Super Mario 3D Land by Nintendo

I should start this by saying that I am most likely going to talk about the game in its entirety, so if you are one of those people who want to know absolutely nothing about how Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach, or how Mario saves her by defeating Bowser in a heated battle of macho manliness you should most likely stop reading. Also, if you don’t want to know about the special, post-world eight game bonus stuff, you should probably just go ahead take off as well.

“So, how about that newish handheld Mario game for that newish Nintendo handheld system that is held back from being a great portable device by a terrible, less than three hour battery life?” you might ask.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s Mario, there are goombas and koopa troopers and star coins to collect. It’s all the platforming you come to expect from a Mario game, although it’s been slightly castrated by being far too easy for far too much of the time. That is my only big complaint really, so let’s get it out of the way now. The first half of the game (World 1 through 8) were dead simple, with the Nintendo gods feeling the need to rain down 1-ups for being marginally proficient at jumping atop flag poles and finding “hidden” green mushrooms. And while they handed out psychedelic, life giving fungi, they also decided to make the gauntlet of trials and tribulations Mario must overcome to save his one true -though perhaps promiscuous- love about as challenging as World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros. By the time I reached the Final Bowser boss fight, I had well over 100 lives, and never really felt threatened by anything the game threw at me. (Although, yes, I did once have the game offer me an invincible Tanooki Suit, Nintendo’s way of saying that it felt I might be incapable of completing the level because I had failed to make one irksome jump a handful of times and was worried I might give up and fall upon my Master Sword in shame and frustration). However, there are two things that balance out this complaint. First off, the levels are fun, and well designed. I liked seeing what the designers had thought up next, and it kept me playing (though at first I was bothered by the fact that each world was not a themed collection of levels, but a simple hodgepodge of gimmicks strung along, though I eventually got over that). The second thing that counterbalances the severe easiness of the first eight or so hours is that you can almost view them as a (very) extended tutorial before the real game begins. The last eight special worlds, unlocked after you defeat Bowser, feature a lot of challenges. So if you can keep yourself playing through the first eight hours, which feature well designed, easy levels, you will find a lot to like from the last half (and one or two levels where you want to throw something in anger, which is dangerous considering the streamlined, easily huckable shape of the 3DS itself).

In all honesty, I could probably stop there, since I kind of said all those little, nibbling things that I have been mulling over since beating the game. However, I guess I could quickly discuss the 3D elements of the game. First of all, the 3D effect in the game does add some depth, but doesn’t really do anything for me either way. While the first time I handled the 3DS, (at a kiosk in a Toys R Us), I was blown away by how cool the 3D was, (I wasn’t wearing glasses! The screen wasn’t a darkened mess due to the glasses! There was depth and my eyes were trippin’, man!), after playing a full game with the feature, I like it, but if it didn’t exist I wouldn’t feel like I was missing anything. The only time I really took notice of the feature and thought it added a little something was with the two top-down levels where lava rose up toward me, and Mario dropped down deep holes in the ground to collect coins before hitting a springy block and popping back up at me. Those moments were cool, but only really lasted a few short minutes. I went back and replayed those levels a number of times because they were so cool. Sadly, Nintendo didn’t feel like making more of those. What they did do instead was make a few cloud sections were a little 3D notification floated in the bottom of the screen letting you know you needed to see depth to make the jumps between clouds, so turn on the 3D screen effect if you had turned it off. These sections were boring and the 3D, while suggested by Nintendo, didn’t seem very wow to me, or very necessary to beating the sections. The M.C. Escher-esque demo screen off the start menu was more impressive. The reason for this lack of great 3D use can be traced back to one thing, I feel. Nintendo wants to include everyone, even at the expense of limiting fun for the majority, and this is one example: there is a health and safety warning that says 3D effects should only be used by those ages 7 and up. So, for that huge subset of kids ages 1 month to 6.99 years old who play video games, Nintendo has avoided doing anything where 3D is required as a portion of game design. I do understand that not everyone will be able to see 3D, and that there are lots of kindergarten aged kids that want to play Nintendo, but when the ability to include a touted feature of your system on a flagship brand is squandered you have to wonder why you felt it should be a hardware design component at all. Was it just an excuse to sell me a new handheld when the old one was treating me just fine? Regardless, I feel that Mario could have used a bit more 3D pizzaz.

In general, I had fun with the game, collecting star coins, hoping over lava pits, and trying out all the little gimmicks that Nintendo inserted into the platforming formula. The game featured a number of levels that have stuck in my mind and have enjoyed playing them over a few extra times for fun, and will be going back to every once and a while for brief forays when I start to miss Mario’s mustachioed mug.

Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez

Warren Ellis is one of my favourite writers, both in comics and on the web. He always has something interesting, unique, bizarre and enlightening to say. His website is always worth a gander, though it has become a little less frequently updated this past year or two, although one or two updates a day compared to his old four or five is still pretty good.

Over the past half year or so I have been playing catch up on some of Ellis’ work that was not published by one of the Big Two comic companies (Marvel and DC), and just sat down with the first eight issues of Doktor Sleepless, (collected in Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire), published by Avatar Press. I really enjoyed the trip through the ideas that Ellis laid down on paper, even if it’s not a full story. The series stopped at issue 13, with three last issues promised but on an extended hiatus, (and none of the issues beyond the first eight have been collected and reprinted). So fair warning; if you pick this book up, don’t expect a complete story, but more a collection of ideas wrapped up within the first half of something that promises -with no guarantee- to be something greater down the line.

For me, this didn’t matter though. I want to find out what happens, but at the same time, it was the ideas that Ellis presented that I enjoyed the most, and I got that, so felt appeased at the end of the volume. If the book is ever finished, I will be happy, but I won’t feel slighted if I never get more, either.

What plot we do get is as such:  a man who witnessed his parents die a horrible death as a child comes back to his home town after being gone for a long time, and decides to take on the persona of Doktor Sleepless so that he can speak to the masses about his belief that we have all been cheated out of the future we were promised. Knowing that a symbolic figure is more readily accepted than a mere man when it comes to speaking against the grain of accepted worldviews, as Doktor Sleepless, he reminds people that the future isn’t all flying cars, and that the future is here, it’s just not the one we asked for. The ideas that the Doktor present come in fast spurts that are both a joy and a horror to read. Anyone who has read futurist writings or noses about the futureshock scene has heard a lot of this before, but having it laid out in an easily accessible comic with Warren Ellis’ spin on it means that the reader will be entertained, amused, and provoked into thinking about these ideas readily. Since reading the book, it has captivated a lot of my quiet mussing time, which is what I want from a book with Warren Ellis’ name on it.

These ideas are so much of the book, that for me, the plot is just there to fill in the gaps between ideas. This is why I am okay with having this one book and not desperately needing closure on the story. The characters and events are interesting and I do like the story, but the ideas were greater than the narrative. While I guess this could be a failure in the writing, it’s irrelevant to me because I got what I wanted and more out of it, (which is exactly what one should account for when deciding the merit of something).

In closing, I’m going to just post a few excerpts from the book. Maybe they will appeal to a few of you enough to go hunt down the book.

“You live in the future and you don’t even know it. … The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things. … You want your jetpack, but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones. Were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures.”

“In 1999, Godspeed You! Black Emperor start releasing CDs in untreated cardboard. Intended or not, it denotes authenticity. Keeping it real. … Godspeed You! Black Emperor didn’t play the media game…[b]ut of course they had a brand. You can’t help but notice that Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo” had a fucking logo on the front. Godspeed’s brand was authenticity.”

“Ronald Regan had the right idea—convince the other side that he genuinely didn’t care if Armageddon came. …[The Soviets] saw him telling his young people that they may be the generation that faced the extinction of life on Earth and smiling his funny little smile—and, well, shit, how do you cope with that?”

“In the last month, three hundred billion liters of water were drunk—but four hundred thousand people died from waterborne disease. In fact, right now, here in the future, almost one and a half billion people still don’t have access to clean water. … I want you to think about this before you sleep: What can you do to bring about the real future? Because you know that this isn’t a future worth getting out of bed for.”

Chew by John Layman and Rob Guillory

Chew is a comic series written by John Layman and drawn by Rob Guillory, published by Image Comics. I just recently finished reading volume two (“International Flavor”), but since I don’t really dwell on the plot too much on this blog, I’m going to talk about the first two volumes together for the sake of simplicity.

The first volume of Chew comprised the first story arc in the series called “Taster’s Choice”, and introduces the reader to the world that Layman and Guillory have devised to tell their oddball stories in. In their universe, chicken has been outlawed due to the bird flu so an underground black market has sprung up to meet the needs of the chicken craving, and the police spend a great amount of time cracking down on these illegal investigations. Each of the first two story arcs rely heavily on the fact that the lack of legal chicken has created a demand for either illegal ways to get the product or introducing a proper tasting substitute. The other major element to these stories is that there are certain people who are Cibopathic, meaning they get psychic impressions from whatever they eat. This ability is possessed by the main character of the series, Tony Chu, who is a detective who can’t help but know the complete history of whatever he eats, which makes eating almost everything unpleasant, because guaranteed at some point his food has come in contact with something unpleasant or revolting (pesticides, the horrific way the animal was killed, etc.). Volume two, “International Flavor”, continues Chu’s adventures in solving cases through eating, but this time whisking the reader off to a small little resort island-state. It reintroduces a number of secondary characters from the first story arc, including Chu’s celebrity chef brother who loves cooking with chicken and a food critic who can describe her culinary experiences with such acute word-smithing that she can make her readers almost taste what she describes. The second story is a fun filled romp that just allows the characters to play a bit more in the universe developed in the first arc while ever so slightly introducing a bit more mystery into the series.

The idea of a Cibopath is amusing and bizarre, which is what this book aims to be right from the get go. Tony Chu is quickly swept into bizarre cases where he must eat strange things in order to deduce a key part of a crime, and the artist has the ability to make it all seem gross, regardless of how little or how much he sometimes chooses to show. This isn’t a book to read over lunch unless you have a strong stomach. It’s the bizarreness of the books that make it hard to place into a neat little genre-box. Image categorizes it as a crime book every part of it makes you laugh, so principally it really should be seen as a comedy with just the smallest dash of horror. 

The book is both a treat to read and look at. The artist has a wonderful comic style, and is a real treat. I dare people to take a peek inside one of the volumes next time they are in a book or comic store and not instantly want to buy it. Guillory has this unique style which just looks pretty. His character designs are all unique and looking at each character design you can tell he built each one around the character’s personality so that their posture and look speaks for the character just as much as what they say. Guillory also does these great panels/pages showing what Chu “sees” when he eats something, where the whole background becomes a mosaic of all the events that object was part of up to that moment, (or the moment of its death), that are great to scour for details that might be relevant to the case later on. In terms of the layout of the book, “Taster’s Choice” had more unique and interesting page layouts, but his individual panels became much more nuanced in “International Flavor”. 

Chew is a book made to entertain. When I read it, I enjoy the moment immensely, and when I put it down for the evening I feel satisfied. It is a book that sets out to shake you out of the daily life doldrums by being a fun, bizarre experience. It’s not meant to be a poignant story that sticks in your head beyond the reading experience, but it gives such fun while you read it that it leaves your mind happy and content.

Disney’s John Carter

Having just seen John Carter with a few members of my family, I feel compelled to write briefly about it. This isn’t going to be a long winded thing, and it’s not a review, but more of a what-I-think (which is pretty much what this blog is anyway, I suppose).

I went into this movie with moderately low expectations based on the trailer, which I suppose helped it some. My only true knowledge of the film so far is having seen the trailer a few times while at the movies (which has never impressed me) and having listened to the first few hours of an audiobook of the original A Princess of Mars story by Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was much younger (given to me by my uncle, who has always had a taste for wonderful B-grade things and pulp). I don’t know anything about what others are expecting or have said, but on personally, I mostly enjoyed it.

What worked for me, and why I feel it deserves at least one watch, is that for the most part, the filmmakers managed to make a world that lived in. Even though the CGI was thick and fierce, the screen didn’t feel sterile like some Star Wars prequel, and most things seemed to have a weight to them that a lot of over-the-top-CGI-fests lack. Also, the number of extras that were not just computer models was refreshing to see, and the costume designer deserves kudos for incorporating the pulpy sci-fi/fantasy clothing motif without it appearing ridiculous.

What was surprising was how little of the film I had a problem with. My only true nitpicking is that there were a few rocky parts to the story, (though not nearly as bad as many summer blockbusters), which pulled me out of the movie. The most jarring one was when suddenly grandiose assumptions were being made over a discovery that Carter and Princess Dejah Thoris had made a little less than half way through the film. Beyond that, I enjoyed the story, and was happily surprised to see Michael Chabon’s name attached (having fond memories of the novel Wonder Boys, even if it did take some time after reading it to really appreciate it).

What I appreciate most about the film is that it took a risk. While not an original IP, it is the first time that I know of that this character has been translated to the big screen, and A Princess of Mars is not an overly well-known book either. It is also a story that is pure pulp and features a unique alien world that runs the risk of turning off the masses, (though the film uses plenty of tropes to clifnote the audience whenever it can). What is incredible with this film is that Disney went all in, and didn’t cut corners to save on the budget, (which according to IMBD was an insane $250,000,000), in order to hedge their bets. I feel that the film needs to be seen just to show support for something that does not rely on a franchise or inane board game name licence in order to get made. Lastly, watch this movie for the clearly meant for the kids CGI (non-talking) wacky sidekick. They somehow managed to win me over with it, and I’ll probably watch it again just so I can see it zooming around the screen again.

So ends my brain dump on John Carter. Perhaps next time I will actually discuss something out of my backlog instead of talking about something new.