Terry Francona Out As Manager of the Red Sox

After the Red Sox epic collapse, there was a lot of blame to go around. The hitter went ice-cold, the pitchers couldn't hit the strike zone with a bulldozer, there were no good arms available to pitch after injuries struck, and there were some weird managerial decisions made.

Which problem was the biggest cause? Hard to say, but probably the lack of pitching. Whose fault is that? The management, right? That's on Theo Epstein's doorstep. A few arms went down, they overspent on John Lackey and ended up with crap in the rotation.

So who takes the fall? Terry Francona. Explain to me how this works: How a manager can be a god early in the season, all of his players like him and the rotation is awful because the GM hasn't picked any good players, and yet the manager takes the hit.

This is why I prefer the management structure with teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers. They've had three coaches in 40 years: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin. If a coach has a bad year, you evaluate whether he had a bad year because of bad luck or bad coaching and go accordingly.

In this case, the Sox had a bad year because of bad GM-ing. Let's fire the manager instead! So much easier.

Ironclad Brewers Playoff Predictions

With the Brewers starting the playoffs tomorrow, I figured I would break down how each game is going to go. These are ironclad predictions, so you may not even need to watch the games.

Game 1: Yovani Gallardo pitches 9 innings and throws 27 strikeouts. Ryan Braun hits like 5 home runs and all of the Diamondbacks start crying in the dugout. Kirk Gibson breaks his leg during a particularly strong sob.

Game 2: Zack Greinke pitches 8 innings only because he got bored and sent out a pitching machine in an attempt to make the game even. The pitching machine gets 2 strikeouts and induces a groundout to end the game. Prince Fielder pulls down his pants and poops on Daniel Hudson at midfield after hitting his fourth home run as Hudson curls into the fetal position.

Game 3: The Brewers get to the Arizona stadium only to find that the Diamondbacks are still in their hotel rooms in Milwaukee, rending their garments and throwing ashes in the air. The Brewers decide to give the Diamondbacks some time to get to the stadium, so they postpone Game 3.

Game 3 (Redux): The Diamondbacks walk in to the stadium dragging their bats behind them, each with the expression of a man being led to the gallows. Each player has changed their walkup music to "Leaving on a Jet Plane."

The game begins with Stephen Drew lacing a hit to the outfield. That is the last hit they will get. By the sixth inning they're not even bringing a bat up to the plate, just weakly swinging at each pitch with their hand. After each at-bat, Jonathan Lucroy licks each batter's faces and says, "Your tears are like sweet wine to me."

The Brewers advance to the NLDS, leaving the Diamondbacks questioning the existence of God.

Review: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo

The only video game system I grew up with was a Game Boy, and the first game I bought for it was Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. I would play through levels looking for secrets when there was no indication that a secret lurked in the level. I knew Super Mario Land 2 inside and out and can probably to this day rely on muscle memory enough to beat it without blinking.

That makes me uniquely qualified to tell you if it's a good game or not.
What made Super Mario Land 2 so great is that the first Super Mario Land was kind of bad. The character animation in the first game was drab, all of the sprites were tiny with no detail whatsoever, and the whole game was kind of weird. It was the kind of game that would convince you that handheld games could never, ever live up to their big console counterparts.

Super Mario Land 2 was a different animal. Mario looked like the same character we knew from Super Mario World. He could do a spin jump. He had several different powerups, like bunny ears. The bosses were cool, and the enemies looked like actual Mario enemies instead of tiny little knockoffs. While the original may have convinced you that handheld games were a waste of time, Super Mario Land 2 gave you hope that someday handheld games could be as good as console games.

It was also great because it was the first appearance of Wario, who was an odd enemy. The entire plot of the game revolves around Mario just trying to take back his castle. No princess to rescue, no world to save, just Mario taking back his stuff from a greedy jerk who would become one of Nintendo's more interesting characters.

Super Mario Land 2 was also a very non-linear game. After the first level, which taught you the basics of gameplay, you were free to go to any of the six worlds. Some had to be reached by weird ways, like getting in to a bubble blown by a hippo. (Long story.) Some had multiple ways to beat the world which could allow you to almost bypass entire worlds. That means there was no rational difficulty curve to speak of, but there was usually a lot of interesting stuff to do that kept the gameplay fresh.

Instead of comparing Super Mario Land 2 to other Mario games, I would compare it instead to Mega Man. In Mega Man, as long as you beat the bosses, it didn't matter what order you beat them in. Ditto with Super Mario Land 2: Get the six coins in order to open up your castle, and it didn't matter what order you got them in. That sort of freedom was incredibly rare for a 2-D Mario game, and still is.

So how does Super Mario Land 2 play? It's pretty good. The first Super Mario Land could be difficult because of the tiny size of Mario and your enemies. Since Mario is so much larger in this game, you won't mistime jumps, you won't find yourself getting hit by enemies with as much frequency, and you won't end up falling off of things that you think you're standing on but actually aren't.

There's also great variety in the choice of worlds. You have a forest world and a space world, but you also have a mini world, a haunted house world, a machinery world and a world that takes place inside a whale, complete with blubber that you can swim through. With 32 levels total, you'll have a lot to find and explore.

I thought Super Mario Land 2 was a great deal when I bought it back in 1992 with the money that I earned from my paper route. I paid $30 for it then. It's $3.99 now. If any of this sounds interesting, pick it up.

Final Grade: B+

Game Design: Bad Ideas

We always remember things as being better than they actually were.

I say this because I'm currently playing 10 NES games as provided to me by Nintendo on my 3DS. NES games are usually viewed as being totally awesome, and if you mention that maybe some of these games weren't maybe very good, you run the risk of angering people.


The argument is that these games were good for their time and helped lay the foundation for modern gaming, and that's correct. The danger isn't in recognizing them for what they were, but rather believing that old games are some sort of end-all-be-all and that gaming was somehow better back in the NES days than it is now.

It's a mistake to think so. A lot of the design decisions that are hailed now were only placed there because of system limitations or due to erroneous assumptions about what video games were all about. We're going to go through some design decisions from time to time that were bad ideas then and bad ideas now, and only have managed to stay in gaming because of misguided nostalgia.

The first mistake is evidenced by Super Mario Bros. If you lose all of your lives in Super Mario Bros., what happens? Do you get to restart at the last level you died in? If you die in 8-2, can you restart in 8-1? No, you restart from the beginning of the game, level 1-1.

You may say, "Well, of course! It wouldn't be Super Mario Bros. without that! Gaming shouldn't be about about completing the game, it should be about improving your skills and getting to the point where you can complete it!"

If you say that, you're wrong.

Gaming was born in the arcades. Early designers were tasked not only with making fun games, but also ones that would gobble coins. Pacman, Space Invaders, Gauntlet and Donkey Kong were all about taking your money as quickly and as often as possible. In order to get good at an arcade game, you had to spend lots and lots of money until you could finally get to the point where you didn't have to spend that much money.

That means that you don't want players to restart from the last level they died on. You're giving away your livelihood if you do so. You'll also make a lot of other design decisions that are ridiculous for precisely those reasons, but we'll get to those at a different time.

A lot of developers who came from that background (read: all of them at the time) carried over that philosophy from the arcades. Miyamoto designed arcade games, for example. Therefore, instead of making the game easier to complete, they made it harder to finish precisely because that's the philosophy and experience that they had.

Was it the right choice for Super Mario Bros.? Yeah, it was the right choice because Super Mario Bros. is a rather short game. If you're good, you can finish it in 10 minutes, and if you're really good you can finish it in 5. If you could have started the game over at level 8-1, you probably would have finished it almost immediately, even back when you were 10 years old.

However, is it the right choice for other games of its type? No.

Let's use the example of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. If you lose all three of your lives, instead of starting you out at, say, the beginning of the dungeon that you died in, you restart the game at the very beginning. That means you have to traverse open fields, dangerous caves and lots of hostile environments all just to get back to the last place you died.

Does that force you to get better at the game? Yeah, sure. Does it make you want to keep playing? Of course not.

Imagine playing for two hours, dying, and then having to struggle all the way back to where you died, then dying again and having to get back to the same place. If you're nodding your head and saying, "Yeah, what's the big deal?" then you're part of the problem.

It's easy to forget that you played this type of game when you were a kid. You had a lot of time on your hands, so losing several hours of progress was not a big deal. If you still have that much time on your hands years later, you're probably not doing so hot in life, frankly. Get a job.

For the rest of us, we simply don't have time to waste. My gaming time is sometimes broken down into 15-minute chunks when I have space to breathe. Do I want to waste that time? Heck no! It's too precious to lose!

It didn't take long for game makers to learn that lesson, but some gamers still pine for the days when they had to restart games from the beginning when they lost. Listen, designers only did that to screw you over. It was a bad idea then, and it's a bad idea now.

Zelda: Four Swords

Apparently, Zelda: Four Swords is available worldwide for 3DS users! I'm going to have to pick this up tonight to see how it is, assuming I have time.

Review: Xenoblade Chronicles

Developer: Monolith Soft
Publisher: Nintendo

Xenoblade Chronicles should be released in the States. I don't mean this like, "There's a strong possibility that it will be," or "It could be." I mean this like, "Nintendo owes it to gamers to release Xenoblade Chronicles in their largest market."

It's only fair. Wii owners suffered through lean years, crappy games, jokes about the system being underpowered and "gathering dust" references for the last five years. We can't help but feel inferior to the supposed console "big boys," who end up looking down at us while we plaintively wail that the Wii is not that bad.

Indeed, the Wii has been a pretty good system, considering. Super Mario Galaxy and Zelda: Twilight Princess were some of the best games of this generation. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is pure fan-service. Mario Kart Wii has a great online presence, as does Monster Hunter 3. The WiiWare service was surprisingly robust considering its limitations, and the Virtual Console has been great.

It would be only fitting, then, if Nintendo would release Xenoblade Chronicles, the generation's finest RPG on any system, on their "underpowered" and "kiddie" Wii.

What makes Xenoblade Chronicles so excellent? Let's start by going down the list.

1. Interesting characters. The characters behave in real ways. They feel like real people, while doing and saying things that real people might say. They're not just "generic hero X," and they have real motivations for what they do.
2. Great music. I get the Gaur Plains music in my head all the time, and I never get tired of hearing it.
3. A deep combat system. Your positioning relative to your opponents matters. How long you've had the party together matters. How often you fight battles matters. I've been playing for twenty hours and I'm still finding nuances in the combat system.
4. A unique environment. As opposed to "generic RPG planet X," you're on a giant creature called the Bionis that's been locked in combat with another creature called the Mechonis for aeons. You're playing the game, essentially, on one of the Colossi from Shadow of the Colossus, just fifty times larger.
5. An achievement system that matters. Achievements in most games are merely rubber stamps or things you can use to show off. Here, achievements provide XP rewards.
6. A game that rewards you for mindless exploration. Found a new location? Congratulations, here's some XP. Found a landmark? Congrats, here's a place you can restart your game at any point.
7. Easy travel. Instead of having to walk constantly from point A to point B and all points in between, you can select fast travel and instantly end up where you need to go with no penalty. You can also wind the clock using this method.
8. A quest system that makes sense. You won't just walk in to a town and see hundreds of people with exclamation points over their heads. You'll do a few quests, which will unlock other quests, which will unlock others, and so on. You can even help rebuild a city using this system.
9. Longevity. I've been playing twenty hours, like I said before. I looked at an FAQ to see how far I have to go, and I'm about 1/3 of the way through. That's with me skipping over some quests or sidestepping others altogether.
10. No harsh penalty for losing battles. If you die, you don't have to sit through a Game Over screen, then go back to the main menu, then reload your game from your last save point. If you die, your character restarts the game at the last major landmark that you saw, meaning that you can try some battles repeatedly until you get it right, or just leave the area and come back when you're more powerful. It's your choice.

Xenoblade Chronicles isn't perfect. For example, the voice acting isn't necessarily bad, but the characters are all far too chatty. During combat, they'll all be talking, announcing their moves, saying how they feel, shouting words of encouragement, sometimes all at the same time. Some battles will sound like everyone's just talking at once, which is a little silly, not to mention annoying and confusing.

Plus, battles can be a little hard to control. It can be too easy to end up attacking the wrong enemy or putting your friends in a position where they all get bushwhacked. Plus, since the Wii is underpowered, you can't always tell which enemy is which.

There are some features that look plain ugly. In one early part, they showed the landscape of the surrounding area, and the ground was quite literally one texture stretched across several hills. It looked hideous. This is a game that would have benefited from being released in HD, no doubt.

Still, seriously, Nintendo, what's the deal? You'll release Wii Play Motion and Mario Sports Mix, while allowing your system to get overrun with Game Party derivatives. Yet, when a really good game falls in your lap, you refuse to release it in the United States. It's almost as if you don't want people to have a deep experience on the Wii for fear they'll go screaming to the hills.

Anyway, if you can find the way to play PAL games on your Wii, go out and get Xenoblade Chronicles. It'll tide you over until Nintendo decides not to release The Last Story in the US, and that'll give us another reason to get angry.

Final Grade: A

A Reason For 3DS Anger?

The recent 3DS event that Nintendo held was underwhelming for American viewers, no doubt. We saw demonstrations of New Love Plus, weird Japanese dancing games, and other oddities. The big draw of the night was Monster Hunter 3G and the announcement of Monster Hunter 4, both of which are niche products here in the States.


We're seeing a pile of angry articles now, complaining that 3DS users were "beta testers," that there's still no good games for it, that Kid Icarus is getting delayed, everything. Anything and everything having to do with the 3DS now sucks.

I can't entirely blame them, honestly. What started off as such a promising system has been held down by delays and retreads.

For example, let's say the launch of the 3DS was held up until August. We would have seen a massive launch with all of the games that we saw at launch already, like the updated PilotWings game, Nintendogs + Cats, and Ghost Recon. We would have had full eShop functionality, the Ocarina remake ready to go, and a quick succession of games ready almost right after launch, including Star Fox 64 3D, Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7, and then Kid Icarus Uprising in early 2012.

With that kind of lineup, it would have been a fantastic launch, one of the best ever for any system. Instead, it's been kind of a limp, weird launch that hasn't impressed anyone.

That being said, it hasn't been all bad. Early adopters have piles of free games now, and while yes, some features have been held out for a while, we still have them. I think I have another reason that people are angry, though.

On my DS, I had an R4DS card. Now before you criticize or write an angry screed in the comments section about how "piracy is killing the game industry," remember that lot of people bought flashcarts. So many people did that game manufacturers started to get wise.

Publishers started tossing in code into their games in order to glitch flashcarts or make the games simply not work using a flashcart. That required the flashcart makers to patch up the games, and around and around they went. They were so popular they were banned in Japan, although they're still freely available here.

On my flashcart, I had a Nintendo emulator, Sega Genesis emulator, Game Boy Color emulator and the ability to play GBA games. Once again, I suspect there were other people in the same boat.

It wasn't very difficult to find out about the existence of flashcarts, either. Respectable gaming websites like Kotaku and others reported on the R4DS as dutifully as they reported on George Hotz' hacking of the PS3. However, reporting about something also brings attention to it, so more people would buy the flashcarts, and around and around we went again.

OK, so what kind of people bought flashcarts? These people aren't the scenesters who spend hours a day cruising DS rom sites, but just people who want to play lots and lots of games. They're the kind of people who cruise gaming websites for info. They're able to search online and find things relatively easily. They obviously care about getting the most for their money and like to have the newest and brightest shinies to show off.

Now we go back to those who bought the 3DS at launch. Which kind of people were these? They were those who followed information about the 3DS. They like to have the newest and brightest shinies to show off. They're people who love games.

Do you see the intersect here?

I'm speaking from personal experience, but I find myself a little annoyed that I can't play all of my emulators and switch between games at will on my 3DS. I'm annoyed that my saved games don't stay with the system but stay with the cartridge. These are all things I got used to while pirating the DS.

So now I've gone from having a system where every game I wanted was free, I had all of my saved games stored on the system and had unlimited access to a back library of games to having a system where new games are $40 and I have to wait for Nintendo to release older games for the system.

Are these things the 3DS' fault? No, they're my fault. I shouldn't have pirated the DS in the first place. Does it still annoy me? Yes, yes it does. Are there ways to pirate the 3DS yet? Probably. I'm not going to look into them. I've had a good run, but I'm not doing that anymore.

Am I saying that everyone who complains about the 3DS is or was a pirate? No. Not at all. There are legitimate complaints about the 3DS as it was released. As we said, the library was dumpy and the launch kind of staggered along.

Yet, could this be part of the anger directed at the 3DS? It's no surprise that the people who are complaining about the 3DS are also trumpeting a) The PS Vita, where games will be able to be placed on memory sticks and b) iOS gaming, where games are cheap, plentiful and can be switched in and out easily.

With both of those systems, the same things you would get if you had a DS flashcart, i.e. switching between games at will and cheap games, are available in one form or another. Sure, Vita games will be expensive, but you shouldn't have to switch out games that often. Sure, iOS games aren't that deep, but they're cheap.

We'll see how this pans out, but it wouldn't surprise me. If it's true, DS piracy may not have hurt the fortunes of the DS, but it certainly may have killed the 3DS in its cradle.