Just installed the "New Xbox Experience," and the avatars are fucking garbage. Back when the Wii came out, Miis were charming, fun, and easy to make. Avatars are none of these things. Instead of simple yet surprisingly versatile creation options, we get an endless parade of douchebags, none of which look like you, and the available tools don't allow much deviation from that shitty standard. You can't even create some sort of hideous freak, which would really take the edge off.
I might have some impressions of the "Experience" itself, but I've spent the last couple of hours wrestling with this damn avatar bullshit, so I have no idea what the rest of the interface is like. Once I've managed form my dude into something that won't make me want to kill myself every time I turn on my Xbox, I might share some of that Experience(tm) with you.
Until then, if you see me online please forgive my douchey appearance, and I will forgive yours.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Wil Wheaton Is Kind Of An Asshole
Here is something exactly one person I know will find hilarious:
http://twitter.com/wilw/status/1005052946
http://twitter.com/wilw/status/1005052946
Friday, November 14, 2008
A Funny Thing Happened...
So, something interesting has happened. While looking through my recent traffic, there was a decent-sized spike right around when I posted my last entry on the California gay marriage ban. The reason this is interesting is because, random searches for off-kilter pornography aside, I would estimate that this blog is read by a grand total of about four people. That's when I noticed I had been linked from a Mormon apologetic message board.
That alone gave me a chuckle. Because of this, far more people have been exposed to my words than I ever intended, and it's because of someone who obviously disagrees with me. Then I read his post, and my chuckle graduated to become something like spontaneous rapture.
See, this guy decided to analyze my post. He posted it in pieces, with his own little comments after each section, analyzing my "arguments." The word "arguments" is in quotes there because I am referring to the points I made in my rant. Because that's what it was, a nice little rant that I only wrote because I was pissed off and writing about it helped me feel better. But I felt about a million times even better when I saw that idiots were obsessing over my own stupid little blog.
This has honestly made my night, that for at least a little while some asshole not only read my off-the-top-of-my-head purposefully inflammatory post, but was forced to actually think about them. Seriously, this is like catching someone watching a fake newscast on a TV show and thinking that it's real. Not that there was anything fake about my words, the opinions are true and valid, it's just that I probably wouldn't go publishing them in any scholarly journals, because it was just for fun. And I am just loving how it's making people squirm.
And no, I'm not going to link to it, because these people are still assholes, and even though I enjoy laughing at them they do not deserve any of the attention they get. Here, however, are some people I will happily draw attention to:
"What's more harmful to society - two well-dressed men getting married and settling down, or two idiots tying the knot and cranking out any number of additional idiots?"
--Robert Kirby, Salt Lake Tribune
--
"To those of you sitting out there gloating, wasn't it enough to have Stuart Matis' blood on your hands? You wanted more blood? You, the vampires of the human spirit seem to have an insatiable need to keep robbing those of us who are different of our lifeblood and our desire for safety and dignity.
"You have robbed wrongly this time. You have unleashed the fury of a thousand gays. You have piled on the final straw, the last drop, the last nail. You have taken your last best swing and now you will pay the piper.
"The smugness on your faces right now will soon be replaced with a more humbled countenance as you begin to realize how much damage you have done to yourselves and begin to be aware of the sound and the fury that is coming. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of smugness because it will soon be over. Oh man, you have no idea. Go back and read about Stonewall and know that this is its second coming."
--TLC, Exmormon.org Recovery Board
--
"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
--Thomas Jefferson
--
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow."
--Martin Luther King Jr., Acceptance Speech, Nobel Peace Prize 1964
Quotes like these remind me of the power of words. But it seems, even words shouted into the void, shouted in vain for no reason other than to please the one that spoke them, can wield power, even if that power is just the ability to piss off some religious nutjobs. Which is a fine and respectable power to have. In fact, this power is as close to a genuine goddamned miracle as I have ever seen.
When I wrote my last post, people sat up and took notice of someone who was, in the grand scheme of things, entirely unimportant. After all, who am I? Nobody really, I'm just some guy who writes his opinions down on a blog because it helps him to organize his thoughts. But it worried them. It worried them that someone cared so much, to see that outpouring of emotion. One man writes a blog to nobody in particular, and they go on the defensive. We are dealing with scared people here, who know that their current state of power is built on a house of cards, and the only way they can keep it from blowing over is to blow back as hard as they can.
So do me a favor. Anyone who reads these words, go out there and piss someone off. Someone who really deserves it. It doesn't take much, and remember that the fact that you're getting to them means that you're undermining their position. Show the world your love, your anger, your indomitable spirit, your righteous indignation, whatever. If the best revenge is living well, then live as well as you can. Do whatever makes you happy, and be proud of it. And if the jackasses of the world get their panties all in a bunch, you know you are doing it right.
Words have tremendous power. Even when you are throwing them away on a dumb little blog. And this tiny little splash that I doubt many people have even noticed still contributes to the growing ripple that will one day change the world.
And that is very cool indeed.
That alone gave me a chuckle. Because of this, far more people have been exposed to my words than I ever intended, and it's because of someone who obviously disagrees with me. Then I read his post, and my chuckle graduated to become something like spontaneous rapture.
See, this guy decided to analyze my post. He posted it in pieces, with his own little comments after each section, analyzing my "arguments." The word "arguments" is in quotes there because I am referring to the points I made in my rant. Because that's what it was, a nice little rant that I only wrote because I was pissed off and writing about it helped me feel better. But I felt about a million times even better when I saw that idiots were obsessing over my own stupid little blog.
This has honestly made my night, that for at least a little while some asshole not only read my off-the-top-of-my-head purposefully inflammatory post, but was forced to actually think about them. Seriously, this is like catching someone watching a fake newscast on a TV show and thinking that it's real. Not that there was anything fake about my words, the opinions are true and valid, it's just that I probably wouldn't go publishing them in any scholarly journals, because it was just for fun. And I am just loving how it's making people squirm.
And no, I'm not going to link to it, because these people are still assholes, and even though I enjoy laughing at them they do not deserve any of the attention they get. Here, however, are some people I will happily draw attention to:
"What's more harmful to society - two well-dressed men getting married and settling down, or two idiots tying the knot and cranking out any number of additional idiots?"
--Robert Kirby, Salt Lake Tribune
--
"To those of you sitting out there gloating, wasn't it enough to have Stuart Matis' blood on your hands? You wanted more blood? You, the vampires of the human spirit seem to have an insatiable need to keep robbing those of us who are different of our lifeblood and our desire for safety and dignity.
"You have robbed wrongly this time. You have unleashed the fury of a thousand gays. You have piled on the final straw, the last drop, the last nail. You have taken your last best swing and now you will pay the piper.
"The smugness on your faces right now will soon be replaced with a more humbled countenance as you begin to realize how much damage you have done to yourselves and begin to be aware of the sound and the fury that is coming. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of smugness because it will soon be over. Oh man, you have no idea. Go back and read about Stonewall and know that this is its second coming."
--TLC, Exmormon.org Recovery Board
--
"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
--Thomas Jefferson
--
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow."
--Martin Luther King Jr., Acceptance Speech, Nobel Peace Prize 1964
Quotes like these remind me of the power of words. But it seems, even words shouted into the void, shouted in vain for no reason other than to please the one that spoke them, can wield power, even if that power is just the ability to piss off some religious nutjobs. Which is a fine and respectable power to have. In fact, this power is as close to a genuine goddamned miracle as I have ever seen.
When I wrote my last post, people sat up and took notice of someone who was, in the grand scheme of things, entirely unimportant. After all, who am I? Nobody really, I'm just some guy who writes his opinions down on a blog because it helps him to organize his thoughts. But it worried them. It worried them that someone cared so much, to see that outpouring of emotion. One man writes a blog to nobody in particular, and they go on the defensive. We are dealing with scared people here, who know that their current state of power is built on a house of cards, and the only way they can keep it from blowing over is to blow back as hard as they can.
So do me a favor. Anyone who reads these words, go out there and piss someone off. Someone who really deserves it. It doesn't take much, and remember that the fact that you're getting to them means that you're undermining their position. Show the world your love, your anger, your indomitable spirit, your righteous indignation, whatever. If the best revenge is living well, then live as well as you can. Do whatever makes you happy, and be proud of it. And if the jackasses of the world get their panties all in a bunch, you know you are doing it right.
Words have tremendous power. Even when you are throwing them away on a dumb little blog. And this tiny little splash that I doubt many people have even noticed still contributes to the growing ripple that will one day change the world.
And that is very cool indeed.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Proposition Hate
Let’s talk about lies for a moment. Specifically, let’s talk about liars. When I say liars, I don’t mean people who have told a lie, or even people who lie often. A lie does not a liar make, just as a theft does not create a thief. I don’t even mean people who habitually lie, and have only told the truth maybe once or twice in their entire lives, so long as they do it for entirely selfish reasons. No, a true liar, a filthy, goddamn, piece of shit liar is someone who lies to impose their will on others.
I can understand the people who lie for self-serving purposes, their true motives are clear, but the fucking Liars-with-a-capital-fucking-L, who knows what the hell they’re thinking. The idea that someone can see another person and think, “I need to protect this person from themselves,” simply confounds and repulses me. It’s an entirely new level of self-serving attitude, and it’s evil on a level that even puts most murderers to shame. After all, most murderers act out of passion or for personal gain. But deliberately misleading people to try to bring about your own vision of an ideal world, it’s social manipulation at its most twisted.
This past election day, a ballot measure was passed in the State of California revoking certain rights to a certain group of people. This measure was backed, in secret(note: see Addendum below), almost in total by the Mormon Church. While it’s despicable enough that they hid behind a token list of other names despite being the driving force behind the campaign, the campaign itself also hid behind wall of lies. Ironically, they portrayed their campaign to take away civil liberties as a defense of their own civil liberties. Their case was, of course, entirely made up.
The Mormons spent 80 million dollars to cover the state with lies. And it worked. Of course it worked, because how do you counter such a thing? Who could ever imagine that someone would spend 80 million dollars promoting hate? You simply can’t match that figure to oppose it, because in sane society people don’t go around spending millions of dollars to destroy something that offends them and causes them no harm whatsoever. I’d like to think that people would spend a good deal more than 80 million dollars promoting love, but that’s a far different animal than opposing hate. People just can’t conceive of that amount of hate, because it’s an inconceivable amount. It’s crazy. It’s something only a sociopath would do. It’s Nazi-like in its conception, though admittedly much smaller in scope. But at least Hitler was upfront about what he was doing.
This tears me up inside, not least of all because I was raised by people who to this day continue to count themselves as Mormons. Betrayal is perhaps the wrong word, as I didn’t have any faith in the Mormon church to begin with, but on some level I do feel betrayed. For good or for ill, Mormonism remains a large part of my childhood, and much as I’d like to I can’t just shut it off. That church gave me some wonderful friends, and it did much to help me find my identity, to shape me as a person, even though the shape that took form was in opposition to everything the church stood for. So when it goes out of its way to stomp on the dreams of people I care about, and thousands more, I guess that does in fact read something like betrayal.
Joseph Smith started a religion so he could have sex with teenage girls. That’s bad, but it doesn’t make me hate the religion. He led a bloody coup against the United States, but that doesn’t make me hate the Mormons. Brigham Young ordered THE MASS MURDER OF OVER A HUNDRED UNARMED INNOCENT PEOPLE, yet I still cannot hate him for it, because it was done out of ignorance and fear. But this, this is too much. This is enough for me to finally say, I hate the Mormon church.
I hate the Mormon church. Earlier I mentioned how the majority of murderers are better than this breed of liars, but I left out one class of murderer. The final type of people who kill are those that think that their victims would be much better off dead. And that’s what it boils down to, that the logic of these people who are out to save the world from itself is the logic of a psychopath. And there’s really no defense against that. In the same way that a serial killer can terrorize a city for years without being caught, organizations like the Mormon church can continue to pour money into deceptive campaigns for whatever stupid, crazy act of intolerance takes their fancy. Because there is no motive, no good reason for them to be doing what they are doing. You cannot outmaneuver them because they are not maneuvering. It’s a mental illness, and there is no logical way to counter it.
Usually, I like to end these with an idea to change something, to bring about some glimmer of hope. But I honestly see no solution here. You can’t win an argument with a crazy person, you can only hope that eventually everyone else will see that your opponent is crazy. And since everyone is so worried about trampling on anyone else’s feelings, it could be a long time before people start to see that. So instead of trying to find the good in this situation, because damned if I can see any, I’m just going to say one final thing to make myself feel better.
Fuck you, Mormon church.
ADDENDUM: Since writing this, someone has made the point to me that their stupid fucking church wasn't acting in secret. I disagree. The Mormon church never issued any sort of public statement backing the proposition, and the despite encouraging their members to dig deep for donations, not a single cent was donated by the leaders at the top. They obviously didn't want their role to be known because the church would be flooded with bad press, like it is right now. Just because they failed completely and utterly at covering it up does not mean that they didn't intend to keep their influence in the matter a secret.
I can understand the people who lie for self-serving purposes, their true motives are clear, but the fucking Liars-with-a-capital-fucking-L, who knows what the hell they’re thinking. The idea that someone can see another person and think, “I need to protect this person from themselves,” simply confounds and repulses me. It’s an entirely new level of self-serving attitude, and it’s evil on a level that even puts most murderers to shame. After all, most murderers act out of passion or for personal gain. But deliberately misleading people to try to bring about your own vision of an ideal world, it’s social manipulation at its most twisted.
This past election day, a ballot measure was passed in the State of California revoking certain rights to a certain group of people. This measure was backed, in secret(note: see Addendum below), almost in total by the Mormon Church. While it’s despicable enough that they hid behind a token list of other names despite being the driving force behind the campaign, the campaign itself also hid behind wall of lies. Ironically, they portrayed their campaign to take away civil liberties as a defense of their own civil liberties. Their case was, of course, entirely made up.
The Mormons spent 80 million dollars to cover the state with lies. And it worked. Of course it worked, because how do you counter such a thing? Who could ever imagine that someone would spend 80 million dollars promoting hate? You simply can’t match that figure to oppose it, because in sane society people don’t go around spending millions of dollars to destroy something that offends them and causes them no harm whatsoever. I’d like to think that people would spend a good deal more than 80 million dollars promoting love, but that’s a far different animal than opposing hate. People just can’t conceive of that amount of hate, because it’s an inconceivable amount. It’s crazy. It’s something only a sociopath would do. It’s Nazi-like in its conception, though admittedly much smaller in scope. But at least Hitler was upfront about what he was doing.
This tears me up inside, not least of all because I was raised by people who to this day continue to count themselves as Mormons. Betrayal is perhaps the wrong word, as I didn’t have any faith in the Mormon church to begin with, but on some level I do feel betrayed. For good or for ill, Mormonism remains a large part of my childhood, and much as I’d like to I can’t just shut it off. That church gave me some wonderful friends, and it did much to help me find my identity, to shape me as a person, even though the shape that took form was in opposition to everything the church stood for. So when it goes out of its way to stomp on the dreams of people I care about, and thousands more, I guess that does in fact read something like betrayal.
Joseph Smith started a religion so he could have sex with teenage girls. That’s bad, but it doesn’t make me hate the religion. He led a bloody coup against the United States, but that doesn’t make me hate the Mormons. Brigham Young ordered THE MASS MURDER OF OVER A HUNDRED UNARMED INNOCENT PEOPLE, yet I still cannot hate him for it, because it was done out of ignorance and fear. But this, this is too much. This is enough for me to finally say, I hate the Mormon church.
I hate the Mormon church. Earlier I mentioned how the majority of murderers are better than this breed of liars, but I left out one class of murderer. The final type of people who kill are those that think that their victims would be much better off dead. And that’s what it boils down to, that the logic of these people who are out to save the world from itself is the logic of a psychopath. And there’s really no defense against that. In the same way that a serial killer can terrorize a city for years without being caught, organizations like the Mormon church can continue to pour money into deceptive campaigns for whatever stupid, crazy act of intolerance takes their fancy. Because there is no motive, no good reason for them to be doing what they are doing. You cannot outmaneuver them because they are not maneuvering. It’s a mental illness, and there is no logical way to counter it.
Usually, I like to end these with an idea to change something, to bring about some glimmer of hope. But I honestly see no solution here. You can’t win an argument with a crazy person, you can only hope that eventually everyone else will see that your opponent is crazy. And since everyone is so worried about trampling on anyone else’s feelings, it could be a long time before people start to see that. So instead of trying to find the good in this situation, because damned if I can see any, I’m just going to say one final thing to make myself feel better.
Fuck you, Mormon church.
ADDENDUM: Since writing this, someone has made the point to me that their stupid fucking church wasn't acting in secret. I disagree. The Mormon church never issued any sort of public statement backing the proposition, and the despite encouraging their members to dig deep for donations, not a single cent was donated by the leaders at the top. They obviously didn't want their role to be known because the church would be flooded with bad press, like it is right now. Just because they failed completely and utterly at covering it up does not mean that they didn't intend to keep their influence in the matter a secret.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Dick Shandley and the Altamont Divide
Dick Shandley was an unassuming man. He made it a point never to judge people. Never to think good or ill of them or their choices. That wasn’t his job. His job was to insert himself into their lives and expose them as liars and frauds. Dick was a private investigator.
Because of his unassuming nature, he regarded the nervous little man sitting in his office with polite detachment. So what if his eyes had the unsettling quality of never really settling on one thing, instead ceaselessly darting around the room, like a staccato metronome set on “crazy?” Dick knew that this behavior usually indicated that the speaker was lying, just like the beads of sweat at the mans brow, the nervous shuffling of his feet, and the fact that he was wringing his hands so hard he could have crushed walnuts into diamonds. But because he was a man of an unassuming sensibility, he ignored all of this. He ignored, but he also kept his hand on the gun in his pocket.
The man in the chair was in his 50s, with an actively receding hairline and large, thick glasses. What was left of his hair was black, too black, and greasy. He was wearing a dark-colored suit that he seemed to have borrowed from someone two sizes larger than him, and the one thing that bugged Dick was that one of his socks was a slightly darker shade of brown than the other. He jotted down a quick note on his notepad, “Investigate socks.”
“And that’s when the trouble started,” the man said. Dick nodded his head. He wasn’t actually paying attention to what the man was saying, because he was too busy writing down the sock comment, but he knew if he asked him to repeat it, it would hurt the image of his unassuming nature. So he acted as though he had been paying attention all along, and asked the man to continue.
“I trust you know of the incident on the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969?” asked the man.
“Of course,” replied Dick, “Hell’s Angels, a handful dead, several injured. It was the end of free love, ‘the day the music died.’”
“Well spoken. Well, as I’m sure you know, the fortieth anniversary of the event is coming up soon, two weeks from now, in fact, and as it gets closer the… incidents have started occurring more often.”
Incidents? Dick wondered what the hell he could mean by incidents. If only he had paid attention earlier. He looked into the man’s eyes for some sort of clue, but they refused to meet his, instead continuing to dance around the room. As he watched, he noticed that the mans eyebrows almost came together to join into a single brow, save for a perfectly circular patch of bare skin in the center. This was interesting, he would have to write this down. He did so, and then looked up again at his client.
“--and then they just vanish. So, Mr. Shandley, what do you think?”
Shit, he had done it again. He would have to continue to fake his way through the conversation.
“Uh, first why don’t you tell me what you think?”
“Well, as I mentioned before, I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, but as I understand it, spirits can be drawn to areas of strong emotional events.”
Ghosts! Aha!
Dick breathed a sigh of relief, because now he knew what the case was all about. The paranormal was something of a specialty of his. Most of his cases were paranormal in origin, a decision he had made because they were the easiest cases he had ever gotten. Ninety percent of the time, he could simply pull out an old walkman he had glued some aluminum foil to, wave it around, say some spooky things and then declare the apparition evicted, and collect his fee. The other ten percent, well, those required some quick thinking.
“So you want me to head out to Altamont to hunt some ghosts, right?”
“Well, that’s not exactly how I’d put it, but yes.”
“I can be on a plane tonight.” Dick leapt to his feet, shook the man’s hand, grabbed his hat and coat and rushed out the door. The man was left standing in Dick’s office, alone and confused. He wondered if Dick had forgotten to lock the door, but looking around, realized that there was not anything worth stealing. Once he had waited long enough to be sure that Shandley wasn’t coming back, he too walked out the door.
---
Dick Shandley arrived at the Altamont Speedway early in the morning, to make sure it was empty. He didn’t want a lot of people around to wonder what it was he was looking for. Actually, Dick wasn’t so sure himself what he was looking for, but he knew he was looking for something, and that set his mind at ease.
He remembered his client saying something about people going missing, but he wasn’t really sure how to check that out. Dick didn’t trust the police, and it was too early for the library to be open to check the newspapers. Well, if he couldn’t follow his only lead, he would have to create one himself. He turned his attention toward the only other person he could find, a man half-heartedly pushing a broom around.
“Hey, buddy,” he shouted, “you know anything about these disappearances?”
“Yeah, my brother disappeared last week!”
That was convenient.
“Anything you can tell me about his disappearance?”
The man moved closer to him. “Yeah, it happened right over there.” He pointed at a small empty space between two portable toilets.
“What do you mean it happened over there?”
“Well, I saw it. He was standing over there, then there was a flash, and then he wasn’t standing there no more.”
“And the place he was standing, it was that little nook between the port-a-potties?”
“That’s it.”
“Why was he standing there?” Dick rightly asked.
The man shrugged. “Derek was always fond of tight, smelly places.” Dick could have used this opportunity to make a crude joke at the man’s expense, but he refrained, instead thanking him for his time.
Dick quickly worked his way into the small gap, wedging himself into a very stinky crevice. Realizing the impact of what he was doing, but unable to come up with a suitable witticism, he simply muttered the word “anus” under his breath. The moment he spoke it, he was instantly blinded by a bright light, and he felt his stomach pulled sharply downward. Before he knew it he was falling freely, surrounded by total darkness. This was particularly surprising, as he had still been trying to come up with poop jokes, and was having a little trouble processing this all.
Before long, the falling stopped, and Dick’s eyes had to readjust to the white room that had formed around him. The first thing he noticed was the eerie quality of the walls, if you could call them that, because they did not seem to have any substance, just endless white, stretching off into the distance. He also was not sure what he was standing on, as there was really no discernable floor. The second thing he noticed was that he was not alone.
Standing near him was a silver-haired man wearing a dark suit. The suit, like the man, had something of a timeless style about it. It had no buttons, yet that did not stop it from remaining firmly closed. An odd thought entered Dick’s head, that it was as though the suit had evolved beyond the need for buttons. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but that was unmistakably the impression he got. The man seemed young, monochrome hair aside, yet there was an ancient and knowing quality about his eyes.
“Good evening, Mr. Shandley,” said the man. His voice was soft and reassuring, yet there was a kind of menace there too, like the translation of a nightmare. “It was very nice of you to visit speak the ancient word so you could visit me.”
Dick was curious about how the man knew his name, but there was one thing he was even more curious about. “The ancient word is ‘ANUS?’”
“Oh yes, you see I was imprisoned here long ago in this place, the Trilogic Dimension. Those who trapped me here sealed the rift with a word that they knew nobody would ever say. The most unpleasant word they could think of.”
“Well, apparently they fucked up. After all, I said ‘anus’ and I’m guessing all those other people who I think might have gone missing, maybe. Right?”
“Indeed, you are correct, Mr. Shandley. These others you speak of, they became my prisoners. You see, I am the Game Master, and the only way out of this place is to defeat me in a game of skill!”
Shandley let out a deep laugh. “Are you serious? The Game Master? Did you come up with that name in your parents’ basement?”
“Fine. My name is Steve, okay? Are you happy? To leave this place you must defeat the ancient and powerful Steve.”
“So to get out of here I have to play Dungeons and Dragons with the Great Steve?”
Steve laughed. “If you’ll recall, I said we would play a game of skill.” Steve snapped his fingers, and suddenly a table appeared, with what appeared to be a chess board with triangular spaces, and a sawed off shotgun next to it.
“The game,” declared Steve, “is known as pan-dimensional shotgun chess. The rules are similar to standard chess, except each space has a light component, and a dark component. This affects which pieces can be captured, and when. Also, the knight moves six spaces instead of the standard five, the queen can only capture while moving diagonally, and the bishop must change between light and dark configurations on every turn. Do you understand?” Dick did not understand.
“Don’t worry,” Steve continued, “either you will pick it up when we start playing, or you will lose and be trapped here forever. Another thing to be aware of is that at the end of each turn, you will be transported to a sub-dimension where you must face a challenge of both wits and physical ability. Try not to die during these, because they can be quite dangerous. Finally, you will notice the shotgun on the table. This can be a great asset to you, but be aware you can only use it once, so make it count. In order to use the shotgun...”
He did not finish, because at this point Dick picked up the shotgun and fired it into Steve’s chest, killing him instantly. As soon as Steve’s bloody corpse hit the ground, a rope was lowered from the sky. Dick climbed it, and soon found himself back at the Speedway.
Dick Shandley wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but then again that would be an assumption, and Dick Shandley was an unassuming man. He hadn’t found the missing people, and he wasn’t even sure that more wouldn’t wind up missing. But then, Dick knew that chasing perfection never led to anything but madness. There were just some mysteries better left unsolved. With that, Dick made his way to a little restaurant to get a bowl of clam chowder, and then returned to his hotel one last time to steal the sheets before catching the next flight home. It was a good day.
Because of his unassuming nature, he regarded the nervous little man sitting in his office with polite detachment. So what if his eyes had the unsettling quality of never really settling on one thing, instead ceaselessly darting around the room, like a staccato metronome set on “crazy?” Dick knew that this behavior usually indicated that the speaker was lying, just like the beads of sweat at the mans brow, the nervous shuffling of his feet, and the fact that he was wringing his hands so hard he could have crushed walnuts into diamonds. But because he was a man of an unassuming sensibility, he ignored all of this. He ignored, but he also kept his hand on the gun in his pocket.
The man in the chair was in his 50s, with an actively receding hairline and large, thick glasses. What was left of his hair was black, too black, and greasy. He was wearing a dark-colored suit that he seemed to have borrowed from someone two sizes larger than him, and the one thing that bugged Dick was that one of his socks was a slightly darker shade of brown than the other. He jotted down a quick note on his notepad, “Investigate socks.”
“And that’s when the trouble started,” the man said. Dick nodded his head. He wasn’t actually paying attention to what the man was saying, because he was too busy writing down the sock comment, but he knew if he asked him to repeat it, it would hurt the image of his unassuming nature. So he acted as though he had been paying attention all along, and asked the man to continue.
“I trust you know of the incident on the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969?” asked the man.
“Of course,” replied Dick, “Hell’s Angels, a handful dead, several injured. It was the end of free love, ‘the day the music died.’”
“Well spoken. Well, as I’m sure you know, the fortieth anniversary of the event is coming up soon, two weeks from now, in fact, and as it gets closer the… incidents have started occurring more often.”
Incidents? Dick wondered what the hell he could mean by incidents. If only he had paid attention earlier. He looked into the man’s eyes for some sort of clue, but they refused to meet his, instead continuing to dance around the room. As he watched, he noticed that the mans eyebrows almost came together to join into a single brow, save for a perfectly circular patch of bare skin in the center. This was interesting, he would have to write this down. He did so, and then looked up again at his client.
“--and then they just vanish. So, Mr. Shandley, what do you think?”
Shit, he had done it again. He would have to continue to fake his way through the conversation.
“Uh, first why don’t you tell me what you think?”
“Well, as I mentioned before, I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, but as I understand it, spirits can be drawn to areas of strong emotional events.”
Ghosts! Aha!
Dick breathed a sigh of relief, because now he knew what the case was all about. The paranormal was something of a specialty of his. Most of his cases were paranormal in origin, a decision he had made because they were the easiest cases he had ever gotten. Ninety percent of the time, he could simply pull out an old walkman he had glued some aluminum foil to, wave it around, say some spooky things and then declare the apparition evicted, and collect his fee. The other ten percent, well, those required some quick thinking.
“So you want me to head out to Altamont to hunt some ghosts, right?”
“Well, that’s not exactly how I’d put it, but yes.”
“I can be on a plane tonight.” Dick leapt to his feet, shook the man’s hand, grabbed his hat and coat and rushed out the door. The man was left standing in Dick’s office, alone and confused. He wondered if Dick had forgotten to lock the door, but looking around, realized that there was not anything worth stealing. Once he had waited long enough to be sure that Shandley wasn’t coming back, he too walked out the door.
---
Dick Shandley arrived at the Altamont Speedway early in the morning, to make sure it was empty. He didn’t want a lot of people around to wonder what it was he was looking for. Actually, Dick wasn’t so sure himself what he was looking for, but he knew he was looking for something, and that set his mind at ease.
He remembered his client saying something about people going missing, but he wasn’t really sure how to check that out. Dick didn’t trust the police, and it was too early for the library to be open to check the newspapers. Well, if he couldn’t follow his only lead, he would have to create one himself. He turned his attention toward the only other person he could find, a man half-heartedly pushing a broom around.
“Hey, buddy,” he shouted, “you know anything about these disappearances?”
“Yeah, my brother disappeared last week!”
That was convenient.
“Anything you can tell me about his disappearance?”
The man moved closer to him. “Yeah, it happened right over there.” He pointed at a small empty space between two portable toilets.
“What do you mean it happened over there?”
“Well, I saw it. He was standing over there, then there was a flash, and then he wasn’t standing there no more.”
“And the place he was standing, it was that little nook between the port-a-potties?”
“That’s it.”
“Why was he standing there?” Dick rightly asked.
The man shrugged. “Derek was always fond of tight, smelly places.” Dick could have used this opportunity to make a crude joke at the man’s expense, but he refrained, instead thanking him for his time.
Dick quickly worked his way into the small gap, wedging himself into a very stinky crevice. Realizing the impact of what he was doing, but unable to come up with a suitable witticism, he simply muttered the word “anus” under his breath. The moment he spoke it, he was instantly blinded by a bright light, and he felt his stomach pulled sharply downward. Before he knew it he was falling freely, surrounded by total darkness. This was particularly surprising, as he had still been trying to come up with poop jokes, and was having a little trouble processing this all.
Before long, the falling stopped, and Dick’s eyes had to readjust to the white room that had formed around him. The first thing he noticed was the eerie quality of the walls, if you could call them that, because they did not seem to have any substance, just endless white, stretching off into the distance. He also was not sure what he was standing on, as there was really no discernable floor. The second thing he noticed was that he was not alone.
Standing near him was a silver-haired man wearing a dark suit. The suit, like the man, had something of a timeless style about it. It had no buttons, yet that did not stop it from remaining firmly closed. An odd thought entered Dick’s head, that it was as though the suit had evolved beyond the need for buttons. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but that was unmistakably the impression he got. The man seemed young, monochrome hair aside, yet there was an ancient and knowing quality about his eyes.
“Good evening, Mr. Shandley,” said the man. His voice was soft and reassuring, yet there was a kind of menace there too, like the translation of a nightmare. “It was very nice of you to visit speak the ancient word so you could visit me.”
Dick was curious about how the man knew his name, but there was one thing he was even more curious about. “The ancient word is ‘ANUS?’”
“Oh yes, you see I was imprisoned here long ago in this place, the Trilogic Dimension. Those who trapped me here sealed the rift with a word that they knew nobody would ever say. The most unpleasant word they could think of.”
“Well, apparently they fucked up. After all, I said ‘anus’ and I’m guessing all those other people who I think might have gone missing, maybe. Right?”
“Indeed, you are correct, Mr. Shandley. These others you speak of, they became my prisoners. You see, I am the Game Master, and the only way out of this place is to defeat me in a game of skill!”
Shandley let out a deep laugh. “Are you serious? The Game Master? Did you come up with that name in your parents’ basement?”
“Fine. My name is Steve, okay? Are you happy? To leave this place you must defeat the ancient and powerful Steve.”
“So to get out of here I have to play Dungeons and Dragons with the Great Steve?”
Steve laughed. “If you’ll recall, I said we would play a game of skill.” Steve snapped his fingers, and suddenly a table appeared, with what appeared to be a chess board with triangular spaces, and a sawed off shotgun next to it.
“The game,” declared Steve, “is known as pan-dimensional shotgun chess. The rules are similar to standard chess, except each space has a light component, and a dark component. This affects which pieces can be captured, and when. Also, the knight moves six spaces instead of the standard five, the queen can only capture while moving diagonally, and the bishop must change between light and dark configurations on every turn. Do you understand?” Dick did not understand.
“Don’t worry,” Steve continued, “either you will pick it up when we start playing, or you will lose and be trapped here forever. Another thing to be aware of is that at the end of each turn, you will be transported to a sub-dimension where you must face a challenge of both wits and physical ability. Try not to die during these, because they can be quite dangerous. Finally, you will notice the shotgun on the table. This can be a great asset to you, but be aware you can only use it once, so make it count. In order to use the shotgun...”
He did not finish, because at this point Dick picked up the shotgun and fired it into Steve’s chest, killing him instantly. As soon as Steve’s bloody corpse hit the ground, a rope was lowered from the sky. Dick climbed it, and soon found himself back at the Speedway.
Dick Shandley wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but then again that would be an assumption, and Dick Shandley was an unassuming man. He hadn’t found the missing people, and he wasn’t even sure that more wouldn’t wind up missing. But then, Dick knew that chasing perfection never led to anything but madness. There were just some mysteries better left unsolved. With that, Dick made his way to a little restaurant to get a bowl of clam chowder, and then returned to his hotel one last time to steal the sheets before catching the next flight home. It was a good day.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Why Super Mario Bros. 3 Was Overrated - and Why EVERYONE is wrong about Super Mario Galaxy
A while ago I mentioned that I thought Super Mario Bros. 3 was overrated and that Super Mario World was far superior. I thought I would take some time to clarify my comments, mainly because they were brief and dismissive, owing to the fact that they were a one-off in a post on an unrelated topic. That, and I want to stat an oh-so-timely discussion about Super Mario Galaxy, which came out about a year ago. So, let's start digging at some old wounds, shall we?
The only word fit to fully describe Super Mario Bros. 3 (which, for brevity, shall henceforth be known as Mario 3) is "extravagant." To understand what I mean by this, let's take a look at the history of the series. The original Super Mario Bros. was clean and simplistic, yet depth existed, not in the form of thousands of collectibles or side quests, but in the form of its basic gameplay mechanics and the pure joy of movement. The fact that it was instantly understandable and fun, and its complex yet intuitive gameplay is what made it such a huge hit, and why it continues to be appealing even today. When the sequel was finally going to come out, there were certain expectations about what the game would be like.
Of course, all those expectations were broken. As we all know, Mario 2 was different. Very different. Even though it had the same characters as the first game, it was barely recognizable as a Mario game. Instantly this turned a lot of people off, people who simply wanted more of the same thing. When it was finally printed in Nintendo Power, for in those pre-Internet times Nintendo Power was our only source for game-related news, the news spread quickly that this wasn't a Mario game at all, but some unrelated Japanese game that had Mario shoehorned in to appeal to American gamers. Thus, Mario 2 was seen as an impostor, a pretender to the throne, a subpar game hiding behind the mask of our beloved Super Mario. In truth, these statements are unfair, as Mario 2 was a good game, and definitely better than Mario 3. It amuses me how people who practically worship Shigeru Miyamoto decry this game for ripping off his work, when it was Miyamoto who designed it in the first place, and in fact had nothing to do with what fans consider the "true" sequel, the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2. However, it also makes me sad, as this attitude is exactly what ruined Mario 3.
This attempt by Miyamoto to continue to innovate in games and take them in new directions was met by indifference by fans both American and Japanese, yet the Japanese took to the official Mario sequel. The Japanese Mario 2 was essentially the same game as the first, yet made arbitrarily harder, with new items and abilities. It played like Mario 1 with all the fun sucked out of it. Everything about the game was mean, from the ridiculous number of jumps that could only be made if your reaction time was about 1/30 of a second, mushrooms that would hurt you and were virtually indistinguishable from the good ones, and secret warp zones that actually sent you backwards in the game. Doki Doki Panic (the game that in America became Mario 2) was fun, and Mario 2 was soulless yet hardcore. At this time, gamers voted with their wallets that they preferred the latter.
Since the preferred Mario 2 was the same game with some extras, there was nowhere left to go with the third one except to release the same game with a fucking shitload of extras. Huge worlds, lots of crazy powerups, alternate routes through the level maps, the ability to collect powerups for use on a specific level, this game had a lot of extraneous shit. You can see this simply in a list of the powerups in the game. In addition to the classic mushroom, flower, and star this game had a leaf that turned you into a flying raccoon, a suit that lets you throw hammers into a useless upward arc, a suit that's basically the same as the leaf except you can turn into a statue, which serves no purpose whatsoever, a suit that made you hop around like a frog, making it extremely difficult to control, and a giant shoe that you could hop around in like a maniac, usually right into a pit. And to think people accuse New Super Mario Bros of having a lot of useless items.
I've heard it said that Super Mario World ruined Nintendo. This notion is wrong. World was an attempt to pare down the bullshit and return Mario to the state of being something fun, rather than being a "videogame." But the damage was already done, not just to Nintendo, but to the entire industry. From then on the focus has changed from creating interesting experiences to making things more "videogamey." There's a formula now, and it's depressing. It's all about stats, and scores, and learning curves, and it just needs to stop. Had Doki Doki Panic done well, the face of gaming might have been very different indeed, for the better.
In fact, between World and Mario 64, it seemed like maybe Nintendo was back on track again. Though World was still part of the same formula that would eventually suck the entire gaming industry dry of innovation, unlike the game that inspired it this was a game that believed that less was more. It replaced all those useless extra powerups with one, one which enabled flight with a wonderfully difficult and complex timing based mechanic that was entirely optional to the completion of the game. Mario 64 added the collection of stars, which was intended to expand the game and make it more open-ended, but really just ended up bogging down the experience with an unnecessary and tedious collection status. There was no logical reason to be collecting these things, other than that you needed them, and they ended up segmenting what should have been a cohesive experience. On the other hand, the game finally managed to recapture the original Super Mario Bros. in terms of fun and joy of movement. Sadly, only the tedious part would endure.
Super Mario Sunshine was, to reuse a phrase that should now have become all too familiar, Mario 64 with all the fun removed. You still had the quest of collecting all 120 thing-a-ma-doos, but without the wonderful physics or sense of presence of the previous game. People rightfully hated the game, but oddly enough praised the sections of the game where the water pack was removed and the player transported to a platforming world made of simplistic blocks. There are two problems with this. One, the water pack was the central mechanic of the game, so it's pretty fucked up that removing it makes the game better. Two, these parts of the game sucked. These sections were described by most people as "challenging," but what they really were was unfair. You would never miss these jumps because you messed up the timing or misjudged the angle. You would miss them because of the terrible camera and floaty physics. This was why the water pack was invaluable in that game, you needed that hover to compensate for these design deficiencies. However, despite the fact that the game was completely broken, there were some clever things going on with the use of water in that game. This became a sign of the Miyamoto to come for the next while, interesting ideas with poor execution. This can probably be owed to the fact that Miyamoto is now simply an idea man, giving birth to wonderful concepts and then stepping aside as others see them through to completion.
Which brings us to Super Mario Galaxy. No matter what you think of this game, you are wrong. Think it's a worthy successor to Mario 64? You are wrong. Think it's a poorly designed game? You are wrong. Think it's a decent game that was over hyped? You are wrong. Think it's exemplary of what has been going wrong with Nintendo for a while now? Guess what? You are wrong. Because here is what Galaxy really is, and I have never seen anyone ever point this out:
Super Mario Galaxy is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made.
Take a moment to let that sink in. It's a heady idea to be sure, and one that is not free of irony. But think about it for a bit and it will begin to make sense.
Galaxy is a game where you never stop moving. Sure, you CAN stop, but then again so could Sonic. Yet for some reason you don't. In both games, some unseen force compels you to continue moving, to continue driving forward. This presence has never been felt in any previous Mario game, each one taking place at a fairly relaxed pace, despite the fact that the majority of them have time limits. In Galaxy, the impulse to keep moving is helped along by the fact that you always know where to go. If this were a Mario game, this would be called hand-holding, but viewed as a Sonic game, this is simply streamlining. Still not convinced this game is a Sonic game? Alright, try this on for size: Mario's main form of attack in the game is a spinning move that briefly makes him both invincible and deadly. Sound familiar?
Now that we've established Galaxy as Sonic game, on to the second part of my claim, that it is in fact the BEST Sonic game. The problem with the Sonic the Hedgehog games is that they are not just game, but also tech demo. For the Genesis to prove its superiority over Nintendo's systems, they had to demonstrate that their games could render at ludicrous speeds. So they made Sonic fast. Really fast. Too fast, in fact. Sonic's incredible speed is a hindrance to the level design of the games. Because the player cannot see the obstacles ahead, all of the levels either have to be nothing but a pretty roller coaster, or they have to throw up a vertical wall to slow the player down for a more slow paced platforming section. It's once you've started to memorize the layouts of these harder platforming sections that the true joy of the game comes out, moving at a brisk pace through dangerous terrain. Anyone who has ever truly loved a Sonic game will understand that it's not really about speed, it's about momentum.
Galaxy cuts the speed in order to preserve all that wonderful momentum while still letting you retain a sense of control and accomplishment. They've even managed to include the "wow" factor of the old experience of going through loops and spirals at full speed, in the form of the star cannons that launch you from planetoid to planetoid. When the idea of Super Mario Galaxy rocketed from Miyamoto's brain down to earth, whoever picked it up must have been someone who truly understood and loved Sonic the Hedgehog.
So, this concludes my brief history of the Mario games. The series rose, started to fall with Mario 3, and finally transformed into Sonic the Hedgehog. Meanwhile, the Sonic games transformed into utter shit. Growing up in the 1990s, one had to take sides either with Mario or Sonic, for the two were representative of their consoles, constantly at war. It's hard to say who won out, Sega for crafting such an incredible concept, or Nintendo for finally realizing it so fully. Either way, Mario and Sonic are now one and the same, and perhaps the fighting can finally stop.
The only word fit to fully describe Super Mario Bros. 3 (which, for brevity, shall henceforth be known as Mario 3) is "extravagant." To understand what I mean by this, let's take a look at the history of the series. The original Super Mario Bros. was clean and simplistic, yet depth existed, not in the form of thousands of collectibles or side quests, but in the form of its basic gameplay mechanics and the pure joy of movement. The fact that it was instantly understandable and fun, and its complex yet intuitive gameplay is what made it such a huge hit, and why it continues to be appealing even today. When the sequel was finally going to come out, there were certain expectations about what the game would be like.
Of course, all those expectations were broken. As we all know, Mario 2 was different. Very different. Even though it had the same characters as the first game, it was barely recognizable as a Mario game. Instantly this turned a lot of people off, people who simply wanted more of the same thing. When it was finally printed in Nintendo Power, for in those pre-Internet times Nintendo Power was our only source for game-related news, the news spread quickly that this wasn't a Mario game at all, but some unrelated Japanese game that had Mario shoehorned in to appeal to American gamers. Thus, Mario 2 was seen as an impostor, a pretender to the throne, a subpar game hiding behind the mask of our beloved Super Mario. In truth, these statements are unfair, as Mario 2 was a good game, and definitely better than Mario 3. It amuses me how people who practically worship Shigeru Miyamoto decry this game for ripping off his work, when it was Miyamoto who designed it in the first place, and in fact had nothing to do with what fans consider the "true" sequel, the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2. However, it also makes me sad, as this attitude is exactly what ruined Mario 3.
This attempt by Miyamoto to continue to innovate in games and take them in new directions was met by indifference by fans both American and Japanese, yet the Japanese took to the official Mario sequel. The Japanese Mario 2 was essentially the same game as the first, yet made arbitrarily harder, with new items and abilities. It played like Mario 1 with all the fun sucked out of it. Everything about the game was mean, from the ridiculous number of jumps that could only be made if your reaction time was about 1/30 of a second, mushrooms that would hurt you and were virtually indistinguishable from the good ones, and secret warp zones that actually sent you backwards in the game. Doki Doki Panic (the game that in America became Mario 2) was fun, and Mario 2 was soulless yet hardcore. At this time, gamers voted with their wallets that they preferred the latter.
Since the preferred Mario 2 was the same game with some extras, there was nowhere left to go with the third one except to release the same game with a fucking shitload of extras. Huge worlds, lots of crazy powerups, alternate routes through the level maps, the ability to collect powerups for use on a specific level, this game had a lot of extraneous shit. You can see this simply in a list of the powerups in the game. In addition to the classic mushroom, flower, and star this game had a leaf that turned you into a flying raccoon, a suit that lets you throw hammers into a useless upward arc, a suit that's basically the same as the leaf except you can turn into a statue, which serves no purpose whatsoever, a suit that made you hop around like a frog, making it extremely difficult to control, and a giant shoe that you could hop around in like a maniac, usually right into a pit. And to think people accuse New Super Mario Bros of having a lot of useless items.
I've heard it said that Super Mario World ruined Nintendo. This notion is wrong. World was an attempt to pare down the bullshit and return Mario to the state of being something fun, rather than being a "videogame." But the damage was already done, not just to Nintendo, but to the entire industry. From then on the focus has changed from creating interesting experiences to making things more "videogamey." There's a formula now, and it's depressing. It's all about stats, and scores, and learning curves, and it just needs to stop. Had Doki Doki Panic done well, the face of gaming might have been very different indeed, for the better.
In fact, between World and Mario 64, it seemed like maybe Nintendo was back on track again. Though World was still part of the same formula that would eventually suck the entire gaming industry dry of innovation, unlike the game that inspired it this was a game that believed that less was more. It replaced all those useless extra powerups with one, one which enabled flight with a wonderfully difficult and complex timing based mechanic that was entirely optional to the completion of the game. Mario 64 added the collection of stars, which was intended to expand the game and make it more open-ended, but really just ended up bogging down the experience with an unnecessary and tedious collection status. There was no logical reason to be collecting these things, other than that you needed them, and they ended up segmenting what should have been a cohesive experience. On the other hand, the game finally managed to recapture the original Super Mario Bros. in terms of fun and joy of movement. Sadly, only the tedious part would endure.
Super Mario Sunshine was, to reuse a phrase that should now have become all too familiar, Mario 64 with all the fun removed. You still had the quest of collecting all 120 thing-a-ma-doos, but without the wonderful physics or sense of presence of the previous game. People rightfully hated the game, but oddly enough praised the sections of the game where the water pack was removed and the player transported to a platforming world made of simplistic blocks. There are two problems with this. One, the water pack was the central mechanic of the game, so it's pretty fucked up that removing it makes the game better. Two, these parts of the game sucked. These sections were described by most people as "challenging," but what they really were was unfair. You would never miss these jumps because you messed up the timing or misjudged the angle. You would miss them because of the terrible camera and floaty physics. This was why the water pack was invaluable in that game, you needed that hover to compensate for these design deficiencies. However, despite the fact that the game was completely broken, there were some clever things going on with the use of water in that game. This became a sign of the Miyamoto to come for the next while, interesting ideas with poor execution. This can probably be owed to the fact that Miyamoto is now simply an idea man, giving birth to wonderful concepts and then stepping aside as others see them through to completion.
Which brings us to Super Mario Galaxy. No matter what you think of this game, you are wrong. Think it's a worthy successor to Mario 64? You are wrong. Think it's a poorly designed game? You are wrong. Think it's a decent game that was over hyped? You are wrong. Think it's exemplary of what has been going wrong with Nintendo for a while now? Guess what? You are wrong. Because here is what Galaxy really is, and I have never seen anyone ever point this out:
Super Mario Galaxy is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made.
Take a moment to let that sink in. It's a heady idea to be sure, and one that is not free of irony. But think about it for a bit and it will begin to make sense.
Galaxy is a game where you never stop moving. Sure, you CAN stop, but then again so could Sonic. Yet for some reason you don't. In both games, some unseen force compels you to continue moving, to continue driving forward. This presence has never been felt in any previous Mario game, each one taking place at a fairly relaxed pace, despite the fact that the majority of them have time limits. In Galaxy, the impulse to keep moving is helped along by the fact that you always know where to go. If this were a Mario game, this would be called hand-holding, but viewed as a Sonic game, this is simply streamlining. Still not convinced this game is a Sonic game? Alright, try this on for size: Mario's main form of attack in the game is a spinning move that briefly makes him both invincible and deadly. Sound familiar?
Now that we've established Galaxy as Sonic game, on to the second part of my claim, that it is in fact the BEST Sonic game. The problem with the Sonic the Hedgehog games is that they are not just game, but also tech demo. For the Genesis to prove its superiority over Nintendo's systems, they had to demonstrate that their games could render at ludicrous speeds. So they made Sonic fast. Really fast. Too fast, in fact. Sonic's incredible speed is a hindrance to the level design of the games. Because the player cannot see the obstacles ahead, all of the levels either have to be nothing but a pretty roller coaster, or they have to throw up a vertical wall to slow the player down for a more slow paced platforming section. It's once you've started to memorize the layouts of these harder platforming sections that the true joy of the game comes out, moving at a brisk pace through dangerous terrain. Anyone who has ever truly loved a Sonic game will understand that it's not really about speed, it's about momentum.
Galaxy cuts the speed in order to preserve all that wonderful momentum while still letting you retain a sense of control and accomplishment. They've even managed to include the "wow" factor of the old experience of going through loops and spirals at full speed, in the form of the star cannons that launch you from planetoid to planetoid. When the idea of Super Mario Galaxy rocketed from Miyamoto's brain down to earth, whoever picked it up must have been someone who truly understood and loved Sonic the Hedgehog.
So, this concludes my brief history of the Mario games. The series rose, started to fall with Mario 3, and finally transformed into Sonic the Hedgehog. Meanwhile, the Sonic games transformed into utter shit. Growing up in the 1990s, one had to take sides either with Mario or Sonic, for the two were representative of their consoles, constantly at war. It's hard to say who won out, Sega for crafting such an incredible concept, or Nintendo for finally realizing it so fully. Either way, Mario and Sonic are now one and the same, and perhaps the fighting can finally stop.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Mission Accomplished
It saddens me to say that this will be my last post, because I have finally achieved the goal that I set out when I started this blog. It's been a long, strange, somewhat infuriating trip, but all good things have to come to an end sometime. Before I started out, I made a promise to my self that I would quit once I had reached the zenith of my blogging career, and not flame out after a long period of gross irrelevance, like some pathetic nobody. I don't want to be like that band that you see in the shitty dive bar, whose name sounds familiar, and it bugs you for a while until you realize that they were some big name band in the 80s, and now they're playing in some shitty dump just to make rent. No, much better to gracefully bow out when you're at the top. And I think once I explain how I came to this decision, that you will agree that this is the best, and indeed only, course of action I can take. Here is the situation:
I got a hit from the following Google search string: "The effect of fucking in the ass"
That's it. I can't imagine it getting any better than this. I can't even make fun of this person, because it's just so perfect. Someone was looking for descriptions (and possibly illustrations) of a stretched out ass hole, and instead they found my meaningless rant page. That is just too great for words, and you can't make jokes about it, because the situation itself IS a joke. Obviously I have no choice but to bow out of the world of internet self-publishing forever. Thanks for reading, and never forget to always check your prejudices at the door. Peace out.
Postscript:
As is hopefully obvious, I am just kidding. The truth is I'm not worried about becoming irrelevant, because my blog is already irrelevant to most people's interests. I have, and will, in the future, continue to write in this space in a way that purely serves my own interests. And no, I don't pity the washed up 80s band. I love washed up 80s bands. If I could be anything I wanted to be, I would be in a washed up 80s band, playing in a shitty bar for unappreciative jerks. That's right, I want to die out slowly and painfully. The fact is, I will continue to maintain this blog long after I and anyone I know has lost interest. In fact, given Google's proclivity for archiving, this site may well last for as long as the human species continues to thrive, because I'm sure as hell not taking it down (If you are reading this post in the distant future, I hope you enjoy my opinions on your now historically ancient software and deities. Actually, I don't care whether you do or not, I was just being polite, though I honestly don't know why. In fact, fuck you, the future. You've never brought us anything but total annihilation by robots anyway. Honestly, I think we should build some kind of device that stops time so we never have to see the fucking future, but shit, I just realized that that kind of technology only exists in the future. Fuck). So look forward to many great times to come, followed by not so great times, followed by downright excruciating times. But hey, at least there will be times, right? And that's what really matters.
Postscript to the postscript:
In that last parenthetical, perhaps I was a bit hard on the future. The truth as, I actually have some very humanistic tendencies, and I have every reason to believe that the future is actually going to be pretty fucking great. I think that I'm being fairly objective when I say that the world is a better place than it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago. I believe that today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow is going to be better than today, every day for a long, long time. But the futures depicted in science fiction are some fucked up futures. Those futures can kiss my ass. Seriously.
Postscript to the post-postscript:
I'm pretty sure this section is already longer than the original post. David Foster Wallace would be proud (If he weren't dead, and if he had any idea who I was when he was alive, or cared about the type of shit that I write about (Also, he might be pissed that I dissed the science fiction futures (Or maybe not, being fucked up is kind of the point, after all))). But now things have just gotten convoluted and silly, and I don't really have any idea where to go with this crazy idea.
Postscript to the post-post-postscript:
I like pie.
I got a hit from the following Google search string: "The effect of fucking in the ass"
That's it. I can't imagine it getting any better than this. I can't even make fun of this person, because it's just so perfect. Someone was looking for descriptions (and possibly illustrations) of a stretched out ass hole, and instead they found my meaningless rant page. That is just too great for words, and you can't make jokes about it, because the situation itself IS a joke. Obviously I have no choice but to bow out of the world of internet self-publishing forever. Thanks for reading, and never forget to always check your prejudices at the door. Peace out.
Postscript:
As is hopefully obvious, I am just kidding. The truth is I'm not worried about becoming irrelevant, because my blog is already irrelevant to most people's interests. I have, and will, in the future, continue to write in this space in a way that purely serves my own interests. And no, I don't pity the washed up 80s band. I love washed up 80s bands. If I could be anything I wanted to be, I would be in a washed up 80s band, playing in a shitty bar for unappreciative jerks. That's right, I want to die out slowly and painfully. The fact is, I will continue to maintain this blog long after I and anyone I know has lost interest. In fact, given Google's proclivity for archiving, this site may well last for as long as the human species continues to thrive, because I'm sure as hell not taking it down (If you are reading this post in the distant future, I hope you enjoy my opinions on your now historically ancient software and deities. Actually, I don't care whether you do or not, I was just being polite, though I honestly don't know why. In fact, fuck you, the future. You've never brought us anything but total annihilation by robots anyway. Honestly, I think we should build some kind of device that stops time so we never have to see the fucking future, but shit, I just realized that that kind of technology only exists in the future. Fuck). So look forward to many great times to come, followed by not so great times, followed by downright excruciating times. But hey, at least there will be times, right? And that's what really matters.
Postscript to the postscript:
In that last parenthetical, perhaps I was a bit hard on the future. The truth as, I actually have some very humanistic tendencies, and I have every reason to believe that the future is actually going to be pretty fucking great. I think that I'm being fairly objective when I say that the world is a better place than it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago. I believe that today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow is going to be better than today, every day for a long, long time. But the futures depicted in science fiction are some fucked up futures. Those futures can kiss my ass. Seriously.
Postscript to the post-postscript:
I'm pretty sure this section is already longer than the original post. David Foster Wallace would be proud (If he weren't dead, and if he had any idea who I was when he was alive, or cared about the type of shit that I write about (Also, he might be pissed that I dissed the science fiction futures (Or maybe not, being fucked up is kind of the point, after all))). But now things have just gotten convoluted and silly, and I don't really have any idea where to go with this crazy idea.
Postscript to the post-post-postscript:
I like pie.
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