Criminally Overlooked Games: Super Mario Bros. 2

It's no secret to many that I'm a huge fan of Super Mario Bros. 2. For many gamers, it's the black sheep of the Mario series. Screw Attack named it the 9th worst Mario game of all time, because they claimed it was "a lie." You're not stepping on the heads of Goombas, there's no Bowser, and there's a life bar, for goodness sake! What is this?

There's no debating that Mario 2 is very different from the others in the series. It brings to mind another early Nintendo sequel that was just as out-of-left-field, The Legend of Zelda 2. Nintendo was in a very experimental phase, as well they should have been. Gaming had been around since 1961, but modern gaming had only been around for about five years. Franchises barely existed at this point, and the ones that did were games in completely different genres, like the Ultima series.

In other words, no one really knew what a Mario game was supposed to be. At this point, there was Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. and the extra levels that existed in Japan, and that was it. There really wasn't any other indication of what they should or shouldn't do, and no specific formula to follow.

Nintendo of America knew that there was no way they could release the "Lost Levels" in America. Presciently, they decided that Americans wouldn't appreciate a mere level pack, and especially one that didn't add much to Mario. Instead they took a game that had been created by Shigeru Miyamoto, Doki Doki Panic, and reskinned it. According to Wikipedia, Miyamoto actually had more input in this game than he did with the Lost Levels.

So, what makes Mario 2 such a revolutionary step in platforming? First, the graphics were crisper than any other game at the time. Sure, Mega Man helped pioneer crisply drawn, lined sprites, but Mario 2 had rolling logs, moving vegetables, and shifting sands. There was so much going on onscreen with relatively little slowdown, which was a testament to the polish behind it.

The revolution didn't stop there, of course. It would have been a pretty lame revolution if it had. No, it continued with the great twists to the basic gameplay. For instance, the first level starts with you dropping downwards, a no-no in most platform games of the time. After that, the level seems fairly straightforward until you reach the point where you have to climb vines, avoiding ladybugs on the way up, and then fight a weird pink thing by catching the eggs that it spits and throwing them back. That's the first sign that this game is radically different than others in the genre.

To follow it up, the next level has you climbing on top of a magic-carpet-riding bird, throwing him off and stealing his magic carpet. Then, you find a key in a pot, avoid a creepy mask that keeps swooping in on you, break down some barriers with bombs, and once again kill a weird egg-spitting thing. That's all after just two levels.

Here's the point: more than any other platformer to date, Mario 2 provided variety. Nowadays, we take this for granted. We demand that platformers don't just give us a mere obstacle course, but really clever level design and a wide variety of things to do. You can see it in platformers from the Ratchet & Clank series to LittleBigPlanet to Nintendo's own Super Mario Galaxy. That all came from Mario 2.

Another excellent addition to the platforming genre was the different styles of terrain in the game. For instance, the ice in World 4 was actually slippery, something that really hadn't been done much before. Sure, other games might have attempted slippery terrain or quicksand before, but none were as fun as Mario 2, and none made them so intrinsic to the gameplay as Mario 2 did. I mean, one level even allowed you to sink into the quicksand at the beginning and bypass the majority of the level. How cool was that?

Frequently, when people talk about the Mario series, they bring up Super Mario World or the original Super Mario Bros. as seminal games. Super Mario Bros. 2 frequently gets passed over because of its "black sheep" status, in spite of all the innovations that it brought to the genre. Without it, we wouldn't have seen half of the stuff that we see in later Mario games, and platform games as a group would have been far different. That's why Super Mario Bros. 2 is Criminally Overlooked.

Finally Back Into Lost

I had heard some good things about Lost recently. I heard that they were finally moving the story forward, and the fact that the show now has an endpoint intrigued me. The trouble was, I couldn't get my wife to watch it with me. A couple of days ago, we were channel surfing and I happened upon Lost in HD. I stopped to admire how it looked in HD, and something happened along the way.

My wife kept asking me, "Who's that? Why are they doing that? What are they doing there?" I would plainly confess that I didn't know, and I kept on bringing up the fact that she was the one who got tired of it and didn't want to watch. My lovely wife got intrigued, and now we're plowing through Season 3 en route to Season 4. I'm actually really psyched, because we're seeing some really great stuff and we don't have to wait a week between each episode.

The more I watch, the more theories I'll have. Stay tuned.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix Impressions

I was a big fan of Puzzle Quest. It was a novel concept, so I was excited to play the new Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. Here's a quick rundown of what I've found so far after about two hours with it:

The puzzle mechanics took a lot of getting used to. Once I figured it out it made perfect sense, but I was really grasping at straws for a while...

There's a lot more roaming around looking for things to do so far. In the first game, you spent a much shorter amount of time looking for fights. The "Puzzle" part of Puzzle Quest shouldn't be actually finding a fight...

I have no idea what the plot is, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for me to care.

Saving Game Reviews From Irrelevancy Part 1

When you ask the majority of gamers their opinion of game reviewers, they usually have a very skeptical view. They may not believe, like some conspiracy theorists do, that reviewers are paid for a good review, but we've been burned repeatedly.

Consider, for instance, the curious case of Super Mario Sunshine. When Sunshine was released in 2002, reviewers loved it. On Metacritic, it has scored 92/100 and recieved the "Universal Acclaim" tag. After playing Super Mario Galaxy, a game which is truly amazing, I decided to go back and play Sunshine, a game that I had missed before. I was really excited for more Mario. I mean, if Galaxy was one of the best games I'd ever played, Sunshine should be great too, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong. Super Mario Sunshine in one of those games that gets worse the more you play it. There is no way now that you could possibly say that it is "universally acclaimed." According to this article from IGN, "Because it is uneven, Super Mario Sunshine is probably the closest you can get to labeling a Super Mario game 'bad.' "

Oh, sure, tell us NOW. After we've already bought the game, played it, gotten frustrated with it and sold it on eBay. I only paid $17.99 at Gamestop and I was disappointed. I shudder to think of the poor souls who paid $50 at retail.

This is not an uncommon occurence, which leads many to be understandably skeptical about game reviews. Why do we have problems with them? How can they be improved? How can we learn to trust them again?

There is a major issue behind reviews that's the "elephant in the room" of most gaming publications. In order to make ends meet, most gaming mags and sites rely on advertising. What types of companies willingly advertise in gaming publications? Why, game companies, of course. So, in effect, the game companies are paying for the gaming publications, who are supposed to be giving objective reviews of the games that the very companies are paying them to review.

Now, that's not to say that every review is bought and paid for. Far from it. There are many outstanding reviewers out there who consistently are objective, and will take a game to task for being bad. Not all companies are as scrupulous, though. It's a business, and some will do whatever it takes to get their bottom line

By now, everyone knows the story of Kane & Lynch, Eidos Interactive, Jeff Gerstmann and Gamespot, but I'll recap for those playing at home who've never heard it: Before the game's release, Gamespot had ads plastered throughout the site for Kane & Lynch, and on the game's release, Jeff Gerstmann panned it. Eidos was angry, pulled their advertising, Gamespot fired Jeff Gerstmann, and there was a huge PR fiasco for all involved. Was this a case of Eidos wanting the ballet box stuffed? There's a lot of circumstantial evidence, and no one has ever come out and expressly said anything, but it's safe to assume that it was. Is this common? No, it isn't.

When writing reviews for a game site myself, I ran into a similar problem. These companies would send us a game and ask us to review it. What are you supposed to say? If you say that the game blows, will you get the next big release? If you say the game is great, will you anger your audience? How do you properly review a game when you're getting it from the maker?

Years ago, a wise man told me the phrase, "Perception is reality." In other words, if people think you're unscrupulous, then it doesn't matter what you say. You are. If people think that you handle issues well, then you do. People think that game companies are in collusion with review sites, and incidents like these only serve to make the issue worse. Therefore, in the public's eyes, they are.

There's also another tricky issue with game reviews: Length. It's easy to review a CD. You listen for a half hour to an hour, and then you put it down. If you want to listen to it again, you listen to it again. It's easy to review a movie. You watch it for two, maybe three hours maximum. Then you go home and digest what you've seen. Games are different animals. You have to have a certain amount of skill to play a game, and the experience can take anywhere from 5 hours for a short game to 100 hours for in-depth RPGs.

On top of that, when do people (and game companies) want game reviews? Two weeks after the game comes out? A month? Of course not! We want the review NOW. We want to know all about how good or bad the game is NOW. There's no way. You can't review 100 hours of content in a couple of days. At most, you're getting a sniff of the game, and at worst, you're missing the entire point of it.

I always point to this Gamespot review of Chrono Cross, a fine game that somehow got a 10.0 rating. I was willing to give it the same rating myself for most of the game. For 2/3 of the game, I was enraptured. Then you had to seek out 8 dragons and do...something with a frozen sea? And...what were we doing again? Why do I have thirty characters that I can choose from when all of them play basically the same?

See, for twenty hours, it was one of the finest games I had ever played. Then, it all fell apart. How can you review that? Was the 10.0 review the right review? Was it wrong? How far can you really review a game before you say that it was good or bad?

There are some reviewers who doesn't fall prey to these issues, like Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. He's the diabolical mind behind Zero Punctuation, and his reviews manage to skirt these problems. Other reviewers manage to avoid these problems as well. What do they do, what lessons can we learn, and how can reviewers make their reviews relevant again? The answers are coming on Monday.

GTA: Lost And Damned Has Nudity In It? OH NOOOOEEESS

Here comes some news! The new expansion pack for GTA is going to have full-frontal nudity. Won't someone think of the children?

I'll tell you something. We live in a world where Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy are more well known than Ingmar Bergman and Milan Kundera. Kate Winslet just won an Academy Award for The Reader, a movie in which she spent a large portion of the first part naked. Anyone can find porn on the internet just by searching for the word "porn." None of these things are for kids.

Hey, here's a newsflash to those parents groups: In order to have those kids, you had to participate in full-frontal nudity! You're all SICK!

Hey, here's an idea. Maybe instead of freaking out over something that is obviously meant for, marketed to, and developed for adults, why not do something else? Maybe take a vacation. See the sights. Go visit Paris. Maybe once you come back, you'll be much calmer and be able to clearly see that the industry is already doing its best at keeping content that is not meant for kids away from kids.

Adventures In Pirating Part 2

In Friday's post, I talked about reasons that normal, law-abiding people will pirate. In this installment, I'll be discussing ways that the gaming industry can win wayward customers like myself back.

1) Become more active in the community. Yes, corporations are nameless, faceless, soulless entities, existing solely to make a profit. However, Ken Levine is not a corporation. Sid Meier is not a corporation. Help us to see you companies as groups of people and communities, not corporations. And for the love of God, whatever you do, do not throw the developers to the wolves only after you've angered the community, like you did to poor Ken Levine.

I hold up as a great example GoodOldGames.com. They've put faces on their community. Even though it's a company, and yes, the bottom line is to make money, they've found that the best way to do so is through fomenting the idea of a group of people who just want what everyone else wants: They want to make money doing what they love and being fair. Sounds good to me, and it's harder to pirate from a person than a corporation. This dovetails with the next point...

2) Get rid of excessive DRM. I'm not talking about removing CD checks or product keys, or going back to the wild, woolly days of software swapping. I have no problem with CD checks or product keys. It's when you start getting out of hand that you hand the high ground over to pirates.

Once again, GoodOldGames seems to be prospering with this idea. We have no solid numbers to back it up yet, but since developers are constantly jumping on board with it, I think we can safely say that it's a success. Since there's no DRM, there's no moral justification to pirate. Therefore, people like us who only pirate when they can justify it to ourselves have no recourse.

3) Remember you're not going to stop everyone. I say that there's two groups of pirates: casual pirates and hardcore pirates. Casual pirates are people like myself. We pirate not because we get any thrill out of it, but as a practical matter. It's easy and cheap. I'm able to play all the latest games for free. I don't pirate to stick it to any mythical "man." I pirate because I like to play games and it's the easiest way to get them. Especially in a down economy, it's going to be hard for a lot of pirates to give up their habits.

The Rubicon between casual and hardcore pirates in my mind seems to be modchipping. When you open your console, you've crossed the line from casual to hardcore. People who willingly open their systems and void their warranties just to get free content are on a different level. The majority of hardcore pirates won't stop. You can try and make the systems harder and harder to hack, but then you're adding layers of complexity for your developers. You still won't stop the pirates either, because the harder it is to hack, the more of a personal challenge it becomes.

In other words, don't try stopping EVERYONE, because you won't. Instead, do this...

4) Give bonuses to people who buy your games at retail. Atlus has started doing this. When they release a game, like Ys Books I&II for the DS, they include a bonus, like a soundtrack CD. Other games will include tchotchkes like figurines or a cloth map. Are these huge presents? No. They're not. The soundtrack will probably be on the torrent sites within minutes of release. The figurine will probably end up buried in a toybox somewhere.

Still, it's not what you give, it's that you give at all. Remember, your living is based on goodwill and warm, fuzzy feelings with your clientele. Making sure they're appreciated goes a long way toward building brand loyalty. Remember, you don't have to do this for every release. It's just that every once in a while, you should get us something nice. Make us feel pretty.

5) Allow us to return games again. This is a bigger bone of contention with publishers, but it would go a long way to reducing piracy. Now, I know Gamestop and others are scared of being considered in league with piracy, as they should be. So, here's a really easy way to handle this that doesn't cost them a penny more.

You know those Edge Cards people sign up for at Gamestop? Let us return games with them too. If we have an Edge Card, allow us to return 1 out of every 10 games we buy. There. Now we're not buying games to pirate them, and now we're able to return purchases that aren't good. Problem solved.

Oh, that's right. I forgot that Gamestop doesn't want to let people return games because they prefer to run their business as an upscale pawn shop. My mistake.

6) Give us more demos. When a movie is good, they let critics screen it ahead of time to provide early reviews and build positive buzz about it. When a movie isn't good, no one gets any pre-screenings because the studio is ashamed of it and wants to limit negative buzz. Let's do that with game demos. Let us see what you're working on before you release it, and don't just let the same purveyors of "exclusive" content in the gaming industry get their hands on it. We don't trust them anymore, so it's not helping.

On top of that, it helps get rid of another excuse that I forgot to mention: The system requirements boondoggle. Years ago, PC Gamer included a demo of Deus Ex with one of their magazines. I really wanted to play it, but I had doubts that it would work on my system. I installed the demo, and it didn't work. I'm so glad I had a demo, because otherwise I would have found out the hard way.

This would also take care of another justification that Shamus Young points out in his "Excuses on the High Seas" article: Now you know whether or not the game will work on your system. You know whether or not it will be good. You don't have to take blind, shot-in-the-dark guesses based on a byzantine list of system requirements and the cryptic reviews of sycophantic game reviewers.

7) Reviewers need to be detached from the industry. Imagine if Roger Ebert worked for Entertainment Weekly. What if, on the cover of every copy of EW for the last six months, they were hyping a new movie. Now, the movie comes out and Roger Ebert hates it. What pressure would he feel to give the movie a better review than normal? I mean, EW survives because it has access, not in spite of it. Ebert might do the right thing because he seems to be an upstanding guy, but it might bring him some flak from the suits higher up.

Now, remember the Jeff Gerstmann incident? Where Gerstmann seemingly left Gamespot over a bad review of Kane & Lynch? Imagine having to do that every single day: Toe the line between hyping up new releases and giving honest opinions. That's where game reviewers are when they work for a company that relies on access.

Getting detached from the industry at large serves another major purpose as well: It slows down the hype machine. Now, instead of fifty different sites all jostling for "Exclusive Access" that will inevitably be parroted on every site as soon as it's released, they're able to concentrate on the games in front of them. This builds value into the product, meaning that pirates are more willing to see the benefit of actually purchasing the game, rather than just consuming it and throwing it aside.

7) Give us more specials. As Valve just proved with Steam, not only do sales go up with lower prices, so do profits. I know it's common to see a AAA title for $50 and a budget title for $20. Ask yourself: Is that really fair pricing? If you're losing customers by the handfuls, are we really making the situation better by keeping the prices so high, especially in a bad worldwide economy? Hopefully we see a dialogue about pricing, and hopefully one that doesn't sound like a preschool fight.

8) Add complexity to pirating. We talked about how simple it is to pirate PC and DS games, and how complicated it is to pirate PS3, 360 and Wii games. Nintendo is taking the next step in anti-piracy with the DSi, which should lock out most major flash cards and also allow for firmware upgrades. It's about time.

The PC is more difficult to lock down. They're on to something with online distribution like Steam, but the PC market is dying. It might be time to abandon it as a single-player platform in favor of more multi-player experiences. I could live with that: My PC as my multiplayer machine, and my consoles as single-player machines. Even fiascos like Spore had a healthy online component that will keep sales going for a long time.

Let's also have CD-key checks for online servers. If I want to play Call of Duty 4 online, double-check my CD-key. Make sure it's legit. The only people who will complain are the pirates. In other words, tell the pirates, "Go ahead. Pirate the single-player experience. You're not getting into multiplayer, though." I guarantee that once the word gets out, you'll limit the amount of pirated copies being distributed. They might set up their own servers, but those servers won't be as well-run as yours are, with online leaderboards.

9) Lastly, it's on us, the pirates. We have to stop. Let's not pretend that we're helplessly being borne along by the waves of technology. We've made the decision to buy the flash card or search for the torrent. We're not helpless victims. We're people who are trying to take content from others.

I take issue with people who say that pirates are killing the industry, but there is a kernel of truth to it. If a popular game doesn't sell, it doesn't matter how many people are playing it. They're not going to make another one.

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There it is: a list of several solutions to the piracy crisis. Companies usually focus on only two: Making it harder to pirate and telling us to stop pirating. It's not that simple. There are economic considerations and broken trust on both sides. In order to fix a problem that runs this deep, there needs to be a long two-sided dialogue. Your move, game companies.

Adventures In Pirating Part 1

I'm going to just come out and say it: I'm a pirate.

Here's the kicker: So are a lot of other people.

Usually, whenever there's an article about pirating, it is essentially written from the publisher's point of view. This holds true even for "edgy" publications, like the Escapist. Here's a sampling from their "Pirate Week:"

Pirates Anonymous: In which a former pirate reforms and realizes the error of his ways.
Viva La Revolucion: A mocking treatise about the supposed justifications of pirates.
Rob From The Rich, Steal From The Poor: About how pirating from small-time companies hurts their bottom line.

In other words, even when game journalists try and broach the subject, they have to be careful what they say. If they say too much, they risk alienating publishers and developers. They have to talk about how pirating is a "scourge" and it's destroying the industry, all while clucking their tongues at the pirates for being such naughty children.

The problem lies here: There's more to pirating than people who just want free things. It's a complex issue with a lot of variables, and understanding the underlying causes can help alleviate the problem.

Now, I pride myself on being an honest person. I have never stolen anything from a store, except for once when I was five I took a piece of candy from a Brach's Pick-A-Mix stand and felt horribly guilty for years afterwards. I drive the speed limit, I am respectful to my elders, and I treat law enforcement with the utmost respect and dignity. So how could I decide to pirate games?

Above all, remember this: I'm not trying to justify or legitimize piracy. I'm not trying to say that it's right and noble. I'm just spelling out why someone like myself pirates games instead of paying for them. In the next part of this series, I'll be breaking down what can be done to bring former customers like myself back into the fold.

1) The bad economy. I had been working at a computer store for about two years. It paid okay, but it wasn't phenomenal. My wife works too, and we're both in debt to the tune of about 10 grand total. About five months ago, I lost my job. I have since reentered the full-time workforce at my previous wage, but we're playing a lot of catchup. I suspect that there are a lot of people in my position, or worse.

If you have a choice between buying a game or putting food on the table, which would you do? That dovetails nicely with the next point:

2) The price of games. I'm not the only person who thinks this is an issue. There is one person who I consistently agree with: Gabe Newell. He has said that pirates are "underserved customers," which is true. He also says that games are too expensive. Look at this article, where he talks about promotions. He says that during a sales period, an unnamed third-party game went on sale, and the amount of sales went up 36,000% for that title. He also publicly stated that not only did the sales go up during sales on Steam, but profits went up too.

$50-$60 for a new release is expensive. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, especially in a bad economy. When you have maybe $20 left over after you pay all your bills or you have had your hours cut at work, it's very difficult to justify spending so much money for something frivolous.

3) Chiding game journalists. This goes back to the articles I posted at first. The article about the reformed game journalist who decided to give up piracy made my blood boil. He talks about he realized that he wasn't able to really play games when he was a pirate, so he really didn't love them like he does now that he stopped pirating.

That's bull. I love games just as much as the next guy. I have played video games since I was five, and I can't imagine life without them. I am able to dig deep into games because I have such a wide swath of games to enjoy. Don't treat me like a second-class citizen because I don't buy them.

Besides, how many game journalists who consistently chide pirating gamers have a 100% legitimate music collection? Have you ever downloaded a song from early Napster, Kazaa, or Limewire? Congratulations! You're a pirate!

You know what else gets me? When game journalists blame all of gaming's ills on pirates. When a game doesn't sell, they blame all the pirates for ruining it. I can't find the article now, but it blames the R4DS for Nintendo not making any hardcore games for the DS. I would argue that the strategy RPG is one of the most hardcore types of game out there, and the DS is swimming with them. In fact, Nintendo just released Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon on the DS this week. Are you telling me they've abandoned the DS? You have to be kidding me.

When game journalists harp on this viewpoint, it detracts from the real issues in the industry and makes pirates disrespect your viewpoint even more. Instead, it makes pirates defensive and angry. What possible benefit are you getting out of these articles, other than making publishers more happy with you?

4) DRM issues. Some people will point to DRM as being the only issue driving pirates. It's not. However, it is an issue. Why should I pay $50 for Spore and be able to install it five times? Why should I wait for CD-checks, Starforce, rootkits and other detritus to start before I can play my game? Why can't I just go and get the game and own it?

Imagine if you were going to buy a blender. The salesman told you that you could only have this blender in five different locations around the house. After that, it would stop working, and the only way to get it to work is by calling the manufacturer. If you lend it to someone else, the blender will stop working for them or you. The company claims that most households will only ever keep it in one spot, so it's not an issue. They want to make sure that everyone has to buy a blender.

There would be mass consumer outrage! There would be a company-wide investigation into why they did this, and who allowed this to happen. It would give anti-blender consumerists the moral high ground.

And therein lies the problem. Draconian DRM is a problem because it gives pirates the feeling of a moral high ground. Whether or not it's true, it doesn't change the fact that people like "sticking it to the man," especially when "the man" keeps trying to stick it to them.

5) No-refund policies. I didn't always used to be a pirate. There was a time when I bought games left and right, amassing a huge collection. There was a reason: Electronics Boutique opened up in our local mall. At the time, they had a policy that you could return games after they were opened if you didn't like them. I didn't take advantage of it much, but I did once after buying Wizardry 8.

Why is a return policy such a big deal? Well, would you buy anything else if you couldn't return it? In other words, you have to know before you buy the game whether or not you will like it. That's impossible to know. For instance, I have a fear of water and swimming. There are no review sites that will point out whether or not a game has swimming portions in it. I have had games that I bought that I didn't like because of that reason. They're good games, but I can't play them, and now I can't return them.

6) The ease of piracy. I download PC games, and I own an R4DS card. I frequently use emulators. I have never modded a system. In the last few years I have owned a PS2, a Gamecube, and a Wii, and I buy games legitimately for all of them. What are the common threads between what I pirate and what I don't pirate?

Piracy on the PC and DS is easy. You can't brick your PC by pirating a game. You can't destroy your DS by using an R4 card. Emulators are simple to use: Download the emulator, download a game. Configure controls, push play. You're done.

On the other hand, piracy on a console is a different proposition. You're usually cracking open the console (thereby voiding your warranty), putting in a chip, and then burning metal onto that chip to keep it in place. It's dangerous, and a huge risk to take with an expensive machine.

7) The game journalism cycle. We, the game journalists, have to stop doing this. When a game is announced, we start rolling out the hype machine. We talk about all the amazing features that Game X will have, and how you can't be without it. Then, when it comes out we try and be the first company to post a review. We maybe talk about the game for another week, tops. Then we move on to the next "must-have" game, and keep the hype machine rolling.

Now, this works great with movies and music. Movies and music require minimal investments of time. You don't have to "learn" most movies or music. You can sit, watch or listen to it for 2-3 hours, and then walk away. Games aren't like that. You need to learn the game and then spend time enjoying it. We whine when a game has only 6 hours of playtime.

Therein lies the problem. It's not just that games are so expensive, it's that there are so many of them. How are we supposed to keep on top of the gaming cycle without piracy? When is there a chance to catch your breath and catch up on games that you didn't play before? When does the hype machine stop rolling?

9) Companies are nameless, faceless corporations. Most companies seem to be just people in suits. We can't imagine them as gamers, since the decisions they make are so frequently wrong from a gamer's standpoint. I mean, mention EA to some gamers, and you get almost a visceral reaction, as if EA had killed their puppy when they were a kid, or bullied them on the way home from school.

10) Habit. It starts with one game. Then the next. After a while, you don't even think about going to buy that hot new release. You just wait for it to hit the torrents and get it. I've even looked for indie fare, like Depths of Peril, but after Shamus Young commented on pirating indie games, I decided against it.

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Once again, none of these reasons make it okay to pirate. I'm not condoning it. I'm saying that people have legitimate reasons why they choose to pirate games. So what can be done? What are game companies doing right, what are they doing wrong, and what can they do to bring pirates back to the fold? The answer is coming on Monday.

Some interesting stuff about Avalon Code

Here's a hands-on from Gamespot. I wasn't sure if we really needed another RPG for the DS, but this looks promising.

Finally Logged Into Club Nintendo

I'm now officially a member of Club Nintendo. I'm pretty excited. I don't know what for, but I've been trying to do this for a while now, so to finally get the monkey off my back is a big deal.

Weird Rulership Situations In Gaming: Part 1

There are lots of strange leadership situations in gaming. We're talking ineffectual kings, worthless princesses, and "captains" who can't actually lead anything. Today, we're going to highlight one of my favorites: King DeDeDe from the Kirby series.

Let's do a quick recap of what King DeDeDe has accomplished during his tenure as monarch over Dream Land. In Kirby's Dream Land, he attempted to steal all the food from the kingdom, only to get defeated by the hero of the land, Kirby. You would think that he would have been permanently removed from office after such a disgrace, but maybe there's a really strong base for him in the Dream Land House of Lords, or they just haven't signed a Magna Carta there.

After this a pattern starts. In Kirby's Adventure, Kirby beats the crap out of the king again, only to find that he was actually protecting the country by turning off the Fountain of Dreams. This shows that he is a poor delegator. I mean, don't you think you would tell the person who seems to have a vendetta against you what you're planning on doing before getting the crap kicked out of you again?

This is a recurring theme afterwards: It's repeated in Kirby's Dream Land 2 and 3. DeDeDe has a hare-brained scheme to save the land, but he doesn't tell anyone. This leaves the confused populace to fend for themselves and the country devolves into a bloody battlefield. Kirby is constantly getting attacked by otherwise friendly countrymen who apparently swear loyalty to the king. It's possible that DeDeDe has great approval ratings.

However, even if his consituents love him, as the picture below would seem to indicate, that only makes things worse. Then, Kirby isn't quite the hero he's made out to be. Here's something to make you think: Maybe the people of Dream Land truly know the King's intentions. Maybe Kirby is instead the last one to know, so he's a murderer instead, responsible for the needless deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of Dream Land residents. In other words, when you play Kirby games, you're playing the story of a misguided, murderous monster who kills rather than ask questions.

In fact, the situation has gotten so bad that in Kirby: Squeak Squad, Kirby isn't really justified in anything he does. Here's the plot: He's sitting down to eat some cake, and then someone who is shaped like a rat steals the cake. Instead of chasing after someone who is clearly a rat, he goes and beats up King DeDeDe. Again. Once again, how is this helping? How are you restoring faith in the monarchy when every time something goes wrong, you march straight into the palace, slaughter the guards, and humiliate the king?

How did it get to this point? Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of DeDeDe. He was the one who started this mess back in Kirby's Dream Land. Naturally, once someone tries to steal all of the food in the country, it's assumed that they're a bad guy. But this has now gone beyond mere distrust. This is now a personal vendetta, and one that needs drastic action. We're talking out-and-out treason against the crown, which should not stand.

Apparently, the lines of communication have not been open to this live wire, loose cannon named Kirby. I can imagine his trepidation over opening a dialogue, considering that Kirby seems to kill anyone associated with the King. But wouldn't you at least try, considering the untold damage that's he done?

All of this makes me think that underneath the surface of the happy-go-lucky Kirby series lies a deep well of resentment and hatred that is bound to burst forth one day in a new, gritty reboot, one in which the very fabric of Dream Land is being rent asunder by warring factions. Lives will be lost. Kingdoms will fall. Fruit will be eaten.

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