Crossing the Streams to Inclusion

I hurt so many with my playing.

The sad truth about most of the Ghostbusters video game adaptations is that they are bad, and you FEEL bad while playing them. There was this one time where I got highly intoxicated at a friend’s house and fell asleep in his mother’s china cabinet, my face covered in wet potted plant soil and my pants blissfully missing. When her father finally pulled my twitching body from the cabinet’s cold, wooden embrace, I was told I spent most of the night playing the NES version of Ghostbusters.

I still haven’t forgiven myself. I probably never will.

Another sad truth – one of the saddest truths in video game history – is that all but a measly two Ghostbusters games leave out good ol’ Winston Zeddemore – and one was only released in PAL territories. If you live in America, your only chance to see the oft-forgotten fourth ‘Buster in action is 2008’s Atari adaptation of the franchise for next gen consoles (and also the Wii).

On the NES? No.

Good ol' Winston is one of the most under-appreciated characters in comedic cinema history. As the last Ghostbuster to join the fray against the demons and demigods trashing the semi-innocents of New York City, most viewers see Winston as “the token black guy,” but his appeal – and his merit as a paranormal investigator – go far beyond his genetics. Mr. Zeddemore represents what would happen if the viewer were clad in a silly jumpsuit with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator strapped to his or her back: While the other three ‘Busters are trying to find ways to take down the ancient evils roaming beneath the city streets, Winston is cashing his paycheck, paying his rent, and praying to the Almighty that he gets out alive and home in time for a beer with his wife. Also, Winston has a really rockin’ mustache, which is indeed the truest measure of a man’s character. So thumbs up to you, Winston Zeddemore, and thank you for all you've done to protect the living from the wrath of the evil dead.

In the meantime, I’m going to go petition Sega to re-release the Genesis/Mega Drive version of Ghostbusters with Winston as a playable character. Then not only would bustin’ make me feel good, it would make me feel like a great wrong had been made right.

UNACCEPTABLE.
Also Peter looks like a scumbag and Egon looks like Billy from the Power Rangers.

An Underwhelming E3

Despite the best intentions of my plump, juicy (and likely very tasty) brain, my pathetic body slumbered blissfully through Nintendo's E3 presentation yesterday, in which Reggie Fils-aime apparently announced a lot of cool stuff, like the same Zelda game Nintendo promised us at last year's E3 and a Kid Icarus title that's been in the works for quite awhile. Also, there was something about affixing random letters to the end of the already stupid Wii name and calling it a different console - the Wii U, which sounds like a frighteningly surreal college where small children go to become more proficient at Wii Sports. However, I'm a biased, bitter old man with a cane fashioned from the microchips of thousands of copies of Super Mario/Duckhunt, so I promise to withhold my ire until further information on Nintendo's next gen box is available.

What really excited me was the announcement of Super Mario 3D for the 3DS, which appears to have ripped a page from Mario 3's book by bringing back the beloved Tanooki suit. I'm sure it won't recapture the magic of Mario's NES days, but I'm still going to keep an eye on it. After all, a pale but well-intentioned imitation of a beloved classic is better than another insipid Pokemon title.

IT HAS A TAIL

I also missed Sony's pitch, but I assume it was just an hour and a half of high-level businessmen apologizing over the recent PSN outage and committing sepukuu, then a man dressed as Cole MacGrath from inFAMOUS nervously explaining how Sony's new security features will add hours of fun to your PlayStation Home trolling experience.

Thankfully-ish, my brain was able to jolt my body awake in time for the Xbox 360 presentation, which consisted of approximately 4000 first person shooters - all sequels - another Tomb Raider game that didn't look too bad, and the fact that now you can be much more lazy when purchasing content on the Xbox Marketplace by just screaming out what you want to buy instead of using the wireless controller to navigate menus. If my neighbors don't think that I'm crazy at this point, my early morning shouts of "Xbox! Show me Transformers cartoons NOW!" should confirm their worst fears.

Halo 4 or whatever; yawn.

Microsoft's showing show presented me with a conundrum: How could I have been mind shatteringly disinterested in a show completely devoted to my favorite pass time?

The most important thing this year's E3 taught me is that no matter how disillusioned I become with Nintendo, I'd still rather hang with them than wade through the uninspired shooter wasteland that is the Xbox 360.

Oh no! Evil Nintendo!

Have you ever heard the urban legend about the Evil NES? I guess it's kind of silly, but a little frightening in a way.

Apparently the cartridge slot is the best you've ever seen: It plays any game you put in, regardless of how dirty the connections might be. Both of the controllers are functioning perfectly and the light gun works on any television, even the new flat pannels.

But supposedly, after you turn the NES off for the 666th time, the game remains on your screen. No matter what you do, it won't go away. Finally you take out the cartridge. The power is off and there's no game in the console, but that image just won't go away.
Then you go in for one more look...



Nobody really knows what happens at that point. Some say the player's soul is sucked into the unit; others say it takes your sanity.

The one thing that's generally agreed upon is that once the Evil NES has obtained its grim harvest, it disappears from the victim's home... and reappears on the shelf of some used game store, good as new.

It's got to be an old wives tale. But do be careful the next time you head into a pawn shop.

Nintendo Life, Vol. 4

Nintendo Life, Vol. 3: Now with More NES Advantage

At the suggestion of Wade from Video Games or Bust:

Nintendo Life, Vol. 2

'till the end of time

Nintendo Life

Top Games of All Time #4: Final Fantasy (NES)

In the late ‘80s, a small Japanese video game company named Square found itself rocketing towards bankruptcy. After a string of lukewarm releases like 3-D WorldRunner , King’s Knight and Rad Racer (known in the Land of the Rising Sun as Highway Star), things were looking grim. Square Director Hironobu Sakaguchi felt he didn’t have a good action game left in him, so he tore a page out of Dragon Quest’s book and decided that Square’s final project would be fantasy role playing game. If the gambit didn’t pan out, Sakaguchi was reportedly poised to quit making video games and head back to university.

FF1 North American box.

Thankfully for the gaming world, university would not see the likes of Sakaguchi any time soon: Released a week before Christmas 1987, Final Fantasy for the Famicom was the critical hit Square needed to stay afloat. More than 23 years later, the little company that almost drowned in the waves of the Nintendo console market has merged with Enix – the creators of the Dragon Quest series – and is a dominating force in the gaming world, with much of the credit going to Sakaguchi’s not-so-final fantasy game.

Released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 in North America, almost three years after it appeared in Japan (and the same year Square unleashed Final Fantasy III on eager Japanese gamers), Final Fantasy made a moderate impact on a small-but-devoted, RPG-starved American audience. The only thing American console gamers had seen that was anything like FF1 up to that point was the original Dragon Quest game, dubbed Dragon Warrior in the US and released just the year before. Unlike Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy gave the player control of not one, but four warriors of varying ability. What’s more, the player could chose his or her team from six character types, allowing for 126 possible combinations. This is not counting the unofficial trio, duo and solo possibilities for gamers looking for more of a challenge, or the option to forgo the class change option halfway through the game and press on with the young, inexperienced versions of your characters.

For those wondering, that leads to 418 possible combinations.

Herein lies the reason you’re currently reading about the original Final Fantasy and not 1994’s SNES classic Final Fantasy III/VI. After 16 years, my desire to take on Final Fantasy IV again is not nearly as high as my wish to take new and exciting FF1 parties into battle against the four elemental fiends. I’ve finished Final Fantasy in its various incarnations, from the NES original to the PS1, GBA and PSP remakes and even on my cell phone, more than 10 times. And still I want to dig deeper, to ignore the world outside and pour myself into this decades-old video masterpiece.

Battle!

Your party determines everything in FF1, from how long you have to grind (if at all) and how much money you’ll need to how long you can stay out in the wild before having to trudge back to town with your tail between your legs. Four fighters are expensive killbots who, with limited healing options and armor slots, have a tougher time taking down the evil Chaos than you might think. You could go with a party that will have a lot of trouble throughout the adventure, like four white or black mages; or a party who’s lives get progressively more difficult as the game progresses, like two red mages and two black mages; or even a group that overcomes initial adversities to blossom into a well-oiled war machine, like a black belt, a thief and two white mages (I highly recommend this party to those looking for a “ugly duckling” style coming of age experience).

With patience, know-how and a bit of old fashioned luck, any four-member combination (with class change) can finish the game, barring an unwelcome meeting with WarMECH on Tiamat’s bridge or a well-timed CUR4 by Chaos; just be sure to grab the Mas(a)mune sword, bury your hardest hitter at the bottom of the lineup, RUSE/INV2/White Shirt like crazy and pray, pray, pray.

Many of the incarnations of FF1 available in North America.

Things are much easier on the PSP and Gameboy Advance (Dawn of Souls) version of the game; ridiculously easy, in fact. The extras in these “upgraded” iterations feel tacked on and mismatched at best and completely game-breaking at worst. If you’re looking for the true FF1 experience and you’re not a little sissy baby who can’t handle a bit of adversity and leveling, the original NES cart or the PlayStation 1’s Final Fantasy Origins disc are the way to go. Also, Namco’s recent cell phone port of FF1 retains about 90 percent of the challenge of the original, so if you can stand squashed graphics and crippled sound, grab that mobile device and start saving the world.

Classic. Epic. Flock of Birds.

Speaking of the true Final Fantasy experience, players knew they were in for something special when the main credits began rolling only after they conquered the game’s first real challenge. Not many games bothered with cinematic elements in the mid to late 1980s, so when a screen popped up telling the player that the game has now truly begun as he or she crossed the first bridge into the unfamiliar, it really felt like you were about to embark on an epic adventure the likes of which had been hitherto unknown to the world of console gaming. The four Warriors of Light climb a hill as the sun sets in the background, looking back on the castle from whence they came and trudging ahead to the challenges that await them. Just like feeling one gets the first time they plug in The Legend of Zelda, the player suddenly felt like anything is possible. A vast new world was theirs to explore, a feeling that’s hard to shake even two decades later.

Please don't make fun of my cell model.

My current party, on the cell phone version of the game, is a red mage, a black belt, a white mage and a black mage. Yeah, the going is a little tough, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That is, unless I felt like it at the character select screen.

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What are YOUR top games of all time? Leave me a comment with your top three games, in order, and have your opinions heard in a future post here on Wordsmith VG!
 
Tomorrow: We'll Duke it out with one of gaming's baddest anti-heroes!

Avant-Garde



By Erin Middendorf



Lackluster Super Mario Costumes for Lackluster Children

I ain't afraid of no six month
long costume hunt!

When I was a kid, we didn't go down to the local Disguise Hut and purchase prefabricated Halloween costumes; we MADE them, gosh darnit. You wanna be a Ghostbuster? Then it's time to hop in the car and spend the next 2000 hours finding a child-sized jumpsuit and making ecto-goggles out of your dad's safety glasses and two plastic cups. You wanna be Guile from Street Fighter II? Then it's time to scour the tri-state area for some kind of hair spray that will make you blond for a day but you can wash it out and it won't stain your clothes, as well as a pair of camouflage pants that look Flash Kick appropriate. You wanna be a cross dresser? I do too sometimes; it's really confusing. Er, for Halloween, of course.

In my experience, it was best to start making your costume in May of the year before you wanted to wear it.

In 1990, the year Super Mario Bros. 3 was released, my brother Ian and I dressed as Mario and Luigi, respectively. While no pictures of this event exist because my parents thought that the whole Nintendo thing was just a phase, or probably they just didn't have a camera, I assure you that it was mind-blowing. The quest for green pants in a child's size negative 12 went on for days: A determined eight-year-old Matt and his slightly less determined mother camped out in the tent section of Playtogs Warehouse and when the store closed we resumed our search in the "slightly irregular" section, braving the dark stillness of after hours. Eventually we found a pair of green jeans that was approximately 16 sizes too small, and though I can never have children of my own now, I was glad to complete my costume. Add a set of cardboard raccoon ears and a tail that we cut and colored ourselves and you've got the most epic Halloween anywhere ever. It was so epic my parents for got the damn camera.

At the store next to where I work occasionally (when they feel like giving me hours), is some kind of Halloween shop that opened a few weeks ago. Inside there's the typical array of cheap, gaudy costumes and life-sized foam dead people you can put on your lawn to frighten the neighbor children, even on Halloween. As I walked around, something on the back wall caught my eye: Super Mario costumes.

It'sa me.. Mario?

I suddenly flashed back to those cold, lonely nights I spent weeding through the urine-soaked bottoms of the bargain bins for anything that resembled green pants or a green hat. I shivered a bit as I thought, "There they are in one package!" albeit kind of cheesy looking.

It'sa me, Luwiggy-o!

It took me a month to find all that stuff when I was a kid! But I'm pretty sure my Luwiggy (as I call him) costume was much cooler, though I'd know for sure if SOMEONE HAD TAKEN A PICTURE. This one kind of reminds me of Luwiggy's Mansion.

I wonder if this kid makes squeaky noises when he gets hit, like in the 1989 Super Mario Bros. cartoon.

For children with no ambition, here's a Toad costume. I prefer to call him "Tod" though as I'm falling down thousands of pits when playing as him. Tod's the worst Super Mario character ever. First he and his people get themselves turned into bricks, then his stats are frelled in Super Mario Bros. 2 to the point where when he jumps, the player thinks his pockets are filled with hundreds of pounds of rotting veggies and dead trouters. Well, at least he can pick things up quickly, so he's got a great future in the cigarette butt retrieval industry.

Robo-Yoshi, here to kill us all.

This one actually looks pretty good and would be difficult to make yourself. But I wouldn't allow a child of mine to get it because it apparently forces the wearer to do the robot dance every second they have it on, as evidenced by the unfortunate child in the picture.

OBLIGATORY FEMALE COSTUME

Even though the princess was the best character in Super Mario Bros. 2 because she floats like a butterfly and stings like angry young royalty, much of today's gaming youth don't remember her like that. Ever since she changed her name to Peach for no good reason, she's stopped fighting bad guys and spent her time playing boardgames and tennis. There's a feminist rant in here somewhere, but I think I'll just point out that young girl gamers who are really into the Mario series would be better off dressing as the red man himself and showing the world that women can be strong too, even after having their starring role in Super Mario Bros. 2 reduced to captured princess again just one game later.

As I examined these costumes for way too long and creepily took pictures of them, I thought to myself that they don't look BAD, they just look a little... generic. I imagine that the kids coming to my door wearing these costumes on Halloween will be kind of generic too, you know? (Unless you're Isaac Quintana's thankfully un-color blind son; then you're awesome. Who's Isaac Quintana, you ask? He's not an insider, a journalist, or a programmer, but he is a fine and insightful writer.)

There's a great thrill of finding all the components to a costume yourself. Anyone who's done it knows that Halloween is just more fun if you've dug through the bargain bins and cut and colored your own costume. But I want to let you in on a little secret - The best Mario Bros. costume of all time isn't the one I wore in 1990, nor is it available at a Halloween store or even in the pages of Nintendo Power, this decade or any other. No, it's right here:


My God! The late '80s puked all over that poor child!

My parents didn't have a camera around when Ian and I were the Super Matt Bros., but they did take a photo of me wearing the most embarrassing outfit/best Mario-themed costume of all time: a neon blue Super Mario 3 shirt, lime green biker shorts that clung to my thighs like spandex (because they were), a hat only a painter could love and socks pulled up to approximately nipple height. I'm not sure why Mom and Dad let me go out in public like this. Maybe they were laughing at me behind my back, or maybe they knew that two decades in the future, I'd post this image on my glorious blog for the world to see.

I'm pretty sure it's the laughing at me behind my back thing though. Oh well, at least with an outfit like that, I could join the gangs of Rival Turf!.

So to all those kids out there looking to bum some candy from their begrudgingly obliging neighbors this Halloween, start making your costume now. It'll never be as good as the one with the Godforsaken biker shorts that I came up with, but you'll stand out triumphantly in a sea of store-bought Marios, Luwiggys, Tods and Robo-Yoshis. Have fun, be safe, and OH GOD IN HEAVEN MOM AND DAD LET ME WALK AROUND LIKE THAT IN PUBLIC.

Happy Halloween!