Yamauchi on Games

I really wonder just how bad Nintendo's instant rice was. They made it in the early 60s, and apparently even Yamauchi himself could not eat it. But really. just how bad could it be?

The company's forays into various avenues is really quite curious. And it spans the full gamut from toys to baby accessories, from food to porno (in so far as love hotels and a shooting gallery game involving shooting off a young Swedish woman's clothes count as pornography). But as soon as they found success with video games, it sounds like they really attached themselves to that.

The four characteristics of an excellent game, which Yamauchi himself quoted, being "competition, chance, imitation, and the pursuit of exhilaration " definitely come into play with all of the most popular video games.

But so what?

Well, I think that these four principles can be boiled down to just two - the thrill of an even competition wherein any player has a chance to win, and the placement of this experience into a setting that imitates life or is in some way relateable. This really applies to a lot of games of today, but what it doesn't apply to are many online shooters. Chance often seems stripped away from them in favour of experience, but really, how can you roll over a troop of experienced regular players to give new players a chance?

The book's quality continues to be on the side of trivia and factoids, while things like lacklustre grammar and improper editing saw a spike in the previous two chapters ("Other Products" and "Nintendo and Arcade Games").

On the whole, the book's strength is definitely not in its verbal presentation, but really, that's to be expected. Neither of the book's authors are native speakers of English, and as many ties as the English and French languages have, translating between even them can be perilous. Still, the errors aren't debilitating and the book's still a fascinating read - even as its end looms ahead.