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.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , ,

Favorite #30: Banjo Kazooie

Posted on 2nd March 2011 in Something Daily

Ok, this is the official beginning of the actual list of my favorite games of all time. Let’s talk about Banjo Kazooie.

As you will definitely be able to tell from this list, I was a child of the Nintendo 64. It was the first and only console we had in our house for many years of my childhood, until Gamecube came out in 2001. I’d come home every day from school excited to play some Diddy Kong Racing, Super Mario 64, or, as was the case a little later on, Banjo Kazooie. I have no recollection of how I initially came in contact with it, but it was most likely through Nintendo Power magazine, which I subscribed to religiously for a good number of years. I’d always read them cover to cover, vicariously playing the games that I didn’t own just by reading every word of the walkthroughs and poring over the screenshots and punny title headings. But at some point, Nintendo Power probably did a walkthrough of a segment of Banjo Kazooie, and I probably got it for my birthday or Christmas or something.

I’m sure I expected Banjo Kazooie to be a lot like Super Mario 64, which was my best and favorite game around the time that BK was released in 1998. It made sense to my young mind that it would basically just be more of the same, except with a bear and bird instead of an italian in overalls. Obviously, that’s not really the case at all, and really all that the two games share is a general adventure genre aesthetic and design philosophy – you have to get a certain number of x to get through this door, you have to collect z y to get more x, et cetera. In Mario 64 it was red coins and stars, in Banjo Kazooie it was Jinjoes and puzzle pieces. Apart from that kind of basic similarity, though, I actually remember thinking that Banjo Kazooie was a lot cooler than Mario 64 – like it had grown up and gotten into more awesome stuff. You can turn into an ant, for one thing, which allows you to walk on walls – that is pretty cool. Also, this is one of the few games I played in my youth that had cheat codes BUILT IN…you usually had to use a Gameshark that would screw up your game somehow, but here it’s so easy! The sandcastle in the pirate ship level has the alphabet on the ground, and you can ground-pound in cheat codes one letter at a time. I remember thinking that part was so cool.

As Banjo Kazooie went on, I remember having a lot of trouble with the later levels, especially Clanker’s Cavern and the big metal ship level. That game actually got quite difficult pretty quickly. I still think it’s pretty hard (another example of me whining nonstop about game difficulty) – and I hesitate to admit that I’ve never actually finished it. I did come ridiculously close back when I owned it for N64, getting all the way to the final battle with Gruntilda – and then of course, after trying the battle once and being totally demolished, my savegame was lost. I think that’s when I started playing Lego Racers (by the way, there is no feeling to match the despair of having a parent turn off the console after you’ve made a lot of progress in a game but haven’t gotten to a save point yet. More on that later in the list). I know that it’s probably no harder than Ocarina is, for example, but I’ve put in a lot more time on Ocarina than I have on BK. I’m sure there was even a time when I thought Mario 64 was hard. It’s just that I didn’t really try as hard as I did with other games. Maybe I didn’t truly love this one as much, but I still feel like it deserves a place on my all-time list. My childhood would have been very different without it, as is the case with many of the games on this list. I do really love Banjo Kazooie; the sequel, not so much. The multiplayer was sweet though.

The list of TSM’s Favorite Games so far:
30: Banjo Kazooie
Honorable Mentions: Age of Empires 2
Gears of War 2
SSX: Tricky
Burnout 3

comments: 0 » tags: , , , ,

Honorable Mention: SSX: Tricky

Posted on 1st March 2011 in Something Daily

SSX: Tricky used to be a very important part of my life. I was quite addicted to this game in my middle school years, to the point where I’d go through the whole game and get 100% with multiple characters. It might have been how all of the characters have their own interactions with each of the other ones that gives this one such great replay value, but I feel like it’s maybe more due to the ridiculously cartoony nature of all of the huge jumps and course designs, as well as the fact that there’s a whole category of tricks you can do that involve you taking your feet out of the snowboard bindings in midair.

SSX: Tricky is the reason I know who Rahzel is (the DJ who does all the crazy vocal scratching and announces all of the races in this game – he says stuff like “yeah yeah yeah, that’s a good trick…”). He’s on one of the tracks on Rakim’s album The Master and the first time I heard that track I was so sure that it was the guy from SSX: Tricky, but I didn’t tell anybody because I didn’t want to sound silly in case I was wrong. I checked first, and it turns out he is in fact the same guy. But anyway….

My Tricky characters always have been, currently are, and will forever be Kaori and (to a slightly lesser extent) Psymon – the Japanese schoolgirl and the mental patient, respectively (side note: the fact that Psymon’s bio says that he listens to Slayer is a big part of the reason that I first got into their album Reign in Blood, which I am currently listening to). But those two really are my only characters. I’m sure when I first picked this one up used for Gamecube, I gave a bunch of different characters a try, but now, the thought of playing even one race or showoff contest with Moby, Elise, Mac, or that guy with the afro just seems completely wrong. I would never do it. Plus half of them ride the alpine board..what even is that? Is that a real kind of snowbaord? Show me where people are riding alpine boards. I don’t believe you. My love for Kaori especially is possibly due to the fact that I practiced with her so much when I used to own Tricky that I got her leveled up to a very high level pretty quickly, and her stats were so good that I could win any race or showoff contest pretty much guaranteed – her spin was so good that I’d frequently get the ??? where the degrees of a trick’s spin usually showed up. Psymon was really awesome too, I played almost as much as him, and leveled him all the way up as well. It just got to the point where every time I played, I expected the character to be as good as my leveled-up Kaori.

I obviously played a lot of SSX: Tricky, but I feel like it didn’t make the list for good reason. It’s a really fun game, but kind of shallow in the unlockables and level options that it gives you. I will never stop loving it though. Rahzel is too good.

Ok that’s all of the honorable mentions, next time it’s number 30 on my list of all time best games of the universe: an N64 adventure game that I really hoped would be like Super Mario 64 and it wasn’t. Not in a bad way though.

comments: 0 » tags: , , ,

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.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , ,

Honorable Mention: Gears of War 2

Posted on 26th February 2011 in Something Daily

I wasn’t really looking forward to writing about Gears of War. There’s something about it that’s too big-budget blockbusterly for me to get excited about putting in my two cents on it, because so much has already been said about it. Come to think of it, though, that applies to pretty much every game on this list of TSM’s favorites, so I think the real reason is that it’s the newest game on my entire list of 30. I get a bit uncomfortable writing about a game that new. But I digress. Gears of War 2 is sweet.

My first experience with GoW2 was when I was a theater tech in high school. Me (the sound guy, of course), the lighting people, the stage manager, and our assistants all worked from this little booth at the back of the auditorium with windows so we could see the stage. We spent a lot of time in there, so we had posters and christmas lights and jamboxes and more mixed in with the tech equipment, including an XBox 360. We also had a lot of downtime during the average rehearsal, because the cast and crew typically took a lot longer to get ready than the techs did. So we played a lot of GTA III and Gears of War 2. I remember playing it all the way through over the course of a week of five-hour sessions with a tech friend – we’d finish and be totally burned out and bloodshot-eyed, and we’d just come back the next morning, not say a word, and turn on the console. I’ve played it through one other time since then (last year lugging my roommate’s 360 and my friends’ huge TV all over the floor).

This is probably the bloodiest game I’ve ever played…at least I can’t think of any others in which it’s a relatively common activity to chainsaw the crap out of an enemy’s neck while blood sprays all over the camera (see screenshot). Mortal Kombat: Armageddon might win, but the blood in that game is so horribly rendered in this awful cartoony style that looks completely fake, so while there may or may not be more of it in MK:A, it definitely looks loads better in Gears of War 2. I’m not going to say that the blood is why I love this game, but it’s certainly a contributing factor. This really goes hand-in-hand with the more overarching reason, which is that playing GoW2 has a certain feel that, I believe, other games have tried and failed to replicate. In Gears of War, you can practically see each bullet leaving your gun, since they glow orange. The camera reacts to your character taking damage in such a way that it feels much more visceral than the typical analogue in a first-person shooter. The camera wobbles and drifts as if it’s handheld as you move through the environments – what I’m trying to say is that this game has a raw, visceral gameplay experience that’s unlike anything else I’ve played. You feel like you’re there.

I never had too hard a time finishing Gears of War 2; honestly it’s not really as difficult on normal as I expected it to be. Getting the hang of the controls was really the only hurdle for me (and I love to complain about how hard games are). And I’m a big fan of cover-based combat (meaning I’m a big fan of this franchise, essentially). Gears of War 2 will always be around for me if I need to let off some steam and chainsaw some alien dudes, or fry them with a giant sky laser, or just shoot them with my future shotguns. Honestly, this game probably didn’t make the list proper because I have a thing about how a game needs to be seen with a good deal of hindsight before it can really be accepted into the canon (or whatever), but this is really a good game. You’ve probably played it more than I have. But if not, you should play it. It’s really great, guys.

Next on the list of four honorable mentions: a racing game.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , ,

Honorable Mention: Age of Empires 2

Posted on 24th February 2011 in Something Daily

This is the first of a new, approximately month-long series of posts that I’m plannng that will outline my personal top-30 list of video games. The question of my personal “best game ever” hasn’t really been a question to me for a while (if you’ve read TSM a decent amount you probably know what I’m talking about), but I’ve always been interested in deciding with partial certainty my top ten (in order), or even my top 20 or 30. So I’ve put together an ordered list and I’m going to do one per day, in ascending order, finishing off with number 1.

This isn’t going to be the list of what I think the best games are – just what my favorites are. I’ll probably write about why I think they’re awesome, as well as include anecdotes about my experiences with them. Every game on the list is one that I’ve either finished or come very close to finishing; they’re also games that I’m very familiar with, many of which I’ve played through at least twice. For those reasons, games like Wave Race 64 and Crash Bandicoot: Warped were left off the list, despite the fact that they’re incredible games. I have to know what I’m talking about here. Super Mario Land isn’t on the list because it sucks, despite the fact that it was the first game I ever played. You’ll find from this list that, in general, I think games are getting better as the technology improves. Not in all cases are new games better than old ones, but in general, that’s how I feel.

And I’m not going to do this every day. The auxilliary purpose of the countdown is to help me out when I don’t do anything interesting in a day and still need to write. So I’ll keep up with writing normally when I do fun stuff, and intersperse another game rank when I don’t. It’ll be a journey. And if you want to find them all in one spot, they’ll all be tagged “TSM’s Favorite Games”, which you can just type into the little search bar over on the right. And of course I’ll put up the complete list in a single post when I get to the end. Hope you enjoy. Maybe you’ll learn a bit about a game you didn’t know much about before.

Enough talk. There are a few honorable mentions, the first of which is Age of Empires 2.

This was the first PC game I ever owned. I suppose based on the release date of 1999 that my 8-year-old self was already decently into Nintendo 64 and Gameboy, and I really don’t know what caused me to come across AoE II. Maybe it was a birthday present or something. I wasn’t into realtime strategy really, and I’m still not (other than Starcraft I)…but it’s totally a sweet game.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Age of Empires is how hard this game actually is. I know I say this about every game I’ve ever played, you don’t have to tell me. This is an especially good example, though, of evidence that one of the following has happened: either I was incredibly good at gaming in my childhood and lost a huge portion of that skill in the process of maturing, or I’ve always been really bad and have been deluding myself for my whole life. Replaying a game like Age of Empires II recently, I can’t imagine how I did it when I was eight. Even at 19, I sit down, start a deathmatch game on normal difficulty, and start developing my society at what I think is a decent rate. I’ll be farming pretty quickly, upgrading my technologies and building walls when I think I should be. I’ll have a barracks set up with some normal foot soldiers and a few horse guys, some archers too. I’ll just be upgrading to the castle age when one of the CPU players comes in out of nowhere with an outlandishly sized compliment of calvary and archers, burning down my palisade wall before I can say “regicide” and continuing on until all that’s left of my little town is the single peasant/scout calvary combination I managed to get out during the attack, with no town center, no food, no houses, no anything. And they’ll probably get killed too. My question is: how in the world could I even play this game at all when I was eight? Was I a video game prodigy? I mean I did spend a lot of time playing Pokemon, but come on…

But apart from it making me feel like a quite inferior civil engineer/general/king, Age of Empires II is a good game. I’m not a very knowledgeable RTS fan, so I’m not going to waste space attempting to compare it to others of the genre (it’s also part of the reason that AoE is just a runner up on this list). But every time I play it, I have a lot of fun on my first try – when I think it’s all going great, and then the above happens. But until that point, I’m really into it. I like getting the war elephants and taking them on boats, then attacking from the coast (on easy mode, obviously). This will always be one that I can come back to for a bit of fun (as Roller Coaster Tycoon would be if I hadn’t lost the disc…)

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , ,