Day 19: Genres

 

 

 

This is a game.

What do you think of when you think of a video game?  Something like the above, right?  Well that's a platformer, only one of several types of popular genres out there in mainstream gaming.  It's one of the most classic types out there.  Nothing says video game like controlling a sprite that hops, skips, and jumps their way to victory.  But what about the other types of games?  Sure, Mario is great fun for those people who are satisfied with a simple beat the level and get the highest score scenario.  Yes, there's usually a plot to a platform game but does it really matter in the end?  If you want a game that tells a story, look for a Role-Playing Game.

My favorite RPG of all time.

 This is definitely my favorite game type of all time.  The RPG has every element that I want and need in a game.  Those aspects are a complex story, strategy, and obviously a large role-playing piece.  At their core, these types of games pit the player and their party in turn-based battles of might, magic, and skill against monsters, humans, and what have you while questing to save the world.  Along the way the party increases in skill, levels up as it's called, and gathers a variety of skills and equipment to help assure victory.  One intangible, but undeniably essential, part of an RPG is the great joy one finds in completing side quests and finding rare items.  For instance, in Chrono Trigger the story circles around the ability to time travel and the effects that the characters have on the space-time continuum.  Each character has a specific time and place that will trigger quests and each quest that you complete affects the ending of the game.  Not to mention that each side quest ends up giving you extra, fantastic items and that there's a feature that activates at the end of the game called New Game + that allows you to restart the game with everything that you gained throughout the course of playing.  Another genre that has some of these similar elements yet combines them with parts of a platforming game is Adventure.

Stop looking at her breasts.

Tomb Raider is an excellent example of an Adventure game.  Not only are you getting the story aspect of the RPG genre, but you're seeing a lot of the platformer's aspects in action.  Lara Croft runs, jumps, and shoots her way through tons of different areas, all in an effort to gather some artifact to save the world or something.  The picture on the left looks like she's dunking a basketball or diving to tackle someone.  Of course, this is my heavy-handed segway into Sports games, but you knew that already.

This is actually very entertaining.

Sports games come in a variety of flavors, football, soccer, hockey, basketball, and every other sport you can think of down to horse racing.  Now of course the idea behind these games is pretty simple, you take control of a team and play against other teams to see who wins.  As time has gone on, however, the games have evolved to include things like drafts, franchise mode, and career mode.  These various additions make it feel a lot more like a real life sport that you're watching and controlling at the same time.  Now for those of us that are up to date on our motion gaming, we all know that sports games using a controller are starting to fade away and we're seeing something more like this on the right where you are the player and you are actually moving in line with what you need to accomplish. 

Ugh, even the graphics are ass.

All of what I've gone over are some of the essential building blocks of more complex and exciting game types.  Companies have certainly mixed and matched to both gamers' delight and agony.  There are a few genres out there though that need to be approached with caution because more often than not, you're going to end up playing a piece of shit.  Point and click games are just wrong.  You go screen to screen trying to accomplish an objective like escaping an island, but you don't really do anything video game-like.  You move a cursor around the fucking screen and click on shit until you advance to the next screen, and so on and so on.  Of course the games are a bit more complex as you need to move from location to location and back and forth and back and forth; it gets so horrible that by the end of the game you want to vomit like you just read the worst run-on sentence in your entire life.  Now combine that with an Educational game and you're just asking for it.  A great example of an educational game is Mario Piano.  Who the fuck wants to play the piano with Mario?  Yeah, that's what kids want, they want to learn to play the piano with Mario.  Kids play video games to have fun not to learn.  What game company sat around their gigantic executive board room table and had their execs agree that making an educational game, in this day and age, is a good idea?  I'd really like to know, because they have got to be the dumbest shits in existence.  The only way that I can imagine that they are still afloat is that their CEO has the ability to crap out a golden egg every 15 minutes.  That's the only way I can see them still standing amongst the good gaming companies out there; every 15 minutes, two pounds of gold.  That's a realistic situation.

Day 18: Pwning

Looking back on the internet gaming sensations of the past few years, one thing always stands out, or rather over, everything else when it comes to similar aspects of playing the games involved.  One person is always better than another and that person is most likely going to be an arrogant asshole because of it.  I myself end up in that type of situation often while playing Halo, but most of the time I attempt to curb my arrogance and just move on with the game.  However, there are those players who, from time to time, will "assert their dominance" as it were by using the above maneuver.  Let's get a bit of history on this phenomenon before we just jump in though.

This could be a normal person.

Counter Strike is definitely one of the greatest and most memorable internet shooters of all time, there's no doubt about it, but it started a literary trend that has been guided into the language of every gamer to ever play an online shooter.  To a normal person, owning something is to have ownership or to have something be your property, but to a gamer owning has become something much more.  For instance, in Counter Strike, if you kill someone without even having to try or with an extreme amount of skill, you may "own" the person because you're able to assert your dominance with your abilities.  Whomever first coined the word own to be used in this manner for online gaming started a flash fire in the vocabularies of players everywhere.  Now instead of saying, "Oh damn that guy killed the shit out of me," we now say, "Oh damn that guy owned my ass!"  Notice the differences.

This is only one step too far.

Moving along the timeline that I'm imagining, it's not hard to see how an infectious use of the word own could be misspelled at some point close to it's origin.  Considering that everyone and their mother makes a million spelling errors every second, someone at some point hit the p key rather than the o key and the world ended up with "pwn."  Now clearly not everyone uses pwn, there's still a large segment of the internet population that uses the original own, but the pwn population ended up migrating off the beaten path of insults and took things a few steps too far.  Take a look at the image on the right.  How many of us remember My Little Pony?  Well, this is what happens when the internet and the pwners get a hold of decency and cartoons.

This is demoralization.

Remember the image at the beginning?  The Teabagging gaming community, members of which run over to a downed corpse and crouch repeatedly to mimic the sexual act of teabagging though for an aspect of humiliation rather than of the actual act, at some point along the timeline merged with the pwners.  What you have now is a mutation of not only the original word own, but also of the acts that they entail.  This is also partially caused by the lack of both speech and type capabilities when playing the newer games that include the option to not listen to everyone's inane bullshit chatter about what they did last night.  Now when a victim is downed in Halo, they are owned by the killer's abilities and then teabagged, thus resulting in a pwn.  It's been scientifically proven that the only way to stop someone from pwning is to pwn them yourself. So join with me and declare war on pwners.

Let's all be bigger people.

In war, demoralization is just as important as inflicting actual casualties, perhaps even more important.  So here's my proposition to stop the pwners that pwn just for the fun and humiliation: pwn only the people who pwn you first.  Pwn them so hard that they won't ever want to pwn again.  Of course there's always the sane option of just killing them and moving on without the added humiliation, and thus being the bigger person, but I doubt that many gamers can be convinced to do that.

Day 17: Conan the Barbarian

I cannot think of a more exemplary example of the classic Barbarian character, or class for us Dungeons and Dragons addicts, than Conan.  He is epic.  The legend began with some short stories, then moved to comics, onto video games, and eventually became immortalized in the 1980s film.  For those of you that haven't been to the movies in months, you most likely didn't know that a new film recently hit theaters in the states.  As a fairly avid movie-goer I noticed the previews immediately as they hit the big screen, and they were amazing.  I thought that it couldn't get any better than Conan in 2011.  Well, I was wrong.  Horribly, horribly wrong.

The start of the movie gave a long and boring story.  Sure, I need some backstory to involve myself in any fantasy movie, but I don't think that I've sat through quite that much bullshit in a long while.  My only solace for the first ten minutes or so was Morgan Freeman's soothing voice.  Unfortunately that peace is quickly taken away by a sword jabbing into the belly of Conan's mother.  I want to point out here that I have no problem with action, violence, and gore so these scenes don't really affect me in that way, they just suck like there's no tomorrow.  Right, back to the birth.  Conan's father rushes over and cuts the baby out and he receives his namesake before his mommy dies, fantastic.  For whatever reason, the transition through to the next stage of life for the young hero is preceded by his father pulling a Lion King in the middle of a brutal battle without so much as looking around to check for enemies.  Yeah, right, and no one would rush up to kill the moron staring into the sky holding up the most fake baby ever.

So Conan rushes through life to somewhere around 10 or 12, pre-teen, whatever.  To be a warrior you have to run around a hill without breaking an egg or some shit, I really couldn't pay much attention since the loss of any action at all.  After some agonizing scenes of kids running, Conan gets attacked by some crazy, growling natives...I think.  He ends up killing all four or five and taking the heads back without his egg being broken.  Pretty cool I have to admit, but I'm not impressed.  I want to see the grown-up Barbarian legend, not some weird little boy with homicidal tendencies!  So whatever, you sit through another half hour of Conan making a sword, some crazy guy with a bone mask who wants to be a god, and the death of the father.  Skipping ahead 20 years Conan is some Fabio lookalike reject killing slavers with an African-American pirate or something, which just makes me think of Sinbad in more ways than one.  After freeing about a million slaves in two different areas, we realize that Conan is consumed by revenge for his father's death.

This is an example of a Shadow Lord.

The man who killed him is now some Shadow Lord or something and Conan essentially goes through all of the man's five generals while protecting some innocent, "pure" woman from being abducted to wake up some necromancer.  The story really doesn't matter here, it's well put together but it's executed very poorly so it's easy to lose interest and just beg for Conan to fight some more.  Long story short, the woman gets abducted by mask guy who plans to cut her up and become a god.  Conan shows up at the last minute and a battle ensues that lasts for waaaay too long.  Conan wins and takes the lady home and wanders off for more hijinks.


I was so sorely disappointed in the movie that I didn't even want to finish my popcorn, and that is unheard of.  So in any case what I found is that this film was too difficult to care about.  We were never in one place long enough to really learn about what's going on.  I thought I was just being dumb about how this movie progressed until I had a revelation today that explains the whole thing.  It's all really just a big Mardi Gras party.  Yeah, get this there were like 7000 topless women, flashy outfits all over, violence, alcohol, and this giant boat/float thing.  It was exactly like the Mardi Gras celebration, no different whatsoever.  You don't even remember anything happened afterwards they're so similar.  I feel like I went to New Orleans rather than a movie theater.  Well, at least that's one thing I can check off of my to-do list.

Day 16: Puss N Boots

Probably not something like this.

Before this character became huge on the big screen due to the countless number of Shrek movies, he starred in a role that was a bit less dramatic.  If you don't know who Puss n Boots is, he's a cat who essentially gets inherited by the youngest son of a miller and asks for a pair of boots.  He then does some random stuff and eventually kills an ogre that changes into a mouse.  Some strange French literary tale.  Whatever, moving on.   

Electro Brain Corp?

Puss N Boots, the NES game, stars the cat running around the world to various locations.  In fact, the first screen shows the various areas that you’ll visit:  The West, Ocean, New York, Liberty, London, Space Wars, and Arabia… What the fuck?  First off, what are these areas even supposed to represent.  Space Wars?  So I’m going to space?  Let's just take a step back here:  You're a cat, wearing boots, and going into outer space to have a war?  Sure.

That's the boomerang, it's really on target isn't it?

The first level is The West. Now of course this is just a terrible reproduction of the Old West with flying horseshoes, cat outlaws, and weird bubble things as your enemies.  Now the first issue I have here is that Pero, the cat hero, jumps like 20 feet in the air.  He literally jumps on top of the houses in this old western town with ease.  Of course, if I was getting the shit beaten out of me by flying horseshoes, I might jump that high too just to get out of the damn way.  So Pero walks way too fucking slow.  The only option that you have to move more quickly is to jump forward.  For whatever reason, the leap you perform rockets you forward and you propel through the levels much more quickly.  Your attacks consist of a gun, a bomb, and some boomerang shaped thing.  I really only ever used the gun, it’s got the longest range and best attack pattern of all three.

Classy.

 

So after jumping through the first stage, you end up at The Ocean.  Like there’s only one in existence, even though the map clearly shows you in Hawaii.   In this level you travel by boat and end up scooting around in a submarine.  Not only is the first and only level with a submarine, but it's also one of the few levels with a boss.  It’s some frog fuck.  Arabia, the next level, is pretty self-explanatory besides the car you drive around in. 

After Arabia we somehow end up in some airplane flying over some nondescript mountains.  This is the Space Wars level.  Now wouldn’t you expect some kind of spaceship battle far above Earth for an area called Space Wars?  I just didn’t fucking get it at first, but I think I might have deduced what the title means:  it’s a war for space, like in trying to expand your middle-eastern country, not a war that takes place out past the Earth’s atmosphere.  At least that's the best I can come up.

This is the boss of London, which makes all kinds of sense.

Stage 5 is London.  This level is again pretty straightforward, like the first level, but here you’re dealing with cats dressed up as British Foot Guards rather than cats dressed up as Cowboys.  Big fucking difference, right?  For whatever random ass reason there’s a boss at the end of this level too.  How the fuck were the programmers this inconsistent?  We have five levels and only two bosses?  Each level should have it’s own boss, it’s just gaming 101!

Little known fact:  Liberty is blurry.

Liberty is the next area, wherever the hell it is.  Here you’re flying around in a hot air balloon dodging lightning and pirate balloons.  That’s about all there is, you fly around in the balloon until you get to the end of the level.  /sigh

The final stage is New York, and it seems like the game programmers spent all of their time on this last level.  This is the only level that’s non-linear.  You enter the Statue of Liberty or some shit and wander around moving through various doors that pop you out in different places.  I spent maybe half an hour before I figured out that I was basically going in circles here.  Again I’m seeing this problem with inconsistency.  Why make every stage linear and then create this fucking maze at the end that doesn’t fit with anything else that we’ve previously seen in the game.  Yes it’s unique, but why do you have to fucking trick the gamer? 

This just doesn't look fair, you're like half their size!

The final boss is actually two bosses.  Yes, the game ends up not putting bosses in most of the levels, and then puts two of them at the end of the final level.  Makes total sense right?  These two actually gave me some trouble as they’re really fucked up compared to all of the other bosses in the game.  You can only damage one of them at a time, but they’re both running around on screen during the whole fight.  Also, whichever one you’re damaging you can’t touch or you’ll take damage.  Even with the added confusion, these two bosses take just a few tries to defeat.  With that, Pero climbs to the top of the Statue of Liberty and the game ends.

Now that's a good endgame screen.

Okay, so you’re a cat that goes from the Old West through Arabia and finally to New York?  I’m still wondering what the fuck just happened.  So I read up on the game itself and it turns out it’s all about time travel.  How in the hell would I have known that without still owning the fucking manual?  So here’s the actual plot word for word from the manual, and Wikipedia:  

“Count Gruemon, a notorious swine, hated mice with a passion. One day, he discovered a mouse in his castle. Frustrated and irate, Count Gruemon ordered Puss 'N Boots (Pero) to find and destroy the mouse. However, Pero was a kind-hearted cat and had become friends with the mouse, and so, helped the little creature to escape. In a fit of anger, Count Gruemon, aided by Dr. Gari-gari, a fiendish scientist wolf, sent Pero on a perilous time-travel journey around the world and into the past.

Pero must locate and defeat Count Gruemon and the mad Dr. Gari-gari, and use their time machine to get home - or be stuck in the past forever. To make matters worse, the Cat Kingdom has sent Killers after Pero because he helped a mouse and thereby violated Cat Kingdom Law. Pero must travel to exotic lands and overcome many hazards, but can he defeat the combined might of the diabolical Count Gruemon, Dr. Gari-gari, and the Killers?”

Right.

Day 15: Madden NFL

I have nothing against sports games overall, hell I even used to be an avid player of them in my younger years, but I just don't understand why we need 1500 iterations of the same damn game.

Madden NFL has been around for a long time and it's easy to tell why when you sit down and play the games as compared to other football adaptations on the next generation consoles.  It's just an all-around great experience.  For the most part.

There are several things that I just never understood about the series.  Why do they keep getting released?  I mean, if you own the 2010 Madden game, what's so damn special about 2011 except for new players.  So to sate my curiousity, and to fill up this post because I'm just too lazy today, I checked out a review on IGN of Madden NFL 12.

So from what I understand the things that change from game to game are few and far between.  The AI performance is usually improved, the graphics get better, and the game modes get a little bit better.  But why do people keep buying them?  The review didn't really answer my burning question.  I find it similar to buying a sequel, but if you compare DragonAge and DragonAge II to Madden 2011 and 2012, with the RPGs you're getting a completely new game, but with Madden you're just recycling the same fucking crap with minor smell improvements.  There's no new plot, there's no major improvements, and ultimately there's no new game.  Are these bought out of loyalty, out of the love of sports, or just out of curiosity?  Please somebody tell me why the hell people keep buying Madden even though each new one is basically the same game as the last!

Day 14: Media

Cartridges were a beautiful idea, quick and efficient.  The limitations came quickly though, as storage space and graphics became a problem.  I mean, there's no way that Halo could have been developed on a cartridge based system.  Back in the days of the Nintendo 64 and the PS1, it was almost novel to see CDs being utilized in every day gaming, even though the Sega CD and the TurboGrafx 16 both used the media.  CDs didn't really catch on earlier than they did partially because of the awful sales that killed both of the consoles.  The PS1 was definitely the biggest winner when it came to CD gaming.  All of the early CD-based systems suffered from the same problems: load times and fragility.  Who didn't sit at their Sega Saturn or their Playstation for 15 plus minutes waiting for a game or specific screen to load?  The system is basically taunting you the whole time too.  Just as you think it's about to load, the game shoots out a telepathic "fuck you." 

It even looks like it sucks; like a giant, old VCR.

The CD-I was the worst of all of the early CD systems.  This thing was shat out by Phillips in conjunction with Nintendo.  Of course this doesn't make it any better, it just means that it could use some characters that were licensed by Nintendo while Sony couldn't.  The thing's just a piece of shit.  Most of the didn't work in the first place, think first generation Xbox 360, and if they did, the load times were horrendous.

I never did understand the design.

So by the time that the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox were released, most of the load time issues had been resolved.  One game that I do remember being a hassle just exacerbated the issue.  Xenosaga Episode 1 was a pretty excellent RPG game, but it had severe limitations hidden in the length of it's cutscenes.  The fact that you had to wait literally 15 minutes, at some times, to find any playable content was mind-boggling.  It's like all I wanted to do was fight a boss character, but I needed to wait for the cutscene to load, then wait for it to play, then wait for the boss to load, and by the time that the game is ready I'm getting my ass handed to me because I'm half asleep from boredom!

Looking at today's systems, long load times are usually eliminated, though several games come to mind such as Duke Nukem Forever, but if they're still present in a game there's at least something to entertain you while you wait.  For instance, one of the Dragonball Z games allows you to spin a character around the screen while Call of Duty gives you "helpful" hints about various things in the game.  So all of the loading time issues aside, another problem came with the advent of the CD-DVD video gaming.  Freezing.  The entire reason that I bring all of this crap up is that I've recently had my own shitty run-ins with my games freezing and causing me to lose valuable save data.  I know that this is something that's unavoidable, but I don't think I ever once had an issue with a cartridge game freezing.  Can we find some kind of alternative media that's not going to freeze, but allow the same storage space and graphical enhancements?  I know that both the 360 and PS3 are able to download games directly onto the hard drive of your system, so that could be a potential fix, but at that point why don't we just shove all of the game onto separate HDDs and call it a fucking day?  The bottom line is, if you're playing a game prone to freezing or locking up during loading sequences, save often or you'll end up a bitter, angry shell of your former self.  Or maybe you'll just get pissed off and play anyway, your choice.

Day 13: Movie Adaptations

That's possibly Jean Claude Van Damme.

Who doesn't love a good movie?  With any good movie comes the want to relive it by watching it time and time again.  Well what if you could be in the movie?  Direct it with your video game controller.  Sounds awesome, right?  Well you're wrong, horribly, horribly wrong.  Let's start with the shittiest movie/game adaptation ever: Street Figher the Movie the Game.  Who's fucking idea was this?  Street Fighter was already a very successful game franchise, why'd they need to go and fuck it up?  The movie was a pile of crap starring a bunch of B-movie rejects, but it was just too awesome to pass up making a game for, because who doesn't love a game that uses digitizes actors?  Beyond the lag caused by the digitization, the game is just your basic Street Fighter with a bunch of limitations and minus the fun that the pace and excitement of Street Fighter 2 brings.  All in all, this was a pretty crappy fighter game and shouldn't even exist it's so bad.

Looks fun, right?  It's not.

The list goes on and on with games that are shat out so quickly by third parties looking to cash in on the hot, new box office smash hit.  For instance, Jurassic Park was an epic book and movie, and I personally love it as both.  But did it ever need to have games made after it?  There were so many fucking Jurassic Park games that it's almost as pathetic as the third movie itself, and that's saying a lot.  The one I owned was Jurassic Park 2:  The Chaos Continues.  It was a decent side-scrolling shooter, but that's all it was, decent.  You ran around shooting an infinite number of dinosaurs until you got bored out of your mind or couldn't find out where to go.  In fact, the game allowed various objects to get in front of your objectives so that you literally couldn't see the way to go.  That's a good game right there.

It looks like it could be a good game.

The Matrix is an undeniably groundbreaking movie, but the games it produced do not stand up to the title they're named after.  One perfect example is The Matrix Online.  Not only did this game just not get enough players and attention to really become as popular as WoW, but it suffered from some serious control issues.  When I played for a short time I just couldn't figure it out.  Like it was way too futuristic for me to understand because it takes place in the Matrix.  Of course the last straw with this thing was the fact that everyone and their mother tried to be Neo.  I mean, just look at the picture above, the coat, the hair, it's all the same.  And everyone tried.  So here again we see that the game is alright, but it just can't live up to the movie, nor can it deliver such a great experience as a game not associated to a movie.

Rabble rabble rabble, I'm a Frost Giant.

Now we've come to the cream of the crop, as well as one of the most current movie/video game adaptations.  Thor: God of Thunder was released in conjunction with the movie, and most people agree that the film was in line with the greatness of all of the recent Marvel Comics movies leading up to the Avengers.  Now this game had a lot to live up to, but it also had a lot of potential.  Unfortunately, it bombed like a giant turd splashing in the toilet.  The game's release made it clear that the company rushed through production and attempted to just shit out gold.  All of the defects and bugs killed the game and reduced it to what many people have called a bargain bin game.  Yes, this game is barely worth the five dollars you could end up paying for it at your local Gamestop.

So why do all of these game suck ass?  Is it because the companies rushed to get them out in time for the big movie release?  Is it because they have something to live up to, and when they don't hit the standard that the movie created we snub them off as bad?  No, the reason these games suck is because they're designed around a plot and idea that's not created for a video game setting.  Jurassic Park, Lost World, and the third movie just don't have enough action and pure shooting violence to be that type of game, never mind the multitude of flaws that came with it.  Thor was an awesome movie in a sequence of films designed to be a cinematic experience, and the game just cannot compete with that unless it was treated in the same manner.  The game was in a world all by itself, while the movie had all of the other Marvel movies to draw attention to it.  Throw in a production team that can't work the bugs out before shipping and you get a pile of steaming goat shit.  The Matrix Online just couldn't compete with better MMOs that were already out on the scene and the customization ability just leads everyone to try to make it like the movie, which we already know it couldn't be.  Finally we come back to Street Fighter.  This is a rare specimen, but I think it exemplifies all of the qualities of the other movie games while living in its own bubble.  The movie was developed around the plot of a game, rather than the game being developed around the plot of the movie.  We can see in reverse how the connection fails and see an extreme version of the failed video game movie in Street Fighter the Movie the Game.  I think the lesson that needs to come out of this is that the video game industry cannot depend on the success of the movie industry.  No one, and I'm pretty damn certain on this, wants to play a shitty movie game over an excellent standalone game.  It's like the difference between getting a Popsicle that's been stored in 90 degree weather and one that's been frozen the entire time.  They'll both taste similar, but one's just a pool of flavored piss.

Day 12: Super Mario Land

The box just doesn't make sense.

With handheld devices fresh in my mind, I had to take a look at this strange customer.  This is one of the games that really drove the Game Boy's success in the early years.  Since Super Mario Bros. and it's successors were so popular on the NES, of course Nintendo would need to release a similar title on their mobile to look for the same success in that market.  My main issue with this game is just how fucked up it makes Mario.  I mean, just take a look at the box art.  He's in a submarine chasing after some crazy ass spaceship on Easter Island and later in Egypt?  I just don't get it.  At first I thought that playing it would give me some clarity, but I was horrifyingly wrong.

Yes, because Mario would do this.

The game is very similar to the others in the series as far as your platforming adventures go.  You jump on your enemies, collect coins, and try to reach the end of every level.  The differences in this game just baffle the shit out me.  First off, the controls are all fucked up.  The momentum of the NES game is gone and replaced by an awkward feeling.  The Super Mushrooms and Fire Flowers are still in this game, but the Fire Flowers don't give you the ability to shoot the signature Fireball.  Instead you throw balls.  Bouncy balls at a 45 degree angle.  Why the hell would you change the Fireball?  It's such an awesome move and pretty original for one of the very first "good" platforming games.  The other things that were changed to create this abomination were some of the transportation.  Rather than having Mario run and jump across every level to make it to the end, the game forces you into a flying machine and a submarine to reach your goal.  Mario's a freaking plumber, how in the hell is he flying a plane or navigating a submarine, much less all by himself?  Or maybe in all of his downtime after saving the princess, he relaxes by getting his fucking pilot's license.  That must be it.

Why does the pipe look like a huge tootsie roll?

So not only were some of the key components of Mario's essential gameplay changed here, but the plot was also changed.  Instead of chasing after Bowser to save Princess Toadstool, Mario is chasing after a spaceman, Tatanga, to save Princess Daisy.  The minions of Tatanga appear as Daisy to draw Mario in and then transform to kill him.  A spaceman with shape shifting alien thugs?  Who in the hell decided that Mario needs to battle some alien fucks to save the reject princess that doesn't appear in the mainstream games all that often?  I just don't get it.  Why change what was working so well on the NES? 




There's no denying that fans of Mario games around the world like even this piece of shit adaptation.  A sequel was even made to continue to bleed the mobile market dry.  Mario has had too many spinoffs in his day and this was the root cause of it all.  I clearly see the benefits of creating spinoffs like this and exercising the limits of Mario's success, but what the fuck is the reasoning behind changing the game itself?  A spinoff like this would be fine on the Game Boy, and I'm glad it happened because without it we would have lost a lot of good games through the years, but can't you make a freaking spinoff that at least has some of the same elements?  This game just doesn't feel like Mario.  I mean, Mario's certainly in it, but fighting a spaceman in Sarasaland where they end up having an epic showdown in Chai land?  None of it makes any sense.  Where's the Mushroom Kingdom?  Where's Bowser?  Where the hell is the Mario we know and love that throws balls of fire, not bounces balls like a goddamn four year old?

Day 11: Mobile Gaming

Simple, yet addictive.

Nintendo's success in the mobile market began with the Game and Watch games, like the one above.  These games are 100% classic, but as game graphics improved on consoles, so too did they improve for gaming on the go.  Never did we think that we could play console quality games while flying, but we've hit that point and much, much more.  With a goal in mind of dominating the mobile gaming market, as neither Sega nor Atari had a piece of the pie at the time, Nintendo continued to develop and experiment until they hit it big with the Game Boy.

Good 'ol Mean Green.

Of course this beast was the next logical step up from the Game and Watch series.  It's not exactly a giant leap for the graphics, but the ability to use interchangeable games was a huge improvement.  When I got my first Game Boy one of my thoughts was, "What the hell just threw up in my game?"  The games are clear enough, but whose idea was it to have the games be in black and greenish-yellow?  I mean, just take a look at the Atari Lynx the visuals alone make the Game Boy look like shit.  Not that the Lynx is perfect either.  The piece of crap drained batteries like nothing else and you need to angle the screen perfectly to see without any type of glare or blurriness.  Some of the same issues plagued the Game Gear and both machines would see a similar failing against the Game Boy's battery life and third party support as many peripherals would make up for it's lack of a backlit screen and other shortcomings.  Nintendo's success should also be partially attributed to their prior mobile device experience from Game and Watch games.

Nintendo keeps the config simple.

After the release of the SNES, Nintendo came out with a unique concept: Super Game Boy.  Essentially the idea was to play your old Game Boy games on a giant TV screen using the Super Nintendo and a special cartridge that you plugged smaller cartridges into.  At the same time, Sega came out with an actual mobile gaming unit known as the Nomad.  The Sega Nomad was essentially your Genesis on the go.  So while Sega tried to redefine the mobile market with a handheld system that played console games, Nintendo seemed to be going in the opposite direction.  That is, of course, until the company once again released a Game Boy.  This time it was in color.  The Game Boy Color had it's own library of games, along with being backwards compatible with your old green and black games.  Even with the Nomad's powerful capabilities, Sega lost out again when the newest Nintendo mobile hit the scene.

Steaming pile.

During this period, all of the remaining gaming companies, Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, were all gearing up for the next generation systems to hit the scene.  To fill the time, Nintendo attempted to release a system that would take advantage of the newer technologies that they were going to implement on their later Nintendo 64 system.  A pseudo-3d effect was added to a pair of goggles thrown together with a batch of shitty games and you got the piece of shit Virtual Boy.  I'm not even going to add a link here it's so bad.  I just want to forget about it.  When I was a kid, this thing looked like the shit, but it turned out to be just shit.  Ugh, let's just skip a few years.


The next gen consoles were released and so was Nintendo's next accomplishment in the handheld world.  The Game Boy Advance took the Game Boy Color and kicked it up a few notches, as it were.  The games got better, the graphics were sharper, and the system was still backwards compatible.  Several adaptations of the Advance would come out, most notably the fold-able SP.  Nintendo was still dominating the handheld market, especially since Sega's bust with their Dreamcast gamble.  Not until the DS and it's successors were released did Sony finally enter the market with the PSP and give Nintendo some competition.  That struggle for market share continues today with no other game companies wanting to step into the ring with the heavyweight champion and the up and comer.

Ugh, just... What the hell?

Now I'm sure you're wondering, "What the hell?  This isn't funny and everything's out of chronological order dumbass."  While that may be true, it all brings me to the shorter topic of the tablet or phone gaming craze.  Yes, the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile devices that aren't handheld systems may be cool and come with a seemingly limitless supply of "really awesome games," they suck ass as gaming platforms and do not make someone a gamer if used prolifically.  That's right, no matter how many shitty clones of Tetris you have, you still do not equal someone who experienced the original on that black and green screen while using an attached light to see in the dark at 4 AM.  I do have to admit some of the ports, Sim City in particular, do well on the iPad and iPhone, but they are side dishes to my actual gaming activities and systems, not the main course.  You can't have a three course meal with only soup and salad, you'd be perpetually stuck on the first course. 

The reason for all of this?  While driving the other day I passed a car full of teenage/early college-aged kids that had an Angry Birds pillow sitting in the back window for everyone to see.  It's as if the kid that owned the car was explaining that he's the shit because he's a hardcore Angry Birds fan.  The game can be addicting and certainly fun to waste time with, but memorabilia and attitudes like that demean what it means to be a real "gamer."  A gamer dedicates time and effort to a game, not for the satisfaction of being a dick or showing off, but for the rich experience that a good game can bring, the completion of a story, the rewarding ending you worked for, or the defeat of that impossible endgame boss.  Real gamers don't waste their time.

Day 10: Mr. Video

Who would you consider to be the most iconic and influential video gaming character in history?  A character who's been in all genres, sold over 200 million games, and is an Italian from Japan? Well, if you aren't a fan of Nintendo, you're just going to have to suck it up and realize that Mario's been around a long time, and he's not likely to ship off anytime soon.

This definitely came from Japan...

Mario's had many forms over the years with just as many names to go with them.  What we see on the left is an adaption of Ossan, Shigeru Miyamoto's first "Mario" concept.  For those of us that need to use Google to translate for us, Ossan apparently means something along the lines of "middle-aged man".  It seems that Shigeru had wanted to create a game that rivaled Pac-Man's popularity, but couldn't quite get the right components together.  He initially wanted to use Popeye and his crew in that endeavor but was unable to get the rights.  So instead, Ossan, who was known as Mr. Video outside of the company, became the star of Donkey Kong. 

Why barrels?

With the advent of Donkey Kong came a new name for Mario: Jumpman.  Why Jumpman you ask?  The best I can figure is this:  Miyamoto's original intentions for the game was to have it be a maze setting similar to Pac-Man.  However, to beat the curve as it were, Shigeru enabled the character to jump and created the Donkey Kong that we remember today.  Any way you cut it, this game is pure classic arcade goodness.  The name was conceived during this era and from my understanding it came from a landlord that wanted his rent money from Nintendo.  Apparently, the man, whose name was Mario, and Nintendo came to the decision to rename Jumpman to alleviate some of the landlord's rent issues with the company.  I find it no coincidence then that Mario's profession involves fixing leaky pipes.

 

 

This just speaks for itself.

Just as Mario's name hasn't always been, so is it with his job.  During the original Donkey Kong, Mario was a carpenter.  It makes sense what with all the ladders leading to nowhere, the flaming oil barrel with the hellish flaming imps that appear, and the hammer...Wait, no it doesn't.  Of course, when Mario made his leap onto the NES his profession became that of a plumber as most of the scenes involve going down pipes into underground settings.  The game involves navigating through the Mushroom Kingdom to save the Retainers of the kingdom in each castle until the eighth, when you have to toss that bastard King Koopa, known today as Bowser, into the pit of lava.  I've always wondered though, why is he a turtle?  I had to look it up.  Apparently, Shigeru Miyamoto's original design for the turtle king was mimicked after the Ox King, who's shown up in various forms throughout the years.  My most fond memories of him occur in the Dragonball and DBZ series.  At some point during the design phases, someone pointed out to Miyamoto that he looked more like a turtle than an ox.  Thus, King Koopa evolved from an ox into a turtle.

Mario today.

I could go on for days writing down the history of Mario, but that's not my intent.  What I wanted to do was flesh out some possible missing pieces from everyone's common knowledge of Mario. The early years are something that occurred mostly beyond my knowledge due to my date of birth being before their time.  However, I've wanted to know this information for some time as I have played every Mario game that I could get my hands on, good or bad, and the character's progression through those games has always impressed me.  I am no less impressed with what I've recently learned of his heroic journey to the year 2011.  Who would've thought that Nintendo's runner-up to Popeye could come so far through long shot odds to be the star of over 200 video games?

Retro Game of the Week 1: The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang

What the hell is wrong with his face?!

Before I delve into this post I want to say that I fucking LOVE this game, even as ridiculous as it seems.  It implements my favorite action role playing game elements and keeps the story light and fun.  But even so, I have to shout out a huge, "What the fuck?"

It's holding a key.  Cause garlic can do that.

First off, what the fuck is the title all about?  How is it so twisted?  All it is is your typical action RPG where you're a boy vampire prince trying to save your parents and kingdom from evil garlic, cat women, and giant alligator men.  And of course, one of your companions is an Easter Island head stone guy...  Okay, I take that back, the title makes perfect sense; this shit is twisted.  Who in their right mind makes a game like this?  Your health is represented by tomatoes, which I guess makes more sense for a child audience than the blood or hearts of your victims, but what video game have you ever played that had anything remotely close to a tomato life bar?

That's right, they're called Killer Cloves...

So let's talk about how to battle these fiends that have taken over your kingdom.  As a vampire, you'd expect our hero to use super strength, claws, teeth, and his overall dark, vampiric demeanor to kill his enemies, right?  Well, the game comes pretty close to all that as Spike uses his cape.  The cape spin is your main form of attack.  That just doesn't make any sense on a physics level.  Are there fucking blades attached to it or does he just spin so damn fast that the enemies are pummeled by relentless wind bursts?  I'm glad to say that there's an alternate form of attack, but for whatever reason, it's the kid's hat.  If you hold the attack button, Spike's hat lifts off and is tossed in the direction your facing.  Again, how the fuck does this harm your enemies?  It's a fucking hat, not a javelin!

I'm really not sure what's going on here.

The final method of defending yourself from attackers, you're not going to believe this, is a deck of card tricks.  Yeah, like he's a fucking magician.  The cards can turn enemies into animals, turn you invisible, give you unlimited flying hat for a period of time, etc.  So what I've finally decided is that Spike isn't just a vampire, oh no, he's a boy magician vampire extraordinaire!

I mean, what the fuck?  This whole game just boggles my mind.  For some reason though, back in the SNES age, I didn't question anything that went on here.  Apparently at that stage in my life, evil, walking garlic seemed just as normal to me as any house cat.  But, hey, to be fair, if I heard of a boy magician vampire wandering around the world doing card tricks, I would be all over that action.

Day Eight: Star Craft 64

Ah, Star Craft.  What PC or console gamer hasn't heard of this classic Real Time Strategy game set in outer space?  It's a wonderful story of Space Marines, Alienesque (like the movie series) creatures, and your typical "super-advanced" race of Predatoresque aliens.  The game is pure classic however you look at it, and a sequel came out just recently that mimics the great feel of the original and could be a candidate for one of the best RTS games of all time.

These types of games are best played with a mouse and a keyboard.  Not only do you need precise, tactical movements in a large-scale battlegrounds, but you need to be able to move quickly from squad to squad and fight to fight.  With a keyboard and mouse you can use single keystrokes to move to designated squads.  How in the love of fuck do you accomplish all of that with the N64 controller?  So obviously the controller doesn't have enough buttons to have up to ten squads simultaneously yet separately accessible.  Rather than assigning 1 to a squad and 2 to a squad and moving between them freely, the controller only really allows you to move between groups on a fixed basis, so from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4.

The other thing on my shitlist about this pile of crap is the movement.  An infrared mouse is difficult to beat, especially when you're attempting the same level of complexity with an analog stick.  It's like trying to play Halo with an Atari 2600 controller.  Okay, maybe not that bad, but it still sucks ass.  This isn't the only time that a PC game has been ported to a console an been a freaking pile.  The Command and Conquer series also put a game onto a console, but this time, it's for the Playstation.

So here we see the same limitations, but at a much higher rate of failure.  In this regard, again, it's the controller's fault.  The 64's controller is limited, yes, but the Playstation's is even more so, especially if you're looking at a controller that's not Dual Shock.  On a purely button vs. button comparison we see 11 on the 64 and only nine on the PS1.  Fans of C&C might love the adaptation, but at best, it's a butchered version of a mediocre RTS.  Even the expansion packs were released onto the PS1.  Now that's a desperate attempt to expand your game onto a new platform.  If you need a more recent example, there's Halo Wars, and that crap bombed out even though it's part of one of the most marketable franchises in recent gaming history, though it was more streamlined and optimized to be easier to handle with an Xbox 360 controller.  Bottom line, don't port your goddamn RTS onto a console, it just doesn't fucking work  Leave it where it belongs.

Day Seven: Pioneer's Syndrome

Nintendo has always attempted to be an innovator in the field of video gaming.  Just take a look at the Power Glove or ROB the Robot.  The problem with being that innovative is that pioneers usually die.  Think of the Donner Party or what can happen when you play Oregon Trail.

Nintendo has dysentary and left ROB and the Power Glove dead on the trail.  Over the years, more and more peripherals came out, each one improving on the last, but all suffering from what I call Pioneer's Syndrome.  Even the Wii suffers from it.

The Kinect holds an easy first place over the Wii in the motion gaming department.  It's like, why wave a stick around when you could be punching the shit out of zombies?  The whole point of the discusion is Nintendo's latest invention, the Wii U.

First off, what the fuck kind of name is the Wii U?  Am I going to the Wii University so I can learn to play the piece of crap?  So the idea is that it's essentially a Wii with updated graphics, backwards compatibility, and a tablet controller.  To be fair, the tablet controller is fairly complex and pretty neat, but why the fuck do I need it?  Nintendo already has a successful line of portable devices, so why would I need to "take my game with me"?  It's like they took their two most successful franchises to date and slapped 'em together.  A tablet craze may be starting in the mobile world, but it doesn't justify making an entire system designed to work with it when you already have the DS, DSi, and 3DS to dominate the market.  Take a look at the thing for yourself and decide how you feel.  For myself, though, nothing will ever beat a controller, your console, and your TV.  After all, isn't that what it's all about?

Day Seven: Reworking

Due to my own frustration with the Fallout project and my lack of anything interesting to say within it, I'm going to scrap it.  I may come back to it and work things out so that it's actually worthwhile, but for now I'm dissatisfied.  Instead I'll be writing about whatever comes to mind on a daily basis.

I'm also going to be introducing a weekly retro gaming spot that highlights a particular game from my childhood and my opinion on it now as a much more evolved gamer and person.  I'll try to do this spot on Fridays, but it may vary.  In any case, it's going to be a lot more fun than my cruddy Fallout descriptions.

Day Six: Nipton and Frustration

After seeing the town of Goodsprings safely into the hands of the Powder Gangers, I started on down the highway towards my would-be killers.  My first stop was the New California Republic Correctional Facility.  I heard on the radio from Mr. New Vegas that the Powder Gangers had recently taken it for themselves, and I wanted to get some caps from my good deeds that were done in their name.  The leader of the gang gave me a few jobs to do and offered to give me free explosives!  Of course I was going to do whatever they needed so I could get some more dynamite to blow shit up with.  After killing a few deserters and defending the facility from and NCR Army attack, I was given all the dynamite I wanted and a free pass back into the prison.  While I was there I took some time to sneak around and pickpocket a few sleeping convicts for some extra boom-boom.

My second stop of the day was Nipton a small town where I was hoping to gather some information and grab a few boxes of ammo.  The entrance to the town was quiet and strewn with blood.  I spied a single man in Powder Ganger garb who was running around screaming something about winning the lottery, I wasn't quite sure what lottery he won, or what he actually won, so I avoided him, just like all of the other crazies.  The general store was in complete disarray and the owner seemed to be dead asleep on a chair.  I noticed that he had a lottery ticket on him as well.  As he was sleeping I decided to help myself to whatever was left in the shop.  The rest of the town was spattered with blood and I noticed that the town hall road was lined with wooden crosses. Each cross had a man or woman nailed to it.  As I walked by I realized with horror that the people were still alive.  The end of the street was blocked by a squad of strangely dressed men that called themselves Caeser's Legion.  They let me walk on by as long as I spread the word of their deeds.  I highly value my life, especially after being killed once before so I agreed wholeheartedly and started my way towards the NCR's Mojave Outpost.





As a gamer, I often wonder what it is we love about frustration.  Some of the games that I play most regularly, Halo: Reach being a good example, frustrate me the most yet I continue to play them time after time.  I get to the point of swearing at every single kill and death, even if I'm winning the game.  I'm fairly certain that my most used phrase during any game is, "How the fuck?"  Even though the freaking game takes place mostly in a science fiction world, I still expect it to have some kind of "normal" physics.  That's the single most frustrating fact of any game that I play.  How in the hell do I get shot around corners?  It happens all the fucking time too!  Wanted didn't make any sense and made me my brain try to eat it's way out of my head, so when I see the same type of shit in a video game when it shouldn't be there I go into a blind rage.  And then I just start to lose more and more, it's really a terrible mechanism.  The bottom line is that I still play the game even if I don't like the way that the bullets travel or that the lag is handled, whichever of those items is the culprit.  In fact, I think I'm fueled by my frustration.  It's a piece of gaming that has been alive since the beginning.  Who didn't get frustrated on those levels of Super Mario Brothers that just seemed impossible?  Even so, we all continued to try and try again.  We even tend to look for games with levels of difficulty that frustrate us, take a look at Ninja Gaiden back in the day and for a current reference there's Legendary difficulty on the Halo franchise.  Why do we love frustration?

Day Five: The Beginning

I was surprisingly limber and fit after having my body dug out of a shallow grave and the bullet removed from my brain.  It was lucky that they didn't shoot me anywhere else.  Doc Mitchell seems like a nice enough man, I mean, he did stitch me up and all, but I'm still wary of his motives.  He leads me around to some antiquated strength testing machine, which I clumsily grip.  The test proved that I'm apparently made of solid stuff.  Afterwards, the Doc took me over to his couch and told me to sit down.  At this point I'd ruled out that the guy was a necrophiliac, but I still wasn't quite sure that he wasn't going to just rape me.  The questions didn't help clear him of being a crazed killer/rapist either.  He asked me a bunch of ridiculous word-association questions that I basically just rigged to make it sound like I was going to blow the shit out of him if he tried to attack me.  Well, the questions finally stopped and I was able to freely leave the house, but I watched my back around the old man even after the fact.  That was before I killed him, of course.

After relearning how to walk around and shoot shit up with Sunny Smiles, the local law enforcement, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.  I attempted to gather some information about my shooter and the town that I found myself in, Goodsprings.  Ringo, some trader that took refuge in the local gas station ruins, was being hunted by the Powder Gangers, named for the gunpowder in their explosives, and that was the big news in town.  I took it upon myself to go up and see the guy; figured he might know something about the man who shot me.  Of course he drew a gun on me as soon as he heard my footsteps outside the door.  He told me some story about being chased by the Powder Gangers because he was some with some caravan.  It was really hard to keep interest after I killed him and took everything he owned.  Afterwards I met up with the Powder Gangers that were going to kill Ringo and told them I already did the deed.  What happened next was mostly a blur.  I helped the Gangers take over the town, killed Doc Mitchell so I'd never have to worry about my rear end again.  My next destination would have to be Primm, following the men who shot me.  I would get revenge, one way or another.

Day Four: MMORPG

It's come to my attention that World of Warcraft is now free to play.  I was surfing around on the internet, looking at a wiki for some Fallout information, when 47 different ads instantly assaulted my browser and I, claiming "NOW FREE TO PLAY!"  Of course there's a catch, the game is now free to play, but only to level 20.  When I played the game, the first 20 levels were always somewhat exciting to be sure, but how is that going to give players an idea of what to expect when they finally ascend to the endgame?  Blizzard is giving a free taste of, in my opinion, the best part of the game but they're not quite giving the whole picture.  In my time, at level 60, I was raiding all of the damn time and I was bored as hell after the first two or three times I ran through each of the raid areas.  Unless you're a hardcore MMORPG gamer, I would stay away from WoW even if they are promoting a free 20 levels of fun.  All you'll get in the end is a waste of 20 bucks a month and a huge pain in your ass.

That all said, my dislike of MMORPGs stems from a long line of them that I used to play.  Here's a quick rundown of each and every one that I had a chance to play:

The first online game that I played was Final Fantasy 11, and I played it for a good year or two.  The game itself was able to feed my love of RPGs as well as my love of the Final Fantasy world.  Tucked neatly within the horrible, horrible level grinding were useless quests that gave little to no reward, and thus no reason to complete them.  After coming to the conclusion that continuing to play FFXI was just a huge drain on my bank account and a worthless endeavor, because no one in that game besides White Mages was actually able to find a party, I looked to another MMO for a reprieve.  WoW satisfied me for another year or two, but the fun of the game quickly fizzled out after my Shaman was nerfed time and time again.  When I went from being a decent damage dealer and jack of all trades to merely a pathetic healer for my raid groups, I lost all of my want to play.  I quickly moved on to find that City of Heroes could only hold my interest as long as I could continue to create new heroes.  The bland combat and repetitive buildings only fueled my frustration.  I believe that City of Heroes lasted me maybe a month or two.  The same issue came about with Lord of the Rings Online.  Though I love the LOTRO world and the very idea of playing inside of Tolkien's rich, expansive world, the game itself fell short of the novel's delivery of the experience.  The last MMO that I attempted to play was Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Here I experienced a great deal of soloing as a Paladin, but once I moved to another class, I was unable to do anything by myself.  DDO ultimately suffered from the same problems as WoW.

My issues with each and every one of the above games came right down to playability.  I can play Dragon Age over and over and I don't need to wait for five other nerds to log on to do anything fun.  Once I reach the end of the game, my experience has been fulfilled and the end of the story ensues.  Normal games reward a player for reaching the end by completing the story or allowing the player to see the aftermath of their choices.  MMOs steal that experience away.  The story is unfortunately never complete and the fulfillment never comes.  So each player continues to shell out month after month, attempting to collect all of those armor pieces and that last special pet so that his character can look like Santa and ride a Reindeer during Christmas.  But who wouldn't want to do that for 20 dollars a month?

Day Three: Lego Everything

Browsing Barnes and Noble is rather dangerous.  Not only can one get lost for hours on end, but you also run into such items as Lego Harry Potter books, or Lego Star Wars books, or Lego Pirates of the Caribbean books, or even Lego Batman books.  It's like a trip to the past when Legos were the most awesome and creative thing a kid could own.  Epic battles and nations could be created on a massive scale using little yellow people with peg heads and clamp-like hands.  I used to love building expansive castles and imagining a siege complete with engines of war and soldiers of fortune.  But today there are so many damn Lego adaptations that it'll make your head spin.  Of course this phenomenon isn't confined only to the physical blocks, but also expands to the digital world.  If we have Legos to play and build with in real life, why do we need them also in video game form?

I enjoyed Lego Star Wars, in fact I liked running around as R2D2 and building useful objects out of bricks, but little did I know that it was just the beginning.  Next we saw Lego Batman, a decent game in its own right, but it's the same damn thing.  That's the problem with these games, there's no fucking difference between one or the other.  Whether you're Batman, Luke Skywalker, or Indiana Jones you're building the same useless crap in the same environments with the same controls.  I could see creating a sequel to a successful game franchise, but why did it need to escalate to the monstrosity it is today?  It's like you have a decent cheeseburger with all of the fixings: ketchup, mustard, lettuce, and all the other junk, so you decide to make it again.  Only the next time you make it, it turns out a little less tasty and you change the combination of the toppings.  If this happens time and time again you'll eventually reach the outcome that your burger is essentially a piece of shitty beef that you've eaten too many times only with the toppings being swapped.  That's what our Legos have been reduced to.  The only logical limit is a shitheap, or in this case, Lego Universe.

Day Two: Downloadable Content and Magic Sword

Downloadable Content, or DLC for short, has to be one of the most insidious items ever created for human entertainment.  Take, for instance, a game like Fallout 3.  If you aren't satisfied with the 20+ hours of game time already built in, why not spend $10 on DLC that will extend the game's life to 25?  It'll add a bunch of new weapons, armor, and perks!  Yeehaw!

Those of you who've purchased DLC know the deadly truth, though, that the first purchase is only a gateway.  Once you've gotten those few extra perks and quests, you just can't live without getting every single DLC pack that exists.  I'd make some vague reference to Pokemon, about having to catch 'em all, but I'm just not in the mood.  We all try to rationalize this with vague excuses like, "You can't have all of these new weapons without new quests to try them on!  And with all of these new quests, I'm going to need this other pack so that I can make my own ammo!"  Pretty soon you're looking at credit card debt of $3000 and a potentially serious psychological disorder.  As far as I'm aware, there's no cure.

My trek through the wasteland has been delayed until next week, so expect some more random gaming thoughts until then.  I have to compile more data before I have anything to say that anyone will actually give two shits about.

The other thing on my mind today is Magic Sword.  From what I can tell, the game is an arcade port to the SNES.  I've been playing it a bit on my phone and though the controls are lacking, which isn't the fault of the game, I'm happy to say that it's a good waste of my time when it's needed.  It kind of reminds me of a horrible, nightmarish cross between Golden Axe and Zelda 2.  You climb a tower as some kind of Fabio reject and fight enemies, gather items, and defeat bosses to earn points.  Along the way you gather approximately a million keys to open random doors.  Seriously, every fucking enemy seems to have a key... which makes total sense to me.  What skeleton or minotaur doesn't want their own room with a lock?  Anyway, so the points you earn really don't do diddly squat.  I think that you're able to get some extra lives, but really it's just the old arcade gimmick:  Earn more points then your friends and show off your nerdy power.  Of course today these scores mean absolutely nothing.  Back then they meant very little as well.  Who in their right mind bought a game for the Super Nintendo whose main goal was to earn points?  After Atari, gamers were looking for an experience where you could conquer your enemies and overcome obstacles.  A scoring system just no longer works like it used to, besides, what kind of sense does that make in real life?  If we were all scored on a system like Magic Sword, I guarantee we wouldn't have any extra lives.