When Super Mario World first came out way back in 1991, it boasted 96 levels. A number of levels that high had never even been an afterthought in the early 90s, as gaming was just beginning to develop a personality and an image in the world of entertainment. In the NES days, 20 stages was considered an excellent amount. Super Mario World however broke the mold in a fathom of ways. Not only did it nearly hit the 100-level plateau, but did it without having to sacrifice any other aspects of the game---the background art, the pacing, the design, the music, and the overall quality of the game. It was a hands-down masterpiece, and from an early stage tested the limits of the Super Nintendo with its quantity as well as its quality.
Fast-forward to today. We barely can find video games that can hit past 90 levels, and some of the biggest video gamers out there can be beaten in just a couple hours. Halo 3’s campaign mode can be beaten in a fast 2-3 hours. The newer Call of Duty games focus so much on the multi-player that they cut back on the single-player mode by a substantial amount. Remember the endless days you worked on Super Metroid? Well, Metroid: Other M barely checks in at past 15 hours. Kirby Super Star for the SNES has 7 games embedded in it, including an updated version of Kirby’s Adventure. The latest Kirby game can be beat in 5-6 hours. Worst of all even the RPGs are becoming notoriously smaller. Pokemon Gold/Silver contained 16 badges, an Elite Four, and so much to do the game pack was barely able to contain it. The latest Pokemon game is still at a meager 8 badges, and still doesn’t have the badly-needed tournaments that we always see on the anime.
Now, before you mention that it’s Nintendo and only Nintendo lacking the progression, the other companies are not off the hook. The Final Fantasies of the 90s have far more gameplay and storyline to cover than the ones of today. The Gran Taurismo franchise seems to spin its wheels often after the second installment, which boasted over 100 cars to collect. The fourth one? Not even close....just 50 more cars and a dirty dozen more tracks--which are mostly retreads of previous installments. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 could have been beaten in one afternoon, while the Genesis Sonic games contained longer levels, and more of them. We still don’t have an action/adventure game from any non-Nintendo company that comes even close to hitting the amount of gameplay hours required to beat Ocarina of Time, and that game has been around for over a decade.
What the heck is going on? The games are still being sold at massive prices, similar to that of back in the 90s, but the amount of gameplay contained in the games have diminished. We have seen gameplay being shelled out and replaced with cinematic scenes, higher-quality graphics, and more multi-player goodies that occupy most of the space of the disk. Remember when the Playstation won the gaming war because the CDs were cheaper and can fit much more content? What is the excuse of the gaming industry for still not progressing in terms of amount of actual gameplay content in their video games? Picture this: when Super Mario World came out, the IPod had not been invented, and the game had over 70 stages (The 96 levels boasting was a mild lie, it actually has 96 different ways of beating a level). New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the best-selling platform game of the past generation, only has 70-80 levels. And New Mario Bros. was by no means a graphical achievement.
Some may argue that the graphics and difficulty of 3-D game production has led to shorter games. And to this, I bid bull. Check out the games that pushed the limits of the SNES graphics: Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, Star Fox, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. They did not just provide top-notch graphics at its time; they were also all lengthy games (with Star Fox slightly being the exception). Hell, let’s go to a Game Boy game called Wario Land 2. That game has over 50 stages for crying out loud!! We still have 2-D games nowadays, as they’ve made a recent surge in popularity, but they still don’t hit the quantity amount of Mario World. We still don’t have a racing game that is fearless enough to give us more than 40 tracks to race in.
With the technology we possess in our hands, seeing that televisions look better than movie screens and we can communicate with someone and visually see them (even though they might be thousands of miles away) with a small computer, why in the heck are we not at a point in which games take ions to beat? Why are we not at a point in which we see 2-D games with 200 levels, or racing games banking in 75 levels?
This is because gamers are not only a crazy supportive breed, but we tend to look past the shortcomings just because we are so hungry for the next game. Gamers are some of the best consumers in the American economy, which is why video games make more money than movies, and is why more and more second/third-party companies are jumping ship to the industry. Everyone wants a piece of this pie. But we gamers just fork over $50 bucks no questions asked despite the fact that they are giving us less but maintaining the same price. 25 million gamers around the world bought Mario Kart Wii, even though it has 32 stages—the same exact number of stages as Mario Kart: Super Circuit---a Game Boy Advance game released 10 years ago. 20 million gamers bought Modern Warfare 2, even though it can be beaten in just 4-6 hours. Now gaming companies are relying on the Blockbuster effect: hype up the games to holy hell, so everyone buys them immediately before realizing that the game is eerily short.
Why is this lack of quantity thing an issue? Because video game sales are dying because of the resale market. The issue isn’t big now, but in the coming future we might have problems as the smaller companies might succumb to sluggish sales and have to stop competing. Now, if you create a game that requires months to beat, and then unload extra downloadable content on top of that, then the lasting appeal of your game will prevent you from trading in the game a mere month after you originally bought it (unless the game sucks, but that’s a totally different article). We have been blessed with arguably the greatest generation of video games in history, as all three competitors gave us a multitude of excellent games on a consistent basis. The war of the seventh generation had started way back in 2006, and just now we finally saw the market slow down a bit. That being said, how can the industry progress any further seeing all they accomplished in just 5 years? By increasing the value of the games, by infusing some more gameplay hours.
I want the next 2-D Mario to truly test my patience and endurance by flipping the script and doubling the amount of levels contained in Super Mario World---a video game that is turning 20 this year. I want the next Fable to keep me on my toes for months to come. I want the next Call of Duty to stretch to the length of a Tom Clancy novel as well as give us many more places to go and more places to engage in combat. I want the next big racing game to give us so many tracks it will take me months to master them all. I want an RPG that just explodes in storyline, similar to what we gamers experienced with Final Fantasy VI way back in 1994. I think we very supportive gamers deserve bigger, badder, lengthier games. Or at least not make it such a cinch to beat. Or at least give us multiple endings to gun for. Chrono Trigger back in 1995 had a dozen endings. Grand Theft Auto IV? Two. And that game is a freakin’ modern-day sandbox game.
Bottom Line: Video games need to be longer, there are no excuses for any video game that can be beaten in less than 10 hours. Yes I know there are some excellent games that can be beaten in less than 5, but those are very far and few when compared to the amount of games that are decent, slightly entertaining, but already beaten three days after you bought the thing. Back in the 80s and 90s we bled for those games, spent weeks mastering them and finally trying to beat the last level, the last boss. Games have gotten much easier and I will let that one slide, but if you are going to minimize difficulty, at least maximize the length. All companies are guilty of this, as they are all adopting the blockbuster technique of maximizing sales within the first week before anybody catches on (Nintendo is the lone exception as they rely on word-of-mouth to improve the sales).
For this next generation of gaming, I want more companies to truly test the limits of not the hardware, but its software and just how much they can fit inside their disks. Give me back my quantity. Quality doesn’t have to be sacrificed for quantity, just look at all the amazingly lengthy games from the SNES and Playstation back in the 90s.
We need a change.
I want to lose my social life to these upcoming video games, not have them continuously become a mere one-weekend activity.
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