Back of the Cereal Box

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

In Praise of Pixels and in Search of Super Mario Bros. 5

As I was tossing out old magazines to make way for the 2009 stack, I came across an issue of Retro Gamer, a British publication which focuses specifically on the chunky gloriousness that is old video games. An apparently regular feature is “Pixel Perfect,” in which a certain game’s sprites are showcased — not just for being good enough considering the technical restraints of the time but instead for being aesthetically pleasing in their own right. The issue I picked up happened to honor Super Mario World and its enemy sprites in particular. Yes, their every colored block component is visible, even at a distance, but Retro Gamer encourages us to see this as a positive.

The scans:

It might be odd for some people my age to see a game that debuted in 1991 be held up as iconic, even though pretty much anyone who regularly held a video game controller that year would know that Super Mario World is held in high regard. Looking at the character sprites laid out in a grid, however, with whatever Mario game they debuted in noted beneath, I can’t help but to notice how many of these characters never appeared again after Super Mario World and which, consequently, didn’t become such weirdly large parts of my childhood.

Who is it, I have to wonder, that gets to decide which ones get to become series staples and which ones fall by the side? Who decided that the Porcu-Puffer or the Dino-Torch were so inherently flawed that they didn’t need to appear in any subsequent Mario games? What made them so inferior to the rest of the minions pictured in the second scan? And who thought it necessary to bring Pokey back from the obscurity of Super Mario Bros. 2, resulting in the segmented, ambulatory cactus’s appearance in nearly every subsequent Mario game? (Damn activists and their pro-cactus agenda.)

Maybe more importantly, I note two facts in the infobox on the right side of the first scan: in order, “[Super Mario World] is known as Super Mario Bros. 4 in Japan” and “Super Mario World’s direct sequel was Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds and was supposed to be released on the CD-i.” I’ve read about Wacky Worlds a bit online and recognize that it is the Mario game that never came to be. And I realize that Super Mario World was released in Japan with the subtitle “Super Mario Bros. 4.”

super mario bros. 4 super mario world japanese box art

See? And it makes sense, especially given that an earlier incarnation of Super Mario World featured Mario sporting the raccoon tail that allowed him to fly in Super Mario Bros. 3. (Like in real life!) But if this Super Nintendo launch title is Super Mario Bros. 4, then what is Super Mario Bros. 5, especially if the horrifically titled Wacky Worlds — that is, the “direct sequel” to the subject at hand — never came to be?

In 1995, Nintendo released a sequel to Super Mario World: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, which starred Mario in infantile form, clinging tenaciously onto Yoshi and screaming like a banshee when the two were separated.

It would seem logical that an actually published sequel to Super Mario World would get to take the title of Super Mario Bros. 5, but I’m not sure that this game actually should. Essentially, this game departed enough from the standard Mario hop-and-bop gameplay that it birthed Nintendo’s Yoshi games as a series in their own right, what with their egg-tossing and constant eating. (They’re like a primer for bad motherhood.)

So if it’s not Yoshi’s Island, maybe it’s Super Mario 64 — the first 3-D Mario game and the second title to continue the trend of one-title-per-system that began with Super Mario World. (If the Wii gets a follow-up to Super Mario Galaxy before a new age of Nintendo systems dons on it, it would be the first in years to break this trend.) Of course, you could also say that Super Mario 64 was the start of the al the games where Mario could run around in any one of 360 degrees from where he’s standing — yes, that is different than up, down, backward and forward — like in Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy. So, essentially, this one may not be the true sequel either, if you look at it instead as the first in a new series.

Really, if any game deserves to inherit the subtitle Super Mario Bros. 5, it would be a game that most people probably didn’t play and which has never been ported to any latter-day Nintendo system: Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. It was the game that introduced that Freudian nightmare Wario as well as the second Mario outing for the Game Boy. The game did its best to re-create the basic Super Mario World graphics and atmosphere and gameplay with the magic of creamed spinach color. But even if it was the title that deserved to be the true follow-up to Super Mario World, it should get nixed for the same reason that the previous two games should: It spun off into a radically non-Mario direction. Its sequel, Super Mario Land 3 starred not Mario but Wario, who later went on to bop-and-hop through five more games, each with a more Wario-specific style of gameplay. Beyond that, Six Golden Coins is already a sequel to another game: the Super Mario Land, which owes more to the original Super Mario Bros. than anything else.

The conclusion: None. There is no Super Mario Bros. 5, and, thus, it’s stupid to imagine what could deserve that honor.

Realization: Anything that had a chance at having the honor immediately lost it by spinning off into its own thing. Boo.

Additional realization: I think I hate Pokey.

Third realization: What the hell ever happened to the Koopa Kids, foremost among them Morton Koopa Jr. — the only video game character to be named after trash TV titan Morton Downey Jr.?

Other noteworthy Super Mario-related posts:

Dog Star

I wouldn’t want yesterday’s post to overshadow my own dog, who has not and will not appear in a dog show but who my family considers a grand champion in his own right. A neurotic, troubled champion.

Monday, January 5, 2009

The Lost City of Caninopolis

Though this post will not illustrate this fact, I’ve learned that dog shows make for good people watching in addition to good dog watching. For whatever reason, weirdos seems to abound in greater numbers than they do at horse events or car events, these two being the other sort of show-and-tell powwows that I’ve attended. They weren’t all weirdos, of course. There were just more of them to see than if you had you gone to the liquidation sale on the other events center. Why should dog enthusiasts drive the weirdometer to excessive beeping and flashing? I don’t know and won’t attempt an answer here. But really — these people must have seen Best in Show, right? I mean, could there be a movie that they’d want to watch more? Shouldn’t they want to stray a little from the dog show nut stereotype? It boggles the mind.

While you roll these questions around, do remember to enjoy the dogs. (And if you’re so inclined, the rest of the dog show photos are posted at my Flickr account.)

sad-eyed irish wolfhound

flop-bodied mopdog

petulant paris hilton dog

sheep-looking — but not exactly sheepish — bedlington terrier

steely- and heterochromatic-eyed glarehound

tongue-lolling st. bernard

the best thing ever: a great dane in a playpen

life-contemplating french ennui spaniel

the great caledonian fluff-face dog

emotionally needy weimaraner

miniature ewok dog

The motivation for attending the show, by the way, was Patrick, the Irish Water Spaniel whom you might remember from the last dogorama blog post. He came, he showed, and he actually failed to conquer on the particular day these photos were taken. But he nonetheless enjoyed what I’m sure he thought was a post-competition victory lap on the lawn outside.

And please offer any theories about the dog show-weirdo correlation in the comment section below or — failing that — praise about the cuteness of the dogs.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Too Little Too Late / And a Little Too Wrong

Embarrassing to realize but generative for blog fodder: a song I like is actually a cover of something horrible.

Here, for your consideration, is a YouTube video highlighting the song “Too Little Too Late,” by Daniel Rossen. (Ignore the accompanying animations. In fact, just minimize the window and listen to the song a bit.)

Rossen writes music and plays guitar for the band Grizzly Bear, which I very much so want to like but, so far, have not been able to, regardless of good reviews and friends’ ravings. This song, however, totally won me over. Lushly instrumented, a little gothic, and a little dour, it represents the opposite of what pop music usually is but the best of what it could be.

Then I found out it was a cover of a song by JoJo, the newly 18-year-old singer-actress whose existence I otherwise had no reason to acknowledge. (I admit it right now: I was not exactly the first in line to buy tickets for Aquamarine.) JoJo is one of those nymphet vocalists who practice that sultry, warbling style of singing that so often sounds like melodic sex moans. Which is just wrong, given that she’s only recently moved out of Statutory County, USA. All this aside, she did sing the original version of “Too Little Too Late.”

That’s what I get for trying to like music — status as a backdoor JoJo fan.

Previous songs of the week:

Star of the Electric Blue Sea

The closest I came to attending church this Christmas:

In retrospect, I should have taken the photo the night I drove up, when the rain made for maximum twinklage.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Adult Education, So to Speak

So it has begun: A new alphabetical word-of-the-week cycle. The last one ended in December with the all-too appropriate gem of a word, epeolatry. This second one shall begin on a word that itself is not especially wondrous but simply captured my attention.

adulterine (uh-DULT-er-EEN) — adjective: 1. characterized by adulteration, spurious. 2. unauthorized by law, illegal. 3. born of adultery. noun: 1. a person born of adulterous union.

The final definition — which, notably, is the only one not appearing in the American Heritage Dictionary entry for the word — is the one that grabs my attention. I can’t imagine how invaluable this word will be at my high school reunion. Also, I feel I should note that it sounds like a name with which some unfortunate backwoods woman might be cursed. (“Hey Ma, tell me again whyfor my name is ‘Adulterine’”?)

Frank McCourt’s Depraved and Insulting English notes that the distinction between an adulterine and a bastard is important: While a bastard’s parents are simply not married, an adulterine’s parents are married — but specifically not to each other. McCourt encourages us all to confer adulterine with gandermooner (a man who chases women during the month after his wife has given birth), uzzard (a third-generation bastard), wetewold (an understanding cuckold), and yaldson (the son of a prostitute). Yes, we English-speakers have words for all the things that are important to us.

Previous words worth knowing:

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Your New Year's Goose

Here’s to a good 2009. Perhaps it will be a less tumultuous year, with fewer fires, instance of economic instability and presidential elections. In accordance with New Year’s Tradition, here’s the customary Gosling of Good Intentions. May she insulate you in this new year with a metaphorical lining of down feathers.

So who was your qualtagh?

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