News

The kids are better than all right. In conversations with parents of young gamers, I hear the same thing: Parents are wary of buying games, sometimes for $50 or more, because their kids finish them before the cellophane wrapping hits the floor.

At first, I thought these young players must be skipping steps or missing the point of more complicated games, like speed-readers finishing Crime and Punishment without knowing why Raskolnikov was so hard on himself. But then I watched a 10-year-old pick up a Nintendo DS for the first time and whip through a level of New Super Mario Bros., one that had taken me a good hour to beat, in about three minutes. And he found every hidden area and every coin.

Being born in the nineties doesn't guarantee that you will have gaming chops, but it's true with any technology that each generation is more comfortable with it than the last.

That's a huge challenge for game designers. Balancing difficulty, which encompasses the controls for moving characters, solving puzzles and the complexity of the plot, is an art form. You need to include as many people as possible, of various ages and abilities, without turning the game into a four-hour romp for dexterous 11-year-olds. Judging that balance is difficult, but if I find something too easy, given my advanced age and declining reflexes, it probably is too easy.

This week, I played three new games for the Nintendo Wii, two rated E10+, or everyone aged 10 and over, and one rated Everyone, for all ages. I found the two E10 games far too simple. Disney's Meet the Robinsons is mostly a platform game, which means you explore an environment by jumping around, but it does the jumping for the player: Aim your character at a ledge and off he'll go. TMNT, another movie tie-in, has decent controls for the teen turtles — it's fun to move them around and kick up a fuss — but the path through the game is so straightforward you almost don't need to watch where you're going.

In short, it's impossible to imagine any young person spending more than a week, at one hour a night, playing either game.

That time would be much better spent playing the third game, Super Paper Mario, which was released Tuesday and was made for Nintendo by the Intelligent Systems studio. Nintendo's signature achievement over the years has been how it has mastered the too-easy, too-difficult balancing act, and this game is no exception. Super Paper Mario is accessible yet magically, wondrously deep — parents, you're looking at a month's worth of entertainment for the kids, probably more once you start cutting into their time by playing and hogging the Wii yourselves.

Nintendo's secret is to change the structure of its games continually, usually from the ground up, without introducing unnecessary complications like 14 new buttons to press. Super Paper Mario is a hybrid that mixes playing categories — namely the role-playing and character advancement found in the Paper Mario series with the explore-everything ethos of the Super Mario Bros. games. But the magic is in how it merges them: With the touch of a button, every flat, two-dimensional screen (hence paper) spins away to reveal a 3-D world. What looks like a wall blocking your path in the 2-D world might be an arch in 3-D. This thing breaks down the fourth wall and then keeps going, and you don't need to know a platform game from an RPG to enjoy the results.

Once you learn how to look at the game world, new wrinkles are introduced. You can switch between characters, including old favourites Princess Peach and Bowser, and each has abilities that might solve a puzzle or get you past the next door. It's not terribly difficult to manipulate the buttons and navigate the menus, but every move takes some thought and experimentation, and every 10 minutes serves up some kind of surprise.

To top it off, the story, about a pan-dimensional villain looking to destroy a series of linked worlds, has elements that will please young and old alike. (My favourite touch is an evil character who talks like the boss in Office Space: “I'm going to need to go ahead and pencil you in for a 10 o'clock brainwashing, ‘k?”) When it comes to challenge and filling time rather than wasting it, Super Paper Mario joins a select list of recent video games — Psychonauts, Okami, and the Kingdom Hearts and LEGO Star Wars series — that aren't too easy or too hard. They're just right.

This Week in Games

As my great grandfather used to say, thank goodness for downloadable content.

This time of year used to be a dead zone for video games, but companies have offered up regular doses of new stuff this spring, much of it free, thanks to the increasingly frequent use of digital distribution on the next-generation consoles.

PlayStation 3 owners with high-speed connections were given three bonuses this week: a new version of Gran Turismo HD Concept, the slim but free driving game that adds support for steering wheel peripherals and worldwide rankings; a playable demo of the forthcoming mech shooter, Armored Core 4; and a trailer video for the next Grand Theft Auto title, which is due in October. (A teaser for the teaser: a pretty city that looks like New York and a protagonist with an Eastern European accent.) Over in Xbox 360 land, this week brought new ways to play old games, if you consider titles released five months ago old. Lost Planet players were given access to new maps, the 3-D levels that serve as settings for online battles.

Epic Games, maker of the bestselling shooter Gears of War, went one better: It unveiled a whole new multiplayer mode, or game type, for its online players. The new Annex mode challenges each team to take control of glowing circles for 60 seconds, and it offers players the ability to pop back into life after being blown up for the first time in the game.

These updates aren't as good as fresh, full games, but they can extend the playing life of existing titles. Add in a demo or two and gamers can fill rainy spring nights without bothersome trips to the mall.

scolbourne@globeandmail.com