I'm-a Mario! I'm-a an end in-a myself!
Who is Mario?
Mario is a guy with a moustache and red suspenders. He jumps on top of or over things in order to rescue a princess.
Why does he want to rescue the Princess?
Because she’s been kidnapped: sometimes by a giant ape, sometimes by a giant turtle.
No, that’s why she needs rescuing. That’s a tautology. Why does Mario want to be the one that rescues her?
Well, that depends on the setting. Most instances of Mario rescuing the Princess imply a rather chaste romance between the two.
Can Mario want something other than to rescue the Princess?
… hmm.
The Tyger Uppercut
Tyger! Tyger uppercut!
Tyger knee him in the gut.
What jump forward jab or fierce
Could brave this fearful Street Fighter?
In what level’s pixeled sky
Doth one escape his patch’ed eye?
What the leap evade his ire?
What the turtle block his fire?
And what flash kick, sonic boom –
What wall jump from across the room?
What better move in all the game?
What yoga fire? Yoga flame?
What the Ryu? What the Ken?
What hadouken, shoryuken?
What the Blanka? What beast’s trick?
Down forward punch? Charge forward kick?
When Zangief bared his scratch’ed chest,
Or Cammy spandex’d up her breasts,
Did Sagat’s scar they think to see?
Did you just counter-pick Chun Li?
Tyger! Tyger uppercut!
Tyger knee him in the gut.
What jump forward jab or fierce
Dare brave this fearful Street Fighter?
- Fenzel
O Captain, my Captain!
Little did I know when we were recording the most recent podcast that it would become so sadly topical: today the world mourns the loss of Louis Vincent “Captain Lou Albano” Albano, who passed this morning at the age of 76.
I feel shaken by his death. We were just talking about the guy. And I hadn’t so much as thought of him in years. In years. And now he’s dead. It didn’t make any sense. Oh, I know all about the law of large numbers. While the odds of me talking about a specific celebrity and having them die shortly thereafter are low, the odds that someone, somewhere in the world will be talking about ANY given celebrity shortly before his death are probably pretty close to one. So in the grand scheme of things, what happened to me today is not all that strange. It probably happens to hundreds of people every day, and will probably happen to all of us, if we wait long enough. But it had never happened to me before. And it felt weird. It didn’t make any sense.
That was how I felt today at about 3:00, when I heard the news. Two hours later, I had an epiphany. Of course it didn’t make any sense! This was Captain Lou Albano, often imitated, never duplicated! NOTHING about his life made any sense.
[Enjoy today's guest post by Craig Spivack. Don't forget to leave some feedback in the comments.]
Video games are an important part of culture, but are rarely psychoanalyzed in the same way that literature and film are. One famous video game that deals with Oedipal conflicts and phallic imagery is Star Fox 64. The story of the game encompasses many of Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas, and speaks to the game player.
[In recognition of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band today, guest writer Trevor Siegler takes us on a walk through their back catalog. Only one of these songs is on the Beatles Rock Band playlist - can you guess which one?]
The Beatles are so iconic in our modern pop culture, it’s impossible to imagine a time before their meteoric rise to fame and eventual dissolution. Their songs are legendary, and almost anyone can name more than a handful of their most popular songs: “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Hey Jude,” “Revolution,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” etc. But on the eve of the world release of “The Beatles Rock Band,” I think it’s time to recognize some of the lesser-known nuggets from the Fab Four’s catalogue, songs that might have been pop gold in the hand of lesser artists but exist as mere afterthoughts or album filler. I’m limiting myself to five for considerations of space, but not from lack of material to choose from. This list could be even longer.
1. I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party (Beatles for Sale)
In the waning months of 1964, the Beatles were trying desperately to survive the first full onslaught of “Beatlemania” with their psyches intact. Their contractually obligated third album, coming on the heels of the first two masterpieces “Please Please Me” and “With the Beatles” (released Stateside with a different track listing as “Meet the Beatles”), was bound to suffer from the lack of time on the road to write new material, much less perfect it onstage in front of screaming female fans. So the lads can be forgiven for dipping in the well of their prodigious record collection for some decent covers. But one of the better originals on the album (alongside the better-known “I’ll Follow the Sun”) is “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.” A rockabilly-infused ditty which catches John at his most melancholy, the tune echoes the contrast of “I’m a Loser” by juxtaposing depressing lyrics (in this case, a jealous guy who leaves a party where his girl is obviously having more fun without him) with an upbeat melody. It’s a slight tune, for sure, but it’s one of the first hints that, underneath the bubbly surface of “Beatle John,” there lies the soul of a poet and artist with more personal concerns. It’s no small leap from “Party” to “Nowhere Man,” “Imagine,” and “Jealous Guy.” This is truly one worth seeking out.
New guest writer Kevin Johnson asks: How widespread is the Toadstool dynasty?
She was Princess Toadstool at first. When Super Mario Land was released, there was a bit of confusion over whether Daisy and Princess Toadstool were the same. The crappy movie implied that they were, but Nintendo pretty much laid that to rest. When they brought the Peach name over from Japan, Peach and Daisy officially became two different people, and two different leaders.
Though the actual identities have been cleared up, the connotation of the “Toadstool” name is another matter. How do the inhabitants of the Mushroom World view the Toadstool crown? What does it evoke, and more importantly, how significant is the name Toadstool throughout the regions? In other words, how much power and influence does Princess Toadstool really have over the lands around her?
When we talk about video game RPGs—as opposed to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, or roleplaying performance like acting or improv theater—we’re talking about a set of games with recognizable characteristics. They may be lines of monochrome text, like the original Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. They might be dungeon crawls with sizable parties, like the Might & Magic series or Dragon Quest. They might be the world-spanning epics we’ve come to associate with Japan, like the Final Fantasy saga. These games cover a disparate range of play styles, play experiences and settings, yet everyone calls them RPGs.
Why?
For one thing, the original console RPGs – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and the like – were all intended to emulate other things that we called RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. So calling them the same thing made sense: this is just like the RPG you play with your friends, only you’re playing it on a Nintendo. Even if later games like the Final Fantasy series weren’t meant to emulate the D&D experience, they had evolved from games that had. So we can trace every console RPG through a chain of descendants back to the original tabletop RPGs that inspired them.
And yet.
Enjoy today’s guest post by Chris Richards: some much-needed Overthink on the Legend of Zelda series. If you like it, or even if you think it’s out there, sound off in the comments!
Over the last three decades, there are few videogame franchises that maintain their marketing tour-de-force for longer than a few years. Halo has dimmed, Mario is no longer a staple of every game-based living room, and poor Sonic doesn’t even have a system anymore (or any real following that doesn’t rely on nostalgia…and even Stretch Armstrong can sell via nostalgia). But one franchise that has endured, and has actually grown in prominence, is The Legend of Zelda.
When the first game came out, it was popular enough, to be sure. But it wasn’t THE game. Mario Bros. 3 certainly sold more cartridges. But, over the years, the Zelda cult has grown to the point that its
hero, Link, is now more important in launching Nintendo hardware than Mario. Pretty impressive for a semi- androgynous, poor-and-uneducated, forest farmboy.
At the center of the whole series is a mystical artifact called the Triforce, a triangle-shaped golden MacGuffin of amazing power and influence (which we see little of, really). The Triforce was given to
the people of Hyrule by the Three Gods, Din, Nayru, and Farore, and contains their purified essence. After all the hoopla over the thing, you’d think that it would really be world-changing, like the One Ring or The Box of Ordon or Two Tickets of Transit. But no, the Triforce not only fails to live up to the hype, it also fails to live up to its own description. For the sake of this argument, I’m basing my arguments on The Ocarina of Time, but most of the Zelda games are just retelling the same story with new inconsistencies (there is no
Triforce of Plot Coherence)
I was reading an essay called “Art and Answerability” by Mikhail Bakhtin the other day, where he makes the claim that one of the most important differences between novels and dreams is that in novels, we see the main character from the outside. And as so often happens when I’m ostensibly reading something for my real job, I immediately started thinking about how I could squeeze a blog post out of it.
With regard to literature and dreams, this statement of Bakhtin’s is one of those ideas that seems accurate, but can never be tested. I’ve never heard of anyone having a dream where another person was the main character, but that doesn’t mean it can never happen (and I did once dream a non-representational laser light show, which was pretty weird), and even if it never does happen, that doesn’t mean that this is an important differance. And Choose Your Own Adventure books aside, there’s not a whole lot of novels out there that situate the reader as the experiencing subsect of the book. Yes, rewriting The DaVinci Code in the second person might make it more dreamlike, but while writing in the second person might create a dreamlike effect, but it’s mostly just going to jump out at the reader as an affectation. It’s too unnatural to be taken seriously. So pointing out that a narrative needs to depict its characters from the outside is accurate, but it’s also nigh-tautological, kind of like pointing out that the story needs to be made up of sentences and words.
That, at any rate, was the state of affairs when Bakhtin was writing. Luckily, the times have now caught up with him, and we have a new form of narrative where both 2nd and 3rd person narration are common. I’m talking about video games, and will continue to do so after the jump.