Getting a laugh is not the same as being funny, just as getting applause does not mean you have created something great.  Yet in our increasingly end-based consumer culture, these distinctions are beginning to blur as never before.

Can you imagine an age of media without advertisements?  America sure couldn’t.  Right from the get-go in the 1920’s, radio was filled with deeply embedded commercials, from delicious Chesterfields to less-delicious Ovaltine.  In the 50’s and 60’s, with the popularization of television, the keen Madison Avenue minds realized something obvious, yet profound: the younger the customer you hooked to your product, the more years you would have access to their wallet.  You don’t advertise to a dying man.

As a direct result of this shifting focus towards youth, young people were thenceforth pandered to ceaselessly, and the culture we had inherited from our forebearers dating back to the motherland — a culture which valued age, wisdom and experience — was subverted to favor the young, beautiful and clueless.  In an era-defining shift, the most potent forces of American culture were now oriented almost single-mindedly towards youth.  In concert with the burgeoning self-esteem movement, young people were made to feel like the center of the universe.  Topol and Anacin commercials didn’t have to go home, but they couldn’t stay in primetime.

By the 1980’s, children’s programming had finally made the bold, inevitable move to 30-minute commercials.  Masters of the Universe, Voltron, Robotech, Thundercats, My Little Pony — all of them engrossing, entrancing to 80’s kids.  Animation which had begun 70 years prior as the extraordinary work of American artists, had been replaced by mass-produced, off-model schlock designed not to be great or to bring pure joy, but merely to entertain.  As long as you could hypnotize a 12 year-old for 30 minutes, you could sell toys, and that meant you were in business.  If you are now of a certain age, you look back on those Saturday mornings with radiating joy, but with your older, wiser, more experienced (and therefore unappreciated) eye, you see it for what it was: a vast winking of hoods.

Photon killed loose tobacco

A watershed moment came in 1986, though we wouldn’t know it until many years later.  Nintendo of Japan released the sequel to what would go on to become the most important video game of its time: Super Mario Brothers.  The new game was not a sequel in the customary sense; it did not place our hero in a novel new context, nor did it introduce brand-expanding new characters.  Its main focus as a sequel — and this seems to have been unique in video game history — was to make the game more difficult.  Not just more difficult, but more clever, more ingenious, more challenging, more rewarding.  Evil mushrooms, deadly gales, pixel-perfect jumps, mazes, tricks, it was a fiasco of exuberant hair-pulling representing the pinnacle of game design.  Nintendo cast its eye across the Pacific, and contemplated what our youth culture had become, and they came to something of a staggering conclusion: we weren’t ready for it.

Us, the youth of the United States of America … could not, in the eyes of Japan, handle their latest video game.  And I think they were wrong.  If we could spend hour after hour defusing a bomb-rigged dam in TMNT, and day after day weaving Battletoad jetbikes through a cavern of white monoliths, we would have been happy to master the Mario game, even if it took months — which it would.  Beating it would have become the ultimate badge of Nintendo honor. But you cannot fault Nintendo for seeing us as feckless, impatient, spoiled little imbeciles who couldn’t handle a poison mushroom.  After all, that’s how our own country was treating us: as though we were simply too shallow to appreciate anything beyond entertainment.  In Nintendo’s eyes, American youth regarded Mario as an arm-waving clown who could occupy us for a few afternoons before we once again got bored and shiftless and began pissing off our moms and tormenting our smaller siblings with strange pseudo-weapons of dubious efficacy made of rubber bands and tinker toys (eyes beware).

So they sent us a different game instead, and called it Super Mario Brothers 2.  It is not a bad game — in fact it is a wonderfully weird and creepy game — but it is many, many times easier, less ingenious, and less rewarding than the game Japan got. I bought it the day it came out, and by 4am it was done.  I was entertained, but when Lost Levels came out, I was … astonished.  This was the pinnacle of platform game design we were promised.  This was the title that elevated gameplay to an art.  But in the eyes of the world, American youth was not up to the challenge.

Now with more Trans-Pacific disdain!

Were they wrong?  Had they indeed underestimated the American 12 year-old, or was their suspicion that we were culturally impoverished family-room slugs on point?

Or had television, movies and “educators” managed to convince us that as American youth we were so special, so effulgent and enviable, that all things should have to meet us at our level, and not the other way around?  We may not be able to answer for how we were 25 years ago, but we know what American youth has since become, and we are now seeing the genuine fruits of popular media’s efforts.  If you have children yourself, perform the following experiment: sit your small ones in front of the original Super Mario Brothers, and see how long they last before denouncing it as intolerably frustrating and difficult.  They won’t have too much of a problem with the graphics — retro is perfectly hip right now — but the demands of even this easier Mario game will still be too much.  In terms of overall difficulty, the original Super Mario Brothers makes Super Mario Galaxy seem like a game of arranging one potato by size.

Now it is 2010.  Rather than striving to push the video game industry forward as Nintendo did in 1985 with Super Mario Brothers, or the motion picture industry did with Bonnie and Clyde, or the television industry did with M*A*S*H, we still nurture an unbending orientation towards youth.  Not just youth, but stupid youth; dim, obstinate, lazy youth who enjoy — due in part to the media’s unyielding Sauron-like eye trained like a laser upon everything young people do and say — a sense of entitlement that necessarily corrupts.  It is no longer acceptable to simply create something great and trust in the curiosity and enthusiasm of young people.  Instead, we need to bring art down to their level, handfeeding it to them in bite-sized, easily-recognizable chunks.  We need motion pictures like Kick-Ass: disposable, nearly formless tarballs of buzzwords and laugh cues that reinforce our kids’ sense that their unwise, inexperienced culture — immaculately cultivated by Microsoft, Apple and Disney — is the zenith of civilization.

It is no surprise that the value of “high” art — that is to say, art which exists purely as an expression of human existence — finds little purchase in American culture, and indeed inspires scorn.  The new art then, is entertainment.  Functional efforts which serve to pass the afternoons of twitchy, increasingly obese, subnormal youths.  More alarming has been the gradual upsell on this idea that entertainment for grown-ups need aspire no higher than entertainment for kids.  Kick-Ass was rated R, and Torchlight is, amazingly, played by grown adults.  Yet these games and movies liberally apply juvenile cues and tropes designed simply to hit the right buttons; to get the laugh, to get the grin, to get the good review and word-of-mouth without actually being funny, creative or laudable.  That is the real working-man’s art — purely functional, formulaic enough that any hack can mash it together, and unchallenging enough to preserve the fragile self-esteem of the American adult. We don’t want anyone getting depressed over Lakitu’s tenacious antagonism, after all.

Dear Kick-Ass: THIS is how you do a memorable hallway scene.

Maybe it is inevitable that entertainment will subsume art in mainstream culture in the future.  Maybe high art really is moribund, and popular media needn’t learn or borrow from its integrity.  It is certain though, that this is a process which needs no hastening. There are many, many keen Madison Avenue sharpshooters and artistic teetotalers whose job it is to ensure that entertainment thrives.  But those among us who value art which does not necessarily sell action figures would do well to fortify the camp of the underdog — pure art, that which softens the singular blow of mortality, and allows a dignity for human existence that young, inexperienced American 12 year-olds could not fathom.  High art does not threaten us, so we should not threaten it.

Cheat codes have a way of getting around; the good ones rarely stay hidden for very long.  Nearly all old-school gamers know how to play Metroid with a clothing-optional Samus Aran, and the Konami code is more widely known than the Hammurabi code.  Still, some cheat codes are not as well known as others.

King’s Quest III

PC

If you press Alt-D, the game enters a debug mode.  From here, you can enter “tp” (for “teleport”), followed by a number, and you’ll be moved to the room that has been assigned that number by the Sierra developers. Careful though; your character remains in the same position when you teleport, so you may end up in the sky, underwater, or inside a wall Amontillado-style, and you’ll have to restore your game.

Thief

PC

Enter “BLUEMOON” at any time during gameplay to enable a distinctly Thief-style God-mode, where you get the cover of dark shadow no matter how much light is in the room.   Enemies will still notice you if you unsheathe a weapon, however.  A CS major I knew at college got this straight from a developer at Looking Glass Studios who worked on the Thief game engine!

Pong

Arcade

Even the grandpappy of video gamery has some tricks up its sleeve.  Glen Crebbles at the arcade museum Marquee Moon in Alameda, California confirms that this works for the original arcade cabinet only, not for home consoles: make sure the game has at least two credits, then tap the red “game start” button six times in quick succession.  This enables a so-called “expert mode” where both players’ paddles are invisible.  It’s essentially unplayable, and Glen says it hasn’t been determined whether this was an intended feature, or just a bug.

Nintendogs: Vengeance

DS

This second entry in the popular Nintendogs franchise has several amusing Easter eggs.  The denizens at 2channel who found this one insist it only works with a Corgi dog (which is great because they’re the cutest breed anyway).  So choose a Corgi and play the game as normal until you find the Santa Claus hat.  Put it on your dog, then walk him 16 times in a row without feeding him any biscuits — it doesn’t matter how short the walk is.  The Corgi will immediately gain the Class 3 heavy arms permit, meaning you don’t need to bother with any of that awful licensing.

Rock Band: Creed World Tour

XBox 360/Playstation 3

The most annoying thing about this game was always the inability to change the default appearance of the band.  I get that they were going for an accurate look, but if we’re being honest, much of the appeal of Rock Band games is the freedom to dick around with your facial hair and wardrobe.  French gaming mag Gamekyo discovered the following cheat code that conveniently addresses this annoyance: first, back out to the main screen and switch to “Neophyte” mode (you can change it back later).  If you’ve already hired a manager, fire him, then visit church.  Hit the “Ditch Appurtenances” icon in the top-right of the screen, back out of church, then go to “Choose Venue”.  You’ll see three new venues unlocked: Budokan, Veteran’s Stadium, and Crebbles Arena.  Select Budokan by having your drummer hit the snare.  Now you can change your wardrobe and appearance as much as you like.

Update: it seems this also adds a song to your basic set list, Passover favorite “Scott Stapp Sings Da Yaynu”.

Sherman Hemsley Presents: Ice Fishing

Sega Master System

No one I know was ever able to get past the Ukraine stage, where you have only three minutes to catch 15 perch.  It was essentially impossible.  Only many years later did I find the code to cheat my way past it: after you beat Sweden and enter the tackle shop, enter the following code using the 2-player controller: Up/Left/Down/Right/1/1/2/2, then UNPLUG that controller. The shopkeeper is then replaced with an 8-bit Marla Gibbs (it looks nothing like her), and she will sell you a “Turbo Great” hand auger for 300 kroner.  Ukraine is then a piece of cake.

Fighter

Atari Jaguar

Let’s be honest, Enemy wasn’t that hard to beat, even in Adequate mode. But if for whatever reason you were having a hard time, there was a cheat code for you: right after Friend betrays you in the warehouse cutscene, pause the game (you couldn’t pause during previous cutscenes but you can here).  Hit the option button to bring up your journal — it looks normal, right?  Not quite; hit the C button and the text changes into a rebus puzzle which is pretty easily decoded as “Man+knee time+s”.  Now, when you go to Associate’s home and he asks you about the crebbling, the new answer shows up as an option, “many times”, and this unlocks your punches.  Enemy is now even easier than he was before.

Part III – Episode II: The Legend of Chapter VII

Playstation 2

The Hell-Orcs make the Sebastia sub-quest a nightmare of farming; you need to basically live in the Sebastopol bacon mines to make up for the orcs’ thievery.  And bear in mind, this game uses the Heartbeat system from the first game; in each game heartbeat (GAME, not crebble) those orcs can violate three women or one Great Steed, so you’re always playing against the clock.  GameFAQs has what turns out to be a simple solution: create 8 wheedling units, select them, then click 8 times on your mana icon using the X button instead of the square.  Voilà, at least 2 (4 if you’re lucky) strains of meningitis cripple the orcs, meaning you have around 400 heartbeats to amass bacon unmolested. Good luck!

The internet has a way of collectively deciding that something is cool, and then inflating it to a stature above what it deserves, so that everyone can feel like part of a group by liking the same things.  Bacon and narwhals are not the GREATEST THINGS EVER, but try telling that to Reddit. Internet societies deliberately nurture the illusions that their chosen idols are untouchably, irrefutably amazing, because it gives character to their community, and affords them the joys of inclusion that may have eluded them in childhood.  It’s understandable.

A collective verdict has been similarly decided in the case of Twilight, but in the other direction.  Twilight-hate on the male internets is the rule of law.  It is a gravitational constant, axiomatic, inescapable, occasionally disappearing but always certain to reappear in another form, like a digital Gozer the Traveler.

But unlike most internerds, I’ve actually seen both Twilight movies (with the help of Mike, Bill and Kevin). So I can credibly confirm that yes, the movies are as that which emerges from my dog, and the Twilight vampires themselves are profoundly insulting to the unenvaginated among us.  But I can also confirm that they are still cooler than zombies.

Yes, Twilight draculas sparkle in the daylight rather than disintegrate, live in stable and supportive family environments rather than alone in a castle or a cave, and would prefer to talk about their feelings rather than your blood.  But they do one thing that zombies don’t: they give us something at least slightly new.  At least they’re trying!

Zombies are the same phenomenon as bacon and tired animals, except on a much, much wider scale.  A truly insane percentage of people have decided that zombies are far, far cooler than they actually are, and work tirelessly to support this infallible idea.  They go to every “new” zombie movie, purchase every zombie survival guide and hack-written zombie trade paperback, and exclaim at every opportunity how much they love zombies. In fact, they can’t believe how much they love them.  They would marry a zombie if they could, and can’t wait for the impending zombie apocalypse, because it’s going to be just so freaking awesome.

It has gone way, way too far.  Online dating concern OkCupid.com cites “zombies” as one of its userbase’s most popular interests, and one of the most successful in matching up with a partner.

Source: OkCupid.com

How can anyone  be “interested” in zombies?   It was a cute idea once — ONCE — but why the enduring fascination?  Do people fantasize about lumbering zombie hordes while waiting for red lights to turn green? Is corporate productivity suffering due to an epidemic of zombie-based daydreaming in the workforce?  What is there to think about?

And every year, we are flooded with zombie movies and zombie video games, and they are eaten right up.  Viral marketing has become necessary because our generation is supposedly wary and distrustful of traditional marketing efforts, yet where is that distrust when it comes to shameless zombie cash grabs across all forms of media?  Why has the internet collectively decided that zombies will be the One True Meme, unifying all subsidiary internet communities with its healing glow?

These are the very same internerds who decry Twilight vampires as dumb and pandering. Well guess what, zombie schtick is just as tired and ridiculous and lazy and insulting as Twilight’s treatment of the vampire trope. You can’t have it both ways.

Zombies who crave bacon? UPVOTED!!

Beeping Tom is a Little Bo Beep column that spies with its little eye those games which fell through the cracks of time.

The Year of Type-Zero

In 1999, Taito’s new Type-Zero hardware made its way to arcades around the globe, extending their tradition of massive, elaborately-customized cabinets designed around specialized simulation games. These monsters had their own detailed seats and all kinds of custom controls, depending on the heavy machinery being simulated.  You’ve almost certainly had the experience of admiring one, seeing how much it cost for a single play (usually a dollar or more), and continuing past to the ghetto section of old 25-cent-play cabinets like 1943 and R-Type where you had to stand on your feet like a shnook.

Many companies made these “deluxe” cabinets, but not all were created equal; many were just gimmicks, letting you rock back and forth on a fake Sea-Doo or drift around in the latest OutRun clone. But not Taito’s Type-Zero machines — these were different creatures. Take for instance Landing High Japan, a notoriously unforgiving passenger jet landing simulator — just the landing part, mind you — with an intimidating cockpit overflowing with complex controls and a secondary screen. Or Taito’s two train sims, Ganbare Untenshi!! and Densha de GO! 3, focusing on light and heavy rail respectively.  That’s right — separate sims for light and heavy commuter rail, finally allowing the common man to experience the thrill of adhering to a timetable to the threat of mild reprimand.

Landing High Japan, one of Taito's Type-Zero cabinets. Not shown: Easy to use controls

Taito’s Type-Zero games let players fork out major yen in exchange for a reliably unembellished simulacrum of what someone somewhere is getting paid to grudgingly do.  They offered all the stress and monotony without that bothersome health insurance and income.

Power Shovel: For the Adult in You

One of the more unusual Type-Zero cabinets was Power Shovel ni Norou!! (which makes 5 exclamation marks between 3 games; well, the more mundane a game’s premise, the louder you gotta yell to get people to play it). Just as Landing High Japan furnished the joy of NOT killing people, and Densha de GO! provided the elation of punctuality, Power Shovel introduced us to the bliss of being careful not to spill dirt.

Heavy manufacturing concern Komatsu worked with Taito to develop the game, and the result is a challenging, utterly entertaining sim which required intense coordination to wrangle the multiple articulations of the excavator vehicles.  While playing, you really felt the incredible weight of the machines you were controlling, and came to appreciate the delicate touch necessary to operate them, as well as the dire consequences of even a single mistake.

The 2000 PlayStation version does a workmanlike job in emulating the immersive arcade cabinet, pushing the DualShock to its limit (a special dual-stick controller was available in Japan for a hair over $100).  The 4 triggers control each tread’s forward and reverse gears, while the 4 main buttons — in concert with the D-pad — control the shovel arm’s various articulating joints, and spin the Komatsu around its main axis.

It’s a lot to keep track of!  As you can see, the game holds your hand to start off, acquainting you with each button’s function and giving you a glimpse of the challenges ahead.  The clock is your enemy, and you quickly realize that you can’t afford to use just one button at a time; it’s necessary to combine as many as five buttons simultaneously into one complex, economic motion.  Make more than one or two mistaken or wasted movements, and you may as well start over.

Power Shovel: For the Japanese in You

As you complete jobs, you earn cash which you can spend on various booby prizes such as CG images and additional in-game voices (although the default voice is pretty hilarious).  The more challenging stages are unlocked by completing licensing tests which start out doable but quickly progress to insane, and eventually to Japanese.  Power Shovel recognizes its own difficulty, and lets you blow off steam by destroying cars and demolishing sheds, but even these tasks prove surprisingly difficult, since you still need to coordinate that giant shovel arm with over 9000 points of articulation.

Where the game really begins to stray into “only-in-Japan” territory is the mini-games.  Instead of wanton acts of destruction, you must also relocate turtles from one pool to another (and seriously, to hell with the gold ones, they can relocate themselves):

And of course, you will need to use your power shovel to pour 200 liters of curry over huge mountains of rice.

Power Shovel is like two games in one; the first a complex heavy machinery simulator, and the second an almost Wii-esque collection of dopey party games that never fail to bring a laugh.  And it is worth nothing that Power Shovel, along with Taito’s other Type-Zero games, supports the viewpoint that murder simulators aren’t the only sim game in town … not when there are turtles to be saved.

Also, Foreman Pac-Hitler here is my new best friend.

Beeping Tom is a new Little Bo Beep column that spies with its little eye those games which fell through the cracks of time.

The Skills to Win

In 1987 I spent a lot of time in DOS editing config.sys and its hetero lifepartner autoexec.bat trying to get Arkanoid to work with a Logitech trackball. But no go.  There wasn’t enough memory in the CompuAdd 286/12 to run both at the same time, just like there isn’t enough nerd cred in the world to justly reward this paragraph.

This meant that I had to play the classic Pong-esque bat-and-ball game with the arrow keys, which simply moved the paddle slowly left and right at a steady, casual speed.  Not good.  In a game like Arkanoid, where success is contingent upon your ability to fly all the way across the screen in a flash to catch up to a frenzied ball, this was like trying to carve an intricate dolphin figurine out of granite, using a giant jackhammer.  But this was 1987, and back then, if you couldn’t have the game you loved, you loved the game you had.  And I had Arkanoid, on a 3-color CGA monitor, with the arrow keys.

Weeks became months, over which time  I learned to play Arkanoid with the proverbial hand tied behind my back.  I gradually trained myself to instinctively predict where the ball would end up once it arrived at the bottom.  I just had to be 3 or 4 steps ahead of the game, reading out the caroms, slowly positioning myself in the spot where the ball would be, prepared to field the volley.  By the end of it, I could beat the game about 50% of the time — 33 boards with a keyboard on a game that had no continues, making me the Jimmy Woods of Arkanoid.  Waste of time?  Hardly.  Whereas most of today’s games force you to level up your character in order for him to beat the last guy, I had to actually level myself up in the real world, learning an actual physical skill in order to win. And skills are what you need if you want to succeed at life.

You'd be surprised how many doors this opens up.

Now, Arkanoid was a bit of a flawed game. Every now and then, the ball would have some kind of LSD flashback and just dart off in a random direction you had no hope of predicting, oftentimes straight the hell down. You only had two extra guys in this game, so if you lost one unfairly because the ball was a little stoned, you just started the game over.  It couldn’t be helped. The angle physics in general weren’t 100% what they needed to be; sometimes the ball would get stuck in a weird corner, trapped in a repeating loop from which it was unable to extricate itself. This was hilarious the first few times it happened, like a basketball getting caught between the rim and backboard.  But it quickly became a tired pain in the ass that prematurely ended games, like a basketball getting caught between yes and so forth.

One time Arkanoid got stuck,  I decided to experiment and left the game running before leaving the house for a sleepover at my friend’s place.  The next day, I returned to find that my dad had turned the computer off shortly after I had left, and he chided me gently for wasting electricity. He was right to do so.

Japanese 7-11’s

Anyway, there have been many, many Arkanoid clones since 1987, and the bat-and-ball game which began with Pong and Breakout soon fleshed out into a legitimate genre of its own. The physics issues were ironed out, and the gameplay was made more complex.  Action Puzzle Prism Land (PlayStation, 2000) is a highly entertaining, low-budget and late-model entry into the field, with all kinds of power-ups — cumulative, mind you — and 100 boards spread over 10 distinct worlds.  The game actually supports a mouse, but — say it with me now – I used da damn keybawd. Finally, another chance to exercise my Arkanoid skill outside of corporate America!

Left to right: the original low-rent, art-free release, the later NTSC-J/PAL version (mercifully renamed "Prism Land Story"), and finally the infuriatingly pandering North American version called "Sorcerer's Maze" which swaps the main characters out for a pasty Emma Watson clone, the jackoff from next door, and Robin Williams as Judd Hirsch as Dumblemerlin.

The story is simple and completely irrelevant: Prim (Player 1) — an anthropomorphic cat Pokémon in cutoffs — travels with Princess Rhythm (Player 2) to the land of [I do not know what the land is called and I cannot imagine that it possibly matters].  There they find that the prisms which keep the land and its creatures healthy and thriving have been imprisoned in crystals by 10 truly queer meanies and their evil boss.  Prisms … encased in crystals.  Your job is to travel the 10 different realms, free all the biome-specific creatures from their crystal prisons by cracking them with a ball, and finally kill the meanies and free the prisms.  I truly cannot tell you how embarrassed I am to have typed all that out.

The game is colorful, the sounds are appealing, and the screen is busy — the perfect way to keep two screaming toddlers occupied, and since the game was usually in the bargain bin of Japanese 7-11’s, an affordable solution as well.

As you clear boards, you accumulate magic points which you can then spend on power ups between levels.  The game lets you see what each level looks like so that you can decide which powers you want to buy.  However, Action Puzzle Prism Land has infinite continues, letting you pick up exactly where you left off without even restarting the board, so there is no real impetus to buy power ups except to amuse yourself.  In fact, there’s no real point to you having lives either — the sign of a thoroughly well-thought-out game.

The game addresses all of the issues which plagued Arkanoid.  One of the most frustrating aspects of the prior game was how difficult it was to hit the final remaining block left on a board — it was often infuriating trying to orient the ball perfectly enough to hit a specific spot where the one remaining block was situated.  Arkanoid “dealt” with the issue by speeding the ball up faster and faster until it basically forced you to clear the block by accident or die.  Real player-friendly, that.  By contrast, Prism Land has a couple of features that solve this problem more elegantly: first off, if you go too long without clearing any blocks away, the game drops down a bomb-style power up, which you can use to detonate the ball, clearing everything in its vicinity.   A niftier power-up is demonstrated below; it basically allows you to control the ball after it leaves your paddle, letting you guide it into tricksy crevices that would have taken Arkanoid’s clumsy ball ages to finger satisfactorily.

Notice the block on the bottom that needs clearing … reverse Arkanoid!  Man walked on the moon, and now this.

There are several of the “crowd-pleasing” types of powerups, rare goodies which are satisfying to use on a very basic emotional level, such as the spicy meatball below, which crashes through everything, even distorting the screen edges.  And yes, this monster can still slip past your paddle and you’ll lose a life. I know because I managed one time to let it do just that, and punished myself for my comical negligence by disallowing corn for 3 days (note: I enacted no such punishment).

These kinds of power-ups — laser beams, ultra-destructive falling stars — allow you to clear a board in just a few seconds.  Sometimes this is a bit of a blessing, as the game designers got rather lazy over the last, oh, 30 or so boards, so one develops a very great desire to plough through these monotonous levels as quickly as possible to simply get the game over with — it’s a pretty long game to begin with for the type of game it is (a good 3-5 hours straight through, less if you really have things planned out).  Whether they ran out of money or effort or simply came up against a deadline, who can say … it is very much like the last few boards of Super Paper Mario for the Wii.  A blatant rush job.

Asymmetrical, Swampcoon Style

Where Prism Land really begins to distinguish itself is the boss fights.  None of them are particularly difficult — in fact, the first boss fight, with the snow queen below, is clearly hardest for some reason — but things do tend to get a bit … memorable.  This icy lady is probably just a bit risqué but it’s nothing out of the ordinary for young boys who were dreamily confused about Cheetara for many years.

This electro-cloudclops is a little fierce, what with his relentless lightning strikitude, but he’s basically a pushover.  You’ll notice that the music doesn’t exactly fill you with dread.

And again the skies are clear for various birds to fly free, as Kid Icarus celebrates the exorcism of the foul vaporclops.

But here is where things definitely skewed oddways.  This wolfy boss is holding the forest prism hostage, and as I wage war against him, his defense is to carve an intricate dolphin figure out of granite, using a giant jackhammer.  He is sculpting at me.  And if I crack his plinth with my ball, he stoically trashes his work and begins anew.  Dude is filled with secrets. In all honesty, I have not yet figured out whether I need to allow him to finish his masterpiece before attacking him, or whether destroying his efforts is the key to his discouragement here, but as long as you just keep the ball alive, the fight tends to end for one reason or another.

As you can see, Prim and the Princess look on as a furious harpy unencumbered by nippledom claws and scrapes at the wolf-artiste, vest, cravate and all, as a wild boar and roid-rage Bambi ignore his cries for mercy.  But the prism atop the mountain eyrie is thankfully unencrystalled, and that is all that matters, I suppose.  Perhaps his crimes were just that great, and his art just that unwanted.

Japanese video games.

Then there’s this hag.

I am not quite sure what manner of comment is appropriate here.  If you watched what I watched, then you saw what I saw, as well as what was seen by thousands of children across various continents as they sought to slay the swamp-aggressor.  It is quite possible that any untoward interpretation of the goings-on would be to impute more than is called for, and upon that presumption I’ll let the matter be.

But it sure as fuck looks like this big-tittied swampbitch is totally masturbating off her fleshy, unmistakably penile appendage, causing it to emit bubbles all over the place.  That seems like a terrible disease!  And judging by her expression, she is ULTRA DETERMINED about this yankoff, concentrating deeply on executing her intriguing, unorthodox method.

After this filthy, filthy creature is defeated, the waters once again run clean, allowing a vast menagerie of Pokémen and furries — yes, we are going ahead and calling them furries by this point — to bathe in peace and contentment, clothing optional, just as the Land of Prisms had been prior to the arrival of the masturbating raccoon, the dolphin-sculpting hammerwolf, and the frenzied cottony Zeus-clops.

It isn’t all quite so dubious — there is a relatively mundane whale boss, an amusing robot made of kitchen utensils, and a perplexing, lazily-coded final guy at the end.   On the balance of things, it’s for you alone to indict or withhold.  But I have to say this desert-level boss fight at the end of world 5 convinced me of a few things, whatever said things may be:

I do not know what that looked like on your monitor, but on mine, that mirror-flashing absolutely blinded me.  Not in the “ho ho, I am unable to see my ball through this uniform white hue, what a jolly effective impediment”, but more like “OW what the-… what WHAT?  Holy what the, that HURT … are you KIDDING ME?  Ow!   OWWWW!”

This boss fight is not all that difficult otherwise, but it takes forever, mostly because of the way her right leg keeps kicking your ball away like a Monty Python cutout.  You need to sneak the ball by her legs just so if you are to have any chance at destroying the sun which is causing the ground beneath you to consume itself.

And if you were wondering, yes, after she is defeated, her clothes come undone, but it is visible for only a few frames, and back in 2000, PlayStations didn’t have a screencapture function.  But a lot changes in 10 years.

Time to go asymmetrical ... SWAMPCOON STYLE.

]]> http://littlebobeep.com/2010/beeping-tom-prism-land/feed/ 3 http://littlebobeep.com/2010/games-adults/ http://littlebobeep.com/2010/games-adults/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:10:21 +0000 Eric http://littlebobeep.com/?p=1413

Paul has already given something of a vivid opinion on Avatar.  And me being a serial cynic of all things existent, I expected that I too would grab the brass hate-ring and hold fast while the carousel of social mania swirled itself into the ground, waiting it out until the bluegasm subsided.

Many critical accounts had already been written about the flom (such a work of hubris and fiscal obscenity virtuosity deserves its own term).  I knew what the critical narrative was, and where the battle lines were being drawn.  Avatar had divided people into brainers and feelers, into environmentalists and fuck-it-allists, into parts of the problem and bearers of solutions.  Devin Faraci’s righteous screed on CHUD seemed to nail down the scrum from the point of view of someone who simply didn’t like being told to turn off his brain. This seemed to be the most popular dissenting view.

Won't the real Avatar please stand up?

Avatar was clearly intended for the mainest of mainstream audiences, skewing considerably towards the action-figure through frat boy age spectrum, although there is no reason that older folks wouldn’t have a grand old time too — Cameron made sure of that.  Experientially, Avatar plays more like a Disneyworld ride than a traditional film, and I know for a fact that grown-ups actually have a pretty dope time on those teacups.

These more mature human males and females, given the choice, would probably still opt instead to see the latest Oscar-baiting English-Patienty movie, or an independent work by an ambitious auteur, or an international film where Judi Dench, Helen Mirren or Kate Winslet plays one of two queens.  And luckily for them, they don’t have to walk far from where Avatar is playing to slake their more demanding intellectual thirst; the film industry has always embraced everything from Meet the Spartans to Primer.  But there is always a stanchion at the center of pop culture around which the cinematic multitudes orbit, and these days that is Avatar.

The same holds for videogames; there is always one Grand Poobah title getting all the adspace and mindshare. Games occupying this critical spot have included some pretty important works: Grand Theft Auto 3, Super Mario Galaxy, Halo, and Fallout 3 to name a few from the past decade, and we can all look forward to the Final Fantasy XIII blitz once it drops in March. Like Avatar, these games inhabited that rarefied space transcending the videogame subculture, where everyone — not just gamers — has at least heard of them.

Mass Effect 2 may be a great game, but it’s still the intellectual equivalent of a Star Wars novel.

At the moment, Mass Effect 2 is at the gaming epicenter, having sold 1 million copies worldwide so far, and encouraging mostly enthusiastic reviews. By any account, it is a solid game, blending story and RPG elements with action gameplay both frenetic and precise.  The voice acting is solid, and we are finally starting to see mouths that look like they are saying the things they are saying.

Both frat boys and the action-figure set are having a blast with it, just as with its movie-industry cultural equivalent Avatar.  But what about the older, more “mature”, more intellectually inclined amongst the potential gaming public?  Pretty much everyone had a good shot at a fun time when going to see Avatar, but what about Mass Effect 2? Would a college professor enjoy it? Would an insufferable asshole brainiac douchebag ever plunk down 60 bucks for the collector’s edition?

Ultimately, no.  Mass Effect 2 may be a great game, but it’s still the intellectual equivalent of a Star Wars novel.  It will never have any lasting cultural significance the way a blockbuster mainstream movie would.  Rocky, E.T., Gone With the Wind — our culture is supercharged with films that have offered something to people of all ages and brain-types, and which will be remembered for generations.  And yet, we still have not seen a video game transcend in that fashion since, well, Pac-Man.  It just hasn’t happened yet.  It is valid to point out that compared to cinema, video games is a nascent medium — Hollywood enjoys a 70+ year head start.  But can you honestly see any trends in the videogame industry that point to an ambition of greater cultural and intellectual impact and importance?

Still waiting on NeytiriXJack slashfic ...

Fart-sniffing holier-than-thous who pooh-pooh Avatar can always go to the Herzog retrospective at the Angelika.  Their needs are met.  And while serious cinema obviously doesn’t inhale cash like its pop-culture cousins, it is still culturally significant, and there are numerous awards which recognize and encourage the efforts of serious filmmakers. But where is the like-minded gamer to go?  If I have determined that Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 are a bit too Froot Loopy when I’m looking for Shredded Wheat, where is the alternative, high-minded intellectual sphere of gaming?  Where is “2001: A Space Quest”?  Where is “A La Recherche du Frickin’ Lasers Perdu“?

Depending on which survey you believe, the average gamer is now between 32 and 35 years old, and 4 of every 10 are women.  Surely then, there is a market for a new kind of mainstream game which embraces intellectual maturity. I’m not saying we need a FPS English Patient, or a bullet-hell I Am Curious Yellow.  But if Hollywood can make a movie out of Tetris, then where is “Seven Samurai: The Game” (and just try and tell me that’s not a spectacular idea)? Why are the only truly fascinating, cerebral games being made and distributed for free by isolated artists? In the film industry, even those guys are getting paid, and when they’re not getting paid, they’re getting recognition.

It’s not just an issue of the perils of acceding to a market which may or may not exist; there is also the issue of how to make a “serious” game fun, or even how to turn an intellectually rich concept or story into a game at all.  But if anyone can think outside that box, it is videogame-creating geniuses like Will Wright, or Hideo Kojima.  And besides, who even says video games need to be “fun to play”?  I’m serious!  Some of the greatest movies ever are abjectly un-fun to watch, but we recognize them as great nevertheless,  and our hearts are full when we experience them, as are our minds.  That kind of reaction tends to open wallets.

Games have perennially inspired predictions of superseding film as the predominant cultural pastime.  When will they inch towards that next step?

PS: No, there is no Tetris movie, and yes, Avatar was completely awesome.

Speaking in a recent interview with Japanese gaming magazine Edge, Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has revealed that the 15th official installment in the stalwart Final Fantasy RPG franchise would be text-based [link, via Game*Spark].

Yoichi Wada, Square Enix CEO since 2003

“[Final Fantasy XIII] has been well-received by its core audience, and the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV Online will take this era of RPG development to its logical conclusion.  We believe the direction of gaming going forward lies not with expensive dedicated consoles that are difficult and costly to develop for.  Rather, as Nintendo has demonstrated with the success of its Wii console, the future of video games is in greater inclusion, bringing new gamers of all generations together, playing accessible titles with minimal technical requirements.  With these goals in mind, a text format Final Fantasy is the obvious choice.”

Wada noted that the new title will boast unprecedented backwards compatibility, with support for PlayStation 2, the original PlayStation, and a wide range of graphing calculators.

The game will also break with the franchise’s long-running traditional naming convention.  “The decision to drop numbers was part of our ongoing internal initiative to position the Final Fantasy brand for continued growth,” Wada explained.  “We don’t want our grandkids playing Final Fantasy LXVIII.  That would be silly.”  At a press conference this morning, Square Enix spokesperson Akitoshi Kawazu confirmed that the new game’s title would be Final Fantasy: Chapter of Crystal Beginnings.

Image courtesy Square Enix ©2010

Despite FF:CoCB having no actual graphics to speak of, Square’s talented team of in-house visual artists should still be busy with the upcoming Final Fantasy Wardrobe Wars iPhone app (July ‘10), as well as their collaboration with ero-game developer GIGA, Final Panty-See (Q1 ‘11).

Kawazu also announced playable demo copies of the game were being made available to industry media.  Little Bo Beep has spent some time with the 41KB downloadable, and is happy to present a sample of gameplay for its readers.

——————————————————————————————————

[[Infoglom® TRIAL EDITION]]

Final Fantasy: Chapter of Crystal Beginnings v0.10

Copyright ©1987-2010 Square Enix

Developed by Yoshinori Kitase and Yasumi Matsuno

Concept art by Yoshitaka Amano

ANSI on.

New / Load / Help

>load game 3

Game 3 loaded.

You are in an extremely colorful room that is clearly from the future or another dimension.  There are glowing areas on the walls and ceiling, and you think parts of the floor are transparent but it is hard to tell, it’s all kind of busy.  High overhead, a Golgotha circles, peering down at your party suspiciously.

> party

Temescal (White BioMage) is in your party.

Splint (Guest) is temporarily in your party.

> hp

HP: 403/612 MP: 41/41 Gil: 8430

>  look at golgotha

You cannot see past your hair.

> kill golgotga

Attack what?

> kill monster

You unsheathe your GunBow and prepare for attack.

Stirring music plays.

Preemptive attack!  Golgotha strikes with Extends claws and gouges you for 294 damage.

Attack / ManaTek / Summon / Item / Flee

> attack

You attack Golgotha for %hit_dmg%!

The Golgotha reacts with a deafening shriek.  This is not a normal Golgotha.  It begins to grow wings out of its scaly back, so many that you could not possibly count them — this must be a boss!  You face GigaGolgoth!

Attack / ManaTek / Summon / Item / Flee

> summon leviathan

You hold aloft the shepherd’s crook given to you by Danzar Garrigan and speak the words of the Leviathan.  The crook glows with summonly power.  A rift in the dimensional fabric of MagiTime slowly opens.

> wait

The rift widens, sending beads of pure Phantom Energy all around.

> wait

Trillions of light-years away, two cells of Granular Matter combine in an explosion which brings to life infinite universes.  The universes hear the call of the Phantom Energy and obey the wishes of their master.

> wait

Time passes.

> wait

The infinite universes coalesce into a single MetaVerse, calling upon the power of  Lavos to supplement its FloyMeld with SageSpark.

> skip

Would you like to skip the sequence?

> yes

What?

> skip sequence

Are you sure you want to skip the sequence?  It is terrific.

> skip sequence

You cannot skip the sequence.

As the power of Lavos fuses with the FloyMeld, the dimensional rift next to you burns crimson red in recognition of Lavosian SageSpark, forming Cytopower.

[[8 pages excised *Powered by Infoglom®*]]

Leviathan’s Hellbentium Phenocyte strikes GigaGolgoth Wing #48 for 4133 damage.

> save game

Game 3 saved.

> quirt

What?

> quit QUIT QUIT

Teasing, groping, and at times abusing the line between gaming and art, Yume Nikki is one of the most beautiful and upsetting games ever made.  Little Bo Beep presents a series exploring this slow-burning nightmare.

Who What?

Yume Nikki (literally, “Dream Diary”) was born in 2005 by a reclusive Japanese man who goes only by “Kikiyama”, using the RPG Maker 2003 game creation software.  It soon gained notoriety on seminal Japanese imageboard 2channel, and eventually came to the attention of  English-language forums where emo teens and assorted basement-dwellers glommed hard onto the game’s profoundly dark tone and bizarre, graphic imagery.  It has since been translated into English, spawned several theorybation websites, inspired more than one crowdsourced sequel, many elaborate fan animations, and continues to support a robust international fanart community rivalling Cave Story in terms of freakish, unnerving obsession to one man’s minutiae.  Suffice it to say this game does not so much hit a nerve, as throttle it.

First, a quick note: Yume Nikki is a series of experiences that can only be had once.  Saying this is not to be hoity-toity or ooh-la-la or lookee-here-we-got-us-a-city-boy — it’s simply how Yume Nikki works.  You get one chance with this game, so watching videos of its gameplay or using a guide to find things, or even just seeing pictures of the creatures and places you’ll be coming across, has a deflating effect.  And athough the game has a concrete ending, heading straight there is the last thing you would want to do.  If you have run the length of your tether and can go no further, there is one guide out there which can help you find and figure out the remaining bits, but its author, Scutilla, is unambiguous:

“… my biggest bit of advice regarding this guide would be: don’t use it.”

So if you’re ready to ride the snake, download the game below, turn off the lights (or blow out the candles if all your electricity has been stolen) and do your thing.  If it’s not up your alley, you will know pretty quickly, and there are many legitimate reasons for feeling averse.  The game is steeped in dread, and not everyone enjoys being genuinely upset by what appears to be, at least superficially, a Nintendo game.  On Yume Nikki forums, players have written with concern about not being able to unsee certain things, even though there is nothing traditionally graphic.  It is also reasonable to be turned off by the gameplay itself, which can feel open-ended and aimless — boring, in so many words — if you are not feeling its groove.

But one of the neat things about Yume Nikki is that it illuminates concepts larger than itself, so whether you A) have played the game to the end, B) are interested in the game but not enough to install it (a nontrivial task), or C) would just prefer to turn on Sister Wendy (or Father Ted), drink some mulled cider and never hear another word about this degenerate game, we’re safe and spoiler-free to back off and explore broader ideas, as the best art will always inspire us to do.

That’s You

"In their minds, it is a vivid tableau!"

It is December 28, 1981.  Two insufferable moms in affluent Darien, CT are chit-chatting at the salon about trivial matters, as they are known to do.  Conversation turns to the new Video Computer Systems they just purchased for their children for Christmas.  One complains that the console’s wood-grain plastic clashes with the wainscotting in the family room, but both agree that they had never seen their children so elated.

“But I just don’t get that weird game little Taylor and Snetterton Jr. are playing for hours on end.  What on earth is it supposed to be”?

Snet and I were playing Yars’ Revenge.  In 1981 every kid was, and for good reason — it was colorful and challenging when very few games were.  The cartridge even came with a comic-style booklet describing how the Yar — insectoid folk — were retaliating against the Qotile (the turquoise sideways jockstrap on the right, shielded by a jagged crescent of feces), for its rape of their home planet Razak IV.  This was still an era where adding a Roman numeral to a pretend word made for plausible sci-fi, an innocent and half-assed age.  Never mind that “Yar” and “Razak” were named for Atari honcho Ray Kassar; somehow I don’t think game author Howard Warshaw was taking all too seriously his effort to clad his little game in backstory, and it’s no surprise that we didn’t either.

“Oh, their imaginations turn those simple TV pictures into something better.  Principal Huffington Buffington VII says they’re imagining at a sixth grade level!”

It’s likely that Us Kids weren’t transforming those pixels into anything in our minds, though.  Rather, we were simply seeing a thing, becoming totally absorbed by that thing, controlling the thing with a joystick, and thus building a special relationship with it.  In Yars’ case, the thing of note was a simplistic, symmetrical assemblage of purple pixels, spitting lines into a brown C, and interacting in various ways with a mesmerizing strip of Multicolor.

Our parents had clearly spent much more time looking at the box than we did.  Us Kids did not realize that apparently, that was us on the cover, a gleaming, chitinous exoskeleton of airbrushed astrometal, spitting molten pinballs at … us?  Flyguy needs to chill, we’re on his side.  And why did the box art look like something we’d find in our older brother’s record collection?

“It looks really simplistic but their imaginations fill in the blanks.”

Right?

No.  Nothing was being “filled in”. That Atari box was forgotten within seconds, and likely tossed out with the discarded gift wrap (unless you had OCD like your cousin Pierre, in which case you re-created the shrinkwrap using clingfilm and your mom’s hair dryer before storing the box in a repurposed aluminum gun cabinet).  The same artwork appeared on the cartridge itself, but even though we handled it daily, it never occurred to us to associate this art with the gameplay itself.  The designs on the box and cartridge always had their own separate place in our minds and memories.  This was the experience not only of the Atari gamer in the early 80’s, but of every gamer since who has taken control of a protagonist that was, graphically, not definitively one thing or another.  Human beings appear to have no problem embodying a monochrome formation of pixels and accepting it for what it is, we do not require any additional descriptive efforts.  Can you imagine the boxart for David Shute’s “Small Worlds“?  A 3-pixel stick would become a cybermarine in a scorched spacesuit, hurling down a corridor kickboxing his haunted memories.  Spare us!  Demystification is a villain more evil than any Qotile.

Yars’ Revenge has nothing to do with chrome insects, or whatever the Qotile was supposed to be.  We just watched what we saw on our TV screens, interpreted those visuals without any real intermediary, and went about our gaming business.  We simply accepted that we actually were that tiny,  two-dimensional thing on the television that was different from anything in real life.  Our imaginations were engaged, no doubt … but surely not in the way envisioned by our Darien soccer moms.  We weren’t playing “as” characters; in talking about our pixelated protag, it was never “that block represents a creature you are controlling”.  Nor was it even “that’s your guy”.  Instead, it was, and has always been, “that’s you on the left”.  You!

A Fake Idea

"Astro Warrior: now with improved spreadsheet functionality!"

Since those days, video games have “progressed” along an inexorable path towards realism, and their boxart has followed suit, with two notable exceptions: first in 1983 with the NES, where Nintendo was briefly proud enough of their cutting-edge graphics to decorate game boxes with in-game sprites, and then again in 1986, when Sega adopted the controversial design philosophy that game boxes should suck.

Nintendo got over their nifty graphics pretty quickly, however, as did their fickle gamers, who were no longer impressed by the detail in Mario’s snotfire.  By the time Super Mario Brothers 2 (née Doki Doki Panic) was released, things in games were more closely resembling things in meatspace, and boxart reflected this.  When you compare the two Mario boxes side-by-side, you can almost feel your imagination shutting off when your eyes move to the SMB 2 box.  Gone is the strange, two-dimensional avatar we look forward to inhabiting in a weird way, replaced by an utterly unremarkable cartoon Mario in exultation following a successful rutabaga heist.  Hey, thanks for scrubbing away that joyful strangeness, and replacing it with this goofy Saturday morning style pablum, leaving our brains with nothing to do.  If you needed the money, you could have just said so.

Boxart is a fake idea.  It implies that we as an audience and participant are incapable of parsing abstract stimuli, and that games need to be more and more like real life in order for us to enjoy them.  This is not only untrue, it is damaging to the truth.  And it doesn’t take a high-minded person to appreciate this … in 1981, even Special Little Timmy down the block had no problem immersing himself happily for hours in what the modern gaming industry would consider the “unsatisfactory” graphics of Yars’ Revenge.  Of course, boxart is in the purview of marketing, and these games receive their adornments long after they’ve left the hands of their creators.  There has never been much choice for Nintendo, let alone a smaller publisher, to compete in crowded shelf space without communicating something bright and immediately appealing to browsing eyes.

But the damage done to games was lasting, and only now that independent games flourish are we seeing abundant creativity to make up for those lost decades of realism.  In Yume Nikki, the special connection we have with abstract graphics is a critical underpinning of our experience.  The game is dependent upon our ability to encounter what we see directly, without any layers of interpretive interference.  It becomes important for us to see something like the dark environment above, and not try to compare it with any place we have been in real life.  It must necessarily be a self-sufficient setting, requiring no corollary.  It must remain fundamentally a Weird Place.  And one wonders whether the endless stream of Yume Nikki fan art is in some respects an attempt to bring the game’s characters and worlds closer to our own, where they can do less harm.

Download and Installation

Not a painless process.  I generally refer potential players to the Yume Nikki post at indiegames.com.  Its primary download link gets you a package of everything you need to get started, and the blurb provides just the right amount of information.  Although the included installation instructions are accurate, they fail to mention that if you have not already installed support for East Asian languages, you will need a Windows CD or ISO to do so.  Also, the “Japanese” menu item in Windows’ Regional and Language settings appears, appropriately enough, in Japanese (as 日本語, although that won’t help you until you have Japanese support installed).  Don’t be scared off — for many people, the entire process takes only a couple of minutes, though for others it can be quite a mess.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It’s no secret how the Japanese operate; constant, steady improvement is preferable to innovation, and ultimately everyone is a beneficiary. It took 15 tries to really nail the “14-year-olds piloting robots which, through self-actualization and subsequent agency, become god and end (or possibly perfect) the world” genre, but by the end they had gotten it pretty much right and we were all the better for it. It took the Japanese to show us that humanity’s inevitable destiny is apocalyptic transubstantiation into a single, worldwide consciousness … sometimes the most important things are the most obvious.

So it was in the best Japanese traditions, and to the most aggregate benefit that in 1990, Sonic Team took the salient elements of Super Mario Brothers — moving to the right and consuming round gold — and sought to improve upon this formula by introducing an element the former game lacked: speed. With the 16-bit magic of Blast Processing (a real actual thing, no seriously), and a marketing campaign that was ludicrous even at the time, Sonic the Hedgehog represented a compelling evolution of the 2-D platform genre Mario had populari$ed.

"Hello? Can we get some canon in here?"

The game made SMB (and its noncanonical 1988 sequel, about which we shall never speak again) seem pathetically slow and drab, a hopelessly outdated vestige of last-generation gaming.  Green Hill Zone was by contrast an absolute blur of color and sound as the cocksure alpha vermin rocketed across the New-Wavy terrain.  At least, until Sonic ploughed into a baddie or a spike, sending him reeling, wedding bands scattered everywhere like a Mormon in a wood chipper.  Then the game became a struggle to hold onto that one last Precious while meticulously tiptoeing toward the goal, thereby attaining the true award: that awesome musical fanfare, terrifically snazzy to this day.

Any Mario diehard knows that when you come upon an enemy or obstacle, the last thing you want to do is slow down.

But was this really an improvement over the Mario gameplay?  Allowing the player to burn rubber for a few satisfying moments, before throwing a stick into his spokes?  An exhilarating burst of speed across a meaninglessly extended dragstrip before an infuriating obstacle shows up, at which point you have to, you know, play the game?  In fact, if Sonic Team sought to improve upon the play speed of SMB, didn’t they in fact accomplish the opposite?  Any Mario diehard knows that when you come upon an enemy or obstacle, the last thing you want to do is slow down.

Because Shigeru Miyamoto created the speedrun.

His game presents as a series of blocks and platforms, with lethargic, nonthreatening creatures ambling across the pixelscape.  The bendy motion physics and control in midair strike you right off the bat as a novel, highly characteristic way to move around, but the schema for interacting with the world appears essentially straightforward.  The magic, as it turns out, happens when you die.  Because then, you have to start the board over.

It’s no secret that in an age of cartridges with limited data capacity, gameplay had to be extended through difficulty and repetition.  Almost all games made use of this schtick — hell, after the 2600 the concept of a game actually ending was revolution enough.  But only Mario turned frustration into a feature; Miyamoto knew that the gamer’s natural impulse upon restarting a board over and over was to try and get through it faster and faster.  Precision gave way to aggravation, a self-compounding process which in most games ends with a controller chucked across the room and a call to the vet.  But in Mario it ends in revelation.  By accident, you realize that the floating turtle isn’t an enemy, but rather a spring; that longish stretch of ground leading up to him — a runway.

There comes a point when playing Mario through for the first time where you realize every board can be completed simply by holding down the run button and jumping the correct way.  This is a moment of awakening akin to Neo realizing he is The One, where the world now appears utterly different, and we need to rethink how to interact with it.  Suddenly, World 1-1 is no longer a series of unrelated jumps and obstacles, but rather one single, complex organism.  The placement of platforms and enemies no longer seems haphazard, having been revealed as one big knowing wink between you and Miyamoto, and you realize the true point of the game is not to dry-hump flagpoles and eat money, but instead to uncover the choreography hidden in each level, and train this shadow-ballet until flawless.

From 2007's "Super IP Brawl 3"

No confusion — Sonic the Hedgehog is a game conceived with the speedrun at its core.  But it is a kind of fake speedrun, ham-fistedly in-your-face, as per the Sonic corporate mantra.  They wanted the players to experience the thrill of moving quickly through an environment, not realizing that the roots of that experience are in the player’s search for — and eventual discovery of — the right path.   Speed alone is not joy, freedom is.  No one wants to do 50 miles per hour in a hamster wheel, and that’s ultimately what Sonic the Hedgehog amounts to: a preordained track, a set of rails within which you can indeed zip about in exact accordance with the designer’s decree, if that tickles your tip.  In SMB, the rails are a decoy, and the path itself can be conquered.  Your reward is the freedom of never slowing down.

Of course, the speedrun paths are still paths, of deliberate design.  So the rails are still there, albeit hidden.  But by the time we realize this, we are too exhilarated to care.  In 1985, Super Mario Brothers was a game whose true purpose was for the gamer to figure out its true purpose.  That was bonkers then, and it is just as bonkers today.  Sonic Team tried hard to relocate the cemetery, but they only moved the headstones.