Less is more

Prompted by last night's off the cuff game review of the newest offering from the MLB catalogue and last month's Wired Magazine's piece on 37signals and their gospel of keeping things as simple as possible, I'm really seeing the benefit of keeping things at their most basic.

As I was working on 2K8's learning curve last night, it struck me that the game would be all but impossible to pick up and play, which is probably accounting for the amount of complaining that is flooding 2K Sports' message boards.

Setting aside the buggy nature of the game and the insulting game manual which incorrectly recycles last year's instructions and even reuses in-game screen caps for the help manuals found in the game itself, the game isn't very user-friendly for the casual gamer.

You only need to look to the runaway success of the Nintendo Wii to see the backlash against sim-type games is landing squarely against the old guard of sports games. Madden is all but unplayable for casual gamers and as a result, the market is making room for stripped down versions of games and over the top arcade style offerings that aren't really in the spirit of the sports people are trying to play.

If I'm a six-year-old today, my options are to play incredibly difficult sim-type baseball games or cartoony slugfests like The Bigs. Actually, that game is pretty entertaining, but if you're a budding baseball nut, you're pretty much out of luck unless you spend all of your time indoors working on the game or are blessed with above-average coordination.

Fun, huh?

For most of these titles, I employ "The Jeff Test" which is to play for a little while and try to gauge how simple it would be for me to explain the mechanics to my brother-in-law before we both get pissed off and play something else instead.

New last night is "The Rich Test" where I realize that I need to e-mail my boss this morning to warn him about the game before he blows 60 bucks on it for his son.

This brings things around full circle for the post, as with the improvements made this year, the team at 2K Sports seems to be trying to create a handheld Wii for every platform and the result is unnecessarily complicated. Does it really make for a better game to throw the ball from the outfield by moving the thumbstick instead of pressing a button to throw to the corresponding base like every other game that has ever been produced?

I don't mind 2K taking chances, just not when the gameplay has gaps and changes made that aren't necessary. Pulling from Wired:

After college, Fried returned to his native Chicago, where he formed 37signals — a Web design firm, named in esoteric reference to SETI — and posted a manifesto on his homepage that railed against the shortcomings of most software. ("The Web should empower, not frustrate," he wrote. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should.") On his protoblog, Signal vs. Noise, he further developed his philosophy. "Remember — size does matter: A small group of 10 great people will outproduce, outwork, outthink a large group of 50 average people."

Try and keep that in mind for 2K9 - empower, stop frustrating.

(Image from: ViewImages.com)