As you completed each world in Super Mario Bros. and beat each fake Bowser you would repeatedly hear the phrase that has gone into videogaming history. “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!”. And while the 43 million of people who bought this game presumably cursed Toad for continually being the bearer of this unwelcome news did anyone every stop to think what it was like for him, sat waiting for you to turn up?
It turns out that actually, yes, someone has. On their Black Pear Tree EP the Mountain Goats have written one of the bleakest songs about videogames I’ve ever heard, entirely from the point of view of Toad in Super Mario Bros, which you can hear here.
As a small child one of my favourite holiday pastimes was to go to the beach and make a small town of little sandcastles and then destroy them by hitting them with a plastic trowel. It recently struck me that, in the couple of decades since, I haven’t played nearly enough games that have pandered to my need to be some kind of God-like creator and destroyer. You can imagine my excitement, then when I played two games last week: the construction-based World of Goo and the destruction-based Boom Blox.
A demo of World of Goo is available to download as a PC game from the website and the full version is available as a PC or a Wiiware game. People have tried to tell me it’s a physics game but given the amount of opportunity it gives for you to comment on struts and weight distribution it’s really an ode to structural engineering. In each level you take a collection of goo blobs and use them to create a variety of gelatinous-looking structures to reach the exit pipe that will be inconveniently placed, usually just beyond a meat tenderiser or giant pit full of spikes. The evolution of goo has clearly been an eventful one, resulting in goo with different characteristics. It’s a very stylish-looking game and one that’s very satisfyingly to play. Even better, the progression between the stages is also handled in old-school Mario style progression, moving from one illuminated blob to the next on a big map. Plus every blob you save in the main game is added to your blob pile for building gigantic structures in the big sandbox section. I imagine they don’t call it a blob pile in the press release as my mind can’t even come up with an image to go with that phrase.
On the other side of the creator/destroyer divide is Boom Blox. It was advertised widely as the result of a team-up between EA games and Steven Spielberg which, to be honest, was completely unnecessary information. All anyone really needs to know is that it’s a game where you can destroy structures which look completely stable with one well placed shot. As such it’s a salve for anyone who’s got so frustrated with playing Jenga that they’ve wanted to just kick the entire tower of blocks over and shout in the face of the person who suggested playing it in the first place. It’s entertaining, like World of Goo it has a variety of blocks with different schticks and like World of Goo the physics of it is spot-on. I only have two gripes about Boom Blox. One, there’s sometimes a lack of precision in the targeting system which results in you hitting something you never aimed at. Two, I like my destruction to be leisurely and considered and there’re a few too many timed sub-games for my liking. Admittedly that second point is fairly personal to me and it may be that frenetically throwing bowling balls at bears in suits of armour is everyone else’s idea of a good time.
All that remains now is for the Wii to feature a game which combines the creation and destruction in one, set in a city made entirely of sand where you rain down destruction using a giant trowel, controlled by the Wii remote.
Jesus Christ. While I applaud this chap for coming clean on some of the pressure that games writers face to go with the flow, I can’t help but feel that he’s still a terrible turd.
As you may recall, I wasted valuable time and money on that game, at least in part because of the near-univeral critical acclaim. More fool me, eh? It seems they just wanted people to think they were cool.
I’ve lost a large amount of my free time recently to Final Fantasy IX. I tried recently to boil down its many qualities for a friend who had never played it and came up with:
– Excellent story and one which is actually a Fantasy story, rather than a Final Sci-fi story like many of the others.
– It gives you the chance, as I have, to complete the game by dropping a giant frog on the head of the final boss.
– As the last (final?) Final Fantasy on the PS it’s low-tech enough to dodge some of the problems of later games. All the dialogue is text rather than spoken, so you don’t get whiny Tidus or whiny Vaan mewling in your ear for hours at a time about their hermaphrodic problems. Also you can choose the names of all the characters, which is always fun.
– It has Vivi in it (or Paddy if you’re playing in my game) who may be the most adorable character ever in a video game. He falls over! He has a giant hat! He’s cute and filled with self-loathing.
Look at his little face!
While my friend had wandered off by the end of point 1 on the list, I was so compelled by the strength of my own arguments that I started playing it again. What I’d completely forgotten and what should have been point 5 on my list is the mini-games. I’ve welcomed in 2009 playing a worrying amount of Chocobo Hot and Cold – a game where you send a big yellow bird to peck around a garden and, depending on the level of enthusiasm in his response, work out where the treasure is buried. I used to play a similar game with my grandmother, where she would hide a thimble somewhere in the room and then I would dress up as a moogle and try to find it.
Mini-games always seem like a waste of time but I find something strangely compelling about them, especially when they help you level up or, in the case of Chocobo Hot and Cold, help you finish a hideously complex optional sub-plot about the in-game postal service. And it’s not just me who gets transfixed by sub games. Rockstar in particular seem to have some sort of perversion for them. Yeah, you could be screeching through the streets of Liberty City trying to shake off a four-star wanted rating, but wouldn’t you rather be playing a bowling sub-game? Or pool? Or darts? Similarly, I remember Bully as being a WarioWare-style mass of minigames where you’re alternately doing anagrams, punching people and playing a retro arcade game where you’re a hungry sumo wrestler.
Granted, they’re not all good. Some are annoying pointless wastes of time. But that’s not what the new year is about. Here’s to the decent mingames. A bit of spice, a tiny break, a little bit of instant gratification in games that otherwise take weeks to finish. Anyway, onwards – these Chocographs aren’t going to unearth themselves.
Posted by Carachan on December 20, 2008 | Permalink
Baddest assest guy ever(est).
I’d long been a fan of everyone’s be-afroed samurai, mainly because the music was divine and you can’t get cooler than Samuel L mothereffing Jackson.
Afro Samurai is an East meets West anime series starring the voice of the one and only Samuel L. A collaboration between Japan and America, it was the first of its kind – personally, I adore the ultra violence (I have a very testosteroney taste in pop culture) and the great hip hop style music, as well as the ridiculous cynicism and anachronism present in each episode. The pull, of course, was the strength of the main character – charismatic despite his few words, the Afro Samurai was funky as fuck and often slid into a rhythm in time with the music in order to slay his foes.
Posted by Carachan on December 13, 2008 | Permalink
Real life hp juice!
I was browsing my local SunKus convenience store in Kagoshima, Japan, and I found this next to the cans of coke. It just sat there, casually, daring me to buy it. Final Fantasy Potion. I never thought I would see the day.
Despite the fact that it tastes like crap, it got me thinking – if you can get potion to top up that 200 hp you were missing when you woke hungover, what else in life could be helped by an item from Final Fantasy?
Here are my thoughts:
A Silence Grenade could come in handy for times when you are stuck in a conversation about last night’s X-Factor.
Holy Water for when you have to go to work on no sleep and you feel a bit zombified.
Remedy: cures abnormal status. i.e, cures your own idiocy. I need this one a lot. You’re in trouble when it wears off though.
Random encounters OFF: A lifesaver when you have a hangover and no makeup on.
Viva Piñata is a strange beast. The original was a brightly coloured all-ages sandbox game that came out at the end of 2006. Since then it’s spawned three further games (a DS version, an apparently terrible set of minigames and the direct 360 sequel Trouble in Paradise) and a children’s TV show.
The two XBox 360 Viva Piñata games are both very entertaining games and there are various things about them that are cute. The little snuffly piñata noises the animals make, the fact that all the species have names that are animal/candy puns, the growing plants and building them little houses and making your piñata happy and sending them off to parties. All very cute. Read the rest of this entry »
In your obligatory slice of Tim Schaefer news, there have been excellent, if slightly unexpected developments on his his latest action adventure project – Brütal Legend. It’s about an axe-wielding roadie fighting demons and riding gigantic souped-up death cars and there may be some Norse mythology thrown in there as well. That thorough synopsis combined with the trailer released in October (below) suggest it’s going to be great and very silly.
In the summer Activision, who were meant to be publishing Brütal Legend, went and spoiled it all by merging with Blizzard and abandoning a load of games they had in development. After six months in publishing limbo it was annouced today that EA have picked up the rights. Yes, that’s EA as in Electronic Arts. While it’s obviously great that its got a publisher it’s a little surprising that it’s sequel-churning behemoth EA who are taking it on. Brütal Legend is not a sequel and not a spin-off from a film and it’s likely to sell to a cult market but not necessarily much beyond. It’s entertaining that it will be brought us by the company that has force-fed the market foie-gras style the hundreds of expansions of the Sims, Madden NFL and FIFA. I hope they bring out a Rock Band expansion to celebrate the launch.
