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 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 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?