Favorite #29: Super Mario Kart

Posted on 9th March 2011 in Something Daily

It’s occurred to me that this idea of enumerating my favorite games may be ill-conceived. Even so, I want to finish now that I’ve started, so I’m just going to keep doing it. It’s helpful for when I don’t have stuff to write about (because for some reason I really feel like I have to post every day). Anyway….

Super Mario Kart is, in a relative sense, a new addition to my collection. Having grown up playing Mario Kart 64, I only learned of the existence of Super Mario Kart in the last year or two, when I had huge SNES marathons with my friend who had one from his childhood. The first thing I remember about SMK is that being used to the N64 version predisposed me to being very bad at the SNES version. I picked up the controller expecting it to feel pretty much the same as playing the 3d version, and it certainly isn’t – for the longest time playing this game, I would just get murdered every time I attempted to take on my friend. Even on 50cc (the lowest difficulty) I could get 3rd place at best in the grand prix, despite having mastered Mario Kart 64 years prior. Lesson learned: that kind of assumption makes no sense.

I still find SMK really hard actually; I am reliably awesome at the mushroom cup on any difficulty, but I’ve once again hit a snag with the flower cup on 150cc. I swear they make Luigi cheat on purpose. He wins every race on 150cc, uses about three super stars per lap, and knows how to position himself right in front of you to make you hit him and spin out. Luigi has robbed me of so many victories on the highest difficulty level that I’ve gotten to the point of actually yelling at him when he pulls some jerk move like that. I’ve never really felt that way about a video game before, where one character in particular is the reason that it’s hard. That’s the thing: in my mind, it’s not that SMK is a hard game, it’s just that Luigi is a cheating scumbag.

Screw you, Luigi…seriously. Stop cheating, and stop making me play Super Mario Galaxy 2 twice.

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Honorable Mention: Burnout 3

Posted on 27th February 2011 in Something Daily

I have always had a special place in my collection for racing games. Typically, while I devote a lot of time and effort to completing story-based games (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, et cetera), racing games are usually the games I play when I don’t care to think about plot or be forced to attempt the same objective again and again. These days, it’s Super Mario Kart, in my childhood it was Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing, and last summer, when I briefly owned a Playstation 2, it was Burnout 3. One of these things is not like the others.

I really liked Extreme G 2. I also really liked the above mentioned DKR and MK games, and F-Zero. I like these probably because they’re complete fantasy – arcade style controls and/or speeds that no real car could ever achieve. I’m not into playing driving games that attempt to make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. Gran Turismo and Need for Speed have never really been my thing, mainly because I don’t think it’s at all fun to not be able to drift around corners or shove other drivers off the track just because a real car can’t do it. That’s where Burnout 3 comes in: to me it’s quite a good blend of realism and arcade ridiculosity. The cars have real names and look like things that you’d actually drive, but they handle impossibly well (for the most part) and do, in fact shove other cars all over the place. They’ve got you racing through back alleys and on highways and in the middle of street markets. It’s all very fantastic and kind of silly.

The fact that the camera automatically goes into slow motion every time you take another car down by ramming the crap out of it is just one more reason. It’s all really indicative of how arcade-y the game really is. And if I remember correctly, they’ve got a ridiculous radio DJ on announcing the whole thing. It’s a lot of fun. I played through the whole thing last summer when I was bored out of my mind lifeguarding by day and gaming by night. I did notice, though, when I started to play it more and more, that I’d be driving in real life in a real car and have the impulse to do Burnout drifts and knock slow drivers around a little bit – this game is dangerous. The same thing happens to me with Mario Kart, though, so maybe I’m just hypersensitive to it. But anyway. One more honorable mention and then the list can truly begin.

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Make your SNES all better

Posted on 9th November 2010 in Something Daily

Last night I sat down to play a bit of Super Mario Kart before bed. As usual, it took a few manual flips of the power switch to get the game started correctly; I also had to take the cartridge out a few times and blow on the contacts. Eventually it started working, I picked my character, and as the first race was starting, I knocked the side of my desk with my foot and the screen went black. I started the game again to see what was up, since this was certainly something out of the ordinary, even for my old and partially broken SNES.

My SNES Game Collection

It turns out that with all of my games except Super Mario World, jiggling the cartridge even the slightest bit while the game was running caused an instant freeze – and, in cases where this applied, a total deletion of the save data (this is why I didn’t do the test with Super Metroid…that game is hard). So seeing that this was happening, and realizing that it was pretty unusual, I looked online and discovered that this type of problem can be caused by a dust buildup on the contacts of the cartridge holder inside the console itself. So I folded up a Post-it and slid it between the two rows of contacts while holding the little door open. I could see a lot of blackish dust and dirt collecting on the paper, and sure enough, when I inserted another game and jiggled it around as a test, it was working fine – totally impervious to freezing. So there it is – if you have an SNES (or, I would guess, any older system that uses cartridges) that’s having trouble reading games, try cleaning out the contacts where the cartridge connects to the console. I really didn’t think it would work, but it totally did the trick.

I’m exposing myself to a lot more PHP/Javascript recently, mainly by reading a ton of posts on Stack Overflow, which is a public forum for programmers of any skill level, with every post organized by tags so you can see conversations about subjects of interest. Mostly it’s a Q&A type situation, where one will make a post asking a question they’ve run into, they can be answered by the community. By the way, Stack Overflow has a huge community (it’s a top 500 site, in fact). But I’ve been reading a lot about PHP and Javascript and how they’re used in conjunction with HTML and APIs like Foursquare and WordPress. I’m not building anything yet, just learning. But this totally counts as a project in my mind. Learning is very important.

Also, I’m listening to MF Doom’s Doomsday, which is an essential underground rap album (released two days after my 8th birthday, fun fact). If you don’t know Doom, I really, really recommend his stuff, especially Doomsday and Madvillainy, which he did with Madlib. Doom has some of the most interesting and unfathomable lyrics I’ve ever heard – “I-C-E cold, nice to be old/Y2G steed twice to threefold/He sold scrolls, lo and behold/Know who’s the illest ever like the greatest story told”…what!? I’m not sure if he writes his stuff on Doomsday or freestyles it, but I think it’s awesome either way. Check it out.

I found this on reddit (where else, right?) – it’s a multitool from ancient Rome. Check out the size of the knife!

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