So, with much regretfulness, the Wii was returned to my home over the weekend.

It is interesting to me the way that Girl feels about the two games (and for now, we’ll treat them as two separate games): Okami for PS2 and Okami for Wii. She was going to keep the Wii until the end of the month — which should have been enough time to finish the game. She wants to play the PS2 version, so she’s not spoiled on the game, but I doubt she’ll ever play the Wii version again. I’ll let her say how she feels about the game in comments, if she wants.

As I said earlier, I’ve tried some of the pieces of the game, and there’s no doubt that some of the recognition isn’t working correctly. I can draw a line, it looks like a line, but it isn’t interpreted as a line. I always had problems with the wind and bloom powers, in both versions. It seems worse in the current version. I just got the fire power, which is context sensitive (it only works if you start on fire, and end on something that can be melted/burned — and you know this as you draw the line.)

I’m going to continue playing it, in order to assess it for myself. My current thesis is still the same: it’s not about making the motions, it’s about how the game recognizes them. My thought is that the recognition should be joyful and fun, if it works. I haven’t played enough Okami to determine if the is joyful and fun.

However, the main reason that I am glad I got the Wii is alluded into the title of this post: downloadable games. This week marked the begining of WiiWare, which is Nintendo’s version of XBLA. It’s misssing demos, which means I’ll almost certainly buy less games. (I download most of the XBLA games that seem remotely interesting, and have purchased things I had no idea were going to be as fun as they are.) So I’ll be going more heavily on reviews to make my Wii purchases.

That is, reviews, and the Entertainment Price Proposition. I realized this years ago, but it’s not a unique idea to me. I grew up watching movies, and so my entertainment dollars are compared to the price of going to see a movie. The price for admission for a movie is around $20 for you and a friend, for about two hours of entertainment. That’s a rough estimate, and it’s for both of you — I don’t see movies alone — so, maybe it should be half that. And, in fact, about $5 for an hours’ worth of entertainment seems more than fair. Pay-per-view movies are less, running about $2/hour of entertainment, but you don’t get the big screen effect unless you’ve invested in some serious home theater.

Based on that, I downloaded two WiiWare games: Lost Winds and Castle Defense, for $10 and $5, respectively. (I like that the WiiPoints are 100 points/dollar, instead of the weird math MS forces on us — they are just obfuscating the actual cost of the games, since the price for points is fixed.)

I started my day with Castle Defense, just to screw around really, and I think I played it for three or four hours over the weekend, and I’m not really done with it. It’s a truly casual game in the sense that you can jump in and just start playing it, and it’s viscerally fun with the cheap-looking (and sounding) style. The explosions (someone making a explosion noise) remind me of the “sploosh”es from WindWaker. It’s also a frenetic little game, that doesn’t take any real though to understand, and in which the controls rareley get in the way of the action. I finally got a second spell yesterday, after fighting forever to have enough points and men to get the wizards high enough in level. I suspect there’s more to the game, but not much more. But I’ve already made back my investment in the game.

Lost Winds is a closer bet, as I played through it in just over two-and-a-half hours, although I suspect I’ll play it again, as I didn’t get all the little statues. This game gives very little explanation of how to navigate the world. You control your character with the nunchuck, using the stick to go from left to right, with the occasional Z-pressing to do something context sensitive. You control a wind spirit with the WiiMote. Wherever you point it on the screen, things respond to the presence of a breeze: leaves rustle, people’s hair and close fly around. You can press the big round “A” button for a stronger breeze, and later get a wind current ability that lets you draw a line while holding the “B” button.

Yes, draw a line. It’s all here: the ‘A’ button plus a quick flick of the wiimote — to make a line on the screen — creates a simple attack and a gust of wind which works as a jump or double jump. Draw a line to form a gust of wind in a direction, to move flames and burn things, to move water and douse things, to move rocks and slam things, and, later, to move your ‘human’ character via a floating mechanism. You even draw a circle around things, to capture them in the wind.

Now, Lost Winds is a much shorter game than Okami, and it’s powers are well planned out so that they are clearly context senstive, both in the kind of motion (line or circle) or the buttons pressed (A or B), so that you’re always pretty sure what the motion you are doing will achieve. And that follows through, you rarely, if ever, have a situation where something unexpected (and wrong) happens. As such, the controls fade away, and I no longer think about how to achieve something, and rather just about what I’m trying to achieve — and achieving it.

One of the things that the Wii has taught us, along with the DS before it — and, honestly, the PC before either of those, if we’d been paying attention — is that simple control schemes can have complex interactions and results. It was easy to miss on the PC: not only do we have a two or three button mouse, but a 100+ keys (not counting ctrl, alt, and shift combinations). It was easier to map an action to a key or a keypress than to find a way to do it with the mouse. But most “casual” games today use only the mouse, and a series of clicks and drags to affect the outcome, and may of those have very complex results. Look back to Black and White, which could hardly be called a casual game, and you see that it had stripped away most of the keyboard controls (and interface) implementing it with simple gesture-based and context sensitive controls.

The DS pushed this boundary, and the Wii pushes it even further. Yes, we have a proliferation of alternate controllers, but most of those just make it easier to understand a basic motion. I can control Mario cart without the WiiWheel, and i don’t need a plastic bat, tennis racket, or sword in order to control similar games. Those devices just allow you to mount the WiiMote in them, and the rest is done with the basic motion sensing of the remote — the plastic extras just make the affordances easier and more approachable.

The key thing, though, is that it makes the interpretations of the player’s movements more complex and shifts the responsibility for accurately comprehending the communication onto the game software, and off of the user. {And since the game software and its authors are the ones who designed the communication code, this seems fair.} It takes much more code to interpret a spiral swoosh as “cast wind, from the left to the right” vs a series of keystrokes, or even simple clicks on runes. It allows for more action and faster feedback than the old systems, but it has to be right, to be fun.

I know that Ready At Dawn, the game studio that was commissioned to make the Wii version in the aftermath of Clover’s closing, faced an uphill battle. They didn’t have all the art assets (including the covers!), and they were given an impossible and incorrect mandate: make the game just like the PS2 version with the Wii controls. Controls are how the player interacts with the game. They are, in many ways, the game itself. Good controls, as in Lost Winds disappear and become tools for the player. Bad tools, or ones inappropriately designed, become obstacles. Trying to keep Okami “exactly the same” meant trying to map from two very different control schemes that are fundamentally different feeling for the player. They had to change something — and they didn’t.

I still look forward to playing through Okami for the Wii, but I suspect that I will discover myself returning to Lost Winds (and hopefully its sequels/continuation) first.  Of course, given how long I’ve played Okami already (not withstanding the number of hours Girl played it, it’s Price/hour is well under either Lost Winds or Castle Defense)