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I remember the first time that I played Super Mario bros on the NES. I was so absolutely blown away, that words don't make justice. I had previous experience wi
by nzonbi 10y ago
I remember the first time that I played Super Mario bros on the NES. I was so absolutely blown away, that words don't make justice. I had previous experience with many consoles and computer games. But this thing -Mario Bros- was so incredibly well designed, that it was beyond unbelievable. This little box, packing this strange, exotic world, full of inexplicable, surprising creatures and devices. With many different areas full of mysteries. Reinforced by the perplexing, hypnotizing music. I still can clearly hear it. The amazing sound effects. I can still clearly hear the sound of entering a pipe, and descending into the underground. The amount of engaging and continually fresh motion, required to overcome the always changing obstacles, was absolutely unequaled at the time.
There were moments that I would be idle, pondering how it was possible to pack so much brilliant design on a thing. I would then be also tremendously impressed by other games of the time, notably Zelda and Super Mario Bros 3. That I would become a big fan of Japanese game design for life. Investigating and following the individual game creators. Since then, I slowly noticed that the Japanese, and some Asians, have a unique sensibility that gives their games a peculiar flavor. Many people -mainly westerns- don't resonate with this peculiar uniqueness, that rarely exist in western games. And that is ok, just interesting. It is like they can achieve a laser focus on a particular set of simple, essential human emotions. It can be found on how they draw things, the stories that write, etc. That particularly inspires some people.
For many people, Nintendo games of the time were so dramatically better designed, compared to the standards of the time, that they were like gold compared to the others dirt. That was an important factor, possibly the biggest, in the creation of the generation Nintendo. It is very interesting to know what were the conditions and events, that allowed Nintendo the company, to come up with these absolutely brilliant products at the time. That allowed it to achieve legendary status among so many people.
- talles 10y agoI once saw in a museum a samurai armour. When I came close I was astonished to see that, not only the armour itself is very detailed, but the cloth that goes under all protection had a lot of handcrafted needlework imagery. Art and military in a suit.
- Danieru 10y agoThere is a risk of oriential mysticism when talking about japan's game design sense. Yet it is a real thing. Japan has a different game design culture which grew during the 80's and 90's. Japan's game designers almost never speak or read english. Entire companies are isolated. So you have isolated game designers working in an isolated country. This has led to several unique understandings of how games should be developed. Some of the ideas just seem wrong to my foreign experience. A designer might say "this is easier for the player to understand", as he suggests something which seems to me 100% opaque and blackbox. There are fundamental differences to how a japanese mega-corp develops a video game.
- wingerlang 10y ago> Yet it is a real thing. Doesn't seem like a "game design sense" anymore than the fact that they have an isolated culture and their games simply resonate within this culture. We all know the 'asian websites' thing which is spoken about a lot. Their websites look like shit to use, but to them it is simply the better way. Nothing "mystic" about it, it is simply how they do stuff. At least this is what I think.
- kome 10y ago> We all know the 'asian websites' thing which is spoken about a lot. Their websites look like shit to use, but to them it is simply the better way. To be fair, I am kinda fed up as well of this American "Chickenshit Minimalism" ( https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1412524 https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... ); If you've ever visited a US landing page, it's like it was designed for a five year old. Huge empty blocks of color, sentences consisting of three or four simple words in large type, very few links widely separated from each other, and almost completely static pages with very low information density. Are Americans illiterate or just easily confused? ;)
- ZenoArrow 10y ago> "Are Americans illiterate or just easily confused? ;)" Joking aside, I'd argue the main reason for the rise of that style of minimalistic website was responsive design. It's much easier to design a website to be responsive if the content is sparsely laid out to begin with. There was a mobile-first trend in web design, and I believe the type of layout you're referring to was the result. Perhaps we'll find better ways of handling responsive design in the future (better in the sense of making sites that are able to better tailor themselves to available resources without a notable increase in code).
- studentrob 10y ago> It is like they can achieve a laser focus on a particular set of simple, essential human emotions Yeah. I like the stickers used in messaging in Asia. Asians, in my experience, were using this years before the US, and their messaging apps had it before Facebook. I can type "sad" in Line and it'll show me a bunch of different characters with sad expressions [1] [2]. The stickers can make conversation more succinct. Line is popular in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. I have no affiliation. This came to mind when I read what you wrote =) [1] http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/08/line1.jpg http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/08/l... [2] http://www.taipeitimes.com/images/2014/12/13/thumbs/P10-141213-002.jpg http://www.taipeitimes.com/images/2014/12/13/thumbs/P10-1412... (says hahaha)
- digi_owl 10y agoHeh, i still recall hitting 1-2 and the music spooked the crap out of me.