I thought about what videogame vistas I liked and wanted to see recreated in this fashion (leaned towards Metroid Prime, to be honest) but it soon became apparent that I was going abroad and a painting wasn’t the most practical thing to bring with me, so it morphed into a thank you gift to my friend JP. The setting became obvious: Bioshock’s Arcadia. I must have a thing for big, artificial environments being consumed by nature (see Metroid Prime) because that was my unbiased favourite area in Bioshock. I figured he’d appreciate it more anyway on account of, you know, his design work on that specific map. The painting arrived yesterday so I can finally post it:

The only reason that I have an iPod Touch is because it came with the MacBook when I bought it, but I’m glad I do since it turned out to be a decent game device with some, amidst the sea of junk, quality games. The lack of any tactile input does hurt it when it comes to the kind of games I know and love, but for more casual fare the machine performs admirably. The developers that need more precise input have managed with virtual joystick and button setups, some better implemented than others. These generally work because the iPhone’s form factor is not all that different from the kind of ergonomics we’ve had since Nintendo released its controller in 1985. It works because it’s stable. The machine rests between two hands, supported by back fingers, while the thumbs are free, in their natural position, to press things. This is also the form you use when typing with the soft keyboard (or, even, your Blackberry.) It works.

It’s great that the iPad is backwards compatible with all the Apps that are out there and all those games that you’ve bought, but I look at its size and weight and wonder how that form factor will affect all those many games. Can you imagine playing a game on your Playstation with a controller that’s seven and a half inches wide and weighs 1.6 pounds (about 3 times wider and 5 times heavier than the iPhone)? I can’t, and I’ve used one of those massive original XBox controllers. This, as a gamer, is the most glaring problem with the iPad.

And since I started writing this Kotaku has posted a hands-on impression that basically echoes these thoughts and a piece on a gamer’s doubts about the device. Also a gamasutra piece. So I’ll leave the thoughts at that.

All told, though, I do hope that this change in ergonomics, making the virtual d-pad awkward, forces developers to really think about the interface, slow down their game designs, and make something nice for this specific platform. Too many rely on old conventions dating back to 1985. When someone does, that’s when I’ll consider the device worth my investment. Maybe a nice, original strategy game. One that can also work on the iPod Touch too. I’d buy it. That gadget works well enough already.

Once upon a time not too long ago
there was a solitary nomad who said “to the south I’ll go!”
He found himself a new home
that was halfway to Rome!
So he packed a suitcase with a lot of heft
and met the landlord before he left.
The landlord gave him Keys of Four,
one for the building, for mailbox, and two for the door.
The nomad booked a train for the Friday evening
excited about all the things a new city would bring.

He got there that night and got into a cabbie
and as he drove through his new city he found it none too shabby.
The taxi driver was new so he got a little bit lost
but he got a nice view of the city without much extra cost.
The heavy suitcase was unloaded and he paid his fares
and then struggled to carry it up four flights of stairs.
He was at the apartment door
with his Keys of Four,
the stairs he managed to survive,
but a new problem arose: he needed Keys of Five!

So he called the landlady in Nice who called it a “disaster,”
interrupted from partying on a Friday night, starting to get plastered.
She booked a train to Cannes that very same night
while the nomad wandered around to see the sight.
People were out reveling, dining, and having fun at that late hour
while the nomad was hungry, frustrated, and oh so sour.
He couldn’t venture too far because of his gear
so he sat on the street as midnight came near.

Eventually she arrived after one in the morning
but let this story act as a warning:
if moving to a city far, far away
remember to charge your phone, it’ll save the day

The 00s began on a tremendous low. I was still a teenager, a freshman at the University of Toronto, living with my parents in suburban Mississauga, broke and broken. I was miserable, newly uncertain of my future, and hopelessly lost. Before that first year was out, just ahead of December’s winter exam season, I effectively gave up. I stopped going to school, skipped all my exams, and abandoned all of my courses. Thousands of dollars, most of it in the form of scholarships, went to the shitter.

It could have been the setup for a devastating decade, but a month later, I managed to find, without even looking, a job at a local internet start-up as a Flash developer at a time when Flash was exploding thanks to newly released version 5. It was nothing but luck, I was in the right place (dreamless.org) at the right time, but it was the defining moment of the decade for me. Everything that came after came because of that. In the years that followed, I expanded my web skills, built up almost nine years of industry experience, and developed a diverse portfolio of projects and brands. My entire decade revolved around work and while I have absolutely no regrets about how it turned out it did mean that I missed out on some things.

That career, if you can call it that, is the reason why I am now in Paris. It is also why, during my four months here, I have seen so little of Paris. I’ve done nothing but sit in front of my MacBook. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for all the people that have hired me and wanted to work with me and thought my work was good. I am thankful that my career has given me the ability to be so independent and autonomous, allowing me to work anywhere I can plug my laptop into the internet. It’s all been great, but as I look back on my life during the last decade and my life during my twenties I see a lot of time and very little living.

That is why I am going through another change of scenery. I’m leaving Paris behind, and its cramped apartments and its excess dust and its hustle and bustle, as I head down to the Cote d’Azur for the winter. As I do so, I plan on leaving all the internet distractions behind. Apart from some loose ends with already committed-to projects, I don’t intend to work. I don’t intend to Tweet much. I don’t intend to surf much. And I don’t intend to write to weblogs.

In many ways this has been the decade of the weblog, and I had been there for the whole of it: as of today this weblog is ten years old. I started a little Blogger.com site back in December 1999 and while it moved around and evolved quite a lot, as has my voice, the essence of it is very much the same as it ever was. Ten years of my life documented on the internet. It’s kind of scary to think about, but mostly kind of mundane. It’s also something that, having existed for a third of my life, feels so completely normal and natural that it’s not anything that I can ever give up. The topics and the interests and the style might change, but once you find your public voice, no matter how few people are listening, you don’t want to lose it. It will continue to be so. I will write and link and create for the next decade and beyond. Bring on the tens!

But in the meantime I’m going to go and attempt to live for once as I try to find my private voice.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

It was a rather simple game with simple vector based graphics that unapologetically played like something straight out of an early 80s arcade. It’s easy to overlook a game like that, but there’s no denying that its influence was massive. It was a herald for a new kind of console game.

1. It was an XBox 360 launch game and, more importantly, it was a launch game for XBox’s Live Arcade digital distribution service. By virtue of being there at the beginning it was one of the first, and the most successful, games that you could buy and play from the console itself. We almost take it for granted now but five years ago this was a big deal.
2. Do you know how many credits the game has for design and programming? One. And even though it was a mini-game within the much larger Project Gotham Racing 3 and had that larger studio backing, it proved, right from the start of the XBox Arcade service, that small one-or-two man teams can create games for the platform and succeed. All the consoles now have quite a few small-team produced, independent games available on them. This too was mostly unthinkable five years ago.
3. It’s not the first modern retro-styled game but it was a popular and successful (and cheaply made) one and because of it you can draw a line from Geometry Wars to Space Invaders Extreme and Pac-Man: Championship Edition and Galaga Legions and many others. Its aesthetic impact on this style of new-retro games is obvious.
4. One of the best games of the decade wouldn’t exist if not for Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and that game is: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.
5. It showed the power of having an instantly accessible quick-play game installed on your system’s hard drive. Downloading something? Start up Geometry Wars, see where your friends are on the leaderboards (perfectly integrated, showing others how to do it from the start), and play for a few minutes.
6. Hundreds of blatant clones.
7. Other reasons.

It’s making me wish I had my XBox 360: my leaderboard scores need a boost.

Emeralds – Emeralds & What Happened

No one better captures that essence than the improvisational, experimental prog collective that is Emeralds. Their CD What Happened, a collection of live improvised recordings, summarizes their aesthetic as best as it can. It’s a great, droning ambient disc that also highlights the problem with an improv band: without the need for studio perfection, they can produce a lot of unique music. Unfortunately, while prolific a lot of that output seems inaccessible and lost to underground cassettes and limited vinyl pressings. Much of the reason for the CD recommendation arises from some of this peripheral output, mostly because my absolute favourite track “Geode” can be found on their self-titled LP. But all this side content just adds to, and never diminishes, the appeal of What Happened.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts

A 2 CD set from another prolific artist that combines three previous albums, two of which were also released this year, and a bunch of unreleased material into one sprawling set. It’s the perfect introduction to his work, as it was for me. Rifts takes a far more nostalgic and electronic approach than Emeralds, seemingly more overtly referencing early 80s computer infomercials, computer graphics, and low-tech sci-fi (like this scene from Stalker.) One moment you have an ambient soundspace and then something like this this, but it’s never jarring because it’s all so thematically interconnected. It do wish I could see his DVD project because if the clips on YouTube (the above link and “Nobody Here“) are any indication it is definitely something I would be entranced by, and the visual style perfectly captures the OPN sound.

Belbury Poly – From a Distant Star

The BBC first started broadcasting in 1922 which means that the signals have travelled 87 lightyears out into space. If the inhabitants of 58 Eridani heard these early broadcasts, sampled them, and sent signals back to Earth^[1], it might not be out-of-place to imagine it sounding like From a Distant Star. The album is entwined in that kind of almost creepy nostalgic happiness of old low-quality children’s broadcasts and late night radio plays and home gardening advice shows. It’s very playful, full of almost toy-like instrumentations, and strangely melancholy at the same time. The Hidden Door (weird YouTube video featuring pictures of Polish girls) is the standout for me, but Adventures in a Miniature Landscape is a better example for that clownish, melancholy flavour.

Alva Noto – Xerrox Volume 2

If Alva Noto’s Xerrox Volume 1 is music for airports copied over and xeroxed a hundred times^[2], then Volume 2 is the equivalent music for spaceports. Carsten Nicolai’s “Xerrox” project takes its name from its basis in some theoretical ideals involving copying in the digital age and what “original” means in this context. Or something. Despite the art house justifications for it, not all that unexpected from the Raster Noton label, it is perfectly enjoyable ambient music. I especially love “Xerrox Sora” which which starts as this clicking badly copied bit that fades away into an ocean of chords and white noise that crescendoes and just instantly fades away leaving nothing but echoes of itself for the last minute and a half.

The previous Volume 1 was equally good and when you consider the packaging that comes with these releases I eagerly await, and hope for, a Volume 3 in 2010.

Nosaj Thing – Drift

Los Angeles is getting a lot of buzz thanks to Flying Lotus, Samiyam, and The Gaslamp Killer and their unique style of instrumental hip hop genre spanning beats. In some ways it feels like the American parallel to UK dubstep^[3]. Nosaj Thing is very much rooted in that scene but replaces a lot of its roughness with a more mellow, at times melodic, spacey synth approach. There are multiple instances of synthesized choirs and voices giving Drift a celestial, if digitized, aesthetic that seems to be more informed by classical symphonies than hip-hop mix tapes. I was instantly hooked on this album after hearing the breathy, melodic beats of “Fog”. It’s so good. If I were to make a Top Five list, rather than an indecisive Top Fifty Five, this would surely be in it. The pseudo Elite 2 inspired artwork doesn’t hurt.

1. Entirely possible since 58 Eridani is about 43 light years away giving them just enough time to send a response. I’d be arriving now. Though, of course, the pedants would note that they’d be responding to the absolute earliest broadcasts from the beginning of the 1920s.
2. Not literally Eno’s Music for Airports. The majority of samples and audio sources on Volume 1 were recorded in airports and during flights, though you could easily make the connection to Eno’s work too.
3. It’s all interconnected, really, with Flying Lotus and Samiyam appearing on London’s Hyperdub records.

As it says there, my skills and talents won me a sweatshirt. During my cleaning and packing prior to coming to Paris, I found it. I photographed it. I reminisced about winning it.

Super Mario World

The first thing you might notice about the above form letter is that I was the high scorer of Super Mario World. This in itself is weird because scoring has never been a goal of any Mario game. Sure, the early games tallied points but it was always acknowledged as a legacy of videogames’ arcade roots and not something inherent to the game design. No one paid attention to it as the goal always was to beat the game. Indeed, all the obsessive challenges around these Super Mario revolve around beating it as fast as possible. There are many speedruns^[1], but playing Mario for score isn’t an expected thing.

By the time the competition arrived in Mississauga, I was already well versed in Super Mario World. I was twelve and I had already beaten it multiple times, found all 96 levels, including the star road, and beaten those, and discovered a few weird exploits. This, of course, was in the days before the likes of gamefaqs.com so all of it was earned the hard way: by sheer will of persistence. Never underestimate a twelve year old’s ability to make the most out of a single game. Of course, in all that time I never played the game for score so this competition required some adjustments.

I had previously, however, maxed the score out at 9,999,990 using one of those found exploits. As anyone that has played an old Mario game knows, continually jumping on enemies (or chaining them with a hit shell) without hitting the ground basically doubles the amount of points you are rewarded. Jumping on one goomba gives you 100 points, hitting a second, without landing, gives you 200, then 400, 800, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, and then a 1UP. At this point you stop getting points, but you start accumulating lives.

In the forest area of Super Mario World, about half-way through the game, there are caterpillar enemies, called Wigglers, that have unique characteristics in the game. Jumping on a Wiggler would net you points as normal, but it wouldn’t kill them. It’d just make them angry. Pissed off Wigglers would turn red and mean and start frantically moving around their area becoming more of a nuisance. You could keep jumping on them in this state, but it’d do nothing and it’d net you no points.

What I noticed was that if you went a screen away from an angry wiggler and then back again they’d respawn in their calm states. This meant that if you were adept enough with the cape and flying through the air, and if there were enough wigglers in a level, you could float back and forth continually, crash landing on them, and accumulate as many 1UPs as you wanted. I figured this would be a good way to collect lives for some of the harder star road levels, so I found a good, open space in one of the levels and went to work. What I didn’t account for was the game glitching out completely after you earned your third or fourth 1UP.

A pointer in the memory must have gone astray because the “1up” pronouncements soon became scrambled graphics and the lives gained became arbitrary additions and the score started to increase by seemingly random values. Scores increase almost exponentially and in less time than it takes to complete a level you can accumulate the maximum 9,999,990 points. Something about those damn Wigglers must have caused an overflow and all the counters went crazy. An example of this can be seen in this video here, although this player did it in a more clever way, and easier location, than I remember doing it. This glitch might be relatively common knowledge now, within the right circles, but back then it was privileged information. I was on top of it, I knew the game back to front, and I was ready for any Super Mario World competition.

The Competition

The Nintendo Power Play Tour’s Mississauga stop was stationed in the Woolco parking lot at the Square One shopping mall, the depressing “heart” of the city. Cordoned off in the area were a few sponsor stalls and one giant trailer, inside of which was a single aisle with encased televisions and Super Nintendos on either side. The right side had the latest games to try and the left were all the competition Super Mario Worlds. People would line up outside until a group was let in. They’d flow in to the trailer and lay claim to a machine and a controller and once everyone was ready the machines would be reset. After five minutes the controllers would be deactivated and the rear doors opened. The staff would take a survey of the Super Mario World machines to see if anyone beat the current high score and, if they did, record their name and contact information. Then the machines would be reset and the next batch of people let in.

As long as you lined up after each go, you could play as many times as you wanted. I thought of the wigglers out there in the Forest of Illusion, but they were too far in the game to reach. For a moment I considered rushing the game, saving as often as I could, and then resuming from that point each round but the problem with that approach was that I wasn’t guaranteed the same machine each time. Not to mention the risk that someone would overwrite the save. There wasn’t even any guarantee that I could reach that point via five minute increments. I had to make due with World 1 and figure out strategies to maximize my score within that.

I played through the first few levels of the game a number of times, taking mental notes of what yields how many points, how long it takes, what’s a waste of time, and how much of a time bonus I could get at the end of a level. I was making good progress, and always looking over my shoulder at how others approached it, but it was slow and it wasn’t getting me a really great competitive score. There had to be a better way.

Then it dawned on me.

Intro

The first level of Super Mario World (technically the first level on the right as SMW is the only Mario game that I can think of without a defined first level.) acts as the typical Nintendo-styled introduction to the game. Everything in the level, and everything Mario can do, is organically revealed. There are no tutorials and no tips, just a plain game mechanic driven carrot on a stick.
To the right of the start is a shell lying on the ground with a platform above on which a bunch of koopas are walking. The setup is obvious, but in that instant it shows you a few things that can be done in Super Mario World. You can either kick shells or pick them up. If you pick them up, you can jump with them. Then you can throw them to dispatch enemies. And, most relevant to my needs, if you kill multiple enemies you will cause a chain and eventually get a 1UP.

That means if you play it right, and it’s hard not to, in the very first few seconds of the first stage you can net yourself 16,400 points. After that, all the time you spend collecting pittances, be it from Yoshi coins or other enemies, seems wasteful by comparison. That’s when I remembered one little trick in the game: if you play through a previously completed level, you can press start and select to cancel out of it. Then you can play it again. And cancel out. And, yes, I did that.

I would rush through the first level, just so I had it completed, then for the rest of the five minutes I’d spend going back to that same level for five second intervals. I’d kill those initial koopas and get the points then pause, hit select, drop back out to the map, and repeat over and over and over again. It might not be in the spirit of the competition, but it was damn effective. I honed my technique and did this about, at the very minimum, ten times. I must have spent over an hour playing Super Mario World in this way. Eventually I had a score I couldn’t beat anymore, 656,500, and I was comfortable enough with it to know that I could finally go home. I was right.

The Prize

A couple weeks later I got the above form letter and this sweatshirt:

The front features a large Super Nintendo logo adorned with extraneous brightly coloured triangles and circles, as was the style of the time. It’s very much of its era, stuck in that post-80s geometric pre-mainstream-grunge Parker Lewis look. With the fashion trends of the last couple of years, it’s almost fashionable again. Or ironic.

The sleeves have the prerequisite junk food sponsor logos. I remember the Power Tour had, as was popular at that time, a Pepsi Taste Test booth near to the Nintendo trailer. As with every Pepsi Taste Test I’ve had, and I’ve had a few, I chose the competitor’s product. Every time.

The back of it has Mario riding Yoshi with more superfluous dots and neon pointing triangles and a green rectangle. Before I left I did try the shirt on and, to my surprise, it fit. It was a little snug, but then it wasn’t designed for someone of my age. That’s probably a testament to the weight I’ve lost these last few years.

Despite my victory, I still wonder what could have been. A few weeks later I received confirmation that I wasn’t the Ontario champion. I can’t remember the exact score, but I think I was bested by a 100,000 to 200,000 points. I think they were from Sudbury or the Sault. I’ve always wondered how they managed that, or what the theoretical best score in five minutes is. I never bothered to try. By then, I was already sick of Super Mario World and I had moved on to the latest and greatest (probably Super Mario Kart.)

I still wonder, in this day of speed-run videos, emulators, and tool-assisted play-throughs, what kind of score can be accomplished in five minutes. More so, I’m curious how close to an optimal strategy I came. As a late twenty-something, I don’t feel as though I have that level of patience and deftness anymore. I look back now and at often times I wonder if I really was more clever as a twelve year old than I am now. That sweatshirt, gaudy as it is, reminds me of that.

1. Yes, there are some low score runs, like this one for Super Mario Bros., but their inherent goal is the same: just beat the game. The low scoring is just an added obstacle. High score runs are unusual, partly because the score always maxes out.

Addition: A Metafilter user tells of her experiences during the same Power Tour.