Video Games and Grevious Injuries.
Video games are generally considered to be a “safe” hobby. When we think of injuries sustained while playing video games, we think of blisters, muscle cramps, and, if you’re in Korea, brutal murder by gang violence instigated by matches of Counterstrike or Starcraft or some other stupid bullshit. But people tend to forget that sometimes video games can cause serious injury can occur that ISN’T a result of Koreans being fucking ridiculous. For example…
Rotating the Control Stick in Mario Party
Mario Party was fucking awesome. There are still few games that can compare to the simple fun of getting a bunch of your friends together and playing minigames for coins. And then, in the end, you end up screaming “GODDAMMIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS A HAPPENING STAR?!? I HAD 8 FUCKING STARS AND I STILL LOST?!?” But, despite what you’d think, the most prevalent injuries weren’t from strangulation among friends or electric shock after chewing through the cartridge trying to eat Toad’s brains for giving someone who did really shitty like 10 FUCKING STARS AT THE END. No, according to this article, Nintendo received several complaints about kids who were receiving blisters and other injuries by spinning the control stick with their palms instead of their thumbs. Of course, this is the mainstream media we’re talking about, so instead of reacting to this in a normal way, by saying “Ok, well, kids aren’t doing this the way they’re intended to, but Nintendo’s fixing the problem by offering free gloves which prevent the injuries,” they freak the fuck out and make shit up. For example:
“One kid got a tetanus shot,” said Christi Pritchard, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
A tetanus shot? Jesus christ! Was the kid playing in a bucket of rusty nails? Also, note who she works for. I think if anybody needs to get a shot to stave off disease, it’s probably her.
Another great line:
“The alarming thing was how little time some of these children spent playing the game before they were injured,” Pritchard said. “One parent said their child had been playing the game for 15 to 20 minutes when they got a second-degree burn.”
Heh, they’d probably be even more shocked if they knew that the “second-degree burn” the kid supposedly received (I say supposedly because I’ve spun the control stick enough times to know there’s no way he could have caused enough friction to leave a second-degree burn unless he was some kind of cold-fusion powered robot) took place in the space of a 30-second long minigame. Those “rotate the joystick” style games didn’t come up very often, and when they did, you never had to rotate for very long.
The problem with the article is the same as with any article about video games that appears in the mainstream press: apparently, journalistic standards just go out the window when you’re writing about video games. There’s no reason to do any research whatsoever; just copy and paste whatever press release the game company releases, then talk to outraged people who are just as fucking clueless and ill-informed as you are. Why should you have to talk to people who enjoy the hobby, or, god forbid, actually play the goddammed game? You’re a journalist, your job is reporting news, not virtual game Natendos. Those will never be news-worthy!
CNET’s poor journalistic ethics aside, you could really fuck your hands up on those control sticks. I got Mario Party for my birthday, and me and 3 of my friends sat and played it all night. It took us about an hour to figure out how much faster you could rotate if you did it with your palm, and once one of us figured it out, the rest of us had to do it to keep up. So, the next day, our hands were covered in blisters. It looked like we had been jerking off the Human Torch. Our hands hurt so bad we couldn’t hold the controllers correctly. That didn’t stop us from playing, of course. Mario Party fucking rules. At least, it does until Toad gives Donkey Kong 6 fucking stars at the end. He didn’t even earn them, he’s a monkey.
Virtual Boy Migranes
This one is a little harder for me to write about, because it’s something I’ve never personally experienced. The Virtual Boy has always gotten a lot of shit because apparently looking at it for 10 minutes causes your brain to start bubbling out of your ears. Supposedly the headaches are so bad that no one can play the damn thing, except for myself, apparently. Tell me THAT shit doesn’t sound like the premise for a cyberpunk movie: a virtual reality device which is so advanced (and yet looks so primative, like all the technology in cyberpunk movies) that no one can use it… except one man: Freddie Electric. Because when you’re in a cyberpunk movie, you have to have a retarded name.
Anyway, when people played the Virtual Boy for more than a few minutes at a time, the red-and-black color scheme and lack of outside light apparently caused severe headaches and, in some cases, temporary sight problems. It really sucks, too, because the Virtual Boy was fucking awesome. Seriously, you guys have no idea what you’re missing. Everybody always likes to beat on the VB because it was so “terrible”, but really, I don’t understand what was terrible about it. Most of the games were fantastic, and, except for the headaches it caused, there was really nothing wrong with the way it looked. I think most people who use it as a point of ridicule do so simply because they think it’s an easy target, and I’d wager that most of the people who use it as an easy punchline have never even played it, or if they have, they haven’t played it for long enough to give it a fair chance. Probably because of the headaches. Stupid humans and their inability to withstand a visual assault.
Controller-spinning Frenzies
Ok, this one is a little more abstract, because it’s not really a video game injury so much as it is a result of childhood stupidity, but every gamer I know did it, so I think it deserves inclusion.
Few things hurt as much as an NES controller spun around at top speed. I know, because I got fucking hit with them all the time. Thankfully, I grew out of that really early, but I had the misfortune to have a little brother 6 years my junior who didn’t. He loved to pick up my controllers and spin them around like a fucking lasso, and 9 times out of 10 this ended up hitting me right in the teeth. It got to the point where I knew exactly how much each controller hurt. The SNES controller has a smaller surface area, but is heavy and more compact, so the hits were harder. The N64 controller was chaos because it was so large, which lead to it being really hard to follow, which means it hit you more. However, the plastic was hollow, so it didn’t hurt as much, unless you got hit with the memory card/Rumble Pak slot on the back. The worst was the PS1 Dual Shock, though, because it was big, heavy, and pointed. A hit by one of those to the temples would hurt for hours. Fortunately, as the older brother, I didn’t need controllers to fight back with, because I could just punch him in the face, which was a lot easier and more efficient.
Of course, now most controllers are wireless, so this should be a thing of the past, right? Wrong.
Motion Controller Murder
With the new wave of motion-controlled systems, games are becoming more active than ever. This means that gamers are becoming more active than ever, and this can only spell tragedy. We don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to full-body movements, and Mountain Dew and pizza do many things, but they sure as hell don’t push your body to perform at max intensity (well, they force your heart to perform at max intensity, but that’s not quite the same thing). All of this shows, too; there are fully two websites dedicated solely to pictures and stories of horrific injuries inflicted by Wiimotes, and multitudes of pictures, videos, and one-shot novelty articles dedicated to the topic. A man went for a smash in Wii Tennis only to jam his hand through a glass lamp cover, shredding his hand to pieces. One woman gave herself a huge black eye before a series of job interviews, leading to her having to explain that she is not, in fact, being abused in her home life. Another woman killed her dog. Killed it! Just flat out. How do you throw a small, light piece of plastic hard enough to kill a dog? Is there some kind of slingshot-Wiimote game? Did she get hit by a bolt of lightning as it launched from her hand? Is she fucking Mileena? Or, with the Wiimote already killing animals, and both Microsoft and Sony introducing their own wholly derivative products, should we all run for the hills and pray that our new kitty-petting simulators and pretend handball games don’t find and kill us? I, for one, favor the latter. At the very least, it will save us from how inevitably shitty Move and the Microsoft EyeToy will be.
My Critiques of My Poorly-Drawn Video Game Characters.
Because I’m hilariously immature, one of my favorite things to do is color with crayons. I do it all the time, way more than I’d like to admit. And you’d think, as much as I do it, that I would be halfway decent at drawing. But you’d be wrong. I’m awful at drawing, and most of the things I come up with are so bad that they’re an embarrassment to everyone involved. So, due to my masochistic love of making myself look stupid for your amusement, I have taken 3 of my recent drawings and viciously torn them apart, like a vindictive art critic, except that, unlike your typical art critic, I understand why art exists. So, we start off with…
Black Mage
One of my biggest problems with my drawings is that no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to draw a person. I’ve never, ever, ever been able to get a regular human being’s dimensions down. So, even when I stick to video game characters, I have to draw things that have the simplest shapes possible. So drawing a Black Mage from Final Fantasy should be easy, right?
Am I ever correct about any hypothetical questions? This looks like a racist depiction of a black guy peeking out of a blue sock. Anybody who is familiar with the series will be able to tell exactly what it is, but they’ll also laugh at me and banish me from any groups they belong to. Also, check out this picture of this drawing before it was finished:
Here he looks like a sock with bodacious, if oddly angled, jugs.
Mallow
I just played through Mario RPG again, for like the 50th time. I think I may have beaten it more than any other game I own. I always feel kind of bad, because immediately upon gaining a 4th party member, I always take Mallow out of the party and he never ends up back in it again for the rest of the game. As part of this guilt, I decided to draw him.
I know he’s a fictional character, and that moreover this is a crayon drawing that I made myself, but I can’t help but feel like he knows how insulting this drawing is. It’s like, he’s smiling, but you know secretly he wishes he didn’t look like a bizarre piece of popcorn with 2 club feet and an arm that was mangled in a factory press.
Magnemite
I looooove Magnemite’s design. I like very simply drawn characters, and especially weird looking ones with one gigantic eye, and Magnemite fits the bill. Actually a lot of the Pokeymans fit that particular bill, but Magnemite probably does the best. But I’ve demonstrated in the past that I can’t seem to draw even the simplest of things. Is this in that category?
Actually, as far as my drawings go, I don’t think this one is too bad. I mean, it has its problems, but it captures the essence of the original Pokemon. Right? Maybe not, those screws on the bottom look awful. But I still like my little electric-type, poorly-drawn screws aside. He is SO going up at my desk at work.
So that’s really the best I can do. Any ideas as to what I should try to draw next?
Nester is a Violent Maniac.
Remember Nester? Probably not. He’s this guy:
Nester, seen here detailing the time he captured the Red October. I know that sounds like a joke caption but it really isn't.
This cocky motherfucker appeared in Nintendo Power until the end of 1993. He was the co-star of Howard & Nester, the epic comic adventures of Howard Phillips, Nintendo spokesectuive. Howard and Nester got into various problems (all of them caused by Nester being an overly self-assured dick) which inevitably led to them somehow being inside of a Nintendo. Then Howard would completely obliterate Nester at something. They were awesome, especially to kids, and they were a big part of making NP feel so personal. Eventually, when the real Howard Phillips left Nintendo (for JVC. Seriously?), the comic became Nester’s Adventures, and Nester went kind of crazy without Howard’s fatherly influence. For the most part, the comic kept its greatness.
However, some of them were completely insane, and that’s saying something for a comic about a 3 foot tall balding teenager with a perfectly circular head and Cloud Strife hair with schizophrenia. Just look at this one from issue 30:
Wouldn’t it be funny if this were the whole comic? I should just leave it out of context.
Here, we have Nester, who is apparently now a spiteful, murderous box car derby driver, destroying other kids’ cars for no particular reason other than that he takes sadistic pleasure in it. Not many kids would be tried as an adult for something they did in a box car derby, but I think this would be enough to convince a judge that the only place Nester is safe is in a cell guarded by 4 of the ass-whompingest guards the state has to offer. I swear, he’s supposed to be the hero of this comic. But look at the expression on his face in that last panel! He clearly takes very sick pleasure in watching these kids’ dreams go out in a storm of fire and shattered soap box.
Here we see the twist to the story, where the referee hits the “F-Zero Virtual Reality” button all homemade wooden cars have, Nester sees himself competing in the F-Zero tournament. Because logically, the best thing to do when you have a kid with violent tendencies is put him in an environment where he sees the cars he’s ramming as evil space aliens to defeat by ramming, with support and bonus tips on murder from a superhero. By the time his car is completely destroyed, the referee finally comes to his senses and realizes that he needs to get Nester into police hands now before he goes on a shooting spree in a shopping mall.
As crazy as this makes him look, Nester was still totally awesome. The comic ended in 1994, but Nester continued to crop up for years, in a couple of one-shot comics in Nintendo Power, disguised as “Lark” for some reason in Pilotwings 64, and even in his own game for the Virtual Boy, Nester’s Funky Bowling. It was, uh, funky.
I’d love to see Nester make a comeback. I know it’ll never happen, because honestly I don’t see any way it would work, but I’d love it if for absolutely no reason the comic began appearing in NP again and Nester started appearing in Chinatown Wars and Madworld. Judging from this comic, he’d be right at home.
I <3 You, Sega.
I feel like a dick.
Yesterday, I posted my article about weird sports games. In it, I went on a wild, totally unrelated-to-Uniracers rant about Nintendo’s Play It Loud! campaign. I bashed Sega’s ad campaigns, in which they focused on Nintendo’s games as being for little kids. While I stand by my opinion that that ad campaign preyed on really stupid kids, I also attacked Sega for generally not having games as good as Nintendo, and specifically for having shitty 3rd party support. Well, I kind of stand by those statements too, but I still fucking love Sega. Well, 90s Sega anyway. 21st century Sega I can’t say the same thing about. Jesus. I just don’t understand how a company can manage to blow 60 years of very powerful good will in such a short amount of time.
Now, I understand that no one from Sega is reading this, and I also understand that my articles, despite my best efforts to the contrary, do not travel back in time and unleash my rage on people that haven’t worked in the games industry in 20 years. Furthermore, I realize that none of you give a shit how I feel about Sega’s ads in 1992. Regardless, I would still feel awful if I bashed the people that brought me Vectorman, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Phantasy Star without proper context. This is my love letter to Sega.
My experience with Sega actually began when I was lucky enough to get a Master System. I don’t remember at all when I got it. All I have from early on are vague memories of Zillion 2, Double Dragon and Gangster Town.
This is pretty much what the 20s were like. Cops sat in the road and shot everybody that walked down the street in a zoot suit.
I liked Zillion 2 and Gangster Town (and I still do. I still think the Master System light gun, the Light Phaser, is the best I’ve ever used), but I loved Double Dragon. I know, I know; everybody does. But not everybody played the Master System version. The NES version of DD is good, but the Master System version is spectacular. Everybody who has played it typically agrees; it has much better graphics, the controls are smoother, it doesn’t have the mystifying level up system of the NES version, and it can handle more enemies on screen at once. Plus, you have infinite continues (until the final stage anyway), which helps with that bitch-ass bridge in the third level.
Although these are the only games I remember having as a kid for the Master System, when I got a little bit older I found several other games that I had apparently had always had stashed away in a box in my closet. Among them were Afterburner and The Ninja. Those weren’t necessarily treasured childhood memories like the others were, but they were solid, fun games. I later got addicted to the arcade version of Afterburner after my local arcade got the totally sweet motion-ride cabinet (I’m not sure exactly how they got a working version of this cabinet in 2003, but I’m not complaining). I bring these games up, though, because they demonstrate one of my favorite things about Sega games: the colors. With all of their older arcade games, the Master System, the Game Gear, and even the Genesis, Sega had a very particular way of designing their games to use unique, instantly identifiable colors. Just look at Fantasy Zone:
Don't look for too long, though. Fantasy Zone is technically a class-III psychotropic.
A lot of Sega’s games looked like this, for several years. They’re still so pretty in so many ways, with the thick sprite outlines and pastel colors. Sega kept this up for a long, long time, pretty much until they started trying to make their games look 3D. Around that time, games like Sonic 3D Blast and Vectorman demonstrated the graphical problems with the Genesis, mainly that everything looked waaaaay too fucking dark. But until about 1995, everything they did managed to look so uniquely colorful that they didn’t have to rival anybody else; their graphics stood in a league of their own.
Another big part of my love for Sega was the mystique everything they did had. In Nintendo, I felt like I had a personal relationship. They communicated with me by strategy guides, TV shows, books, print ads, and of course Nintendo Power. With Sega, though, I didn’t have much to go on. All I knew is that they did what Nintendidn’t. If Nintendo was the cool camp counselor who got down on one knee to talk on my level, Sega was the mysterious suited man who bought me candy, smiled, and walked away without saying anything. Sure, they seemed to have my best interests in mind, but why? They always had ads, but they focused only on the games, with only the briefest of connections to the brand (“SEGA!”). They had an official magazine, but it was apparently more elusive than Bigfoot’s ghost; I’ve still never seen a single copy of it. Sega’s mysterious slogans (like “Welcome to the Next Level”), forbidding parental advisory ratings, and attractive, modern fonts (no, I’m not being sarcastic, dickmouth) didn’t attract me the same way Nintendo’s more personal ads did; they mystified me, made me feel curious and slightly afraid. To pull a feeling like that out of me while simultaneously telling me how fun playing as a super fast blue hedgehog with ‘tude was is pretty impressive even now. The only other company that has been able to do that since was Sony (with its URNOTE ads), and they ended up forgetting about that mysterious and forbidding attitude with the PS2, and then taking it waaaaaay too far with the PS3 (Seriously, look at those ads. It’s like they completely forgot what they were even supposed to be advertising and just decided to try to scare children shitless so they’d never buy their products. Fortunately no one else bought them either, so hopefully they learned their lesson).
But of course, the biggest thing Sega did to ingratiate themselves to me was make excellent games. The merits of Phantasy Star, Virtua Fighter, and of course the Sonic series are well documented, but Sega had a lot of fantastic one-offs too. Spider-Man vs. the Kingpin was the first superhero game that really captured the feeling of being a superhero, and was a good game to boot. Likewise, Spider-Man, The Video Game, the arcade beat-em-up, is one of my favorites in the genre and brings back warm, fuzzy memories both of being taken to play it at the local gas station/hot dog shack (see, here in Tennessee, instead of street food vendors, we have gas station diners. They’re pretty much two sides of the same coin, except our diners have arcade games, whereas street vendors have questionable health standards) and learning more about it as I was trying emulation for the first time (specifically, learning that I couldn’t play it in MAME, because the system it ran on, the Sega Arcade 32 board, wasn’t emulated yet). Chakan, despite the bizarre poses the main character could make (you could make him look like he was directing a plane landing on a runway) and the incredible degree of difficulty (the real final boss is so hard he’s thought to be essentially impossible to beat without cheating, and Sega apparently though so too, because they never programmed the ending you’re supposed to get after beating him), was a really fun and unique platformer, and was really dark compared to other games of the time. Shinobi and its progeny are some of the best run-and-gun platforming available for any system, particularly Shadow Dancer, with its odd-yet-charming dog attack mechanic. Comix Zone is possibly the most underrated, and definitely one of the best, beat-em-ups ever. Hell, even Vectorman, which I was just bashing 2 paragraphs ago is a great game.
So I’m sorry, Sega. I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I love you, and I want you to take me to the next level every night. That’s why I got a Sega CDX. This has already become one of the most valuable things I own, and I only paid $100 for it. It routinely goes for anywhere from $350-$1200 online. But I don’t care about the value. Well, maybe I care a little. Or a lot. But regardless, I’ll never sell it. I’ve spent the last couple of nights playing Sonic CD and a shitton of Genesis games, and they still hold the same mystique they’ve always held. I love you Sega. I hope you really are developing a new console.
P.S. Sorry I didn’t get to the Dreamcast. That’s gonna require a whole article to itself. Someday. ;D
My Mario Paint Problem.
This is going to be a short article, mostly because having to fucking rewrite yesterday’s article took up so much of my time, and I really am busy with finals coming up next week.
However, it will make up for the length with complete lunacy. You see, I have a “problem” with Mario Paint. Actually, not just with Mario Paint, but with any game that allows you even the slightest degree of creativity. Whether it’s a game show that allows you type in your own answers, or a completely freeform creative application game, I go completely fucking bonkers with it. I’m talking really crazy. Like, this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S crazy.
Look at this drawing I did in Mario Paint:
What is that? What is going on there? Why is Mario’s head so big? Why is there a ladder to a terrifying God? Why are that cactus and that elephant playing a prank on that Koopa Troopa? And, for that matter, why did they turn him into a tiger as a prank? That seems a bit overboard. And how did they do it? Cacti and elephi can’t turn things into tigers. Were they granted this ability by Mardok, Lord of Terror over there? And seriously, why is Mario’s head so big? What is he even doing there? He doesn’t belong there.
I do this every time I’m given any degree of freedom in a game; it’s always a terrifying look into my mind. And apparently I’m not the only one who does that:
That’s terrible! And yet I would probably do something worse.
Maybe that’s why we’re given godawful shit games like Dante’s Inferno instead of anything creative. Maybe the game industry is trying to save us from ourselves, before we turn each others’ skin into lampshades.
Let’s Raise Some Acts Up In This Bitch!
ACTRAISER!!
For a lot of people, that word makes absolutely no sense at all. But for some people, my generation, specifically, it’s the only word that has ever made any sense. If you are a part of my generation, you saw that word, jumped up in your chair, and screamed “FUCK YEAH!” And for those of you who don’t understand, there is a reason for that.
You see, Actraiser is one of the most unique games ever made. An early example of genre twisting, Actraiser is a combination platformer/sim game. Now, by themselves, these elements are solid, but not incredible. But that combination of the two managed to make a somewhat obscure game extremely memorable. I haven’t met a single person to whom I can mention the game to who has both played the game and cannot remember nearly every detail of the game. Hell, I even knew a guy with brain damage, and all he could remember Actraiser and the plotline of Serial Mom
One of the weirdest parts about Actraiser was that apparently the acts were being raised to God. The main character of the game was our Lord Jesus Christ. He sits in a floating palace high above the Earth, monitoring humanity’s progress and beaming down Star Trek-style to kick whatever ass needed to be kicked. These platforming sections were played as God as he used to be in the good ol’ days. I’m talking about the Old Testament God, the kind of God who comes down, flaming sword in hand, and just straight up slaughters some motherfuckers, including a minotaur, which I don’t remember God killing in the bible (maybe if he did I would read it). After killing everything in a particular area, the game suddenly switched to a sim game. In these segments, you realized how fucking stupid and whiny your people are, so you just chill in your floating palace while some little bitch-ass angel did all your work for you. Sure, you occasionally sent earthquakes and shit to solve their problems, but for the most part it’s just a tiny angel shooting bats down over Mexico while directing construction traffic.
The most annoying thing about the game was probably the fact that your people begged you to save them, asked for your help every five seconds, required you to go and slay gigantic demons, and even told you to go perform fucking errands, like bringing some bread to one of their kids, and you do every single little thing they ask. Considering you’re God, you would think you’d be calling the shots, but no, apparently you’re the god of being a chump. I bet the attractive women come to talk to you about their problems with men, tell you what a great God you are, then go and date some alpha-dog douche. I mean, fuck, she said you were good looking and really caring! You even killed like 20 flying, earthquake causing skulls for that bitch! Anyway, all of that could be ignored, every bit of it, if it wasn’t for the fact that after you fucking change the face of your creation, literally kill off entire races of creatures and slay all the evil demons, they just fucking forget about you. They don’t even thank you. All you get is a kick in the dick and a commemorative temple. And they don’t even attend services at it!
Now let me say this. I understand atheism in the real world. It makes sense. Why would you believe in something you have no proof of? But in Actraiser, it’s different. You fucking personally came down and killed things. They talked to you on a daily basis. I mean, fuck, you have a palace floating 100 feet above their cities! How are they going to explain that with science? Then the game literally tells you that your personal slaying of all the world’s evil led the people to forget about you. Doesn’t that seem backwards? Shouldn’t that make them even more sure I exist? Maybe that’s why you summon evil back in Actraiser 2.
