Damn airplane germs. Instead of doing anything useful I'm going to
write about video games.
Atticus and Samuel love video games. They mainly love the feedback
loop: they seem just as happy with a cheap toy from a cereal box as
with a DS or GameCube. (However at any given time they must be using
consoles with similar capabilities, or strife ensues.) Alyson and I
played some Mario Kart Double Dash with them. They also like a game
for the DS with the promising title of "Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2"
(however they are not terribly good at that game, so I secretly
unlocked some of the mini-games for them).
I have been out of the gaming console loop for about 15 years, and
playing these games with the kids really drove home to me that Mario
has become a frozen brand. There are about
fifty Mario-branded games but the vast majority are not what I'd
consider "Mario games", ie. platformers. MvDK2 looks just like (say)
Super Mario World, but it's a puzzle game with no more action element
than Lemmings. Mario Kart has the trappings of the Mario universe, but
it's a racing game like every other branded racing game. Mario is now
a figurehead, like Mickey Mouse, except Mickey's figurehead role has
made him milquetoast and neotenous, whereas MvDK2 and MKDD actually
succeed as games.
When I was a kid--no, this is going somewhere--there was one Mario
game and rumors of a second. (Even this is complicating the issue
because there were non-platform Mario games in arcades, but we didn't
think about those.) At this point the universe could go one of two
ways. Nintendo could release in the US the "Super Mario Bros. 2" they
released in Japan, or they could change the sprites on a totally
unrelated platformer and call it "Super Mario Bros. 2". The Japanese
SMB2 is a good game, but it's a straightforward level hack of
SMB1. Option 1 would lead to a world in which one Mario platformer was
pretty much like the last. Option 2 would lead to a Cambrian explosion
of totally new gameplay elements like picking things up and throwing
them, and entirely out-of-left-field characters (like Birdo, now
apparently Yoshi's transvestite boyfriend).
We got the second, and in my middle school the result was
pandemonium--some sort of pre-release hype grapevine I don't remember,
followed by desperate borrowing of cartridges from the kids whose
parents had bought them. Nowadays it's fashionable to treat SMB2 as
the odd man out it objectively is, but at the time it was a huge deal,
and part of the huge deal was that 2 was radically different from 1.
Then the same thing happened with 3, which was radically different
from 2, in the same direction but not the same as 1.
I'm losing control of the narrative and I'm about to go off on a
little fanboy tangent, but my larger point is that up to, say, Super
Mario World, every Mario game was the same kind of game but added
major characters and/or gameplay mechanisms. With SMW and Yoshi, the
Mario brand froze and you wouldn't add more characters any more than
you'd add more characters to the Disney lineup. The idea of new core
mechanics (turtle shells, boxes containing power-ups, picking up and
throwing things, etc.) stopped being meaningful because any sort of
game could be given the Mario brand. And without new core mechanics
that can be deployed in multiple games, the brand is frozen.
Here are the major changes I've noticed in the Mario universe since
I stopped playing console games in the early 1990s: 1. Donkey Kong
came back, started wearing a tie, and had a bunch of kids,
Bowser-style (who's the mother?). 2. Pauline also returned after a
long absence, probably causing some angst on Princess Toadstool's
part. 3. Some kind of parallel-universe Mario named Wario showed
up. There are also baby versions of Mario and Luigi (neoteny!), but
I'm not counting that since obviously M&L were babies at some
point. Even if you count them, all this stuff is revamps and standard
twists on stuff that was canon already, like the fourth season of
Enterprise, or if Disney tried to bring back Clarabelle the
cow. The Cambrian explosion is over.
(Wow, I managed to push the fanboy tangent off past my main
point. Here it is: it took a while for the SMB2 changes to be
integrated into the Mario universe. The only part of SMB2 in SMB3 is
the Bomb-ombs, and nothing further is in SMW except the cacti and a
couple Ninjis in the last level. But by the time of Double Dash and
MvDK2, the weird masked SMB2 enemies are everywhere.)
Since you've read all this way, you'll probably enjoy this collection of videos of
hacked SMW worlds in which Mario triumphs by doing nothing. And if
you like that, you'll like level 3-2 of Air,
and some of the user-defined levels of N. Anything else?
![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "2 comments")
(2) Tue Sep 04 2007 00:48:
Susanna and John, when you move back to Utah you'll need this. 