I’m going to take a contentions
position for an argument. This isn’t
going to be about Nintendo’s future, though my recent (though unpublished,
sorry) thoughts on the subject lean strongly towards Nintendo as “just fine.” Rather, this is going to focus on one tiny
feature that clearly sets Nintendo apart, has done so for 3 years and even in
the teeth of hardware, and still no one is talking about it, despite the
generally positive impact it has had on gaming, especially portable gaming in
general.
I want to tell you all about
StreetPass. I’m deep in the midst of
Animal Crossing: New Leaf, a game that is far superior to comparable titles,
and for whom StreetPass is a huge feature.
Done right, it allows creative games and players to share their unique
creations and progress in the game, to share whole worlds that can be visited,
created by gamers just like the player.
It is a phenomenal teaching tool, just by demonstrating what is
possible. Just to be clear, “done right”
here means that the Nintendo staff feel able to play too, joining in the game
and help to create while using no other tools, while never cheating and still
bound to the same rules as all other players.
Animal Crossing is all of these things, and it would be an order of
magnitude less without StreetPass. It
would be another game just like Animal Crossing: Wild World, a tragedy for a
franchise whose biggest flaw is that its entries feel too much like each other.[i]
As one might expect, I’m quite a
fan of this, but I’m hardly blind to less graceful implementations of StreetPass. Its earliest expressions were in the Nintendogs+Cats
game, directed by Hideki Konno. Dragon
Quest IX was my first exposure to it, and was quite popular at the time.[ii] The idea, at least in Dragon Quest, seemed
awkward to initiate and limited in reward – you had to launch the game, then
put it into a software sleep mode, to potentially share items that could upset
the game balance, potentially making the game too easy. Not that it mattered much – in small town
Ontario, the feature never worked at all, so I didn’t know what to make of it. But in Japan, the idea was catching on.
The 3DS, also the project of director
Hideki Konno, would have the feature at launch, and would do away with the need
to have the cart installed in the cart reader to make it work. Future StreetPasses would be active as long
as the 3DS was active.
The Nintendo Wikia website tracks
a certain history of the features uses.[iii] Earliest uses reflected Street Fighter IV 3D
edition (2010), which stages battles between trophies players earn in story
mode, but automates the battles. Early
adopter asked what use this feature was, but were widely surprised at the team
building depth Street Fighters’ features included.[iv] I first jumped on board for Super Mario 3D
Land, and here StreetPassing takes on the form of players exchanging small
drips of new content, especially in the Mystery Boxes. A great many other 3DS games follow this
format, slowly adding content to the player’s copy of the game to provide
incentives to return later (and subtly incenting against the used games market
too).
But I had said StreetPass was one
of the best innovations in games in recent times, not just a really good
one. The rough edges from the Dragon Quest
IX days are slowly being polished over; Nintendo has recently announced that Nintendo
Zones will now retransmit the data of the last StreetPasser to the next, in
effect allowing StreetPassing between two game holders who have no yet met
directly.[v] Better rewards, such as exchanging Mario Kart
7’s ghost data or Fire Emblem: Awakening’s tacticians, further builds
communities of Nintendo gamers.
Arguably, though, Animal Crossing: New Leaf tops them all, and I could
stand on that opinion if not for another strange and unusual story. The pack in StreetPass games never worked for
me, but they must have worked for someone.
Nintendo is now pulling in $4 million in a month from sales of 4 new
StreetPass games made available through the e-Shop.[vi] The news is still met with skepticism here,
but I expect with content fed to gamers on a distributed schedule, Nintendo may
have a new solution for retaining its audience and brand power in time for
future launches.
I’m still hopeful newer games set
an even higher precedent. StreetPass is
still very much a frontier development with room to grow. But why is StreetPass trumping the
significant challenges that should be holding it back? How is StreetPass really so much more
engaging than using the same Internet dependent systems its rivals depend
on? These are questions that I hope to
answer tomorrow.
[i]
Jack Stapleton. Developer’s Accomplice. June 18, 2013. Retrieved online on August 12th,
2013, at https://www.developersaccomplice.co.uk/animal-crossing-new-leaf/ I remember this opinion being very common
before New Leaf’s launch, but since then less-than-perfect scores of Animal
Crossing have all but evaporated.
[ii]
Iwata Asks Nintendo 3DS. Volume 4. 4. Bragging about your Pet to
the world. Retrieved online on August 12th, 2013, at http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/how-nintendo-3ds-made/3/3
[iii]
StreetPass. The Nintendo Wiki. Retrieved online on August
12th, 2013 at http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/StreetPass
[iv]
Chris Totten, StreetPass Review: Super
Streetfighter IV 3D Edition. StreetPass Network, Connecting Gamers Around
the World. Retrieved online August 12th,
2013 at http://streetpassnetwork.com/features/
[v]
Thomas Whitehead. Nintendo Zone
StreetPass Relay System Announced. NintendoLife.
Retrieved online August 12th, 2013 at http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/07/nintendo_zone_streetpass_relay_system_announced
[vi]
Yannick LeJacq. Nintendo’s 3DS ‘StreetPass’
games makes $4 million in a month.
NBC News. Posted August 5th, 2013. Retrieved online August 12th,
2013 at http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nintendos-3ds-streetpass-games-makes-4-million-month-6C10849956
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