I’ve previously mentioned my official and certified title of regional Super Mario World champion. I still have the proof, in writing, from Nintendo itself.
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.
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.
Maynard James Keenan is a self-professed nerd, despite the stylings of his Tool and A Perfect Circle projects. So when he’s free to let loose on a solo project without the expectations that those two bands come with, he really lets loose. The first sign of this is the fact that “Puscifer“, as a “band”, came into existence via a Mr. Show skit. The second sign? Their first commercial song was Cuntry Boner.
Then there are the juvenile album covers and titles. The latest EP is called ‘”C” Is for (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference Here)’. Yes. If you’d see that in a store you’d dismiss it instantly. But behind the high school hurr hurr titles and art is some really great music and surprising collaborations. See, for example, the above video, which is itself bizarre and amazing and looks like the best ever application of Poser: it has Milla Jovovich singing. Then there’s the song “Potions (Deliverance Mix)” and its writing credit of one “Trent Reznor;” and “The Humbling River”, the most serious and APC-like sounding track on the album, with its hypnotizing aura. For a six track (two live songs) EP, it is really, really solid.
I love this video of a live “performance” by Blondie of the song “Denis” on a Dutch TV program from, I would think, 1978. I don’t know what the story is here, but there’s something appealing about seeing Debbie Harry just stand dead still while multiple televisions around her show proper (from the same show?) live performances of the song. The video inter-cuts between those which is a shame because just watching her stare at the camera with an air of displeasure would have made it all the more absurd. Somehow it seems more genuine then the mostly lip-synced performances of the era, perhaps owing a little bit to Blondie’s oft-overlooked punk origins.
Well, this was a pleasant surprise for a rather cool November afternoon: Bookmat has not one but two new Jahtari releases available for purchase and download. These came as a complete surprise, partly because Jahtari does a poor job with their site: not only was there no word that these were coming, but there still isn’t any word that they even exist.
First, there’s Tapes’ “Hissing Theatricals” which is a brilliant, if brief, foray into lo-fi 8-bit dub patterns, with an added cassette transfer hiss for that extra bit of texture. It’s very much in that Disrupt style but a little more, I don’t know, focused? The mp3 release costs only three pounds so it was an instant impulse purchase for me, especially after hearing the sample for “Gold Love Riddim.” It’s fantastic and worth the cost of the album on its own.
I love Boomkat, but their often sycophantic and overly enthusiastic reviews are some times a little too much. Every other album is massively recommended, a career definer, an essential purchase, three exclamation marks! etc. This is what happens when the reviewer is also the seller. That said, in this case, the album hits all my right buttons and I agree with their sentiment: Massively Recommended!. If I were to make another Bleeping mix, this would be featured front and centre. Hell, it even uses a Capcom opening chime sample — think Street Fighter 2 — which, coincidentally enough, I recently used too.
The second release is an EP between the man himself, Disrupt, and Glasgow MC Soom T. They’ve collaborated before and an entire performance can be heard on Jahtari’s site: Disrupt Live w/ SOOM T at Glasgow Art School. The track “Dirty Money”, from that live set, is what I ended my “Beep-Side” with. It was a bit rough and raw then, but it’s been given the title track treatment for this EP and it’s a lot more cohesive now. Filling out the rest of the EP are two other vocal tracks on the EP, and two instrumental dubs.
It’s a good collaboration with some good jams, but it’s a bit in your face. I’m just not naturally drawn to vocal stuff unless it’s really good, distorted, or just much more in the background. Which is why if I want to hear female vocals over 8-bit dubs I’ll more frequently turn to the low-key stylings Illyah & Limited Candy’s “Machines and Ghosts EP”. Unless I’m sticking it to the man, or Ken, then “Dirty Money” would do.
I was up on Friday morning and rode out to Gare du Nord to catch an early Eurostar train to London. The trip from Paris to London is about two hours total which, for someone that grew up with the vast distances of Ontario, is mind-boggling. It’s a comfortable, easy ride and really the more civilized way to go. Sure, it’s more expensive than flying and takes twice as long in transit, but the overall experience is quicker since both train stations are located centrally, so you don’t need to go through the extra hassle of going out to the boonies to get to an airport, and you don’t have to deal with all that airport bullshit. The entire check-in process, including passport control and security, took less than five minutes.
My first order of business in London was to make my way to the Pixel-Lab‘s Playful event. It was two tube stops from the station, but I decided to stretch my legs and walk it, without a map, and with the faintest of directions. It had been almost exactly a year since I’ve last been in London, when I spent three months there, but it easily could have been two weeks. Everything was instantly recognizable and navigable and despite the unfamiliar destination I managed to find my way without getting lost. Screw Google Maps, Human Brain™ is the real impressive application.
I arrived at Playful during the first break and stayed for all subsequent presentations. It was hit or miss. Some people were clearly not too comfortable in front of a crowd, others were just reading out their script, and others were engaging and entertaining. Russell Davies‘, James Bridle‘s, and Rex Box‘s, somewhat clunky but amusing overhead projector and transparencies powered, presentations were the standouts.
Russel Davies presents
During the lunch break, after a bit of Twitter-tag, I met up with Alex aka. rotational in what would be a precursor to many internet people first meetings. As they say on that side of the Channel, he was a good chap. We talked about the conference, writing for games, the magazine gaming business, and the internet like all true nerds would.
After the conference I headed towards my London City hotel, again by foot. The streets of London are far more stressful than the streets here in Paris. It was the evening rush-hour, already dark, and the hustle and bustle of the place felt very North American to me. I could feel my blood pressure rising just by being surrounded by it. Maybe I’m projecting, as I’m living a very casual, laissez-faire life over here.
I eventually found my hotel, just around the corner from the Eurogamer expo, and to my pleasant surprise I found that I had been upgraded to a deluxe suite. It was wonderful. A room more than five times larger than my current apartment. A large screen TV, two desks, a sofa, a speaker above the toilet so you could listen to the TV while you took a shit, and a cavernous shower larger than the entirety of my current washroom. I knew I wouldn’t want to leave.
So I didn’t and I skipped the Eurogamer Expo for that day while I relaxed and, later in the evening, headed out to The Crosse Keys pub nearby for the Indie Arcade Show & Yell arcade where I would meet up with more internet people, mostly consisting of those weird and crazy people of the Idle Thumbs forums including one of the organizers of the event, David aka. Nachimir. It could have been a disaster of an event — the plasma screen in the venue, specifically chosen because it had a plasma screen, didn’t work, putting a kibosh on any potential showing — but David’s tireless efforts to salvage it with a crowd of drunken indie devs and a megaphone turned it into a fun, if a bit disorganized, yelling match.
Joe Danger shown at the Indie Show & Yell, held up as some sort of monument to indiedom.
After a wonderful sleep and breakfast in the hotel I met up with Aubrey and we headed for the Eurogamer Expo and, not surprisingly, straight for the Indie Arcade. This tiny room with a bunch of PCs had more creativity and heart than the rest of the expo. There I played Joe Danger, easily one of the best games of the show, and chatted with the nice Hello Games people. Terry Cavanagh and Alex May, other swell chaps with whom I’d play 4 player Super Mario Bros co-op later in the day, were there to show VVVVVV and Euphloria, respectively. There was Time Fcuk and Squid Yes! Not So Octopus! and Super Yum Yum and Shooting Starcade. Leaving this little room and entering the vast spaces where the “mainstream” games were held was shocking in its contrast.
Indie Arcade
The problem with shows like this, where a lot of different games are placed within view of each other, is that they reveal just how same-y most of them actually are. No where was this more evident than in the 18+ basement where God of War 3 sat next to Dante’s Inferno. As I watched Aubrey fight some enemies by aimlessly swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus menaced in the background, I looked behind me to see, in a completely different game, someone fight a bunch of enemies by swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus was pissed off in the background. Then I played Bayonetta and I fought a bunch… stone colossus. It was all very depressing.
There was a Street Fighter IV machine — actually, a Playstation 3 inside a Taito arcade cabinet (?) — that was drawing crowds and, in the basement, a the Wii fighter Capcom vs Tatsunoko. Some dude was hogging the game, taking on all comers. I grabbed the second player Wii arcade stick (didn’t know there were any) and picked my characters and then that dude proceeded to unleash multiple ten billion point of damage, literally, combos on me before I could even figure out how to do anything. I managed to get about two punches in the match and quickly left in disgust. This one moron did more to dissuade me from ever looking at this game than anything in the actual game itself. Way to go!
Street Fighter IV: moment of defeat.
Heavy Rain was in the basement, which was too good for it. It should have been under the basement, dismantled, buried in concrete to be forgotten for a thousand years.
The game of the show, as far as I’m concerned, was the one that didn’t involve shooting, stabbing, or racing: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. If you were to judge all games at the expo by the amount of laughter and camaraderie from its players, as opposed to the typical, solitary dead stares most had, Super Mario Bros was the clear winner (Left 4 Dead 2 was second.) The simultaneous four-player co-op was a fun, competitive and cooperative, tour de joy. Much like the indie stuff, it stood out amongst the crowd as a sole beacon of colour. I just wish they didn’t use two Toads for players three and four.
3D videogames: making you look like even more of a nerd.
Afterwards, there was another pub session. The joys (and hats) of Hook Champ were often cited.
Sunday afternoon was lazy and rainy, spent mostly on a sofa with Street Fighter IV, Geometry Wars 2, and Channel4′s Peep Show. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Lady of Shalott while I was in London, but I was tired and this was the most suitable end to the weekend before the evening train ride home.
Unfortunately, the entire trip made me miss my game consoles even more. Once a gamer…
Excuse the journaly nature of this entry.
Heavy Rain really was complete shit. I’ll probably elaborate on this later.
I stayed at the Apex London, which I recommend for obvious reasons. But I’d probably still recommend it if I wasn’t upgraded to a larger suite since the staff there was friendly and helpful.
In trying to remember what videos I enjoyed this decade that weren’t on the list I turned to two places: my YouTube favourites, and my delicious bookmarks. The YouTube favourites were mostly a bust as they were almost entirely made up of old 80s and early 90s videos that were suffixed with the all-too-common Video is no longer available mark. delicious proved more fruitful as the video + music tag intersection gave me a pretty good zeitgeist for most of the decade. I say that having just realized that as of next month I’ve been a delicious user for six years, so it’s a pretty good indicator for most of my tastes through the decade.
What follows is a list of all the music videos that I bookmarked there over those years that aren’t already on antville’s top 100. Some were chosen for the video itself, some for the music, and others for weird cultural reasons (ie. mostly videogame and/or internet meme-ry).
Bleeping Beats B(eep)-Side by nerdm Here’s a B-Side I made to the previous Bleeping Beats mix that includes some new stuff, some stuff I couldn’t really fit in previously, a few goofy things, and some live performances that are a little raw and rough around the edges, all wrapped in a slight early-90s arcade vibe. …
David Shute’s Small Worlds is an entry for JayIsGames’ “Explore” competition. It is a great example of simple storytelling in a game. That might seem like a loaded statement when you consider that the entirety of the piece has no dialog, two lines of text, and features a protagonist that is three pixels tall. It’s …
EA’s Fifa Earth is neat. A Flash based real-time visualizer of stats and trends from games played in Fifa 10. I’m down with stuff like this. It’s ambient information that fits somewhere between the stat heavy specifics of something like Halo 3 and, well, nothing. Indirect stats like this always give a little extra life …
A couple weeks ago I posted a 40 minute mix on nerd music (you can download it here) that focused on (mostly) instrumental hip-hop and dub(step) musicians that incorporate the chiptune sound in their music. The genesis of this mix goes back to the end of August. I started compiling some tracks, quite a few …
The God of High Score Legacies Going through some backlog material I noticed that the above video hadn’t been posted, here or elsewhere. It really should be because of its videogame theme (I do like those) and, more so, because it’s so weird and borderline creepy. A paper-made animated tribute to an imaginary deity that …
Coming from Nick Stumpo, whose abnormal behavior child (abc) I fondly remember as one of the early paragons of the emerging flash/web/motion design scene back when Flash 5 was still fresh, is Fatty Bum Bum. An installation slash game Flash piece by Hanazuki for the Cinekid festival. From a game design perspective, Fatty Bum Bum …
BEAK> is a new project by Geoff Barrow, of Portishead, and two other guys. Extracts from their upcoming album can be listened to, in full, and purchased on their Bandcamp site. If you liked Portishead’s “Third” or, more correctly, the parts of it that were compared to the likes of The Silver Apples and Sunn …
I bought CodeWeaver’s Crossover yesterday in an impulsive moment of “I miss some of my PC games” boredom. Based on open source project WINE, Crossover theoretically lets you play numerous PC games on your Mac without having to boot into a separate Windows installation and all the crap and space that entails (including the requirement …
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
Intro
