Tag: 1990s

The A Button Challenge

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Mario was originally known as “Jumpman” in the first releases of Donkey Kong. Super Mario Bros. defined the platformer. What I’m trying to say is that Mario jumps. Until now.

For 20+ years, an array of gamers dug deep into the code of Super Mario 64 to see in how few A presses (jumping) they could beat the game. Last year, a successful run with zero presses was finally accomplished.

Numerous stars and even entire levels had to be skipped entirely as they required jumping. The centerpiece that enabled the final “A”-less run to be performed involved playing on Wii Virtual Console and using an emulator/porting glitch that had platforms in the Bowser in the Fire Sea stage moving sloooooowly upwards over time. The game had to be run for three real-time days to let them get into place.

Yet in the greatest human accomplishment since the moon landing, the A Button Challenge was finally completed.

Review: Initial D Volume 1

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Initial D Volume 1

Note: The specific thing I reviewed was Initial D omnibus Volume 1 which is actually the first two manga volumes in one book. But whatever.

Reading the legendary racing series in original manga form made me think that… the anime kind of superannuated it. Ok, I already knew what happened from seeing the anime (spoiler alert: Takumi wins), and while the manga has some distinct diffferences (like the order of races), it’s not all that different. Certainly not different enough to be easily better or worse. This isn’t a “behind every good 1970s movie is a bad 1970s book” type of deal.

But it’s pretty self-explanatory how much better in motion picture form a car racing series works. Having one large panel (even if well-drawn) of two cars at a turn with a huge comic “VROOOM!” sound effect just isn’t the same as watching two cars (even if they’re from PS1/N64-era CGI) zip around the same turn. I don’t blame Shigeno for anything. It’s just the format is a lot inherently less capable.

Console Pokemon Returns

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With the release and controversy of Pokemon Legends ZA, it’s time to once again return to the Console Pokemon fantasy that was popped for good in Sword/Shield.

What is “Console Pokemon”? It’s something us 90s/00s kids had in our minds as we moved pocket monsters around our pocket gameboys. Basically, without severe hardware limitations, a Pokemon that would burst out into a paradigm shifting masterpiece.

Was this naive gamer fantasy? Probably. But it was something that had indeed happened with Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time (or GTA III, or Halo, or Final Fantasy VII…) We kept getting hints-a Snap here, a Stadium or Colosseum there. And then the 3DS (probably the first real big “Console Game”) and finally the Switch gave us… unoptimized 3d games with similar mechanics that looked worse than ones twenty years prior.

Of course, now I know that rather than being made by a mega-publisher as its flagship title, it’s actually developed by small Game Freak, whose lack of programming chops was evident in some ways from the get-go. Now I know that the business model is basically that of a yearly sports game, being critic proof in that regard. Now I know that with the franchise so lucrative, the games themselves matter as much as Half Life currently does to Valve.

So yeah, Console Pokemon isn’t coming.

Review: Skygods

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Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Written by aviator and former Pan Am captain Robert Gandt, Skygods is the most fun I’ve had reading a history book in quite some time. First, I want to get the small negatives out of the way: This is very much a David Halberstam style ‘History as Narrative’ book, so I’d recommend taking specific claims with even more grains of salt. That said, everything important I did find corroborating evidence for.

The good part of this “history as narrative” is well, it feels great to read, flowing smoothly and going into the minds of people in a way that Gandt can clearly write from personal experience. And what he says about Pan Am is both interesting and dismal.

Pan Am’s decline, arguably inevitably terminal, started long before Lockerbie. It started long before deregulation. The impression I got from Skygods was that Pan Am was basically to airlines what Harley Davidson is to motorcycles: A wheezing lummox with poor fundamentals whose longevity was/is due to mystique over any practical advantage. There’s also the “British Industrialization” problem Pan Am had where being the first to do big international routes meant they were stuck with the most baggage.

So this is a great book I highly recommend for anyone, not just aviation/history enthusiasts.

Review: Hard Landing

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Hard Landing

Thomas Petzinger’s Hard Landing is a 1995 book about the corporate wars in the airline industry. It’s naturally dated, but that’s not something it can help. I view it as a very good book that could have been great. Why?

On the plus side, there’s lots of things even I didn’t know. Everything from FDR’s attempt to renationalize the air transport industry that served as a rare early bungle to how the Gulf War was truly what finished off Pan Am is there. This is a very detailed history.

On the minus side, it misses the forest for the trees too often. We get long, long descriptions of meetings and takeovers mixed with the occasional vignettes that aren’t really relevant. Yet it’s not good at articulating the basic problem with airlines, similar to sports betting of all things: It’s hard to truly differentiate the product, and costly sales wars are one of the few weapons marketers have.

But there’s a lot more good than bad here. It just hit a triple instead of an inside the park home run.

A Thousand Words: Knuckle Bash

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Knuckle Bash

One of the weirdest Final Fight descendants, Knuckle Bash is a very strange game. Yes I know I repeated myself. But it is. That it was made by the same people who made Zero “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” Wing explains some of it, including the plot which involves pro wrestlers fighting a group called the “Bulls” (well, Michael Jordan was at the height of his power when the game came out…)

The game is janky and poorly translated (to put it mildly) but the best/worst part is the enemies. For instance, the first stage is outside a hotel. The enemies there include hotel doormen. Then a later level as sunglasses wearing tourists alongside the typical thugs.

This isn’t good by any means, but it is memorable. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of video games.

Review: Airframe

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Airframe

Michael Crichton’s Airframe is a book I really, really wanted to like given my interest in disaster investigation and systemic failure. One of the issues is that I already knew a lot about the topic. But there’s two more.

The first is that has Arthur Hailey meets Herman Melville levels of “look how much I know/research I did.”. The second is that air disaster investigations, while a fascinating topic, are one of the worst main topics for a thriller novel, especially with the setup Chrichton makes. He has to use a large impending sale as a mostly artificial way to increase the stakes, race the clock, and create a conflict (said conflict is: The accident might cost the manufacturer a large order. Oh the huge manatee!) The reality is that disaster investigation is one of the least punitive or conflicting events there is, with the worst being various stakeholders understandably trying minimize their direct fault. Which can be problematic and difficult, but isn’t exactly Jon Land conspirators trying to rule the world.

Spoiler Alert: The problem is that it tries to shoehorn the Aeroflot “kid in the cockpit” disaster in, when a far more interesting and realistic method would be to have even the highly trained pilot making a mistake, especially given that what happened (tried to keep controlling it manually too long, which is what someone with a lot of skill would be more vulnerable to falling for.)

So yes, this doesn’t get off the ground. Metaphorically speaking.

Review: Bats

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Bats

The time has come to read William W. Johnstone’s Bats, an epic novel about… ok, you know what it’s abbout. It starts with the main character being a wanted badass who effortlessly killed a group of terrorists. Then come the BATS. See, evil superbats end up in Louisiana. That’s basically the book.

This is a William W. Johnstone book, which means it has pretentions of being ‘epic’ while having a complete inability to actually do so, a hatred of the media that makes even me defend them, and an inability to stick with its nominal subject matter. It’s fitting that I listened to GG Allin while writing this review, for he was to music what Johnstone was to authorship.

So we get about a 10-1 ratio of non-bat to bat scenes. We get devil worshipers (a favorite Johnstone horror villains) starting a rabies chain reaction among other animals. Then comes more conference room scenes than a post-1991 Tom Clancy novel. Then in the same military logistics skill that Johnstone demonstrated in the Ashes Series, a squadron of A-6 Intruders is informally acquired to firebomb the bats and then leaves. Finally the bats are dealt with via a device so lame and contrived that it rivals the end of the Jaws novel in terms of anticlimax. Hint: Imagine if the shark was attacked by a punch of gobies and barracudas and killed in front of Brody.

Well, at least I know now that Johnstone was as bad a horror writer as he was a thriller writer.

Review: Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections

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Star Wars: Incredible Cross Sections

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the Star Wars prequels and their merchandise machine rolled into action, an interesting reference book series emerged. This was Dorling Kindersley’s Incredible Cross Sections. I remembered (and loved) similar books as a child showing real things ranging from Boeing 747s to T-34/85 tanks to old age of sail warships. So the art is beautifully done, even if there are issues like the Millennium Falcon being impossible to square totally with its interior and exterior differences.

So these are beautiful books. Unfortunately, the later ones were marred by a controversial author, Curtis Saxton. Saxton’s story is a nerd’s dream come true: An astrophysicist and Star Wars fan who became the writer of a site called the Star Wars Technical Commentaries. Getting to write official material would have been something.

There were two main issues with Saxton. The first is that he was a maximalist who tried to squish the incredibly soft space fantasy of Star Wars into a Stephen Baxterian hard plausible mold. Yes he gives technically accurate numbers for a galactic scale civilization-but it just doesn’t mesh with the actual movies. The second was his fixation on the “Endor Holocaust” (no really he used the exact name) where the debris from the Death Star would have wiped out the Ewok species. Imagine if a Star Trek fan was absolutely adamant that transporters were ‘destructive teleportation’ (ie killing/destroying the original subject and making a copy on the other side). (Ironically the Warhammer 40k fandom has a section like this in the opposite direction, where every Imperial Guardsman is a special forces equivalent elite soldier and most of the human population lives on advanced peaceful civilized worlds).

So not for the first or last time, it was someone plopping their fanfiction into “canon” in a way that didn’t quite fit. But at least the pictures were and are incredible.