Topic: Extra Life #3: LostWinds

[NWR_Neal]

Extra Life is a weekly column focused on giving games a second chance. Each week, I'll look at one game that I missed. It could be a game that received universal appraisal, or one that seemingly nobody played.


This week's entry is LostWinds, one of the first WiiWare games to be released in North America. Developed by Frontier Developments, LostWinds came out on May 12, 2008.


Check it out.

[Morari]

I play a good chunk of the game back when it was initially released. It was pretty fun. I eventually got stuck in a crevice in one of the caves however. There was a clipping issue and I couldn't get out of the corner. I had played up to that point in just one sitting and got frustrated in having to restart the game do to such a stupid bug. I never did get back around to it. :\

[broodwars]

I bought this game near when it came out, and for the life of me I just can't get into it.  It's boring, it's repetitive, it has terrible controls, and it's kind of buggy.  I'd call it a negative that the game was so short as well, but considering I didn't enjoy it that has to be a good thing.  I also ran into a nasty bug when I fought the end-of-game boss, where the boss glitched me into a sequence where I would get hit infinitely without being able to do anything, yet the game wouldn't kill me.
 
I've heard the second game is a vast improvement, but considering they still haven't fixed the wonky controls (seriously, it wouldn't kill them to give the main character a jump button) I'm just going to stay away from that one.

[ShyGuy]

I didn't run into any bugs playing it, I found it to be very polished, better than many third party titles. The wind was a little finicky but my tolerance for jumping in a 2D platformer is much higher.

[greybrick]

Some potential improvements:

This feature doesn't make much sense to me in general. As a personal blog, it makes plenty of sense, but the whole concept of "extra life" does not click with me. I get that the games are getting an extra life in the sense that someone is talking about them after they have come out, but it is not as if this is Neal's second time playing the games. So they really aren't getting a second chance, they are getting their first chance with Neal, only late. In the case of Silent Hill SM, it has barely stopped being talked about on most podcasts.

One other thing that doesn't make much sense is the fact that these are just discussions about the very beginning portions of the games. I would much rather hear what Neal thinks about the games after finishing them, and not whether or not he thinks he will play them based off of the first twenty minutes or hour. Perhaps this would make more sense if it chronicled Neal's weekly journey throughout an entire game that he is playing, as opposed to brushing over the surface of something new each week. When I think of giving something a second chance, I first imagine that someone is trying it for the second time, and I also imagine that they aren't just trying it for a small amount of time before rendering a temporary evaluation.

This content just doesn't seem to jive with the rest of what NWR puts out, both in format and writing style. I can tell that Neal is trying to pioneer a new type of article for the site, but to me it feels like Extra Life is trying to be something it isn't.

I do like that Neal is putting in so much time into these features, I just think they have some room for improvement. If the articles are going to agree or dissent with previous reviews and opinions, I would much rather hear that from someone who has played the full game. Otherwise, I really don't see why this isn't labeled a blog.

[NWR_Neal]

I totally get where you're coming from. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do these, but you have to keep in mind a few things.

First off, time. If you want these articles to get us consistently, I straight up cannot play through entire games. I don't do this full-time, and I do a lot of other stuff on the site so I can't dedicate a consistent long amount of time for playing games for this feature. A lot of the reasoning behind playing the first hour was so this could be done at all.

Second off, if you read the little blurb at the beginning of each feature (and in this thread), I (hope I) lay out the concept behind the feature

Extra Life is a weekly column focused on giving games a second chance. Each week, I'll look at one game that I missed. It could be a game that received universal appraisal, or one that seemingly nobody played.

I think in this case, we just have different ideas of what Extra Life should mean. To me, it's about giving a game that may have been passed by me and others a chance at all. The game industry works in weird ways when games that are weeks old are old news and no one talks about them.

As for coming back to a game after I'm finished, I might write a follow-up piece when I finish a game and see if my gut reaction was right on target or way off.

And the style of this feature is blog-like. I feel like it'd be very dry and boring without that style, and I would also find it hard to make the stream of consciousness nature of the Game part work without using a blog style.

I don't mean to shoot down what you're saying at all, and I hope I'm not in any way. You bring up valid points.

[greybrick]

"To me, it's about giving a game that may have been passed by me and   others a chance at all."
"It could be a game that received universal appraisal"

That is one part that confuses me, it seems like those games receive plenty of coverage.

As far as the blog-like format, what I was trying to get at is that the feature should simply be labeled as a blog.

With respect to the amount of time each game is played, I don't think that if you are going to reach back in time to assess a game that just writing about the first hour or so is very meaningful. Since this is the internet, I can always just type- "Silent Hill Shattered Memories" into my search field and read plenty of things about the game written by people that have played the whole thing through. Without the context of it being a second look/retrospective, or presenting a dissenting opinion to articles already written, I don't understand what makes the content meaningful outside of the personal space. In the end, EL is useful for those of us that want to know what Neal is up to and what he thought of the first little chunk of a game.

I do like that you are calling older games to people's attention. Games like Lost Winds were very high profile, with Lost Winds being the original poster child for WiiWare. Still, I can see the value in discussing things that people may have forgotten or missed. I do want to make sure that you know that you have my gratitude for even working at this site at all, I appreciate these articles and the work you do on Newscast. I hope that I can be critical without having an air of entitlement about me that springs up on many forums.

[vudu]

I agree that it's a bit too soon for the Silent Hill Extra Life, but other than that, I dig this series.

However, I still think the first one--PoP Fallen Sands--was the best.  The feature seems like it'd be best for games that not many people have played.  Since I played LostWinds I wasn't as interested in this entry.  Then again, most people probably haven't played the game so I can't really fault Neal for picking a game that I just so happened to have beaten. 

[Stratos]

Every game, no matter how amazing or popular it was, had people who missed out on it.

[Mop it up]

LostWinds was an interesting concept, but I feel the game itself is so bare. There isn't much to do, it is really short, and never a challenge. I've heard the second game was quite an improvement, but I haven't been willing to give it a chance after how boring I found the first one to be.

[NWR_Neal]

grey brick, don't worry. I take no offense to this at all.

I'll definitely concede that the Silent Hill one might've been too soon, but it happened to have come in on GameFly at the exact time I was trying to think what game I was going to do next. In the future, I think I'm going to try to do more games like Prince of Persia and less games like Silent Hill, but I'm still feeling my way around this feature.

[Stratos]

I think doing recent games has it's merits because there is the chance that more people will go out and pick it up while it is readily available since some games can disappear into the void after a while and then you have to gut your wallet to acquire a copy.

[ejamer]

Although I really like seeing older games, if Silent Hill arrives then why not use it for the article?  I rather like the "stream of consciousness" approach where we get to read impressions as they are still being formed.  Although the concerns of others are totally valid, I enjoy the articles for what they are and look forward to more (assuming you enjoy creating them).

[Stratos]

Perhaps every 5-10 articles or so you could do a 'post-play summary' compilation of the last few games you did? You could just write up a paragraph or two per title saying whether your impressions held throughout the whole game and other parting thoughts.