My wife hasn’t really used her Nintendo DS in a while, so I thought I’d commandeer it and maybe pickup one of the myriad of RPGs that have apparently been made for it. Instead, she already had Scribblenauts in it, which I picked up for her last Christmas because it was on sale and looked kinda cute, and I’ve pretty much been playing that ever since!
I knew that the big draw was that you could create just about any object from real life in the game, but I didn’t realize just how awesome the parameter of any object could actually be! A couple of examples…
- Playing one puzzle, I had two buttons that I had to hold down both at the same time. I tried creating a BRICK, but I had trouble getting it to balance right on the button. I needed something with a wider base, so instead I tried making a BEAR … which then proceeded to eat me! On my retry, I substituted my bear for something a bit less carnivorous and went with a COW, which stood there just as dumb and happy as can be and held the button down so that I could get my star.
- Another fun puzzle, I had to help a farmer collect some flowers, but in the way were both an angry bee and then later a piranha in the river I had to cross. I first tried to play nice with the bee, thinking that if I gave it some HONEY, it would just let me pass … but no dice. Alright, bee – if that’s the way you want to play it … next I made a FLAMETHROWER and most definitely succeeded in killing the bee, but unfortunately I also managed to burn down the tree that its hive was in, not to mention the barn that the tree was standing next to … so, my bad.
- When I finally got past the bee without resorting to arson, I knew that there weren’t many ways to skin a piranha, but I quickly found that dumping some POISON in the water managed to do the trick! One of the “achievements” that I got for completing that one was for Bio Terrorism, so at least I’ve got that going for me…
- And lastly, my favorite of all was just in the free-play section because that’s when I discovered that you can even create dinosaurs in Scribblenauts, too! My first was obvious – a T-REX … and he proceeded to eat me. Then I made a STEGOSAURUS, thinking that I’d give my next T-REX somebody to play with other than me. He ate the stegosaurus and then proceeded to eat me. It was then that I realized I needed some sort of escape mechanism, and remembering his amusingly tiny arms, I crafted myself a ZEPPELIN and took it to the drop of the screen. From there I was free to make many, many T-Rexes, which surprisingly just sort of left each other alone, mostly feasting on whatever other random animals like KANGAROOS and SHARKS that I tossed in front of them just to see what would happen.
I haven’t quite figured out if there’s an easy way to take videos or screenshots of the things that you come up with, but it looks like I’ve still got a lot of goofing around to do!
GIANT NICE FLYING WINGED DRIVEABLE BANANA?!
Well played, Sir! Very well played, indeed…
I thought this was kind of a neat concept – the designer sought to condense each level of the original Super Mario Bros. into a single screen, and let me tell you – some of them are pretty challenging! One word of warning that caught me quite a few times … the piranha plants in this version will definitely still come out of the pipe even if you’re standing on it, unlike in the original … so just a heads up on that particular issue…
A Super Mario Summary (by Johan Peitz)
Also, upon further inspection, apparently Johan created this game as part of a special competition that gives a single-man programming team 48 hours to code an entire game … pretty impressive for two days of no doubt caffeine and Doritos-fueled programming mayhem!
It seems like I’ve been coming across a lot of intriguing Kickstarter campaigns lately, and this one certainly adds to that legacy!
Basically the guy wants to make a gigantic Lego mosaic mural of the very first level of the original Super Mario Bros – a feat that will clock in at a daunting 6 feet x 90 feet and use upwards of 780,000 bricks in the process! Hence the fundraising drive because even if he can find the colors at $0.02 a piece in the massive quantities that he needs, that’s still over $15 grand just in Legos alone … not to mention the base plates, glue, and whatever else is needed to orchestrate a project of this epic magnitude!
Granted, I’m still not entirely sure what one does with a 90′ mural when all is said and done - hopefully it can find a home in a museum somewhere after it makes the convention tour because I’d kinda doubt that few people aside from Miyamoto himself even have a wall in their house big enough to hang 90′ of video game history!
As an aside, this has kind of inspired me to try my hand at making a Nintendo-oriented Lego mosaic of my own, so stay tuned for more on that… 
I never really got into Minecraft, but this seems pretty neat!
I’ve got to admit that I was a little surprised when I came across this particular Kickstarter campaign to remake the original Leisure Suit Larry game from all the way back in 1987! I was probably in my early teens when I first stumbled upon these great games without my parents’ knowledge … they say you never forget the first set of digitized boobs that you catch an obstructed glimpse at, and Larry was an entertaining romp into that mysterious world of sex and depravity that I’d previously only seen scrambled on the TV at two o’clock in the morning!
In hindsight, those games were actually pretty tame compared to what I could’ve been keeping beneath my mattress, and frankly that’s what made them so much fun because you never quite knew what kind of risque, yet harmless trouble the inept Larry Laffer was going to stumble himself into next. The dialog fell right into line with all of the rest of the great Sierra games that I was in love with at the time, not to mention the stories themselves … what can I say, Al Lowe is a hilariously twisted genius, to say the very least! We actually interviewed him for Just Laugh a while back and he was really fun to talk to – you can see it in the videos on Kickstarter, too – so it’s great to see that he’s on board and getting a chance to become reacquainted with such a classic character of his all over again, too… 
Anyways, it’ll be interesting to see how this progresses, especially given the incredible success that Double Fine saw with their fundraising efforts about a month ago – Al & Co aren’t asking for nearly as much, but they’re also not offering a new game, either … this will simply be a remake (of a remake) of the original LSL1, although there are numerous suggestions that if this title goes well, they’d like to continue remaking the others in the series as well and eventually even make a brand new one that actually stays true to the source material for a change! While it doesn’t sound like they’ve entirely bought the rights back for the franchise, it sounds like they were able to license remake rights for the first title with the hopes of reintroducing the brand and thus providing a reason for the actual owners to let them do the same with some of the others.
I guess we might as well take whatever we can get – a lot of those great, old Sierra titles went every which way during that period where the company was being sold to another conglomerate who didn’t give two shits about their legacy before then handing them off again, so if there’s enough of a fan base to wrestle those dusty floppies out from software purgatory to give ‘em another shot to make nostalgic fans like me chuckle, then why not?
Besides, $15 for an enhanced copy of Larry 1 on my iPhone?! I spend more than that on real porn every month these days!
Yeah, yeah – tons of work to do and only got a fraction, but what can I say … adventure called!
I’m not sure if it’s actually legal to even admit this, or maybe I just can’t post the link to where I downloaded “the stuff”, but instead of digging out an NES that no amount of cartridge blowing in the world will fix at this point anyways, I ended up just downloading a copy of the ROM and firing up an emulator to revisit the original Dragon Warrior that I first got back in 1990 as a free gift for being a loyal subscriber to Nintendo Power! I think it can safely be said that this was the very first RPG that I ever played, even prior to the original Final Fantasy … well, something like Wizardry on our old Apple II clone might’ve predated it, but not by much…
Anyways, it’s kind of amusing to go back and revisit this one … and realize just how mind-numbingly repetitive it actually was! I mean, you literally start out fighting Slimes for 1 XP and 1 gold a piece, and you’re trying to raise enough money to buy a sword that costs 180 gold! Woof – and I’m not necessarily saying that it made me give up again after only a few minutes of play or anything because as you can see, I’m now Level 6 and am trying to earn enough for the next really expensive piece of equipment, but it’s interesting to see how far things have come since then. Leveling via random encounters is very much the majority of the entire game – I’ve been using a walkthrough to remind me where I need to go, and a typical chapter is – “Go north to XYZ Town, fight in the surrounding area until you can buy Slightly Better Sword, then travel east to Yet Another Town…” - rinse and repeat.
I guess maybe I was just easily amused back when I was 10, but I suppose we had to start somewhere! Actually, the only other one I’ve even played in this series was Dragon Quest VIII a year or so ago … maybe I can use this experience as a gateway RPG to start digging into the rest starting from the very beginning once I figure out how to beat the Dragonlord or whatever the heck the point of this first one actually is…
*cough* Also once I get some more work done, of course! *cough*
It looks like we’re getting an early sneak peek at Google’s April Fools’ Day project for this year, and it’s pretty freaking sweet! Below is a quick route of the adventure before me the next time I want to take a trip over to Disney World … I hear the Wyverns along I-4 are pretty bad this time of year, too…
The video really sealed it for me – especially right around the 0:50 mark! Almost makes me feel like digging out my old Dragon Warrior NES cartridge, even though I know the chances of it still working are less than slim to none!
So I caught a glimpse of this hubbub about this Retake Mass Effect controversy that sprung to life last night, and I’ve been kind of following it since despite having never even played the game myself. I think it raises some interesting questions both about fan expectations as well as the politics of being involved with a charity, so I thought I’d write out a few of my thoughts about everything here for what it’s worth…
First and foremost, I’m just going to be blunt and say that as a creative person myself, I kind of take umbrage at the audacity of a group of fans demanding that a work of art get changed because they didn’t like it – in this case, the ending to Mass Effect 3. And I should probably tread lightly here because I don’t have all the facts … I’ve never actually played the game myself, and a lot of the comments that I’ve read cite that the games trailers gave them certain expectations that they felt weren’t lived up to when they actually finished the game. Not for nothing, but using that logic, I’d have to protest about 3/4 of the movies I see at the theater because in entertainment, it’s typically the exception that lives up to its hype, not the rule!
And yeah, gamers can claim that they’re more involved in this world because they’ve spent dozens of hours playing the series – to me that’s kind of a hollow excuse because how many people watched through four and a half seasons of Battlestar Galactica before being pissed about the final ending that Ronald Moore ultimately decided on?!
It’s also been said, and even quoted from the developers, that ”we didn’t write the story – the fans did just as much as we did” … and maybe that’s part of the problem because as much insight that you may allow the fan community at the end of the day, unless they’re sitting down at their PCs pounding out scripts for the game to follow, eventually an actual writing team has to make the official decision of what’s going to go down … I don’t particularly like this as an excuse, but then again, as a writer I’d never open myself up to that kind of problem, either.
Because to me, the roles between writer and reader are related, but still need to have very distinct boundaries – I create the work, you consume the work – and as much as you’re certainly entitled to be disappointed by what I’m able to come up with as the writer, you cross a line when you actually expect me to change my work based on your feedback. It’s a pet peeve that I have with a lot of armchair critics because loads of people love to tell you how they could easily do your job better, but they never actually have to understand just how inappropriate and rude of a thing that is to impose on a creative person. We pour a lot of ourselves out on the page to create what we do – if you aren’t happy with the result, then be disappointed or mad or refuse to ever read again or even go create something better of your own, but it’s just not fair to expect me to change my vision because it didn’t align with your expectations for my imagination!
Granted, bits of that get muddied in this particular situation if the publisher did indeed tote that the fans were intimately involved in the creation process, but still in my mind, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere because otherwise … why aren’t these fans mad at themselves for this piece of art that in theory they all helped to create themselves?!
Something’s just not adding up there…
That said, the other angle about Child’s Play trying to take a step back from this effort to avoid being associated with a political movement, of sorts … after reading through that Reddit thread, frankly Jamie with Child’s Play has been nothing but thoughtful and considerate, and a good number of the rest are exactly what they claim to be trying to avoid – entitled whiners – which from my outside view, is just exasperated by their involvement with the charity because it reads like they’re trying to use donating to Child’s Play as an excuse for rallying against the makers of the game. They wanted their feedback to be heard by EA as “more than just a bunch of whining,” so someone came up with the idea that they’d all donate to Child’s Play to express their anger … and maybe it was unintentional, but inadvertently it most certainly does pull the charity into the line of fire because now they’re using it as a tool to reinforce their displeasure to the publisher, as if their demands must be taken more seriously because $80,000 for sick kids was raised in its name.
I guess I don’t really know any way to say it without sounding demeaning, but it’s not like that crowd is hearing criticism against them anyways … they simply can’t fathom the idea of how their actions have unintended consequences, and why it makes Child’s Play look bad because they wouldn’t have donated otherwise if not for these demands of theirs. And that’s not even taking issue with the ridiculousness of the demands themselves, as mentioned above – by saying, “Let’s raise money for charity by voicing our displeasure for X,” it’s easy to distort that to mean that X and the charity are now somehow connected. Jame also cited that they’d had questions from donors about “How much was needed to get the game changed?” and even concerns from Paypal over chargebacks, so like it or not, the community needs to realize that the charity they’re trying to support is bigger than any one fundraiser and needs to conduct itself as such.
As a whole, Child’s Play has raised over $12 million for children’s hospitals around the world. It’s an awesome number to brag about, but to continue building on that in the years to come, they have to be conscious about the charity’s image and unfortunately, that’s going to occasionally mean saying, “No thanks – that’s not really something we should be involved with…”
Anyways, I’ve rambled long enough. It’s an interesting explosion, and a lot of vitriol and misunderstanding is being flung almost entirely from the side of the movement … probably not really surprising when you consider their core argument, though. You know, looking back through time, I’ve played a lot of video games and some of the endings sure did suck, but that never drove me to complain to the developers about their suckage, much less demand that they do it over and do it better, so I just can’t put myself in the headspace of someone who genuinely thinks that’s a perfectly justifiable claim to make. At the end of the day, all we as creators can do is make what we think is the best possible content, and then hope that others enjoy it, too.
If you don’t like it, pick up a pencil and do it better by creating your own.
Mind you, I pretty much stopped playing after the SNES version, and I know that SimCity 2000 up through SimCity 4 had some pretty neat effects in them, too, but the new game engine that’s currently being designed for the next iteration of the game looks pretty incredible…
For comparison’s sake, here’s the version of the game that I remember from way back when I was first introduced to the game in 1991!
