The Bare Trap (Warning: Nudity!)

Got a minute?

I’ve got a topic that might make some people mad, and I don’t expect a lot of people to agree with me on this one. I just need to get my thoughts down on digital paper and maybe they’ll sound more coherent. Okay. Ready? My thesis statement is the sentence after this one.

Society really needs to get over the problems it has with female breasts.

Think about it. Why are boobs considered too hot for television? Why is it when a naked breast appears on cable TV, they throw in some token pixilation or a black bar over the nipple—which, I must point out, is the only portion of the breast that looks the exact same on women as it does on men. Why is the nude form of a woman visual contraband in mediums and real-life locations that don’t hold the same standard for men?

Some might argue it’s because of their tendency to arouse or at least excite your average heterosexual male. This argument might hold water if the entertainment industry were something like it was in the 1950s, when Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in two different beds, even though they were already married. But every medium today is full of sexual themes, T&A, and fan service. Television shows like Nip Tuck have shown scenes of oral sex that couldn’t have been more explicit without showing the body parts. Movies that miss the R Rating can still be packed with all-but-naked women or lacy lingerie love scenes.

And don’t even get me started on comic books, where sixteen years old is NOT too young to have female characters stripped down and in compromising positions. (A 2006 issue of Teen Titans comes to mind, in which a naked—and underage—Rose Wilson attempted to drunkenly seduce Robin. Conveniently placed black-as-night shadows were the only thing keeping the comic from a Mature Readers label.)

So if there is so much media intended to arouse—sometimes by means that go far beyond simple nudity—then why is it so offensive to just show boobs?

Seriously, I’m asking. I don’t know.

But here’s why I think it matters and why I think it should change. The emphasis on knockers going unseen except in adult content—whether intentionally or not—fetishists boobs. It takes a perfectly innocuous body part and turns it into a something seen as dirty, or at least off limits. That creates a problem when puberty hits the male gender. You see, while most boys will see their fair share of women’s naked chests, a few will believe that their desire makes them perverted or dirty minded. Instead of telling them that their interest is natural, we tell them that looking at nude women is a sin—and all the while they get a bizarre mixed message from the media that nudity is bad, but sexual promiscuity isn’t.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this is pretty personal, because it’s what I went through. I was raised in a fairly conservative Southern Baptist home and went to a fairly conservative Southern Baptist church, and went through a truckload of utterly needless guilt over the issue of looking, lusting, and how much skin is too much. I didn’t even want to watch pornography—that is, I didn’t want to watch depictions of sexual acts, all the while those who were supposed to be guiding me were making me think I was a horrible person for the sin of… having hormones.

There’s another angle to this too. The Internet makes nude pictures easily available, but it also makes a lot more than that available. Just one wrong click can get you some of the vilest porn ever conceived. I was fortunate that I didn’t get pulled deep into the darker side of adult content on the internet—the stuff like bestiality, scat porn, and worst of all, child porn.

But some kids do wind up exposed to that stuff—and then what would be normal interest in the opposite sex becomes legitimate perversion.

Now, if you’re just flat out disagreeing with my… rant… diatribe… whatever this is… please bear with me as I’m gonna answer some objections I anticipate.

“What about the sin of Lust?”

Yeah, that’s the thing my church—especially my youth pastor—liked to harp on. But let’s take a look at the Bible passage that condemns lust in context. It’s in Matthew 5, if you want to compare.

27. "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'^[a] 28. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Notice the context? Jesus spoke these words to married men who were using their minds to be unfaithful to their wives when it wasn’t possible to use their bodies. This is not a condemnation of the healthy and normal sexual desire that everyone experiences. The Greek word translated lust here is ‘epithymia’, also translated Covet. Covetousness and Lust both imply a strong and willful desire—in this case, a desire for someone who is not yours. Thus it’s okay to look at and enjoy the site of the opposite sex on both an aesthetic level and a hormonal level, if you don’t let yourself strongly desire them. (And weak desire can’t logically be a sin because humans do not have direct control over what they fancy; desires are not simply chosen, but cultivated over the course of time.)

Furthermore, notice that in this passage, that the impetus not to sin is placed ENTIRELY on the one who would lust. Thus, the church cannot Biblically argue that a woman who dresses (or undresses) in a manner that shows off the body God gave her is ‘inviting’ men to sin. Not only do the men have the option to look without lusting, but they have the option to not look at all. (Though I must say the latter option is considerably more difficult.)

The second objection might sound something like this:

“But that’s so immodest!”

Not necessarily. Modesty’s association with covering body parts is nothing new, and is found in the Bible—and likely in the holy books of other religions, but since I know very little about other religions, I’ll deal with just the Bible.

But... well, I did a bit of searching on the IntarWeb just to be certain, and the only reference I could find relating to female modesty is this, a passage in 1 Timothy.

9. I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10. but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

Modest dress, it would seem, has more to do with not flaunting wealth than it does with the length of your skirt. Modesty is an inward trait that may be reflected in dress, but is not determined by it. A woman who flaunts her sexual attractiviness would do it in jeans and a T-shirt as well as she would do it in a bikini.

And lastly...

“So you’re saying you think it’s good for us wimm’n-folk to just go around naked/topless/whatever?”

And the answer to this is… Not exactly. First of all, I understand that for many reasons, many women would not be comfortable in situations where they were exposed around the opposite sex. I’m not arguing for an end to appropriate attire or that nudity is appropriate in any situation, and obviously personal comfort and taste come in to play.

What I’d like to happen is for society in general just to chill out over nudity. The sight of the human body isn’t going to corrupt anyone. If that means women who want to are allowed to go topless wherever men are, then I’m fine with that. It’s already legal in some cities, including Toronto.

In closing, uncovering the body isn’t necessarily even a sexual act. Hopefully the drawings I’ve scattered throughout this blog post (which are all copyright to me, don’t steal them or anything) have pointed out some other possible meanings for depictions of nudity.

And with that, I’ve said what I wanted to say.

Peace.

The Robin Problem

I got to thinking about Robin today, and sometimes thinking leads to a blog post. So here goes. DC Comics needs to do something about Robin. The current version of the character is more relatable now than he has been in a few years, but things still aren’t perfect. Upcoming events as revealed by solicitations may change all of this, but as it stands, Robin needs fixing.

To understand where Robin went ‘wrong’, first we have to understand how Batman’s sidekick has evolved over the years. Legend has it that long ago in the distant past, around 1940, DC thought that Batman was getting too dark for the supposed target audience of comics—kids—and came up with a way to lighten him up a bit. Robin was introduced as Dick Grayson, a young circus acrobat whose parents were murdered by a small time mobster. Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne and later discovered that his benefactor was in fact Batman; Bruce trained the boy and set him loose as Robin, the Boy Wonder. The rest is history; Robin became the first superhero’s sidekick, and inspired a wave of imitators.

Several parallel universes and four decades later, Robin had grown up a bit. Instead of a twelve year old boy, he was a 19 year old college student, at odds with Batman more often than by his side. Something had to give. So the then-writer of “New Teen Titans”, Marv Wolfman, decided to get rid of the Robin identity altogether (and thank God he did, given that no young adult male should be running around in hot pants)…

The result was Dick Grayson becoming Nightwing. A new boy, also a circus acrobat, was brought in to replace Dick. His name was Jason Todd, and he was essentially a carbon copy of his predecessors. The only difference was that he had red hair—which he died black anyway to be more like Dick.

Then along came a Crisis. Or rather, a story called Crisis On Infinite Earths. The end result of that is a moment taken straight out of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Everything You Know is Wrong”—a bunch of little details about the universe of DC Comics had changed. Some things remained. Dick was still Nightwing, and Robin was still Jason Todd, but now Jason was no longer the red haired boy readers had tolerated; he was now a rude street urchin who badmouthed Batman and sometimes went a little too far with criminals. As in tossing them out of tall buildings too far. Needless to say, the criminal in question died.

Jason was hated, and DC actually polled the readers on whether he should live or die. Well, he died. So, once again, DC was without a Robin. Along came the third try. Third time’s a charm, right?

It was. The new Robin, Tim Drake, was a resounding success. He was different enough from Dick that he felt like his own character, but never as much of a rude little prick as the new and improved Jason. Tim got a duo of mini series dedicated to him, then his own solo title.

Part of the reason behind Tim’s success was undoubtedly his reliability. Sure, he was super-good at something, like all the Bat-Family must be. In Tim’s case, it was computers. But Tim was different. He had parents that were living, and in the course of his origin, only lost one of them. He continued to have a father for most of his published history—more on that later.

Tim first appeared as a thirteen year old, having deduced Batman and Robin’s identities at the age of nine. He soon grew into a fourteen year old in the first Robin miniseries, in which he traveled the world learning martial arts from teachers even more skilled than Batman himself. All the while Tim kept his identity a secret from his father and the rest of his supporting cast, while facing villains as dastardly and classic as the Joker or as new and bizarre as the General, a young boy who happened to be an evil military genius.

But somewhere along the way something happened. Tim turned fifteen sometime in the early 90s… and then stopped aging completely, even by comic book standards. A combination of factors led to this, but the main thing was the creation of a new generation of young heroes. Superboy, a clone with powers that mimicked Superman’s appeared, along with a super-speedster from the future named Impulse. Soon a new Wonder Girl joined them, along with a legacy hero named Arrowette. Tim and his friends were slipped into a generic age category—the high school age group. Though created over the course of the 90s, all of the “Young Justice” age group were pegged as being fifteen around 1997 and remained fifteen for years—despite DC comics having 1999 take place in real time and celebrating the new millennium in 2000.

Tim finally celebrated his sixteenth birthday in 2003, the age he would official remain during his early tenure in the newest incarnation of the Teen Titans. On one hand, things finally started to get moving again. On the other, some things changed for the worse. Tim’s father, Jack Drake, was killed off by one of the Flash’s supervillains, while his girlfriend Stephanie was tortured and murdered by the Black Mask.

Time skipped forward a year after the second Crisis, and Tim, now seventeen, was adopted by Bruce. He’s moved away from his computer nerd persona, becoming not entirely unlike Dick Grayson. And while his girlfriend… well, got better, Tim remains incomplete. While supposedly a genius, Tim remains in high school. Some of this may be attributed to the sheer amount of school he missed since becoming Robin, but it has to end some time.

I suppose this is where the opinion comes in, so feel free to disagree. Tim needs to graduate. He needs to move on. Despite all that’s happened and all that DC has editorially mandated to change about Tim, he and (what’s left of) his generation still remain in high school. And as someone who graduated high school not to long ago, I must attest that it feels forced. High school ends in the blink of an eye, and DCs teen heroes have been there far too long. Tim is by DC’s own timeline eighteen at this point—that’s five years of association with Batman and four of actually being Robin. He’s no longer the socially awkward computer genius he debuted as. He no longer has a father to hide his identity from.

I feel that Tim is becoming harder and harder to relate to because in almost every way, he’s grown up. He’s an adult trapped by the decrees of editors in a teenage wasteland. Perhaps being a young man in college myself, I am biased on this point, and I fully acknowledge that. Though in my defense, I don’t have trouble relating to other characters in Tim’s demographic, or those older and younger than myself. I simply think—as a fan of the character— that keeping him artificially pigeonholed at a certain age will eventually look ridiculous and make him less relatable to people of all age groups.

So what about the high school demographic? Well, DC has plenty of characters to fill the supposed void that would be left behind if Tim and his generation grew up. The new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes is a new member of the Teen Titans and an excellent new character. He was only introduced in 2006, and is already more relatable and likable than the person Tim has developed into. Kid Devil, Rose Wilson, Miss Martian, and several other young characters can easily pick up the torch of teen vigilantism.

One of the great things about the DC Comics universe is that it is traditionally more aware of the passage of time than the Marvel universe. Robins grow up, sometimes die. The Flash passes the torch to his successor and creates one of the company’s greatest characters in the process. And characters have finally started referring to the Silver Age of superheroes as more than ten years ago.

So yeah. It’s time for Tim to move on. He doesn’t have to reinvent himself as Nightwing.

Just give the kid his diploma already.

Role Playing With Mario

If you're one of the millions who have discovered the fantastic series of RPGs based on the illustrious gaming icon Mario, then this piece really isn't for you, because you already know. But if you're one of the many unfortunate souls who haven't yet discovered them, then read on. Five games that are sure to entertain you will soon be blogged about!

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

I suppose we should begin at the beginning. It all started in 1996 with a company called Squaresoft. You may have heard of them before—the guys behind classics in the gaming world like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series. They decided that it would be swell if they teamed up with Nintendo to make an RPG starring Mario, and thus was born Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. And lo, it WAS swell. SMRPG begins as all Mario stories must—the princess, Bowser, and Mario. A kidnapping, an attempted rescue, a fight. You know the drill. Curiously Peach is referred to as 'Toadstool' by everyone in the game. I guess nobody at Square got the memo that it was okay to use her first name now, given that this came the same year as Mario 64, the game that introduced the US to the name Peach.

Anyway, during the rescue, Bowser's castle is attacked by a giant talking sword and Mairo, Bowser, and the Princess are scattered across the land. Luckily Mario lands in his own house, but Bowser and Peach are nowhere to be scene. Mario sets off to find that the castle has been taken over by an interstellar group of ne'erdowells called the Smithy Gang, and in the process Mario must locate seven stars to repair Star Road and beat Smithy's gang down. The trademark Mario RPG sense of humor gets its start here, as well as many staples of the series, such as timed hits during battles and visible enemies in the over world, things that help alleviate the often-tedious nature of Japanese RPGs.

Paper Mario

Originally called Super Mairo RPG II, Paper Mario began its life during the late 1990s, but didn't see the light of day until 2001. The N64 title was hurt by its late release when it came to sales, but the time in development created a game that more than made up for all its delays. Paper Mario slapped the Mario Universe wholecloth into a story book visual style that still holds up much better than most other games of that era. (Trust me, Paper Mario looks surprisingly good on a 52'' HDTV). Scaling back everything you traditionally associate with RPGs, Mario has an incredibly limited number of hit points and flower points, and everything costs and deals damage accordingly. There are no massive spells that do 9999 damage here. If your foe can hit you with a 7 damage attack, you're in trouble! But the lack of typical RPG excess is part of the game's charm.

This time around the villain is more familiar, Bowser has taken the Star Rod from the orbiting Star Haven and imprisoned its guardians the Star Spirits. There are seven of them, by the way. Mario has to travel all over the Mushroom Kingdom and defeat the guardians Bowser has put in place over the spirits, and enlists the help of some colorful characters of all races through the Mushroom World. Paper Mario is the poster child for everything Nintendo does right, and really cemented the place of Intelligent Systems as one of the best development studios in Nintendo's stable.

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga

The line took a detour onto the Game Boy Advance after its N64 outing, with Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga hitting shelves in 2003. The game takes the timed hits of the previous games to a flawless extreme. Both Mario and Luigi team up this time, each brother controlled by one of the buttons. Mario responds to A and Luigi to B, and all of the game actions require the two to work together to accomplish their goals. The battle system was greatly expanded, adding combined “Bros” attacks to the fray, attacks that combined the brothers' abilites for—forgive me—MASSIVE DAMAGE. Defense was similarly brilliant, each brother dodging with a jump or reflecting with a hammer anything that came at them, as long as you pressed their corresponding button at the right time. This meant for the first time in the history of RPGs it's technically—if not humanly—possible to play through the entire game without taking a single hit aside from the ones the script demands the brothers to take.

On top of all this, Superstar Saga is easily the funniest game of the bunch, with an exuberant wacky sense of humor throughout. The story opens with emissaries from the Bean Bean Kingdom, one of the Mushroom Kingdom's neigbhors, revealing themselves to be none too friendly. They're secretly a witch, Cackletta and her minion Fawful. Together they steal Peach's voice and replace it with explosives! What follows is a trek that must be played to be believed, from Fawful's angry Engrish screeds to the climactic battle against the seven Koopalings and Bowletta at the end of the game—yes, Bowletta. I'll let you figure that one out. If you don't play this game, Fawful... WILL HAVE FURY!

Paper Mario 2: The Thousand Year Door

Back to Nintendo's main console in 2004, the series next entry was a sequel to Paper Mario that pulled out all the visual stops, using the full muscle of the Gamecube to do things that weren't possible on the N64. In addition to the visual upgrade, the game play got a few tweeks, with more interactivity in the battles (as if there wasn't enough already!) in the form of a dynamic audience that reacted to the fight and determined how much your Star Gauge—the meter that powers your special attacks—would charge with each action. Otherwise, the formula was very similar to the previous game: A mysterious door will only open every 1000 years, and beyond it lies a great treasure. The only way to open is to gather the Crystal Stars (You guessed it, all seven of them. Starting to see a pattern?) and beat the villainous X-Nauts to the prize behind it. Paper Mario 2's gameplay excesses can be forgiven largely because of the writing, which is brilliant from start to finish. The characters you meet through the game are instantly likable and more varied than those of the original game, lending the game a feel that you're in a vastly different part of the Mushroom World than where Mario Normally treads. Sure, there are franchise mainstays like the Goomba (this time an archaeologist named Goombella) and the Koopa (now a hoodie-wearing ex-coward named Koops) but you get more than that. A baby Yoshi joins the party, as well as a 'Shadow Siren' and a very large and busty ghost madame with a pair of lungs even bigger than her pair of... eyes..

You even get segments where you get to play as Bowser this time around, through areas that play like classic 2D side-scrollers. It's fun stuff all around.

Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time

Nintendo certainly got a lot faster at releasing these games, but it may want to slow down a little. Probably the weakest link of the bunch, Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time for the DS takes the gameplay of the first to an illogical but nonetheless fun extreme. As the title implies, you team up with a blast from the past—Mario and Luigi as babies. Wait a minute, weren't these guys raised in Brooklyn?

Nintendo doesn't even try to make sense of it, so neither will I. The game ads the little tykes, who have scaled down versions of all their adult counterparts' abilities, and like the first game where Mario and Luigi responded to individual buttons, the babies take advantage of the DS extra two and respond to X and Y. The sense of humor isn't quite as good, but its still a worthwhile adventure for any DS owner.

This time around the enemy is the dangerous Shroob, more aliens from beyond the stars who attacked the Mushroom Kingdom more than thirty years ago, sending shockwaves into the present. (Again, don't try and make sense of it.) Mario and Luigi team up with their baby selves to collect the shards of the Cobalt Star and restore the space time continuum to order—and fight a bunch of aliens along the way.

And there you have it. Five great games, four common themes throughout: Mario, hit points, stars, and plenty of baddies to squash.

If you haven't realized it yet, I'm a huge Mario fanboy, and that has perhaps colored my opinion of these games. Use common sense. If you don't like RPGs or Mario, there's a chance you might not like these games. But there's a chance you may, because they go above and beyond the typical RPG call of duty and do something unique and fun. Just remember to watch out for stray Bob-ombs.

Odds and Ends

Final Crisis

Here we go again; it’s that time of year. DC Comics has just unleashed it’s newst world-changing Mega-Crossover, Final Crisis. For the uninitiated, this is the third in a supposed trilogy of Crises that began in 1985 with Crisis on Infinite Earths and continued in 2005 with the recent Infinite Crisis. Final Crisis is supposedly the bookend to everything the story momentum of the DCU has been building towards over the last few years.

So far, it’s pretty underwhelming though. Now please note that SPOILERS are ahead, so if you plan to read Final Crisis, but haven’t yet, don’t go any further. The issue opens as the author promised it would, with the First Boy, Anthro. In a very cool opening sequence, he is given fire by the self-styled Prometheus, the New God Metron, and uses it to fight off the vandal hordes of the villain who will later be known as Vandal Savage.

The story shifts to the present day, where Dan Turpin, a minor Superman character created by Jack Kirby, finds the dying New God named Orion and watches as he dies. The Guardians of the Universe freak out and cordon off the planet because of a Code 1011, deicide. This proves to be a rather ridiculous elements for reasons entirely beyond the author Grant Morrison’s control

You see, DC has been killing off the New Gods in droves lately, in their year-long weekly series Countdown to Final Crisis as well as an eight-part miniseries know aptly as Death of the New Gods. The characters have been so over saturated that any awe and mystery they should have has been replaced by the tedium of an overused character showing up in places he doesn’t belong. Morrison manages to recapture a little of that, but only if you look at Final Crisis in a vacuum, independent of the failure of a weekly series that counted down to it.

After some good scenes involving Libra, the new big bad of the DCU for the time being, Dark Side (who is, of course, Darkseid himself) and surprisingly the Monitors, one of the most annoying and overused groups throughout Countdown. Morrison manages to make them more interesting in a few pages than Paul Dini and company did in 51 issues.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a big crossover without a hero killed off to show how serious the villain is. This time around the victim is long-time JLA mainstay J’onn J’onnz, the Martian Manhunter. I went in expecting to be outraged and frustrated by the decision, but in the context of the comic it caused a surprising amount of apathy. J’onn hasn’t been used much lately, or at least not used very well. He is off the Justice League, he has a stupid new costume, and his recent mini series was, as far as I’ve heard, mediocre at best.

It sufficiently establishes the stakes of this new world Libra wants to create—a world where Evil wins. I’m not sure how long the death will stick—after all, J’onn is one of the classic JLA mainstays and had a wonderful showing on the Justice League animated series.

Overall, Final Crisis issue 1 just makes me interested and curious about where it’s going. It didn’t turn me off from the whole crossover, but at the same time, it hasn’t grabbed my full attention yet the way Infinite Crisis and Crisis on Infinite Earths did when I first read them. But this is only the first issue, so I suppose whether or not this has all been worth it will be revealed in time.

GameOverthinker 8

In other news, the Game Overthinker video blog that I mentioned in my previous entry has updated again. This time around the topic is race and video games, and the insights by moviebob are very astute, in my opinion.

Gamers by and large are not a racist bunch, at least not anymore so than the rest of the population. When we see that the game is set in Africa, we simply accept it. The fact that the protagonist is a white guy and the zombies this time are all black didn’t occur to most of us until certain parties began complaining that the game was racist. To us, they’re just zombies, no matter what color their skin is.

Of course, there is obviously a potential to be offended if the game is not placed in context. But then, hen has the mass media ever cared about context when it comes to video games? From what they tend to report, Grand Theft Auto is a game about killing hookers and beating up old ladies.

Video Game Theory

I had thought about doing an article on the excellent series of Game OverThinker videos by MovieBob over at YouTube, but then I thought that perhaps it would be better first to explain my own view of the game industry as it stands today before delving into the other guy’s thoughts.

I was practically born with an NES controller in my hands, and my dad ran an arcade with things such as Mortal Kombat, Metal Slug, and Final Fight up until 2003. So I’ve been exposed to video games literally my entire life, and in those twenty years I’ve come to develop a few opinions about them. Despite owning a Genesis, I was a diehard Nintendo fanboy up until the year 1999 when my brother finally got a Playstation. In a bizarre twist, I had somehow managed to avoid ever learning of the Playstation’s existence until well after the release of it’s late-to-the-game competitor, the Nintendo 64. Consequently, even though I enjoyed my PS1, I held fast to the Nintendo as my primary allegiance, and was committed to the Gamecube from the time it was called the Dolphin.

If you think Nintendo fanboyism is creepy and misguided, then Game OverThinker’s most recent episode has an excellent explanation of it. Of course, my blind fanboy stage had to come to an end eventually; I owned all three systems the previous generation and consider the PS2 objectively the best, and regard an X-Box game the single best game of last generation.

I also own the two good systems of this generation and have enjoyed them both greatly. Whoops, there was one of my pesky opinions.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the PS3. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad console; it just doesn’t have enough games that interest me at this time. Ratchet and Clank isn’t enough for the price tag.

Needless to say, Nintendo recapturing the majority of the market has indeed been a source of satisfaction for me, even with the influx of Casual Gamers it has brought. Unfortunately, the influx of Casual Gamers has been a bit troublesome to myself and many others. I don’t think the more avid gamers are going to run out of ‘hardcore’ games anytime soon. Rather I’m more worried about Nintendo dumbing down future iterations of its major franchises to bring new people in.

So, this all brings me to my basic theory of gaming:

Games should be fun. That seems like a no-brainer, but when you get used to arguing over level design, graphics, bump and normal mapping, pixel shaders, and whether or not the last Castlevania was too easy, you run the risk of forgetting the core question about any game: “Am I having fun?”

Of course, fun is a subjective thing, and every type of gamer, indeed every individual will define it a little differently. And that’s okay. Fun can be independent of story, characters, or even good game design. For example, I don’t care how many people tell me that Metal Gear Solid is a brilliantly designed stealth action game, it bored and frustrated me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a good game, even if its put together well by all objective standards. On the other hand, I know BattleTanx for the N64 was a deriviatve and mediocre, yet I had a blast playing it when I was younger.

A little subjectivity is okay. It’s not a sin against the Hardcore Gamer Gods to enjoy Halo—whether or not you think it’s the second coming of sliced bread. All our tastes are different. The problem is that the extremes tend to want everything their way.

I don’t just talk in terms of casual gamers and hardcore gamers. There are more classes than that.

Casual Gamers

The type of player who cares only about the enjoyment factor and doesn’t give one whit about whether it’s been done before, whether it’s objectively good, or whether it’s art. They tend to like simpler things, such as Wii Sports and Brain Age, and tend to be anything but 15-35 year old males.

Pros: They’re making Nintendo truckloads of money; they typically aren’t jerks about their tastes in gaming.

Cons: too many of them can skew the market away from deeper more satisfying experiences. The current glut of third party shovelware on the Wii, for example.

Handheld Gamers

People who do most of their gaming on the go with a DS, GBA, or PSP. For them gaming is about having a fun fix wherever they are. Typically pre-teens and younger teenagers, but also found among disaffected PC gamers.

Pros: They’re easily satisfied and typically aren’t jerks about what they like

Cons: They have little influence on the market at large.

Cool Gamers

The type of person who plays what’s popular. They gush over things like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and many others, while ignoring games that don’t meet a certain standard of acceptability. Sometimes icons like Mario and Smash Brothers will fall into that standard, but many franchises and genres are left by the wayside.

Pros: Usually pick the kings of each console generation, as they are very numerous.

Cons: Rarely are concerned about quality, and sometimes even eschew fun as long as the game is popular. The type that loves their washed out brown graphics, they don’t try things that are cute or outside the mainstream.

Avid Gamers

This is the kind of person who checks Gamespot or IGN every time a game they might want comes out. They care about quality and play games as one of their main hobbies, but are still more about what they enjoy than what everyone else happens to be playing. They’re the most likely type to own a Wii60 combination

Pros: They tend to support good games; they know what they like and are willing to experiment

Cons: May be afraid to give new things a try, especially if its reviews are mixed

Extreme Fanboys

An insidious type of gamer who holds to their favorite console or consoles and hates the others. They tend to own only one console per generation (at least until the generation is over) and argue on message boards about which system is the best. Sometimes they’re fanboys of a specific franchise or type of game., like people who think Halo and Grand Theft Auto are the be all and end all of console gaming.

Pros: They tend to know what games are good and which ones aren’t.

Cons: They don’t play them unless they’re on the console they support; typically rude and arrogant.

Hardcore Gamers

I use this a bit differently than most; to me, Hardcore Gamers are the type who are in things primarily for the challenge, their main desire to have the biggest virtual… presence. They tend to specialize in a few narrow genres and care little about the others, and have very strong opinions which they’ll defend with both arguments and insults.

Pros: Usually very good at their respective genres, as well as knowledgeable about games in general.

Cons: Often rude jerks, they steer the industry towards their punishingly difficult notion of fun and scoff at people who like easier games or even games that simply differ from their personal tastes.

Overall, I consider myself an Avid Gamer, and I think that both the extremes need to change. Too many casual games means that developers will put little effort into their products. If the fifteenth rip off of Wii Sports this month sells a hundred-thousand copies, why bother with epic games like God of War or Zelda, let alone anything knew like Okami?

On the other hand, Hardcore Gamers give the industry a bad image and steer it towards a dull, repetitive, and obscenely difficult future in which all games are Sepia-Toned First Person Shooters set in World War III and have national and world-wide leader boards that get you monuments in Sony’s HOME system.

The bottom line is that games are a form of entertainment. Games should be fun instead of frustrating, but they also need standards that ensure quality, challenge, and good presentation.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play Paper Mario.

Super Mario Galaxy Review

"Hail to the King"

If you have a Wii and have been putting it off since the game came out in November, you need to find $50 and go buy Super Mario Galaxy. It's pretty much that simple. Mario Galaxy is the little plumber's return to a form that suffered a little in the previous generation wit Super Mario Sunshine; it's a blast to play, it looks and runs great, and it's long enough to keep you busy for a solid week of playing—a month if you have a life outside of video games.

And if you find every last Star, you can play it again as Luigi, which I guess is cool. I'm not really sure the point of playing through a game such as this one twice, but it's always fun to see the younger Mario Brother in action.

Graphics

Holy crap, this game looks good. I bought Galaxy later than most, so when Brawl came out, I put it on hold to Smash. But finally my Melee burn-out carried over to Brawl, and I began looking for gaming fixes elsewhere, primarily on the X-Box 360. Especially with Grand Theft Auto 4, an obscure game I plan to review sometime this year. So when I turned Super Mario Galaxy back on last week, I was stunned. It looks, honestly, like a first generation X-Box 360 game.

Nintendo pulled out all the stops, giving the game the best texture work they've ever done and a plethora of lighting effects that make it stand out from anything else on the console. Wii games that look this good are a rare feat indeed. But even aside from the aforementioned, the game is beautiful primarily because of Nintendo's impeccable art direction on the title. Bowser looks more menacing than ever; Rosalina is the hottest new Nintendo character since Samus Aran took off her armor, and the level designs are inspired even when the geometry shows. (This only happens occasionally, by the way.) Best of all, the game runs at sixty frames per second most of the time, meaning you don't miss a millisecond of the action on screen.

Gameplay

When I first saw the demos for this game I was afraid Nintendo was making their main mascot's biggest game in years a gimmick. Not that I expected it to be boring or anything less than great; rather, I thought it was a sign of Nintendo selling Mario out to the lucrative casual microgame market on the Wii, with small levels and basic objectives.

Boy was I wrong. While it certainly starts out in this manner, Mario Galaxy opens up soon after, and has some truly inspired levels and challenges. The Galaxy format allows the developers to take you anywhere, much like the magic paintings of Super Mario 64, and do pretty much anything. The segments where gravity is altered at whim are especially fun, forcing the player to keep on his toes and make sure he's aware which way is down. The game also boasts some of the best Mario Boss Fights since Super Mario World, from a powerful Magikoopa Witch that only shells can kill to the final fight with Bowser inside a massive star.

Nintendo hasn't quite reinvented the wheel with Galaxy, but they made it a lot more interesting.

Sound

You know the drill with Nintendo games. Very limited voice acting, cute but appropriate sound effects, and stellar music. Nothing has changed here, with an excellent sound track that recalls all of Mario's history; there are even orchestrated remixes of some classic Mario tunes in the bonus levels, especially from Super Mario Brothers 3. In stark contrast to the heavy voice acting of Super Mario Sunshine, there is very little in Galaxy. I'd almost call this a flaw if some of the voices in Sunshine hadn't been so bad. But the new method creates a bit of a flaw in and of itself; while Rosalina and Peach are given voices, they aren't given many spoken lines. Sometimes the first word of dialog will be spoken, and the rest of the text is left for you to read. It's jarring. It's also a shame, since none of the vocally annoying characters from Sunshine have returned except for Bowser and his son. And Bowser Jr's existence is far more annoying than his voice ever was.

Final Thoughts

When I was young and the N64 was brand new, Super Mario 64 was without a doubt my favorite game ever. Even my father was amazed by how it revolutionized gaming. Every night he would pick my brother and me up from whoever was watching us that day and say to us, “Let's go home and get some stars!”

Mario Galaxy brings back that sense of discovery and wonder that was absent from Mario Sunshine and even from New Super Mario Bros. The game tells you to go and explore the universe. I'm telling you to go by the game—then go home and get some stars.

Genesis

Why blog? I guess that's the most basic question anyone must answer when they start blogging. If it's for stupid reasons like internet fame or because they think they're already awesome and everyone deserves to hear their opinions--well, they probably won't get very far anyway. You don't write unless you have a reason to write.

My reason for starting a blog just now, ten years after I first logged onto the internet, is simple: I have things to say and don't know of a better way to say them. I don't care whether I have a bunch of readers or if only my friends give this blog the time of day. I don't care if the comments are positive or negative. There are things I've been meaning to say for a long time and I'm finally going to get them out. The title of the blog is Earth-321, my own little world. It's a universe number I assigned to the world where some of my fiction writing takes place; it's the highway I live off of, and it's the state of mind I'm writing this blog from.

I guess the real Genesis here is the internet itself--not just the system of tubes that brings it to your screen, but the attitudes and culture of the Internet. Much of the Web seems to be divided into two extreme camps--people who believe all opinions are sacrosanct and calling any entertainment crap is never objectively true, and people who hate almost everything, and who think that they're better than everyone else because of what they like.

An example of the former would be the people of the forums of Comic Bloc, where strong criticisms of the creators of comic books is frowned upon because the creators might--heaven forbid--actually read them. An example of the latter would be hell holes like Encyclopedia Dramatica and the somewhat popular blog 'Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad', where the authors often wish cancer and worse upon people who've committed the unpardonable sin of not being good at webcomics.

Frankly I've grown sick of both types of people and feel the need blog out a middle ground, even if nobody cares about it. My subjects will be mostly related to movies, fiction, comics, video games, and the internet, but I may veer off into religion and politics occasionally too. Don't worry; I'm not a dogmatist who thinks he's never wrong, and offer everyone the opportunity to take what I say with however many grains of salt they please.

If you've read this far, you apparently do care what I have to say; in that case, check out my archive. I'll try and put up at least one article a week, but as busy as I otherwise am, I make no promises.

...To be continued...