A to Z Challenge: Ultimate Alliance & X-Men Legends

 I think it was about 2004 or so, after the first two X-Men movies but before the not very good third movie (or all the spinoffs and soft reboot movies) that X-Men Legends came out for the PS2 and XBox.  Instead of a side-scroller beat 'em up game or fighting game, it was more of a role-playing game like the D&D games I played in the 90s, only I think the combat wasn't really turn-based like the D&D games.

You play as a new female mutant with volcanic powers.  Then you form a party of four with various other characters from the X-Men universe:  Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Jean-Grey, Beast, Psylocke, and so on.  And as you go on, you train your character so her powers get greater and also level up the other characters.  As I recall they got Patrick Stewart's voice for Professor X but not really any of the other movie actors.  Reading the Wikipedia entry, some of the other voices would be familiar from Star Wars shows like Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum.  Lou Diamond Phillips voiced Forge, who I don't think was ever in the movies.  The venerable Ed Asner voiced a Morlock healer who could help you fix injured characters.

The mansion or school serves as the base where you get to walk around as the female mutant and save the game, play a trivia game, or work out in the Danger Room or stuff like that.

In that game you fight Magneto and the Brotherhood but also some evil humans and Sentinels.  There was a sequel with Apocalypse where I think you get Magneto and the Brotherhood as playable characters but I didn't get that game.

Anyway, it was a fun game for the most part.  The neat thing is after you finish it the first time you can unlock alternate costumes.  The original ones in the game were more like the movie ones, so mostly black and yellow.  It was kind of annoying then because your party would often look pretty similar.  But once you can unlock the costumes you can get the more brightly-colored traditional looks like Wolverine's yellow Spandex, Cyclops's blue suit, and Phoenix in green or red.  I loved the green Phoenix one.  I think there was a cheat code to unlock those sooner.

Shortly after that, they came out with Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which used the same game play but broadened it to the whole Marvel universe.  This was before the MCU had started so other than the X-Men, Blade, and Spider-Man hit franchises and flops like Hulk and Daredevil, there wasn't a lot yet for that. 

In the same way as the X-Men game, you form a party of four from a bunch of different heroes.  You can change your party to fit the situation as sometimes you want raw power and other times you might want more skilled characters or some with magic or whatever.  And you level them up and unlock different powers and costumes and stuff along the way as you fight Dr. Doom.

No matter what you do, though, Dr. Doom is going to steal Odin's power and transform Earth into his playground.  There's kind of a creepy cutscene where you see a bunch of the heroes lying dead while Cyclops I think it is does an Ironhide from Transformers the Movie and meets the same end.

But of course Dr. Doom doesn't just kill all the heroes and your team (whoever they are) were protected at least temporarily by the Watcher and relocated to the Moon.  After fighting some aliens--including Galactus--you return to Earth with some helpful toys.  You get to go into Doom's fortress and defeat him and get Odin's powers back.

I think the first time I played through I used more normal heroes like Captain America, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and someone else.  But another time I created a team of all female heroes:  Sue Storm, Storm, Ms. Marvel (aka Captain Marvel now), Spider-Woman, and one or two others I'd slot in like Jean-Grey, Elektra, or Psylocke or someone like that.  It was pretty fun.  I nicknamed my group the Grumpy Bulldog's Angels after Charlie's Angels:

Another neat thing is like the X-Men game you could change costumes.  They had a lot of alternate costumes from throughout the years for the different characters.  For Blade you could get the weird Robin Hood-esque costume he had early on.  Spider-Woman I think I used her SHIELD outfit instead of the red one--as shown above and Ms. Marvel is in a red outfit that was probably from earlier on.  The cool thing with using the alternate costumes is as you can see above, each has a different hair color, which helps to tell them apart in the middle of a battle.

One lame thing was you couldn't play the Hulk on the PS2 version.  You could only get him on XBox and only in the "Gold" edition.  As if I'd buy a whole new console just to play one freaking game.  I mean, again*.  (*See the "I" entry.  Gratuitous Grumpy Bulldog)

A strange thing is that after you beat the game, Galactus swears to destroy Earth. So you'd think that would be the sequel, right?  Right?  Wrong!

They came out with a sequel that was supposed to be modeled on the "Civil War" story.  First you have kind of a "Secret War" or something story where your team attacks some foreign country and then as the fallout, the government wants to register heroes.  When the heroes pick sides, you get a lot fewer heroes to choose from for your party and have to fight those other heroes.

But that's only like 2-3 levels of the whole game.  Then everyone gets back together to fight the Tinkerer--whoever the hell he was.  Honestly, it wasn't nearly as good.  The PS2 version especially wasn't nearly as deep or full-featured as the first game.  I think a lot of that was it came out when the PS2 was being phased out in favor of the PS3.  It seemed like the programmers just really didn't give a shit about the PS2 version and basically just put in the bare minimum of effort.  Maybe to help drive people to buying the PS3.  Again, as if I'd buy a new console just for that.

A different company developed a third game in 2019 for the Nintendo Switch but obviously I never played that.  There are a lot of other Marvel games for phones and so on.

A to Z Challenge: Tetris

The weird thing about video games is the least complicated games can also be the most fun.  The original Pong was just two rectangles and a square "ball" and people played it for hours or maybe even days thanks in part to the novelty.

Another great example of this is the classic game Tetris.  It's a Russian puzzle game with a catchy theme song that became an instant classic on the NES and Gameboy and because of its simplicity has managed to stay relevant in the smartphone era.

The rules of Tetris are pretty simple:  there are puzzle pieces that fall into a rectangular chute.  You can turn the falling pieces to fit together to fill rows of the chute.  Once a row is filled it disappears and everything above that moves down.  If you're lucky you can get rid of up to 4 rows at the same time.  

The challenge is the pieces will come faster and sometimes new pieces are added.  One little mistake when the pieces are coming fast and furious can start a chain reaction that leads to disaster.  Once the pieces get so backed up that new ones can't be added, the game is over.

Last year there was a movie about the guy who created Tetris back in Soviet-era Russia.  I haven't seen it since it's an Apple movie.  Anyway, the game was and remains to be hugely popular.

While I don't think there was an Atari version to play in the 80s, it came out for the NES, though we never had it.  But later I think maybe we had it or some version of it on the PC.  There have been plenty of sequels and different versions of it for just about every platform.

Mostly I played it for hours on a not-really-smartphone back in the late 2000s, almost up to 2013 or so.  Since that phone wasn't too smart, there weren't a lot of games you could play, so Tetris was one of the few that worked well.  I got over 50 levels completed a few times, but obviously that's not as much as some really good players can do.

There are probably tournaments and all that stuff for the really great players.  It's a testament to the game's simple yet addicting design that it remains circulating about 40 years later.  Like Super Mario, I have the Tetris theme song on an album by the London Philharmonic, which can really get stuck in my head.  I'm hearing it right now!  Maybe you are too.

A to Z Challenge: Spider-Man 2

 There are plenty of games you can use for S, but let me use one of my favorite PS2 games:  Spider-Man 2.  Unlike all movie tie-in games to that point, SM2 had an open world that let you swing around New York City as the webslinger to make it more than just a cheap merchandising product like Happy Meal toys or collector cups.

There is of course a campaign that you can complete.  You have to tangle with Mysterio and maybe Electro or another Spidey villain and work with/against Black Cat in addition to Dr. Octopus.  One of the neat things is they used the movie actor voices for Spidey (Tobey Maguire), Mary-Jane Watson (Kristen Dunst), and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina).  And your guide to the game is none other than Bruce Campbell!  Early on, Bruce will educate you on the controls and such in his own sardonic way.  After you finish the campaign you don't hear from him anymore, which is sad.

And you may ask yourself:  Well, how did I get here?!

The campaign though wasn't really the selling point.  As I said, there was an open world allowing you to go all around New York with familiar landmarks like the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Madison Square Garden, and even Ground Zero.  I doubt everything was exactly accurate, but for a 2004 game it was pretty good.  And really cool to swing up to the top of the Empire State Building, dive off, and then catch yourself by shooting a web right before you go splat.  You can also perch on a building or bridge and watch the sun rise or set.  It's pretty neat.  At that point it was probably the closest you could get to a game that just let you just walk around (or swing around) BEING the superhero.

Even after you complete the campaign, there are still missions you can do while you're swinging around.  They're just mundane ones like stopping robberies, stolen cars, sinking boats, or runaway balloons.  Yes, you get to save balloons which is harder than you might think.  You can't shoot it with webbing or it'll pop so you have to be able to climb up and snatch it, which can be hard.

For the longest time I could not beat the final battle with Dr. Octopus.  Whatever I did, something went wrong.  I finally gave up and just figured I couldn't do it.  A few years ago at random I took the game out and beat that last mission in only like 3 tries.  Maybe I was just trying too hard before.

By now there have certainly been better superhero games but it's still pretty decent for a movie tie-in from 2004.

A to Z Challenge: Rebellion

If you ask people what their favorite pre-Disney Star Wars video game is, a lot of people would probably say Knights of the Old Republic or its sequel.  Or maybe X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, Force Unleashed, Battlefront, or some of the various other ones.  I'm not sure many would even remember Rebellion, which was released in the late 90s only a year or so ahead of The Phantom Menace.

But Rebellion is probably second only to Age of Empires as my favorite strategy game of all time.  It is sort of an Age of Empires game, only set in the Star Wars universe.

Like AOE or even Conflict, there's a pretty simple goal:  destroy the other side's base and capture its leaders.  The Rebellion has to capture the Emperor and Vader and take over the capital world of Coruscant.  The Imperials have to capture Mon Mothma and Luke Skywalker and capture the Rebel base, which unlike the Imperials can move around the board.

You get a map of the entire galaxy from the Core worlds of Coruscant to the Mid-Rim, Outer Rim, and Wild Space.  Most of the Outer Rim and Wild Space are unexplored, so you can dispatch units to go explore and claim those.

There are resources you need to build ships and troops to conquer planets.  So when you take over a planet, you capture any mines it already has and can build more up to however much energy the planet has available.

To build ships you need a Shipyard and to build troops you need a Barracks.  The more shipyards and barracks means the faster each unit gets produced.  The shipyards and barracks can also be upgraded to "Advanced" ones along the way.  But still, to create a Death Star is going to take a while.  

One great thing compared to AOE is you can assign your helper droids (C3PO for the Rebels and some evil droid for the Imperials) to manage your resources for you so you don't have to supervise building mines and dumb shit like that while you're trying to win a war.

There are a few different ways to take over a planet.  The most direct is to launch a planetary assault.  Typically you want to destroy ground forces from orbit with your starships and then land your troops.  Once you do, you'll need to leave a garrison so there's not an uprising to tie up your resources or even to overthrow your units to make the planet neutral or go to the other side.  Another way is to dispatch a diplomat (like Princess Leia for the Rebellion) to cajole the planet to join your side.  That only works with neutral planets, not ones siding with the other side, though you can maybe eventually convince them to be more sympathetic to your cause.  For unclaimed planets, you just land troops and leave a garrison.

Making it more difficult, is that each planet can have defenses:  shields, ion cannons, or laser cannons.  You can't bombard a planet from orbit if the planet has a shield.  Or if it only has a weak shield you need a ton of firepower to overwhelm it.  Bombarding a planet with an ion cannon could disable one of your ships and bombarding a planet with a laser cannon can destroy one of your ships.  For that reason you usually want to try taking those planets by other means.  You can use commando units or certain characters to sabotage the defenses so you can then swoop in and take the place over.

Besides the characters I've mentioned, you get all the main characters from the original 3 movies and a lot from the "Expanded Universe" at the time.  You start out with a few characters but then you have to "recruit" more using some of your characters--Mon Mothma/Luke/Leia/Han for the Rebels and the Emperor/Vader for the Emperor probably have the best chances to recruit someone.  Characters have different abilities and uses.  Some like Leia are diplomats.  Some like Lando or Thrawn are useful to research new weapons.  Some like bounty hunters and special forces types are more useful at sabotaging defenses or capturing other characters.  And some like Ackbar or Piett are more useful for commanding your fleets.  Force users like Luke can train to increase their skills.  At the start of the game, Luke is like at the start of Empire, but at some point he'll run off to train and come back as the Return of the Jedi version.

One funny little thing is you can send the Emperor on missions.  If he succeeds in his mission he'll of course take all the credit.  If he fails he'll say, "You did not adequately prepare me for this mission.  And it has failed."  Sounds like pretty much every boss I've ever had.

Like AOE or Conflict, you start off with only limited weapons you can build.  Stuff like basic troops, X-Wings, TIE Fighters, corvettes, or light cruisers.  As you research, you get newer and better stuff like A-Wings, B-Wings, TIE Defenders, Mon Calamari Cruisers, and Super Star Destroyers.  The Imperials get the Death Star while the Rebellion really has no equivalent.  What sucks with the Death Star is if you actually blow up a planet, basically the whole galaxy will start turning on you.  What's the point of having it then?

If you choose, you can control the battle between forces.  I always found that too slow and clumsy.  So I would always choose to simulate the battles.  But you have to make sure you have enough firepower to do the job then because otherwise you'll probably lose and your units will be destroyed or damaged and have to retreat to the nearest planet you own.

Given the size of the galaxy, a campaign can take a long time.  You can do a shorter game where you only have to take a base, but the longer game is more fun.

If you're the Rebellion, you start off mostly in the Outer Rim with your base on Yavin, though you might have a couple of Core or Mid-Rim worlds like Mon Calamari.  What you want to do is explore the Outer Rim to build up resources and try to convince some neutral planets to your side.  Only then can you try to defeat the Empire's Core worlds.  And you'll want to move your base around a couple of times to make sure it's not too easy for the Empire to find. 

As the Empire, you get a lot of Core worlds, so you have better resources than the Rebellion.  Still, you need to shore up the Core and start taking planets in the Outer Rim to acquire more resources.  You can send units to Yavin, but it's likely the enemy will be gone long before you get there.  

Traveling around the galaxy can take a while, especially from one side of the Rim to the other.  Going from Yavin to Hoth for instance would basically take a fleet months.  For that reason, you need to have shipyards in multiple areas so you have forces able to easily reach almost anywhere.  Think of it like how the US has a Pacific Fleet and Atlantic Fleet so they aren't always having to send ships from one ocean to another.

Playing the game a couple of years ago on Steam it is a little weird in that you don't have the planets and characters from the prequels or any of the TV shows like The Clone Wars or Rebels.  So if you play it now, you might wonder, where's Naboo?  Or Geonosis?  But they didn't exist yet since the game came out just before The Phantom Menace.

As much as I would have liked it, I don't think they ever made an expansion or sequel.  It's too bad, because it is a really fun game if you like strategy games.

A to Z Challenge: Q-Bert

 As I've said before, a lot of old video games had pretty nonsensical stories.  Take Q-Bert, where you guide a weird orange critter around 3D boards by hopping up, down, and sideways.

The big deal about the game at the time was the 3D design of the boards.  They start out as basically stacks of cubes and you have to guide Q-Bert around to touch them all.  But there are other critters like snakes who will untouch the cubes so you have to go back and retouch them until you have them all.  Like Joust it's a weird game but the simplicity makes it fun to play.

In the picture you can see some rules/tips to sort of explain the game.  Why anyone would think this up, I have no idea.

While I'm pretty sure there was some merchandising for Q-Bert in the 80s, the character didn't become a lasting cultural icon like Pac-Man, Mario, or Sonic.  You can probably still find the game to play on your phone or knockoff game systems.

A to Z Challenge: Pac-Man & Pitfall

 There were a few Ps to choose from here (including the original Atari game Pong) but I figure I have to do the classic Pac-Man.  While Mario and Sonic became icons of the industry, Pac-Man was there first.  He had games, toys, a TV show, crappy vitamins, and even a song!

If you've never played, the concept is simple but kinda silly.  You control Pac-Man, the mostly yellow circular dude who goes around the board chomping up pellets.  He's chased by 4 ghosts:  Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.  There are 4 super pellets, one in each corner, where Pac can become invincible for a limited time.  Then he can eat the ghosts, who go to the center of the board until they respawn.  Sometimes a fruit pops up in the middle for bonus points.  

You can get extra lives so you can keep going for a long time.  There is in theory an end, but I'm not sure how many actually made it that far.  

After Pac-Man came Ms. Pac-Man that introduced his girlfriend.  It was pretty much the same game only she had a pink bow!  Then there was Super Pac-Man where he turned into a giant Pac-Man.  And later some spin-off games like Pac-Man Land that I think were more in response to games like Super Mario Bros.

It started in arcades and the 2600 and has been on other platforms.  Google even replaced the "doodle" once with a Pac-Man game you could play.  The Atari 2600 version was apparently so bad that it helped to drive a video game market crash in 1983 along with other junk like ET.  The video game market remained depressed for a couple of years, until the NES came along.

In the book version of Ready Player One, Parsifal plays an entire game on one quarter in an arcade and wins a special token to give him an extra life in the Oasis later on.  So the game remains a part of pop culture today.

I also decided to talk about Pitfall.  The game was one of those licensed games not by Atari for the 2600 and probably also an arcade version too.

You play as Pitfall Harry, who's sort of an Indiana Jones character.  You have to go through the jungle, avoid deadly animals and traps.  Sometimes you could grab a vine to swing over water hazards or bogs, in which case the game would make sort of a Tarzan yell.  Sometimes you had to go underground into tunnels.  The tunnels might then be bricked up so you'd have to go back to the surface.

There were different things to find, though I forget what the ultimate goal was.  Or if there even was an ultimate goal.  It might have simply been one of those games that just went on and on forever until you died, got tired of playing, or the game/power failed since there was no saving anything for the Atari 2600.

There was I think a sequel and some revivals or reboots or whatever for other consoles and PC/Mac.  Maybe you can even get it on your phone now.  It seems like the kind of game they could make a movie for but maybe the similarity with Indiana Jones makes that too difficult.

A to Z Challenge: Oregon Trail

 In the early 90s, Oregon Trail was one of those games you could play a lot on school computers because it was "educational."  Though in all actuality, I don't think my schools really played it that much.  I remember we had this other game in middle school called Life and Death where you got to be a surgeon trying to remove someone's appendix or other stuff.  Though if you're a sadist, it's more fun to torture and kill the patient by not using anesthetic and then cutting them up.

Anyway, Oregon Trail was about trying to guide a family of pioneers from Independence, Missouri or wherever to Oregon.  Along the way you'd have to worry about food, disease (you have died of dysentery!), and Native American attacks.  It was pretty tough to beat, especially if you only had a few minutes at school to play before you had to let someone else have a turn.

There were I think a few sequels and maybe a revival more recently.  In a more recent American Dad episode, the Smith family is trapped in the game (or a game like it) and Klaus or Roger has to save them by winning the game.

It wasn't a big deal to me but it was more so for other kids from the 90s.  Maybe my sisters.  So there.

Another O game I did play was One-on-One Basketball featuring very crude versions of Dr. J (Julius Erving) & Larry Bird.  You can play as Dr. J or Larry Bird and play the other guy in one-on-one basketball, which is only half the court.  It can get boring pretty quick but the fun thing is when you dunk, you can smash the backboard and then this guy comes out and yells at you while he cleans it up:

By the time this came out for the 7800, I'm pretty sure Dr. J had retired and Larry Bird had only a few years left as a player.  Celebrity endorsements like this are why the 7800 never came close to surpassing the NES.

A to Z Challenge: NHL (EA Sports)

 My favorite sports game series has been EA's NHL series.  I first started playing it with NHL 95 for the SNES.  While some people might like other years better, I had a lot of fun with it.  It might not have been the first one where you could create a player, but it did have that feature so you could make your own guy or guys to play alongside the real players.

(In the picture above I took 5 Hartford players against Steve Yzerman and Bob Essensa in practice.  It didn't take long for future Red Wing player/exec Pat Verbeek to score.  About a year later, Hartford would move to Carolina to become the Hurricanes.)

Of course I played the Red Wings a lot, who back then had a really good team.  Though playing it a couple of years later, I'd usually trade Keith Primeau and Paul Coffey for Brendan Shanahan as the Wings did in real life.  You could assemble most of the 97-98 teams if you traded with some other teams for Shanahan, Tomas Sandstrom, Kris Draper, Kirk Maltby, Doug Brown, Mike Vernon, and maybe some others.  You would probably have to make a few others like Tomas Holmstrom, Mathieu Dandenault, or Aaron Ward.

Anyway, besides the regular game, I had a lot of fun with the practice feature.  That let you choose from 0-5 members of two different teams.  So you could play 5-on-5 or 5-4 or even 5 against just the goalie.  You could practice offense or if you let the computer have 5 guys and you only have 1 or just the goalie, you can practice your defense.  Unfortunately that wasn't a feature EA continued.

The next ones I bought were for the PC, starting with NHL 2000.  The graphics were better and the roster building was a lot better too.  You could sign free agents, make your own players, and of course do trades.  I think I had 2001 too, which might have been a little better.  But 2002-2003 weren't that good.

NHL 2004 was one I played a ton on the PS2.  The cool thing with that was not only could you create players; you could create whole teams!  You could make up a city and a logo and then create your own roster with an expansion draft.  But I usually created my own roster--the Mutts!  I made a whole team based on some old stuffed animals.  Spot Mutt II was the star and captain with his son Spot III as the sniper on the top line and his son Spot IV as "the Hammer" or the bigger guy who fought and did the dirty work.  Spot V and Spot VI then were the defensive pair with one being more offense-minded and one more defense-minded.

The second unit featured raccoons with Ricky Raccoon at center and Vern and Zeke as the wingers.  And then a couple more as the defense.  The third unit used St. Bernards with Bernard St. Bernard at center and a bunch of B-names on offense and "Dave" Beethoven on defense.  This line was intended to be the "checking line" or the line that would hit people and play defense more than score.  (Because St. Bernards are big and can be mean.  Get it?)  The final unit was just some randos like Artful Dodger, Cooler Mutt, and Jeremiah Mutt.  The goalies I made one of each animal though they were all female:  Spot's wife Marshy Mutt, Ricky's mother Laura Raccoon, and Bernard's wife Bernice St. Bernard.  Which one was in goal would depend on who had the hot hand--or paw.

Besides making my own team, I'd grease the settings a little to play a faster game.  None of that "trap" bullshit for us!  When you won the Stanley Cup, there was a cool montage at the end that would show your guys and give stats.  And then in "Dynasty Mode" you could go on to the next year!  Your team would carry over and have to do it again.  As players got older, their stats would decline and after a few years some of the more veteran ones would have to be dumped for new players.

Unfortunately, the next year EA mailed it in, probably because of the lockout.  NHL 2005 was shit that I never actually bought, just rented.  I don't think that one even let you create players!  WTF?!  I tried NHL2K5 but the minigames were more fun than the real game.

The next one I bought was NHL 2007 for the PS2.  It was a lot more like NHL 2004, with most of the same features.  And it added in a bunch of European league teams from Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and Russia.  The neat thing about that was sometimes a player might go to Russia for a year or so and then come back, so you might find him on the roster of a team in that league and be able to put him where he was.  Or the team in Sweden or Switzerland might have a prospect an NHL team calls up so you could trade him to that team.  The first couple of years it was a good way to help keep rosters somewhat current.

Again you could create a team and I used basically the same team.  I think the difference was this time with a salary cap you had to be more careful about the players you created so they wouldn't be too expensive.  The montage at the end wasn't as good but overall the game play was largely the same.

I apparently got NHL 2009 as well so some of my memories from 2007 might be for that game.  Or I might not have played it much.  I don't really remember.

Since the PS2 stopped having games made for it a year or two later, I never got any more NHL games.  I could get them for the PC but I don't really care.  I haven't watched a lot of hockey since the Red Wings stopped being good so I don't even know most of the players anymore and a lot of the ones I do know are getting old.  I mean Sid "the Kid" Crosby is like 35 now.  A lot of the star players from the 80s-2000s are coaches or executives now.  Such is the way of things.

A to Z Challenge: It's-a him, Mario!

 Mario became a symbol of Nintendo and the video game industry in general after pretty humble beginnings in Donkey Kong.  In that game for the Atari 2600 and arcade, you had to guide the blobby Mario up ladders to rescue the princess from the giant gorilla, who in no way was like a donkey.  Along the way you jump over barrels or smash them with a hammer.  It was the kind of game that just kept going and getting more complicated.  Maybe at some point you did actually win.

In Donkey Kong Jr., Mario is actually the villain holding Donkey Kong captive while his son has to rescue him.  There was also a regular Mario Bros game where you did...stuff.  I think they made that for the Atari 2600 but we didn't have it.  That was probably the game that introduced Luigi and maybe that they were plumbers.  So you had a good chunk of the Mario mythos established!

When the NES console came out in the mid-80s, Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt were the games that usually game with it.  This time instead of Donkey Kong, Mario and his brother Luigi battle Koopa, who has taken the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom.  You have to jump on or over enemies like "goombas" or turtles and avoid the spiny bad guys and bullets.  You got two upgrades from hitting special ? bricks with your head.  First a mushroom would make Mario/Luigi grow.  Once at full-size another brick would have a flame flower that allowed you to launch fireballs.  Those were helpful against a lot of enemies but not beetles or bullets.

The game had 8 "worlds" each with 4 levels, the last of which was always a special castle where you'd have to jump over a Koopa only to find that "Our princess is in another castle" until of course the last level.  But you don't have to play all 32 levels; you can beat the game by playing only 1/4 of that.  You play 1-1 and then in 1-2 there's a "warp zone" that lets you jump to 4-1.  Then in 4-2 there's another warp zone to 8-1.  From there you have to play through to the end.  

Worlds 2-2 and 7-2 are underwater levels that can be tricky because the water really hampers your ability to move around; it's almost better to be small so you're more agile.  2-3 and 7-3 then you have to run like crazy as flying fish come at you from above and below and you can't really kill them easily.  The third level on a lot of worlds are jumping levels where you have to jump from trees to platforms and stuff.  Those are always a little nerve-wracking as there is no room for error.  Miss something and you fall to your death to probably go splat.  To amp up the difficulty, a couple of these also have bullets flying by.  With the bullets or flames in the castle levels, the problem is you can hear them launch but by the time you see them you might be in mid-jump with no way to correct before you get hit.

The game was (and still is) hugely popular.  On the knockoff Gameboy and knockoff SNES I have, there are versions of Super Mario where someone puts in different characters or different enemies, sort of like the Doom WADs I made in the 90s.

Super Mario 2 then was a really weird game that didn't use much of the gameplay from the first game.  You throw turnips and stuff and...whatever.  It was a bizarre Japanese import that most American players didn't really like because we were expecting something more like the first game.

Raccoons are known for their flying, right?

Around 1988 or 89, they made Super Mario Bros 3, which was far more like the first game.  The gameplay is largely the same, but expanded so you could get the fireball suit but more often a feather that gave you a raccoon tail to let you fly.  In the aquatic levels you could get a frog suit to swim better.  And there were "P Wings" that let you fly a lot longer and higher than the tail.  There were also minigames like matching cards or lining up three objects or just picking from treasure chests.  These things gave you extra lives or spare mushrooms, tails, and so on that you could use.

We didn't have an NES for a while and didn't have Mario 3, though I think we might have rented it a few times.  And on my knockoff Gameboy I've played it, though I keep getting stuck on the pyramid in World 2 because I don't think the controls work all that great for what you need to do, which is throw beetles around to break bricks.

In the cheesy product placement movie The Wizard, Super Mario Bros 3 is the final game played in the "Video Armageddon" tournament.  And as the Rifftrax points out, it's funny how the one player's brother and friend are shouting tips for a game they've never played.

In 1993 there was also a super-cheesy Super Mario Bros live action movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi and Dennis Hopper as Koopa.  The movie is pretty much nothing like the video games.  One time I watched the Rifftrax and then thought about what they could have done differently.  The thing is, I don't think a live action movie could have worked back then especially.  With CGI still in its infancy and really expensive, they'd have needed a budget like Waterworld or Titanic to make it and it still probably would have sucked.  Even now it was a lot smarter to go the animated route than trying to work live action into it.

The 2023 animated movie was obviously better, though I didn't think it was really great.  It did make a ton of money, so I'm sure there will be a sequel at some point.  That movie featured Easter eggs from pretty much all the games featuring Mario and Donkey Kong.

Besides the Super Mario Bros games, there were also games featuring Mario like Dr. Mario and Mario Paint.  When the SNES came out, there was a new game called Super Mario World.  Unfortunately I never had that one because I got the basic SNES that didn't come with that included.  I think I got the most basic one that didn't have any game included.  There was also Mario Kart that let you race around in go-carts with characters from Mario games.

I think then there was another new Mario game for the N64 along with spinoffs for Luigi and Yoshi.  And that continued with the Wii, Wii U, and Switch.  Plus the Gameboy.  For the Wii you could get the original Mario games to play on it, but I never bought that.

Anyway, as I said, Mario has become the symbol for Nintendo and largely for video games in general.  He's basically the Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny of gaming.  (Maybe he's Bugs and Pac-Man is Mickey?)  Even the music from the original Super Mario game has become iconic; I have an MP3 of a version recorded by the London Philharmonic.  Not bad for a plumber from the Bronx.

A to Z Challenge: Legos!

Doing a quick Google search, I found this article that gives a brief history of Lego video games.  So go ahead and read that and I'll see you on Monday!

OK, actually I have played a couple of the Lego games but not a lot.  I think I played the original Star Wars one (the prequel one) a little bit.  And then I know I played the second one with the original trilogy, though I don't think I owned it.  This is a screen shot from a Gameboy version on RetroGames

I know I got the Batman one in a Humble Bundle or something for the PC.  Like most of these games it's fun and somewhat easy, though sometimes not as easy as you might think.  I remember I got stuck on one point and then found it's because you were supposed to do something that you hadn't done before in the game so I had no idea that I could do what they wanted me to do.  Make sense?  No?  Good.

The ones I have played, you generally follow a story of some sort.  You use Lego building to create bridges or other platforms; fix or build vehicles to travel; or to repair or create some other machine for the level.  If you're not careful you can get shot or hit with something or fall down a chasm and then your Lego character will break apart into pieces.  The same can happen to vehicles.

While the games started on the PC, they were also made for the various consoles of the 2000s-today.  Like the later Star Wars specials on Disney+, the stories are generally done tongue-in-cheek with slapstick and nerd humor.  As that article says, that was really good with the prequels considering how much they sucked to most people not named Tony Laplume.

The success of the games is probably a large reason The Lego Movie and Lego Batman Movie came to be.  And at least with the video games it doesn't hurt so much to step on them, right?