Tag: 2000s

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.

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.

A Thousand Words: The Simpsons Wrestling

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The Simpsons Wrestling

Simpsons games have a reputation for a few hits (Hit and Run, the original arcade game) and a lot of misses. One of those is The Simpsons Wrestling, one of the last Playstation 1 games released. By this point, a lot of wrestling games had been made. A lot of 3d and 2d fighting games for it had been made. A lot of Simpsons games were just low-quality knockoffs of the big popular genres, from skateboarding to platforming.

This is at least interestingly bad. It’s a 3d fighting game whose only actual “wrestling” is a pin incorporated in the final knockout. The characters are laughably imbalanced, and the action is unhinged (and not in a good way). Simpsons characters with crude early 3D models pinball around the wrestling ring. Yet the worst thing is the moveset. You have only three attacks, something that Street Fighter 1 had more than twice of.

But if “it’s interestingly bad” is the best one can say about this, then… it’s bad.

A Thousand Words: Aqua Teen Hunger Force

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Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Now Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the most misunderstood show on television. See, most people perceived it as a crude, absurdist, and surreal Adult Swim animation that made South Park look highbrow and subtle. A place featuring the strange happenings of straight man (or straight hovering box of french fries with a beard) Frylock, delightfully immature meatball Meatwad, and idiotic troublemaking drinking cup Master Shake. And their human neighbor Carl.

No. They have it all wrong. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is actually a nature documentary showing viewers the hidden, wondrous and fearsome at the same time place known as New Jersey. People don’t get it, but they just don’t get that this is what Jersey is like.

Seriously, it’s great for what it sets out to do.

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.

Review: The Machiavelli Covenant

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The Machiavelli Covenant

Allan Folsom’s The Machiavelli Covenant is the story of people walking around Europe in search of a nebulous conspiracy. Kind of like his first novel, The Day After Tomorrow, where people walked around Europe in search of a nebulous conspiracy that involved Adolf Hitler’s preserved head. Here it involves the kind of thing that Jon Land would make and make amazing through ridiculous set pieces. Except here, there aren’t any and the whole thing has a poker face that would have given it millions of earnings in the WSOP.

Well, the set pieces technically are ridiculous, but not in a “wow a monster truck chase” kind of way. More like “ok, it’s the twentieth chapter of people getting in and out of cars.” It’s ridiculous in a not-so-fun way, not a fun way.

I truly believe this book could be a quarter of the length it actually was and still work. I hope it was due to some length obligation by the publisher, but given Folsom’s other work, I really doubt it.

Review: America’s Favorite Son

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GG Allin: America’s Favorite Son

The semi-autobiography (it’s a long story) of infamous “punk rocker” GG Allin , America’s Favorite Son is a look into the life and mind of someone who was legitimately not well. Going up to the “Ann Arbor Incident” which resulted in his longest of many prison sentences, the book is honestly disturbing. It does show Allin’s appeal, which was in the same category as the intentional train crashes that Scott Joplin immortalized.

Allin started off as someone who made simple, vulgar punk rock before shedding what talent he had and turning into an outright freak long before his overdose. This book does not paint a good picture of his mental state, and it’s supposed to be sympathetic. But reading it is an experience. Just like watching one of Allin’s “”””concerts””””.

Review: The Last Dive

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The Last Dive

Bernie Chowdhury’s The Last Dive is about one of those ever-evergreen true horror tragedies-a diving accident. With personal knowledge of the victims in the Rouse family, it should be good. But it’s a disappointing book. So much of it is basically an autobiography written in first person. Which is fine but isn’t really the point of the book.

So much theoretical potential amounts to just variants of “they died” (which is about as much of a surprise as The Death of Stalin ) . There’s also “other divers died in similar dives” and “Diving is dangerous.” These three sentences take up a three hundred page book. Which is a shame because the subject matter is so good that the book can’t be all bad. Just mostly bad.

Review: The BAC Three-Eleven

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The BAC Three-Eleven: The Airbus That Should Have Been

In one of those “only someone like me would like this book” book purchases, I got Graziano Freschi’s book on the BAC Three-Eleven. The actual never-was airplane itself was an all-British two engine jumbo jet similar to the Airbus A300 only slightly larger and with both engines in the back.

Freschi both describes the plane and makes the argument that it was a mistake for the British to cancel it, as with many (if not all) their big postwar programs, they would spend large sums of money on something and then cancel it, getting the worst of both worlds. His case is weakened by Britain’s poor reputation in such regards, and he kind of hedges from “This would have been a success” to “Britain would have been in a better negotiating position when they rejoined Airbus”.

Though not perfect, it is an interesting look at an obscure plane.

A Thousand Words: Wario Land 3

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Wario Land 3

Wario Land 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. Wario Land 3, coming out on the preceding Game Boy Color not long before, is not. This is one of those games that you could tell the developers really just needed more power and focus and it would click. With the GBA and a clearer focus, it worked. Here it didn’t.

This is less linear than Wario Land 4 and has the gimmick in that Wario can’t actually get killed (but can get knocked back and cost the player time that way). The problem with losing time instead of losing health is obvious, especially since WL4 didn’t have any absolute game overs. In fact, this game can be described as slow, slowly moving and slowly backtracking in the semi-open world. A lot of this is probably due to the 8 bit GBC’s limitations, but that only makes it dated.

Thankfully, the graphics are very good for the hardware limitations and do not feel dated, and the chiptune soundtrack is beautifully quirky and excellent. The game just doesn’t really gel and has the “misfortune” of being followed up by a classic.