still pre-literate, really before I had enough of a mental visual dictionary to translate the blocky graphics into real objects in my head. I mean, I did okay for the most part, but there were some things on that KQ2 screen I could not comprehend. Trident? Seahorse? Cauldron of chicken soup?

(Okay, I'm being disingenuous. That's not chicken soup.)

I've played lots of stuff from almost every genre that's arisen since then, and I'm at least okay at most of them. Well, I love, but absolutely suck at, Civilization. But I don't have a fundamental inability to play this or that type of game.

Well, my wife definitely has a preference for old-tyme side-scrollers (and top-down adventures). Super Paper Mario was like a dream come true for her. She is thrilled about Fez, and I can't wait to see if she likes Cave Story when it comes to Wii (I haven't tried her on the desktop experience, though perhaps I should). I'm also going to play Braid when it comes to PC, and I think she'll like that, too. And I love side-scrollers and other 2D games too, but I've played and loved so many other kinds of games that I would have thought I had no particular preference for the older style.

But you know what? I think I might.

When we bought our Wii a year and some months ago, I logged lots of time on Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy and Resident Evil 4 and all that, but I really found myself spending just as much time—probably lots more time—playing Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Super Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3, Zelda II, and other mostly 16- and 8-bit games. I played those games for inordinate, embarrassing amounts of time. Then I bought a PSP and, between that and my DS, I've barely been able to claw my way out from RPGs and Metroidvanias (sorry!).

So before I close this first installment out (I have much more to say, as well as an actual theory to posit, in part 2 and, if it comes to that, part 3), I'll just pose this question: what's going on here? Am I giving in to nostalgia? Have I spent so much time playing games with my wife that I'm picking up her preferences? Or is it something else entirely?

And of course I could just be reading too much into this. It was huge for me just to be able to play old games on a real TV screen again.

Today's top image (a dizzy bokoblin to represent my wife getting dizzy from playing WW) comes from wiiconsumer.wordpress.com. The KQ2 image is from adventureclassicgaming.com.