You Played Mario, So What?

Nostalgia's Strange Distillation of a Strange Video Game

I don't really care to engage anyone in the discussion of what makes someone a gamer or not. My take is that if you enjoy playing video games (plural), you are a gamer regardless of what those games might be. Still, I do feel a shred of disappointment when I meet someone whose passion is focused squarely on titles like Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or Words with Friends, which are all primarily mobile-based. There is nothing wrong with these games – they all provide a continual challenge, the first requiring both mental and physical dexterity to master –, but I usually gravitate towards those who enjoy playing plot-oriented games or those with really unique mechanics or graphics. I like the big games. I also don't play mobile games.

One thing I've noticed with regards to people in my age bracket, the roughly 30-35 year-old one, is that a common response to asking someone if he or she games is "I played Mario." This means a myriad of things, of course, as Mario has been featured in over 200 video game titles since his inception. What it does usually boil down to, though, is that the person used to play either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario World as a child. (Make that age bracket 25-35 for the latter.) Unfortunately for me, the gamer seeker, it means that the only relationship they had with "core" games began and ended over 20 years ago. Again, this is not to pass judgment. Playing video games is a hobby, and everyone is willing to devote only so much time to it, which also can translate to no time at all.

With all sincerity, I do think that Super Mario World is one of the best games ever made. It features sheer entertainment value on its surface and a ridiculous ton of secrets to discover at its core. It's also a dramatic expansion of the world explored in the previous games in the series, which vary depending on whether you were raised in Japan on the United States. What I do find peculiar is Mario's lasting legacy in culture today. As judged by the folks at Guinness, he's the second most recognizable video game character to Pac-Man, something I can delve into later. However, Mario paraphernalia has become something of a badge of acceptance among people in general, not just gamers. It is wholly appropriate to wear something with Mario or another character from his universe, probably Yoshi, without any expectation being made of your gaming habits.

We all loved Super Mario Bros., right? Maybe. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, actually. My neighbor did. I moved to my hometown when I was about five years old during my kindergarten year, 1987. In 1989, shortly before I turned seven years old, a pair of kids moved in next door, and they brought with them several Atari systems and the NES. I hadn't played a video game at home yet, and I was always excited to go over there and play. I honestly really enjoyed a lot of the Atari games, though I probably wouldn't touch any of them today. I can't even recall the names of what I played. Of course, along with the NES, my neighbors had Super Mario Bros.

I wasn't good at it or any game for that matter. I never got far in SMB mainly because I didn't have the time to master it. It wasn't inside my home, and as a kid, I had enough energy to want to go outside to play sometimes. I didn't discover warp zones without his or a magazine's aid. But the game did have some appeal, and I would enjoy picking it up now and again. Coupled with not being particularly good at it, I was The Exemplar for the sway – I would attempt to coax Mario across a large gap by moving my entire body in the direction of the jump, sometimes emitting a troubled noise with it. I may not have grown out of this. It's very compelling.

What this boils down to is that you played Mario when you were little. So did I. So what? Why does he get special treatment compared to countless other video game characters?

Saturation helps.

In the US, the Nintendo Entertainment System came with Super Mario Bros. by default. OK, that's notSuper Mario Bros., which was the majority of the offerings in 1985. It was nigh a guarantee that if you owned an NES, you owned SMB. Next, without going too far into it, the NES was the only video game system being sold. After the video game crash of 1983, stores were extremely hesitant to carry another video game system. The fact is that every manufacturer tried to make an Atari or an analog of an Atari, which created an overly segmented market, meaning little money for everybody involved, most notably the stores. When that got buried (like a certain game), "video game" became a four-letter word as far as stores were concerned.
exactly accurate. If you actually cared about value, you bought an NES that was bundled with

Due to the spectacular and extremely risky efforts of Nintendo, stores finally agreed to carry the NES, and it was a booming success. (If you'd like to read more about the whole ordeal, Greg Knight wrote a great essay about it on his blog, and he provides his sources for more reading.) Overall, Nintendo sold 30 million units in the US by 1991, which accounts for roughly 11% of the entire US population by that time. That is not only a significant chunk of the population, but it also translated to 30 million default Super Marios Bros. players. The only other games to achieve similar market saturation have also been bundled inclusions. I'm also neglecting to include worldwide sales on the game, which came out to about 62 million.

When you boil all of this down, it's fair to assume about 1 in 10 people (probably a little less given more precise analysis) living in the US between 1985 and 1991 have owned Super Mario Bros. This figure does increase when you account for people who just played the game at someone else's house but didn't own it themselves. The level to which Mario has left an effect on people around my age is significant. Even if you don't play any video games today, chances are that you played at least this one title on this one system. Let's not forget that the game was featured again in Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, made available digitally via the Wii Virtual Console, and the countless number of people my age who were in college during the Napster (read: piracy) heyday. That was a time when a ridiculous number of old games were accessible through websites and emulators, their size being remarkably permissive even on dial-up connections at home.

Only Super Mario World after it achieved a notable amount of saturation, though not as much. Also, Mario's future games did not achieve the same amount of saturation although they were all successful. Oddly enough, despite retaining the weird elements of the original, these games also were more cohesive in their execution.

Super Mario Bros. didn't make sense, something which people eat up like candy.

I'm sorry to generalize, but we didn't really analyze games when we were little. We either enjoyed playing them or we didn't. Many of our favorite childhood games' stories were contained in their manuals, the conclusions sussed out by beating them. This isn't true of all games, but the largest extent to which SMB presents a story during its gameplay is by uttering, "But our princess is in another castle." You could argue that this counts as a twist, but it happens seven times during the course of play. This was positive, though, because it meant that there was much more game to play compared to the Atari offerings, which only boosted speed or enemy frequency to maintain challenge almost endlessly.

Mushroom

As much as we joke about the elements that make up Mario games, they managed to persist through multiple iterations. Everything that is ridiculous about the first game became iconic. Mario and his brother, Luigi, are plumbers who were magically sucked down a drain into the Mushroom Kingdom. For whatever reason, these plumbers were tasked with saving Princess Toadstool, a human princess in a world full of, um, mushroom people. The kidnapper is a giant bipedal turtle, Bowser, who spits fire. So far, none of this makes sense.

The plumbers, one at a time, must proceed through stages that inexplicably contain giant pipes everywhere, only some of which they can or have to enter to proceed. They can also breathe underwater ad infinitum, though that is eventually adjusted in Mario 64. The first enemy Mario encounters is a goomba, which is a mushroom-like thing that he can stomp on once to eliminate. (In 1985, this was not the most common way to murder animals or the like, I promise you.) The goomba is followed by a koopa troopa, a smaller bipedal turtle that can be stomped on so as to throw his shell around. To aid Mario in his quest, he must punch blocks with question marks on them, which can yield coins in a world without an economy, mushrooms that makes him grow larger for some reason, mushrooms that grant him extra lives because that's a thing down there, or fire flowers, which both alter his outfit and allow him to shoot fire. You encounter most of these things in under a minute after starting the game.

Also a mushroom

If the internet today is any indicator, it should then become no surprise that everything that made up Super Mario Bros. became memorable by virtue of the fact that it didn't make sense. Yes, it was a good game which featured challenging platforming gameplay and a handful of secrets and tricks. But these elements didn't contribute to today's popular culture; rather, they served to retain a section of that population as gamers and inspire future, more cohesive games. Each ridiculous aspect about the Mario universe stands out from one another and so becomes easily memorable and easily marketable in the future. Society loves disruption. Then, along came Yoshi, the Mario equivalent of a kitten.

Memories become distilled over time. Icons remain.

As stated above, Mario is not the most recognizable video game character ever. Pac-Man is. First, Pac-Man manages to increase the age bracket again from the larger end, and as I pointed out from my personal story, some people were still playing Atari in the late 80s. However, Pac-Man's fame came from the arcade; the Atari version of the game was so over-simplified that it was rejected compared to the original. His recognition stems from his form. He's a circle missing a piece, a yellow pie. Why he's not as marketable today as Mario probably lays with the fact that his universe lacks enough other pieces to be as interesting. Aside from Pac-Man, there are only the differently-colored ghosts and the white pellets. If Pokémon was only about Ash and Pikachu, it wouldn't be as popular. The hook is the pieces, the other pokémon, who are more memorable and universal than the games they star in. Again, this is a matter of popular culture versus smaller subsects, i.e., gaming or anime cultures.

Applying this idea to Super Mario Bros., it's not hard to discern why we hold Mario and the other pieces dear. Over time, the game has become pieces, all of which are weird and colorful, iconic and cute. To its credit, none of the enemies are menacing in their appearance save for Bowser, so they were adopted into popular culture as well. But you'll notice that while people will recognize a goomba or a koopa troopa whether or not they can name them, they are less familiar with other enemies from the series. They will recognize the sound of a coin being grabbed. And everyone knows the music. Why? Also as mentioned, you encounter these things in under a minute after starting the game.

This is ultimately the key behind each icon's success, including Mario. If you've played and finished Super Mario Bros., if you've played the game on and off at a friend's house, or if you started the game and decided it ultimately wasn't for you, you remember that first minute more than anything else about it. Everyone remembers the pieces despite having very different memories of the gameplay. Over time, the gameplay doesn't last so much, and this idea crosses over into other games that have become iconic over time, though less so, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. With enough saturation and enough disparate elements, those jarring pieces juxtaposed against one another become memorable and all that is left to remember if you didn't pursue playing video games as a hobby.

The same applies to movies (Indiana Jones, E.T., Back to the Future), books (If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Amelia Bedelia, Choose Your Own Adventure), and even other forms of art (Mona Lisa, Persistence of Memory, Moonlight Sonata). We remember their essence and their elements more so than their experience or sometimes their names or the names of their elements. This is most true of video games because movies, books, paintings, and music don't require skill to complete experiencing them. Many people don't finish games, so it's the beginnings that matter most.

Mario rode the unexpected booming success of the Nintendo Entertainment System into our memories and our hearts despite us. He became equivalent with our childhood regardless of the amount of time we spent with him. He was something that was there when we were a child, and we either interacted by controlling or spectating. It doesn't take a psychology degree to know that we tend to hold pieces of our childhood dear even if our childhood as a whole was unpleasant. We hold onto the things we can remember because every day we forget more and more about what happened to us back then.

Unlike a good many things that existed back then, Mario is immortal. The people have chosen to keep him alive. I'm one of them, I suppose.

Images obtained from various places around the internet. If you own an image and would like me to remove it, please email me, and I will do so.

Deadlight Review

I don't remember any of this happening in 1986. I was four.

Good ol' Mullet's.

One of my most beloved games from years and years ago was Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. It was a 2.5D platformer where every room was a puzzle. The goal was for the titular hero to save his friends from becoming food despite having zero combat prowess to save himself. Enter Tequila Works' Deadlight last year. The initial trailers captivated me because they exhibited similar 2D gameplay with room puzzles, though while the goal to avoid becoming food remained the same, mostly everything else was different. This game takes place in an alternate reality in 1986 Seattle after a zombie outbreak has begrudged the world. You play as Randall Wayne, a Canadian forest ranger looking for his wife and daughter, who have gone ahead of you seeking a safe haven.

It should come as no surprise that gameplay in Deadlight is vastly different from Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and not just because of a lack of a chanting ability (insufficiently replaced with yelling). Here, the goal is to find your family and the safe haven alive all while avoiding the zombies surrounding you. Compared to more confrontational zombie games, such as Left 4 Dead or Dead Island, the key to survival is circumventing the undead foes as much as humanly possible. Randall has typical platforming abilities – running, jumping, crouching, rolling, climbing – and must use his wits to navigate around enemies and environmental obstacles. For example, one area had an immolated fuel truck preventing progress, and you are tasked with pushing a broken tank of water off the top of a building to put it out. Randall's abilities are more than serviceable, and it was fun to navigate the environments and figure out ways to fool the zombies, such as by calling for their attention and making them walk off cliffs, all the while looking for ways over walls and through windows to continue on.

Note: this isn't real.

The only real problems in the gameplay surfaced when you're faced with zombies in his path that you can't avoid. The game equips you with an axe to take down one or two at a time, and you eventually find a gun, but ammo is limited. When it came to some areas with long paths to the right, no platforms to jump on, and no objects in the environment to use for defense, I sometimes questioned what the designers wanted me to do to ensure success. Running with the axe does not always knock zombies down, and it is sadly impossible to run and shoot off your bullets. You must stop and aim first, which takes a life-altering second to ready. These situations did not happen often, though, and in most cases where using the gun is inevitable, Randall's default aim is head-level with the zombies. Still, checkpoints are frequent enough that the penalty for dying is being set back a little.

The story driving you from one end of Seattle to another is not remarkably compelling. You are trying to find your wife and daughter while staying alive, and the game occasionally provides playable flashbacks and hallucination segments to hint at the rather obvious revelation at the end. There were aspects of that revelation, which I found maddening, and what was an otherwise forgettable tale, wrought with Randall's gruff remarks about life and death along the way, took a stupid and puzzling turn for the cliche. The only other puzzle would be why the writers saw fit to throw in a segment in the middle that is literally just a series of rooms and traps that Randall must pass in order to continue on his journey. Aside from being forced in its execution (though still a fun area to play through by contrast), it didn't make sense. The traps were intended to keep out zombies, but by following the laws that the zombies of this game follow, they would not have otherwise been able to navigate to the platforms the traps are on. They can't jump. Come on.

I wonder if I can hire a zombie maid service.

Thankfully, the game is really breathtaking to look at, featuring a style that overlays Limbo's shadowed foreground aesthetic on top of beautifully detailed and colorful backgrounds. Using these shadows, the game's secret areas are hidden away until you discover the ledge or door that reveals them. These rooms typically lead to finding objects for Randall's scrapbook (for you completionists out there), but they can also lead to health and stamina powerups to boost his abilities. Among the scrapbook objects you find are a slew of discarded IDs, which apparently belong to a number of famous serial killers who operated in the northwest during the 80s. This may be another knock against the writers, but I didn't really understand the purpose of including these other than to be futilely tongue-in-cheek. Even my basic effort at performing some internet research revealed that a few of these folks were in jail or nowhere near Seattle in 1986, so I can only surmise that Tequila Works just wanted to be cool.

In terms of sound, effects and music were really top notch. Even basic details like floors cracking under Randall's feet and glass breaking were handled well. The soundtrack was surprisingly astounding though brief. I was actually really mesmerized by the Deadlight's theme, which plays while you navigate the main menus to look at the bonus content (artwork, trailers, and documentaries), which unlocks as you play through the game. Unfortunately, discussing the sound leads to the biggest problem I had with the game. All the cutscenes, including the introduction when you select to start a new game, are done through passable comic-book style animations, but apparently, the PC version of Deadlight has a terrible bug that prevents all sounds from being played during them. If I didn't have subtitles on (yeah, I do that), I would have missed the dialogue behind these events. Thankfully, the sound returns when you are actually playing, but this technical problem comes as a huge disappointment, especially considering how long it's been since the game was released. This kind of thing could have been addressed in the months before I got around to playing it.

If it's alright with you guys, I'll just hang out up here.

So Deadlight is something of a mixed bag whose main highlight is that it's fun to play. This didn't stop me from playing almost 40 hours of Far Cry 3, and it shouldn't prevent anyone from playing 5 hours of this game. Just don't take it too seriously. My sincere hope is that Tequila Works comes out with a spiritual (and more functional) sequel to this game that takes place in their supremely more fascinating home of Spain, especially since the zombie outbreak in this game supposedly originated in Europe. Just sayin'.

Jade Empire Review

Like an Open Palm to the Head

When citizens complain about a lack of street lighting, they don't usually mean all in one place.

Despite the number of games I've played which have come from Asia, I have only played two whose stories take place in Asian settings: Okami and now Jade Empire. The latter is surprising considering BioWare is located in Canada. Also, considering the controversy BioWare ignited in 2012, it may come as a surprise to many gamers that they created an RPG once that was not Mass Effect or a Star Wars derivative. I once started Jade Empire a few years ago but ended up abandoning it for reasons I cannot recall, but it might have had something to do with the difficulty. Thus, it ended up in my backlog again, not to arouse my interest until almost eight years after its creation. Regardless, I have been digressing for an entire paragraph now.

Jade Empire's story takes place in a fictional ancient Chinese setting whose name you can guess by now. You are given the opportunity to choose from a variety of male or female player characters, but they are not customizable in appearance whatsoever, just character stats. No matter whom you choose, the story is the same, and only a handful of interactions with NPCs and your romance options are affected by the gender. The player character begins the tale at a martial arts school up in the mountains in the village, Two Rivers. Here, you are Master Li's very special student with an important destiny that is continually alluded to during the introductory act. Eventually, the village and the school are attacked, your fellow students save for one, the spirit medium Dawn Star, are slaughtered, and your master has been kidnapped, presumably by the Empire's minions. So begins your empire-trotting tale to learn your destiny and save your master. If I sound sarcastic about having a wunderkind player characters, it may be because I think it's cooler to find out you're special than to have everyone at the beginning of the game remind you ad nauseam.

If you thought cell phones were huge way back when, get a lot of this coffee maker.

Overall, the story is a mixed bag. The setting and the folklore behind it are the most impressive qualities with just enough magic to make it intriguing without delving too far into high fantasy. The result is a believable land with strong traces of ancient mysticism and gods. Along your journey, you will also meet plenty of unique characters, which add to the rich setting with personal tales of strife and triumph, some of whose outcomes to affect through side quests. A number of pre-designated characters also join you on your quest and assist you in battle. The main narrative, which drives the player along, is just OK, though. Nothing is thrown at you that you've never seen coming, though the laudable twist is handled gracefully. Where the story fell short is in the rather brief cluster of chapters that make up the conclusion to the game after the twist in the fourth act. It feels like the developers felt a need to pad the time until the ending, so they just threw in some repeated areas with almost none of the exploration or the side quests offered by the first three quarters of the game. To top it off, your time is extended needlessly with battles of escalating difficulty instead. The pay off for your troubles is an extremely brief cutscene with the final boss followed by text explaining what became of your companions. I now question whether or not BioWare ever really knew how to wrap up a storyline.

That said, Jade Empire is still enjoyable to play; I clocked in about thirty hours of gameplay between the main quest and all the side activities. Before the crux of the narrative even comes to pass, Two Rivers offers a number of optional missions to complete, which net you bonus experience and money to really start prepping yourself for the challenge ahead. These are but a taste of the deeper, more relatable side quests that you encounter during your travels around the Jade Empire. Unsurprisingly, the game features a binary choice system where good is called The Way of the Open Palm, and evil is called The Way of the Closed Fist. Although one character argues that neither path is inherently imbued with good or evil, the system's implementation is pretty rudimentary. Open Palm is colored blue, and Closed Fist is colored red. I need not explain further. However, the methods behind gaining favor with either path are varied. Depending on your character's stats, you are able to influence NPCs into doing what you ask of them using charm, intuition, or intimidation. The leanings are situation dependent, but even if you're not being intimidating, it can be obvious when you're trying to convince someone to do something that is ultimately not right, so don't be surprised when you get that red glow about you. Killing folks with abandon isn't the only evil action to take.

We're all done freaking out about this kind of natural phenomenon, right?

The experience you earn from completing quests and doing battle allow you to upgrade your three main stats: body, spirit, and mind. Increasing these influence the bars for your health, chi (magic), and focus (weapon dexterity), but the three unique combinations of each affect your level of charm, intuition, and intimidation for conversation. Battle is focused on using an impressive array of fighting styles – martial styles involve physical attacks with your limbs, weapon styles need no explanation, support styles inflict status effects but no damage, magic styles allow for a bit of ranged fighting and status effects, and transformation styles allow you to turn into a powerful but chi-draining spirit. Not every style works on every type of opponent, either, so it's necessary to stay on your toes when fighting varied groups. Each level you earn also nets you points to apply to improving each of these styles to become truly powerful. The variety of styles you earn or buy during the game outnumber the amount you can bring into battle (10 on PC, one for each hotkey), so you should have no trouble customizing battles to fit your own perception of your ultimate martial arts fighter. I really enjoyed this aspect of combat, and I only wished there was an option later on to reallocate skill points to newer skills you wish to replace older ones with. This is a minor complaint, though.

Battles actually take place in the same environments you traverse, so it's highly possible that saying the wrong word to someone in conversation could result in a fight right where you stand. The only time this becomes a problem is when the battlefield borders feel arbitrarily drawn, and learning that you can't evade because of an invisible wall can lead to doom. Problems aside, what I did like about this feature was that some battles were actually total surprises. Compared to Mass Effect where a giant room or corridor with a lot of waist-high walls meant inevitable cover-based combat was afoot, environments in Jade Empire are varied enough that you honestly can't tell when battle is coming (unless it's a respawn point) and may end up surprised. Overall, combat is satisfying and offers a lot of variety and engaging difficulty. Sometimes, the difficulty spikes when fighting larger groups of spirits in one of the earlier acts of the game (I cursed a lot), but I did find that exerting patience and defensive maneuvers (things I suck at) do lead to triumph.

Even the chickens are holy.

Beyond combat, Jade Empire offers open environments to explore in its second and third acts, which comprise the bulk of the seven act game, believe it or not. The Imperial City in particular, aside from being the largest explorable area in the game, features a slew of side quests and activities to undertake. I was really baffled by how much time I spent there ignoring the main quest, though the writers did throw in squeeze points where you have to proceed with the story for a mission or so to continue with ongoing side quests. One of the city's side quests requires the player to go round after round in a fighting arena. But unlike similar implementations in games like Borderlands, as you progress through the rounds, more side quests and stories spawn from the characters you fight and those who control the arena. It is practically a stand-alone game in itself!

Despite being almost eight years old, Jade Empire is a treat to look at even if it is readily apparent that technology has come so far since its release. There are a lot of organic and large environments with winding paths, and many areas feature details which provide unique character and charm. Despite its impressive size, the Imperial City could have used more variety and colors in the wall and ground textures to be as captivating as the characters seem to think it is. (It's not the Citadel.) Also, the HUD is a rather blocky and large and could afford to be implemented more gracefully. The soundtrack, composed by the amazing Jack Wall (total fanboy), is wonderful. It manages to evoke the Asian setting while layering more modern orchestral compositions over traditional instruments. Most of the voice acting, by contrast, felt a little stiff and forced especially when coupled with the rather silly conversation animations of the character models. Now is a good time to mention that the player character never speaks aloud, only through text options, something obvious that BioWare fixed for its next game.

A ship! This can only have a positive outcome!

Jade Empire was a fun game, and I am glad I picked it up again (ah, the power of a Steam sale) and tried my hand at it a second time. I really enjoyed the battle system and how powerful I felt by the end, and the side quests added a lot of needed depth to the overall story that the main narrative really lacked. Even though it's showing its age, it's definitely a solid RPG to try out if you've got thirty hours to kill.

All screenshots taken by me through Steam. The camera turns with the character, so no face for you!