In Which Wario's Woods And Wouldn'ts

Puzzle games, in general, do not feel the need to justify their story - they expect players to not pay any attention to it anyway, since this genre's forte is the mechanics. An RPG can get away with a glitched battle system and tacked-on minigames if it distracts from them with a shiny epic story, and an action-adventure can gloss over ridiculous camera movement with a beautiful scenery and catchy soundtrack... but no one ever plays a puzzle game for the background and presentation. Still, the levels of ridiculousness have to max out somewhere, but Wario's Woods, the famously difficult NES/SNES critter-bombing trip, takes it too far.

Wario and his horde of mind-boggingly un-Mario-like minions are overrunning the Mushroom Kingdom! Chaos reigns, havoc is wreaked, and one unexpected character rises to defeat them all... Toad. Not a hero, but an incredible simulation! This brave mushroom warrior (read: cowardly kidnappee) is assisted by his long-time friends Wanda the fairy of Mario & Wario fame, and Birdo. Wanda seems to be characterized only by two things: she loves helping people defeat Wario, and she can make stuff appear out of thin air. It was blocks in her first game, now she drops bombs. You'd expect Toad to use her powers and bomb the chips out of the fat troublemaker and his cohorts, but no. Absolutely harmless little fuzzy creatures have to be killed in a cruel color-match game to progress, instead. But wait, there's more idiocy!

Birdo's role is to somehow keep Wario from entering the field's control booth and replacing Wanda with... a Pidgit. Some random Pidgit who doesn't even have a carpet. Said Pidgit drops new fuzzy creatures instead, lengthening the time you'll spend in the level - while Wario shakes the arena and makes the ceiling drop down a bit. After a while of the titular wood owner's shenanigans, Birdo returns and the cycle recommences. Only when the last creature is blown up with same-coloured bombs does the round end... and a new one begins immediately afterward. The minions are fought differently in the two versions of this game: the SNES one has them competing with you in killing innocents, and the (strangely later released) NES one wises up a bit and makes Toad actually fight them with the bombs. However, this is not the point. The point is "WHY?!"

Why Toad? If Wario actually posed any danger to the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario and Luigi would confront him at once. They'd even confront him if he stole their newspaper! There's no reason given for them not being present. In fact, no known Mario characters beside the five main ones are there at all; the fuzzy things are completely arbitrary, while the evil monsters range from anime mermaids to hillbilly pumpkinheads to knights and trolls, i.e. stuff that has no business in a Mario game. But, inversely, if Mario and Luigi have actually been taken out by Wario's henchmen, how could a squishy mushroom possibly stand a chance against them?

Another interesting question. Why is Birdo on Toad's side while the Pidgit is on Wario's? There have been Pidgits in Mario & Wario, too, as the easiest enemies, so Wanda possibly has a vendetta against those birds. Didn't Birdo try to kill Toad and vice versa in SMB2?! "He might have thrown my eggs back at me, but if he's against Wario, then I'm his best friend!" Of course, Subcon might all have been a dream, but nontheless, this all seems extremely peculiar. And Wario actually becomes bigger throughout the game in the NES version. Creepy.

While other Mario stories with only a limited number of characters feel natural (SMB, SMW, SM64, SMS, SMG all had about 4-5 characters actually important to the plot), and even the side games make more or less a sort of sense if you squint and tilt your head sideways, Wario's Woods is downright surreal. An unlikely protagonist, a mini-boss from the game he first was playable in, and a Wario-hating fairy on one team, Wario and a minor enemy from the same game as the mini-boss on the other. The game feels like an elaborate prank, but it's not clear whom the joke is on. Most likely the player. Meanwhile, in an alternate dimension...
Yep. Definitely the player.

~Waluigious: The Subspace Emissary is a piece of cake to understand compared to this.

In Which Hypothetical Apocalypse Someday

Now, there's lot of talks about bad economy and Nintendo losing "gamer cred" recently by making their games too innovative for the fat basement fulltime-campaigning "hardcore" crowd. "Nintendo no longer fun", bitter critics hiss. "Wiimote shake a grave mistake, casual game incredibly lame", Dr. Seuss wannabes proclaim. Some doomsday prophets even blabber about Nintendo having to roll up and exit stage right since they can't keep up with the modern technology of the next generation.

Of course, that's all not true. We know that Nintendo is a software and hardware giant with a budget of billions of whatever currency you want, and it'll take more than some tiny global economic slump or insignificant 50% decrease of customers to inflict any damage to their HP. Remember, we're talking about a company that rose from a family-run playing card store to a brand recognized by everyone who hasn't been living under a rock on one of Saturn's moons for the last 25 years. They have won lawsuits against Universal Studios when they were just beginning to expand, and they survived the GameCube era!

Leaving behind all constraints of reality, however, if Nintendo were to be destroyed in the far future, one possibility would be losing the casual gaming market entirely to some sort of new entertainment medium. In 1972, the year Pong came out, people couldn't have imagined what kind of effect video games would have on society several decades later - they started as nothing more than just another kind of toy, something completely harmless and of no concern to adults. Who's there to say this can't happen again? Maybe a new form of fun-filled pastime is already in progress of being invented somewhere, and people will leave video games for it. Only the die-hard fans, whether the aforementioned shoot-fest aficionados or franchise nerds like the people who read Waluigious, will remain faithful to our hobby if it becomes obsolete. In such a case, Nintendo would have REALLY bad cards if it plans to continue with its current strategy - but all it would take is to revert to its old ways to gather fans again. A lot of the people who hate Nintendo now were avid fans back when the games were more difficult - "Nintendo Hard", if you will.

Mario games are kept up, and will be continued, because they have been around for long enough that even people who hardly ever played a video game in their lives recognize the character, and associate the experience with quality - after all, there aren't many people who were scared or depressed of a Mario game. The joy and fun they bring is universal... true, there are some who found them boring, even as little kids. Most of these people had serious issues and grew up to be criminals or heartless corporate henchmen. Tangents aside, no matter how casual Nintendo may get, no matter how needlessly new and abnormal the controls are, no matter how far the graphics slog behind the current industry benchmarks, we'll still get new Mario games just because he's not merely a mascot, but the main pillar that supports the company.

There's also the real-life-related scenarios likely to bring an end to Nintendo, which would be World War III, Japan-sinking earthquakes and basically any catastrophe big enough for people to think of playing video games in the face of such a disaster as nothing but blasphemy. But really, in these cases, we'd have other things to worry about, like shielding ourselves from the deadly radiation.

And finally, one thing we all - as Mario geeks - have to remember is: while the Mario universe is born within the halls of Nintendo, it lives inside the minds of the fans. Mario will die not when the last game is no longer produced, but when no one longer remembers him. I will remember. Will you?

~Waluigious: *anthem version of SMB main theme*

In Which Adage Associations

A lot of Waluigious' recent articles have been agressive or annoyed in their tone, so as a scenery change, how about some good old-fashioned Mario nerdiness without picking on second-party developers (who admittedly deserve all picking they get and then some)? And let's not even talk about third-party ones. The only good third-party game is Mario Party 3, rimshot, thank you, I'll be here all week, try the Whacka Bumps!

Adages, proverbs, sayings. All different words for "stupid stuff people repeat without thinking about it too much". Some of them have a grain of truth in it, while some just get used because they rhyme, and as a basis for witty newspaper headlines and B-movie titles. After stumbling upon a test asking to complete a bunch of them to test one's knowledge, or "street smartz", I thought: what would these look like in the Mario universe? They probably would have much less wisdom and much more references, like these:

-Never judge a book... by how far hidden in the ruins it is.
-A coin saved... is a coin lost when your wallet maxes out at 999.
-If at first you don't succeed... try savestates.
-You can't see the forest... after all, it is the Forest of Illusions.
-You can't teach an old dog... how to not run out of an autoscrolling screen and drop you into lava. "Poochy Ain't Stupid" my eye!
-You can lead a Yoshi to water... but he will still disintegrate upon contact with it.
-Absence makes... Bowser Jr. bearable.
-A rolling stone... looks like a giant black ball.
-Fools rush in... where wise men use Jugem's Cloud.
-The pen is mightier... than "Unarmed". Or... the pen is mightier than the magic castle-crushing typewriter.
-The road to the Underwhere is paved... with unfinished fan fiction.
-Better to be safe... than redoing the Pit of 100 Trials.
-Laugh, and the world laughs with you... except if you just got the Smash Ball. Then, only you laugh.
-Trapped between a rock... and a Thwomp.
-A friend in need... can stay where he is, you're in the lead! What, was that a blue sh-
-Those who live in glass houses... should not invite Clawgrip to a party.
-Don't put the cart...-ridges in wet or moldy places.
-When it rains... you must be on Luigi Circuit (GBA version).
-All work and no play...-testing results in a bad game.
-Birds of a feather... give out types of coins if they're green, red, or blue, and Shine Sprites if they're yellow.
-A journey of a thousand levels... starts by selecting number of players.
-An apple a day... will not keep Dr. Mario away, what with all those remakes on every system.
-If you can't beat them... there's still GameFAQs.

~Waluigious: Where ignorance is bliss... Song cue and good night!

Music of the Week, Vol. 11

It's time for another batch of music for another batch of days! This week, there's a single theme shared among the songs - they are all from a series of albums offered in Japan as rewards in the Club Nintendo program, called Nintendo Sound Selection. There were 3 albums released, all themed after Mario characters: Vol. 1 - Peach's Healing Music, Vol. 2 - Koopa's (Bowser's for all Wild Westerners) Loud Music, and Vol. 3 - Luigi's B-Side Music. Most of the tracks thereon are from different, quite randomly picked Nintendo games that suited the album's titular direction, but the last couple of songs on each CD are exclusive arrangements. In a surprise fit of surprising fittingness, there are exactly 5 songs in the collection that are non-trivial and Mario-related, which is exactly how much we offer in the Music of the Week section! So let's-a go!

Reminder and instructions: (skip if you already know)
In the right column, under the links, you will find a player with five songs. Choose one of them and click the Play button to listen to that week's wondrous tracks! Beneath the player is a link to the corresponding post containing the download links plus their descriptions.
Please note that the downloads of previous weeks are no longer available - so be sure to check back every week if you are interested.

Aural sensations of the week consist of:

~Rainbow Road (F-Zero X Expansion Kit)
Ah, the 64DD. A wonderful and tragically almost unavailable-outside-of-Japan thing. Exactly how tragic, you'll soon see... this little add-on allowed players to create their own tracks in the fastest racing game since sliced bread. One of the extra musical backgrounds was a remix of Mario Kart 64's Rainbow Road song which most players know by heart since there wasn't much background noise to distract from it while you drove 3 laps without anything exciting happening. Sing along: "It's called the road, the Rainbow Road, where enemies catch up in any mode! Even if youuuu play Toooaaad..."

~Po Pi Pa Pi (Mario Artist Talent Studio)
Why, why did this never get released anywhere but Japan? The three programs: Paint Studio, Talent Studio and Polygon Studio, were the natural progression of Mario Paint, and had they seen success, maybe we would have gotten Mario Game Designer on the Gamecube and Mario's Miraculous Universe of Art on the Wii. But no, we get some half-pounded Wii Ware crêpe instead. This kind of business decisions is what I despise about society. Anyway, here's a song from Talent Studio, the film-making installment. Listen and rage.

~Piranha Plant Lullaby (NSS Vol. 1 - Peach Original)
The first of the exclusive remakes - a soothing piano/strings arrangement of the Piranha Plant Lullaby, which seems to reuse and carry further the same idea from the official Super Mario 64 soundtrack, where it was just the piano. How strange that one of the quietest and most relaxing songs in the Mario series is associated with Piranha Plants, a species that is almost always portrayed as brainless, evil, or brainlessly evil.

~Fortress Boss (NSS Vol. 2 - Koopa Original)
Bowser's "Loud Music" album has all sorts of bossy, battly songs - and what's better than to end that experience with the good old Boom Boom/Koopaling fight theme, turned up to eleven? This remix would fit one of the SSB series games very well... that is, if the composers of the Smash songs actually knew where to stop and didn't cram a 152-instrument orchestra into every track just to show that they're "pros". The best songs in video game history have very few instruments - just ask the SMB main theme.

~Luigi's Mansion (NSS Vol. 3 - Luigi Original)
This is what Luigi's Mansion would sound like if it was actually scary, and if instead of Luigi humming, he sang in an opera voice while searching for his bro. The vocals are slightly off on some notes, but that only adds to the creepiness. It's funny how nothing in the actual game sounds or looks even remotely as scary as Big Boo's Haunt in SM64. There's the dead baby, but that's it. It might be dead, but it's still just a baby. That has nothing on the shock effect of that one Boo door and suspicious chest in Paper Mario... yeah, you know those.

The Picture of the Week is a panel from a Nintendo Comics System one-page short - "The Mario Bros. Guide to Grooming Your Moustache". Those heartwarmingly lame visual puns are what Mario comics are all about. Here's the entire page (click it, don't kick it):
Finally, the Video of the Week is another reason to cry out in agony at never having had a chance to play the 64DD. Mario Artist Polygon Studio is the inspiration behind the first level of Wario Ware, Inc.! It might even be the reason for the entire franchise! I wonder how many people didn't get this reference while playing it. 99.99%? 99.999%? These games were brilliantly creative, and it's an abysmal shame they didn't get the attention they deserved. The music, the graphics, the ideas... all lost to obscurity and undercover absorption by other series.

Tune in next time, same Waluigious-time, same Waluigious-channel! ...This makes no sense on every level, but hey. Sense is overrated.

~Waluigious: Sometimes the right fashion statement is right under your nose!

In Which We Join The Nintendo Fun Club

1987. A simpler time. A time where video games were friendlier, where cheats were exciting, where scores were still important, where the NES was "really rad" and the Game Boy was science fiction. That year, Nintendo brought out the first issue of the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter, which grew larger and larger over its 7 issues and finally became what is today known as Nintendo Power.

This very friendly publication had everything a gaming youth of that time could dream of: tips, tricks, hints, cheats, re- and previews, maps and Nintendo-related reports. Since Super Mario Bros. was the hot game in the two years the newsletter lasted, it was also a popular topic for all kinds of content therein. In fact, the very first page of the initial issue presented Super Mario Bros.:
And yes, Bowser is the deadly Koopa Turtle King. Besides very veiled hints at the existence of a "Warp Zone" in the cheats section, we're also treated to this wonderful constume at the "Super Mario-A-Thon Say No To Drugs Festival":
I sure bet that Mario scared people right out of every drug imaginable. The second issue, published a few months later, was much more direct in the cheat department and offered such techniques as glitching through walls and even getting to the Minus World. But the best thing is this Mario crossword puzzle - of course, not as demanding in its difficulty as Waluigious' in-house series since there's only one game it could ask about thus far - but still fun, even if the clues are a bit of a stretch. With the 1980's in mind, however, you can solve it without a problem:
The third issue gave the readers the possibility to send in their own SMB tips - some very strange and useless, like kicking a Koopa shell into a Podoboo for 500 points. As for the fourth edition - the first to be in full colour and have a dramatically increased number of pages - it only contributed with very bad Mario jokes the likes of "What does Mario get when he eats a Fire Flower? Heart burn. [sic]"

In the antepenultimate issue, we see not only hints at the eventual release of SMB2 and more "Cheep-Cheeps are cheap" jokes, but also these amazing dress-ups:
Wasn't it great to live back in the time you didn't have to be photo-realistic in your costume performance to get nationwide attention? That Fire Mario looks like he initially planned it to be a generic clown, but didn't have the face paint or the funny shoes and, desperate for an idea, wrote "M" on his hat. And the Nintendo salesman - priceless! He nailed the look of their corporate dress and mustache code very well.

Finally, the last newsletter, besides heralding the rise of the new Nintendo Power and its own end, gave the subscribers another, far better, fan-made SMB crossword puzzle:
Now that one truly meets the spirit of Mario geekiness, with questions about the actual game and not just some awkwardly-phrased plots to justify "re" as an answer. Just like the Super Mario World cartoon, the Nintendo Fun Club ended on a high note - and its successor is still with us to this day. Makes one wish all tales of the video game biznus had a happy ending like this.

~Waluigious: Ha, two more crosswords! Soon, there'll be an entire book!

In Which Let's Get Over With Trite "Mysteries"

Waluigious, as you know, is a Mario philosophy blog. It says so right there in the header image, on the about page, and even in a meta content tag that adds a description to a bookmark created of the site. As such, we look into unanswered, unasked and unlikely-to-ever-be-cleared-up questions and try coming up with vague traces of hints of clues that could possibly indicate something mildly relevant. The emphasis lies on "unasked", though. Not stuff that's been beaten to death everywhere by every tangentially Mario-related source ever. But for the sake of completeness, let's once again dive into the all-too-familiar pit of "secrets", "dilemmas" and "problems" that could last be properly identified as such about 10 years ago.

-What is Birdo's gender?
Every time that springs up somewhere, a Mario fan must do everything in his might to withstand the urge to retch. Yes, yes, we DO know about the Super Mario Bros. 2's manual calling her male. Counterpoint: how credible is SMB2, or should I say, Doki Doki Panic USA Extra Hack Edition? The enemies formerly known as Clawglip and Hoopstar would sure tell you lots of things about Ostro's gender. Another one that's often cited is the Super Smash Bros. Brawl trophy using the word "indeterminate". This comes from a series that's about as canon as Hotel Mario and has claimed that coins can't be confirmed as the official currency of the Mushroom Kingdom. How suspiciously strange that the people who use that argument forget that SSBM referred to Birdo as female... anyway, once you see over that boiling sea of hypocrisy, the truth shines clear: BIRDO IS A SHE. Even in Japan (at least on the surface, since those guys really like crossdessing jokes).

-Which Donkey Kong is which?
DK games don't fall squarely under this blog's competence range, but here's what someone who knows a fair bit about Mario thinks of this issue: it doesn't matter, it's a freaking monkey. OK, that was harsh and untrue. Of course that's important, but it's also much too confusing for everyone to ever agree on one thing. The original 1981 Donkey Kong has to be Cranky now, since Cranky always makes references to those times - the biggest one being the title screen of Donkey Kong Country - and the current one is either the grown-up DK Jr. or DK Jr.'s son. My choo-choo train of thought says it's DK Junior, since a) simians age quickly and the time span between Super Mario Kart to Mario Kart 64 might have been just enough for him to grow out of the "Jr." name (just like Tiny Kong grew up suddenly between two games), and b) Cranky Kong calling him "grandson" was just sign of forgetfulness that comes with old age. How could three generations fit into one plumber's middle-aged period, anyway? Mario didn't show any signs of aging since his Jumpman times yet, and assuming that brat DK Jr. could have had a fully-grown son in that time is plain unrealistic. The final verdict: Occam's Razor says "don't make up more generations than needed".

-Who is the Koopalings' mother?
As if that mattered now that the Koopalings are video game history not unlike the times where the industry wasn't sequel-driven and split into warring "hardcore" and "casual" fractions. Bitterness aside, Bowser's taking that secret to his fiery grave. Maybe it actually was Peach, maybe there was no mother and Kamek created them, maybe she just demanded her name to be withheld from publicity and sealed it with a contract. Now that the children got replaced with Bowser Jr. and those Mario Party self-replicating Mini-Bowsers, it's all a mishmashy hodgepodge anyway. Bowser's never been that good a father and doesn't look like he's capable of a relationship with anyone, so here's my simple solution: they are all adopted for nefarious purposes. Alternately, they're the product of asexual reproduction.

-What's the relationship between Peach and Daisy?
There is none. It's hard to believe, but they just look that similar because all human females tend to look like this in Mario games. Just take the throwaway sports series people - look at their faces! Just like little unimportant Daisy clones! Ella, Azalea, Sherry... give them slightly richer clothing and you have more princesses to assign to more plumbers! And Rosalina - now that's proof that every human-looking woman with a crown will look like some other princess' twin sister. In fact, the more important question here is: where are their parents and why are they still princesses and not queens if they have none? Maybe because they're just politically powerless figureheads anyway and no one cares as long as they look pretty. The truth is sometimes very sad... but they get lots of cakes, gardens and dresses! Yay!

-What is the Mario/Wario Bros.' true backstory?
This question has no answer! In fact, the entire series hinges on it never getting an answer. Just like philosophy would collapse if someone found out the meaning of life or physics would collapse if someone invented magic, the Mario series would jump several sharks at once if we finally found out just where Mario and Luigi got those accents and evil doppelgängers from. There's Brooklyn, and Yoshi's Island, and the ridiculously hard-to-justify Yoshi's Island DS, and Pauline, and the edutainment games, and the ongoing merging of canon, fanon, Ganon and Anon in all types of Mario media. While it may make less sense than the Zelda timeline theories, both draw their energy from their inherent mystery - a mystery that would ruin everything if it was ever solved. Let's concentrate on smaller stuff first before even thinking about the big picture - and there are new questions in every object, every character, every string in the fabric of Mario's world.

~Waluigious: Good, now to more burning matters. Shroobs: animals or plants?

In Which I Boil With Topsy-Turvy Rage

Yoshi's Universal Gravitation? More like Universal Abomination!
This looks like fun, doesn't it? Good old-fashioned Yoshi-style platforming, freshened up by a tilt sensor known from hits such as Wario Ware: Twisted!, all in wonderful stationery graphics, right?
I must admit, Artoon, the current Yoshi game developers, sure did a great job in making this game look OK in screenshots, to lure in unknowing victims and naive daydreamers like me who believe the Yoshi series did not fall down a bottomless pit right after Yoshi's Story. For the years I didn't have that game, I assumed it to be slightly better than Yoshi's Island DS in quality - the controls seem innovative, the backgrounds adequate, even the music I was quick to add to my collection isn't half bad. Where I have been mercilessly lied to by all official sources, however, is the gameplay, the core of everything that has the guts to call itself a video game. Many gritty developers on "hardcore" "adult" consoles like the SlayStation and the HaxBox have long forgotten what gameplay means, replacing it with explosions, achievements and a brown palette, but Nintendo ought to know better than let Artoon handle such a franchise.

Briefly, the gameplay can be described as "neverending tutorial". You wait for the actual game to begin... and when you see the credits you finally understand that there will be none. Every level is made up of a number of tiny rooms - in most cases 4 to 6 - and the player is given a mission. "Collect X coins", "eat X apples", "defeat X enemies", "make it to the finish in X seconds", "don't defeat more than 3 enemies", "make it through an autoscrolling level", or any combination thereof. Combined with the fact that once you go to the next room, there's no turning back, and that in more than half of the rooms movement is quite strictly limited to one direction - and you have a game with no freedom and tons of responsibilities.

Let me reiterate: there is NO FREEDOM in this game. You are expected to take a certain route and do things a certain way, that is, tilt your GBA and press buttons at certain times, to get the best result (gold medal) for the level. Taking shortcuts is not only discouraged, it's punished. If Super Mario Bros., the most popular Mario game, was like this, then you would have to kill all Goombas in a level and collect all coins (while you STILL cannot go left, making all mistakes unrectifiable) to make the flagpole appear. And if it was like this, nobody would play it! Yoshi Topsy-Turvy is like that minigame that most RPGs have that is awfully annoying but which you have to beat to proceed, only it's the entire game. As with Yoshi's Island DS, the programmers just have misconceptions about what fun is. As everyone can attest, being able to do something is fun. Artoon people think having to do something is fun. You see the little complication here.

Speaking of abilities outside the player's tilting of the screen, Yoshi has almost none: walking (one speed only!), jumping, flutter-jumping (which is extremely useless and awkward as the height gain is tiny at best), and sticking out his nerfed-length tongue. That's it. Egg shooting, ground pound, sniffing? Bah humbug! Multiple Yoshi colours? Bah double humbug! Any sorts of cute idling animation, at least? I can has humbug? Granted, there are three transformations: a Yoshi balloon that glides directly downwards and is controlled by tilting, a Yoshi boat that sails to the right and is controlled by tilting, and a Yoshi ball that bounces around unpredictably and is "controlled" by tilting. Mucho variety, there. In fact, it seems like the designers just had the motion sensor in mind and literally built the game, or at least this... software... around it.

The visuals deteriorate the further you progress: while they may seem nice at the beginning, almost everything you see in the second half of the game is a recolor. Sprites have very few animation frames, and look stilted... unlike the Shy Guys, who don't have any stilts in this game at all. It's surprising how little different enemies they managed to get in... and don't get me started on the main characters. OK, I got myself started, it's too late now.

So there is that book spirit Hongo who is what tabletop enthusiasts would call "Lawful Neutral" - while trying to lock away a rampaging Bowser in a pop-up book, he accidentally gets Yoshi's Island in as well, and doesn't want to release either. So the other spirits of the book send Yoshi on ungrounded-in-logic missions to get to the last page of the book and defeat Bowser so that the island can be released... presumably, with the defeated Bowser on it... who, of course, just takes a month to recover and attack in the next game. Never has a plot been so doomed to be pointless. The spirits are all horrible clichés, have personalities so obnoxious that you want to punch them in their pre-rendered faces, and have no reason to exist. "I'm the spirit who loves money more than anything! Sparkle, sparkle! You need four or more Happiness Medals to get past me!" Why, the Teletubbies were deeper than that heap!

In the end, after 50 levels of waiting for the game to begin, you fight Bowser. Lean him on his side to make his flames go over you, and make little parachute bombs descend on him. Six hits and a few strong tilts later you are faced with the end. At least the final scrapbook pictures are nice, even though none of the stuff depicted there actually happens in the game:
See those eggs in the last panel? Those are "Egglings". Creatures from Eggland. Really. Shaped like eggs. And Bowser turned them into apples. I repeat: Bowser turned eggs into apples. Must all be part of his master plan:
1. Kidnap Peach
2. Attack Mushroom Kingdom
3. Turn eggs into apples
4. ???
5. Welcome, new galaxy!
The Egglings are absolutely ineffectual and serve only to have something to collect. There are 100, many different types, and all have names so lame that they break laws of physics. There's one with an owl pattern called "Snoozer", and one with a bear design named "Snoozy". I wish I made that up.

All in all, Yoshi Universal Gravitation is not a game for people who like good games. We can only hope that the future will bring some positive development like the Artoon studios getting caught in a blaze of fire so that Nintendo relegates the Yoshi series to EAD again.

~Waluigious: It is a warning to fangame developers what not to do.

Music of the Week, Vol. 10

Wow, it's actually only been a week! Time sure flies like a fireball. For these songs, I did not have to get out the ripping devices, but someone out there has the annoying habit to encode things with variable bitrates, which not only looks ugly when trying to display it in real time, but also is incompatible with Waluigious' web-based player. Don't overcomplicate it, people! 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz ought to be enough for everyone.

Reminder and instructions: (skip if you already know)
In the right column, under the links, you will find a player with five songs. Choose one of them and click the Play button to listen to that week's wondrous tracks! Beneath the player is a link to the corresponding post containing the download links plus their descriptions.
Please note that the downloads of previous weeks are no longer available - so be sure to check back every week if you are interested.

This week's tracks are...

~Sherbet Land (Mario Hoops 3 on 3)
What can be said about a game that pits the huggadorable Mario cast against the whiny emo Final Fantasy crew in a match of almost-basketball? Not much, except that the music is too good for the premise. Why did it get some of the most relaxing and cool songs of all Mario spin-offs when the action mainly consists of dribbling over question spaces? This game has remixes of the SMB2 ending theme AND the SMB3 Toad House theme, and at the same time features a walking cactus as a ball player! All illogic aside, the Sherbet Land performance just plain rocks, no matter how cheap those magic moves of the Square blokes are.

~Wario's Theme (Densetsu no Starfy 3)
In this article, I already reported of Wario's cameo in the definitely-not-a-starfish's game - and here is his speaking theme. Basically, it's a mix of generic seaside, the theme of all Starfy games, and Out Of The Woods, the theme of Wario Land 3. I wish I knew what Wario is saying in that game - I bet it involves lots of "cold, hard cash" and "crrrrushing someone like a grape!" It's kind of strange that this game has the most dialogue for him from any official source ever (save of course the instruction manuals which he often dictates himself), yet it's just a guest appearance.

~Staff Roll (Donkey Kong '94)
You have chased the ape across 9 worlds, each full of dangers, temporary ladders and too many switches to count, and what do you get in the end? A picture of Mario, Pauline, DK and DK Jr. all peaceful while the credits play. Is that really what you died 68 times for in one of those Iceberg levels trying to figure out the right order of puzzle piece placement? I think Mario clubbing Donkey K. into submission and lighting him on fire would constitute a much more satisfying conclusion.

~Versus Plains (New Super Mario Bros.)
If there's something every lonely nerd like me despises, it's content in one of their favourite games that they never get to see because they need a second player to access it. Until human cloning is perfected, though, I am most unlikely to find somebody to play with in the hyperrural out-and-beyond-skirts I live, and so I am left to cracking my knuckles in anger while watching YouTube videos of multiplayer gameplay. This track is just too good to be excluded from the single-player experience - at least they could have done something in the vein of SMBDX's Boo Races.

~Super Mario Bros. Theme (Bitpop?, by Jonas Tunander)
The Bitpop? and its sequel, Bitpop? v2, are outstanding video game remix albums by the Swedish musician Jonas Tunander, reimagining the tunes of some NES/SNES and a few later-era classics. This one is just a sample of his style, the actual collections can be downloaded on his site. It's less pretentious than most other video game musicians, and just plays the melody without great stretches to make it sound "original" that only grate the ears.

The Picture of the Week is something very rarely seen - the Super Hard ending of Wario Land 4. The fact that Wario gets a different vehicle (a semi-truck in plain Hard mode) and two extra scenes are being shown in the background is so unknown that even spriters don't rip it because they're unaware of it. As Waluigious has always said, Wario Land 4 may just be the most neat and polished 2D game ever. Here are the last 2 of Wario's dreams, ripped from the background:
That does look suspiciously like Mona up there, and that's before she gets introduced in Wario Ware, Inc. Interesting... might she be just an evolved extra? (Also, red car. Hm.)

The Video of the Week is a scene from Mario Power Tennis where Shy Guy gets unmasked (of course, without revealing it to the audience) and Luigi gets utterly shocked by seeing his real face. I hope Nintendo will choose to continue not to reveal anything, since it is the hinge-fundament-pivotal point for a fan game I plan on making... and because no matter what it is, most people will be disappointed anyway. It's like giving Link a voice, really.

At this rate, there might be a new update each week! This sounds like something from a fairy tale, I know... but even fairy tales come true... in movies?

~Waluigious: I wish Wario kept that green hovercar for the Mario Kart games.

In Which Yet Another Mario Crossword Puzzle

What's better than just a crossword puzzle or just anagrams? A crossword puzzle with anagrams as clues, of course! In the fifth installment of the Mario Crossword series, the solutions can only be obtained by rearranging the letters of the clues - some are fairly easy game titles and place names, but there are a few not-so-obvious character monikers in there, too! As such, the difficulty of this one is rather mixed.

Here it is - click to enlarge and view:

The answers are here, thumbnail minimized to avoid spoilers:
You can see the previous puzzles here, and download the compilation PDF at Fileuigious. Have fun juggling letters around!

~I So Luau Wig: A broom surprise? Whose spur?

In Which Densetsu No Wario

Observant Super Smash Bros. Brawl players already know that Starfy, the starfish-like non-starfish star of the Legendary Starfy (Densetsu no Starfy) series has met Wario in one of his games, but since the GBA title in question never appeared outside of Japan, this major cameo of our favourite garlic-powered glutton is not very well-documented in languages that utilize the Latin alphabet. I have gotten my pale nerdy hands on Densetsu no Starfy 3 to witness Wario's water voyage in person, however, and survived the onslaught of Japanese text to tell about it.

First, a very brief introduction to the Starfy series. There's the yellow hero-tagonist whose name I won't repeat now - he is the prince of a cloud kingdom thats most remarkable feature is floating blobs of water. In a most original, not-stolen-from-Mallow twist, he falls from the sky and has to get back home. His best friend is the very easily angered yellow clam Kyorosuke, who spends his time hiding in the ground giving advice and screaming at random people. Together, they fight crime. No, literally, they go around helping everyone they meet for no obvious reason, even if it would be 100 times faster to just go and defeat the main villain, an exceptionally ugly... mutant fish or something, it could be a seahorse/Mudkip hybrid for all I know. Oh, and also, in the third game, Starfy gets a token sister named Starpy out of nowhere who is only there for the sake of faux variety and stupid puzzles.

The games can best be described as a mix between Kirby and Super Princess Peach - the design is very Kirby-inspired, but some level features like isolated rooms where the control scheme is altered due to some gameplay mechanic or the semilinear levels remind a lot of SPP - which is probably why it had a cameo of Starfy as an unnamed enemy. Starfy (why not Scarfy? A game where you turn into a cyclops and explode, now that's family fun!) and his tag-along fun-strangling sister learn a few moves along the 10-world quest, but it's really regular, classic, half-underwater platforming action.

In World 8, the 2-stars-1-clam party comes across underwater ruins filled with treasure, and who's the first person to snatch any riches from any Nintendo game even if he has to break dimensions to do it? Correct, it's evil yellow Mario! Right in the first room, he appears out of a Wario Land 4-styled warp portal and announces his plans to plunder the place. Since the heroes have to progress through the ruins, too, they end up helping him gather the four diamonds to open the boss door in the golden chamber (yes, it's just one big Wario Land 4 reference - except for his theme music, which is inexplicably remixed from Wario Land 3.)

Wario uses different powers in each of the 4 levels of the world - in the first one, he needs to be set afire by Starfy and then runs back and forth, controllable by the bouncy platforms he passes. The player has to hit the logs with the right timing so that Wario jumps into the direction of the Fire Block that's barricading the area exit - mistakes result in him jumping a step back. It's not difficult at all (as is the entire game, actually), but it's fun watching him just run around aimlessly, somehow never burning out completely like he does in his own games. After finding the first gem, Starpy and Kyorosuke annoy him for some reason and he shoulder-charges them away for a part of the story. That's Wario at his best!

The second level sees Wario in sub-surface action, trying to get to the bottom of a well and out another well a few times. Yet his allergy to bubbles proves to be a little problem - he can't swim down without getting helplessly caught in one of them. How lucky that Starfy is there to pop all bubbles about to "endanger" the treasure hunter. Wario's AI isn't the best, either - he seems to instinctively swim towards places bubbles come out, like he's being paid by the developers to prolong the playing experience. A twist on the concept makes up for all of that, though: when re-surfacing, Wario HAS to be in bubble form to get through otherwise impassable currents, and Starfy is supposed to PREVENT it from popping by gently pushing it away from spikes. I realize both uses of the bubble transformation come from Wario games, but putting it from another perspective worked very well here.

In the third level, the otherwise unfriendly anti-hero is being nice for a change and teaches Starfy how to do the height-boosted ground pound, after demonstrating it himself. Of course, that's not all - later in the stage, Wario finds the last jewel and Starpy, who by this time catches up with the group, activates a Frog Switch. Yes, the effects-comparable-to-Majora's Mask type. (The name "Starpy", on the other hand, reminds me of "Scrappy". You know, Scrappy-Doo? The one everyone hated?) Cue rumble and rubble, and an autoscrolling part, after which it all comes down to...

...the golden chamber, where for some reason, one of Kyorosuke's older relatives just randomly assaults Wario and takes away the gems just when he was about to open the boss door. How original, how point-having. (On the plus side, that old clam dies in the last part of the story.) You have to do four more few-area parts to get them back again - and here, the celebrity guest's last power is introduced - Puffy Wario! An enemy stings him and he is used as a lift by Starfy - see it here:
And all this ends highly anticlimactically when Wario, after obtaining the keys for the second time, just gets kicked out by the boss enemy, who is an absolutely disappointingly non-Wario-related armored octopus. Boo. And he doesn't reappear until the end, where he just provides the help in places you cannot reach by yourself on your post-completion run. Well, it was fun while it lasted... oh yes, and the costumes he leaves you.
...Yes. In conclusion: don't play this game just because of Wario.

~Waluigious: How about a Waluigi cameo in a, say, Elite Beat Agents game? Why not THAT?

In Which Petey Piranha Loser, Confirms Waluigi

As much as I detest having to post something the whole Internet is abuzz about and generate dup-, trip- or higher-licate content, given the content of this video, I simply must make a mention of it. I'll let sounds speak for themselves:

One of the recently-sadly-too-rare times where Nintendo is surprising me in a positive way. While something like a Super Mario Galaxy sequel announcement would have been a tad more epic, this is one of those little things that proves why the company is the best in the video game biznus.

Now to the article's main point, however - which is, purely coincidentally, another video. Remember the times where Nintendo made those great microsites for games with awesome content, scavenger hunts for buddy icon downloads and custom flash design? What do you mean, there are still some of these around? You might be right, but no one can deny that these sites don't stay up for too long, or even long enough. One-two years after the game in question comes out, the pages are mercilessly deleted, and with them, the work put into them is lost forever.

The site for Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, which I personally only got around to visit when it became a dead link in cold cybernetic space, featured five videos describing the characters. Nothing special as such: almost any title with a big enough player roster is bound to have a couple of those - but only very few videos have witty character commentary voiced by Charles Martinet himself! Take a look:

I see our blog's patron fully supports Waluigious' opinion of Petey Piranha as someone who does not deserve to be there along with the REAL characters. Didn't Mario kill that monster and mop its goopy remains away several times? Apparently, the toothy flower has contractual immortality, or is blackmailing the developers. Now this, unlike Yoshi, is someone who cheats!

The video series shows a surprising amount of dedication: great puns in the narrative, very fitting and humor-adding pictures like Wario's face pixelated so as to protect his identity while Wario is being his usual non-subtle self. Donkey Kong's "to whom it may concern: ROAR" is pretty clever, too - as is the very serious voice delivering lines like "...the Silent Assassin, the Cold-Blooded Clubber, and most of the time... Yoshi". The highlight, however, are Wario and Waluigi's lines. Expert nerds and interview-watchers know this mischievous pair belong to his favourite group of characters, and it's visible how much fun he had here.

Wario calls DK a big "oogly" ape, claims Yoshi is so old school he's jurassic, and threatens to crush people like grapes (crrrush, crrrush, crrrush!). His partner in crime is no better, expanding on his motto "everyone cheating but me!" to include even people he doesn't know. It's interesting to note how he seems to be familiar with Petey, but not with Yoshi. Is this a jab at his latecomer-to-the-lineup status, being so new that he doesn't even recognize SNES-era characters? Or can this little nugget possibly be another jigsaw piece in the transdimensional puzzle that is the Mario timeline? The narrative does explicitly state this golf tournament takes place AFTER Mario Tennis 64, Waluigi's first game - and he did meet Yoshi there - so maybe our favourite purple beanstalk just has bad memory or a weird way to express that he finds people to be unimportant? Or is it just something Martinet came up with on the spot?

The only thing that could have made this more perfect, though, would have been someone making fun of that insufferable brat and 7-siblings-off-killing replacement actor, Bowser Jr. Thanks to him dominating the main Mario action-adventure series, the Koopalings' chances to return are negative zero now. Now we have Fawful as a recurring villain instead. Would someone please fix the sorry state of the evil-guy department?

~Waluigious: Shadow Mario and Bowser Jr. in one game? What?

In Which The Overthere Isn't Worth It

Super Paper Mario is a game that broke with as many Mario conventions as it playfully referenced - the themes were darker than ever before, the parts where there is deliberately no fun intended for the player give it a post-modernist touch, and it shows us where people go after their death game-over. At least the people in Flipside's dimensions, because I truly hope not everyone in the gigantic world around the Mushroom Kingdom is looking toward such a half-hearted aftergame.

This is the Overthere. Where the good people go. And you have to be mighty good to get there, we're talking Mother Teresa/Gandhi-hybrid good - since not even Mario and Luigi make it there after their (not really real) death, and those guys protect the weak as a hobby and save worlds as a profession. The only one of the party to be assigned there is Peach - a person so absurdly pure of heart that she invites her long-time kidnapper to parties regularly. Even she runs into trouble when she eats a random apple and promptly falls asleep since there are no warning signs around. One would expect a place so coveted to take better care of its inhabitants.

Here's a run-down of the Overthere's attractions (come visit us!):
-Everything's made either from clouds or boring beige Ancient Greek-based architecture. There's also a giant pixelated rainbow that requires several people to activate; presumably used on holidays. Now that's something to look forward to!
-The sky is always either pure blue or a weird yellow-blue gradient, with white rings of different sizes in the air to simulate lens flare. It works as well as it sounds. And the music! A 1-minute loop of the finest synth waltz that side of the kicked bucket! You'll listen to it a lot since there's not much to do besides sitting - or standing, since there are no chairs - around. For an eternity.
-Lots of wacky apples to turn you tiny, giant, or cause any other humorous effects (which all last only for a few seconds and do not work on most people). The EXCITEMENT! Plus, you could get the one that makes you sleep forever and not get woken up unless you have heroic friends to come to your rescue.
-The natives talk in faux-Elizabethan English! Oh, the laughs you'll have from hearing "-eth" added to random words. And look how their heads move when they talk - funniest thing ever since Canadians in South Park.
-You can buy hot dogs! MAN, now THIS is what you never sinned in your life for!

With such an array of possibilities to spend the time until the end of the universe, a lot of people would prefer it to come very soon. Of course, the Overthere shown in the game might not be the full version - there should be a lot more room if the administration has any sort of conscience. Also, the game never explicitly states whether the Nimbis are the ascended dead, or the maintenance crew/staff/native people - contrary to the Shaydes of the Underwhere, who certainly are the souls of the dead. If the flying angel thingies are analogous to them, then any being who ran out of lives and went upwards will eventually turn into a rubbish-talking bobblehead. Now tell me, would you join a religion that promises you THAT as a reward for a life according to all rules (i.e. without any fun)? The place isn't even safe from zombie uprisings and unnecessary soap-opera-like "I'm-adopted" drama! Five words: they have a freaking army.

Turning our gaze downwards, though, we see a place a bit more fun reserved for the less-nice. The Underwhere may have disturbing hands coming out of the walls and a purple river with backwards voices coming out of it, but they at least have a TV! The people are more interesting, too: you can chat with the D-Men, play games with the Dorguys, and there are many newcomers joining every day. Lounge by the orange fountain of HP refill, reminisce how you got a game-over, and look at the pretty rectangles raining from the ceiling. And there's a chance that the local skeleton forces will take over the Overthere someday and YOU get to eat those hot dogs for once!

For me, the choice here seems clear... simply don't live in any Flipside-related world and hope you go to a DECENT place like Coin Heaven or Star Road instead.

~Waluigious: Or just never stop eating 1-Up Shrooms.

Music of the Week, Vol. 9

And the Audiovisual Trifecta of the Week returns! The last week only lasted 202 days... let's hope this one will be a little shorter! Also, this time I had to rip 3 of the 5 songs myself - Anon doesn't deliver soundtracks, obviously. Luckily, my trusty Windows Sound Recorder didn't fail me, so here we go!

Reminder and instructions: (skip if you already know)
In the right column, under the links, you will find a player with five songs. Choose one of them and click the Play button to listen to that week's wondrous tracks! Beneath the player is a link to the corresponding post containing the download links plus their descriptions.
Please note that the downloads of previous weeks are no longer available - so be sure to check back every week if you are interested.

The Music of the "Week" is...

~Main Theme (Undake30 Same Game)
From all public-domain, mainstream puzzle games, the developers at the hit-and-miss Hudson laboratories carefully picked the most tedious and boring to Mariofy. It's the Same Game, so lame, what a shame, its only claim to fame is that it's remarkably tame (that is, it has no time limit). Just click on any group of more than two identical adjacent objects (Mario heads, Yoshi eggs, Fire Flowers, Mushrooms and coins) and they disappear. Fun for the whole zombie family. This particular version only has one mode, one field, and one song. Don't sing along. It would be wrong- I'll stop now.

~NES Remix (Wario Ware: Twisted!)
9-Volt and his strangely-large-for-his-age Player 2, 18-Volt (no relation), are very big fans of all things retro. So it's no wonder that their theme song in Wario Ware: Twisted!, the motion sensor microgame agglomeration, is so 8-bit that it'll make your eardrums square just by listening to it. Does anybody know who that guy on the song's record is supposed to be and what the Japanese letters say?

~Lava Dome 1 (Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2)
The castle level tune is surely the Super Mario Bros. song to get remixed the least of all - the weird slow melody and the fingerbreaking repeating background don't make it the performers' favourite, and even professional computer-based rearrangers like the gentlemen at OCRemix have to alter it a lot to include it in their works. Thus, a straight-to-the-axe, no-bridges-attached mix like the one heard in the fifth world of Mario vs. DK 2 is always welcome. There are 3 slightly different variations in-game, but this first one is the most succinct.

~BGM 2 (Picross 2)
Picross 2, the sequel to the wildly successful (not really) Mario's Picross, was only released in Japan, just like all other good Mario games (definitely not really). This installment has a lot more content than the series' debut, but in case of Picross, more content isn't necessarily something to be excited about, especially if it's about as Mario-related as a game of Lacrosse without items. Out of the five available background songs, the second one is the least annoying - curiously, the same holds true for Mario's Picross and Mario's Super Picross, too.

Attention! Do not listen if unprepared for aural pain!
~Heinous Enormity of a Castle Song (Yoshi's Island DS)
I have raged, raved and ranted about this abomination long enough. Now is the time for those with courage, with strong stomachs, with endless determination, with will and self-confidence, with a belief in humanity that doesn't break too quickly, to listen to this song. To imagine harsh and severe passages filled with lava and unforgiving enemies, to imagine heart-rendingly fast and nerve-cuttingly dangerous trips over spikes and deadly traps, to imagine losing 100 lives in a row while BABIES ARE CRYING, THE BABIES! THE CRYING! IT WON'T STOP!
...set to this song.

The Picture of the Week is the "world map" from a very obcure Japanese game, "Yoshi no Kuruppon - Oven de Cookie", which I can only guess means "Cooking Mama with Yoshi". I am being completely serious, people, this is a cooking simulator. You get dozens of tutorials, lessons, tests and mini-games all based on baking cookies. (There's also the original Yoshi's Cookie puzzler in there, but the simulation kind of overshadows it.) One notices that baking is serious business when you have to weigh the ingredients gram-wise.

And the Video of the Week is another rare sight - a completely 3D Mario fangame! While there may be more rendered demos and SM64 hacks out there than you can shake a Control Stick at, a 100% original, three-dimensional fangame is worth 100 of the regular ones (or 1000 of those Flash ones). This should be made into a full game, or at least the source code picked up by someone willing to expand on it.

It's very possible that there will be stuff even more obscure than that next week! Very possible!

~Waluigious: THE BABIES!

In Which Etymology Questions

April 2nd of 2009. A new age. An age of people being able to use their own movements to control games, because this is something fresh and original, and was never possible in the dark ages before the launch of the Nintendo DSi *fanfare*! The new member of the DS series comes out with a new service, too - DSiWare, which brings along a brand-new microgame collection, Wario Ware: Snapped! Behold:

(There is clothing that's OVERSIZED for WARIO? Wow.)

But since Waluigious is strictly "retro" (which is Ancient Sumerian for "too poor to buy anything outside the bargain bin at the video game store"), you will not read much of the grinning girthy greed guy's latest exploits on these pages for quite some time. And just to prove how overwhelmingly retro we are, here's some thoughts about the very first Mario game to be called Super.

The original Koopa Troop, est. 1985 in SMB, is the good old merry jolly 12-enemies-and-a-Firebar gang. All members of it have since reappeared in countless sequels, spin-offs, homages, and of course heaving stockpiles of fanworks. Their names are so ingrained into the subcon(scious) of Mario fans that we don't even think about their meanings - they have just always been there, like Stonehenge or the Moai heads of Rapa Nui (which also have appeared in countless games and conspiracy theories). However, when taking a closer look at the classic foes' handles, one might just notice something curious.

Progressing in lexicographical order, Blooper is first on the list. The name comes from a common onomatopoeia for that creepy underwater bubble sound you hear when you think you're alone at the seabed, just before the quick camera pan reveals the hungry sharks already binding their napkins and comically clanking their forks and knives together behind you. Also, the Bloop is a phenomenon manifesting as a creepy sound in the Pacific, probably coming from the underwater board of Mario Party 3 which is rumored to be located around those parts.

Bullet Bill is next, with a name almost rivaling the obviousness of Blooper's. It's a bullet, and Bill is a generic name of the most generic sort, up there with Jack and Joe on the scale of overusedness. The theme of giving the weapon-based baddies similarly-patterned monikers can be seen on Bob-Omb and Torpedo Ted, among others. Maybe Bowser should invest in a Rocket Rick or Nuke Ned next. Also, with the rate the projectiles are being wasted by the blasters, the bill for the bullets is going to use up half of the Forest of Illusion just for printing it.

We continue with Buzzy Beetle. Hmm, this is the first one with slight difficulties in interpretation. Granted, it's a beetle, but what makes it so buzzy? None of the usual definitions apply - they are neither obviously lively or excited (they are fast, yet not enough to justify naming them for that trait), nor do they give people a buzz or intoxicate them, nor do they emit a buzzing sound. At least Buzzy is a real word, unlike a later offender.

Cheep-Cheep. While they were most definitely "cheep" in the way they just kept coming from the right in the water levels and moved up and down in unpredictable and always-getting-Mario-when-he-is-small ways, this is hardly the reason for the naming. A cheep is a sound emitted by birds, not by fish - which likely refers to them being able to leap out of the water and "fly" around - and probably the translators doubled it to mirror the Japanese version, "Pukupuku".

Jumping further, to (or better, on top of) Goomba. This is one that's often discussed - the comparison to goombah, a slang word for Italian-Americans, is one that always comes up. So Mario is a Goomba-stomping goombah... considering that it should mean "friend", it is particularly ironic. In Hungarian, "gomba" means "mushroom", but that is probably just a miraculous coincidence, just like Chanterelle, the Toad singer from Paper Mario, also being a sort of mushroom.
The "name" of the Hammer Bros. is extremely self-evident, since they throw hammers and almost always come in pairs - that is, until the Lost Levels, where they stop being Bros. and become the distilled reason for broken-in-rage controllers instead. With a history of killing countless lives of Mario's, it seems quite fair that they never get their own identity, having "Bro." finish all their names no matter how unique a representant of the species is.

Two iconic enemies that follow, Koopa Troopa and *ditto* Para*ditto*, have their alias directly from the name of the army/organization they belong to. Interestingly, the Koopas are Troopas even when being pacifists - the classification of Koopas must be strongly military-based. At least the names rhyme - and the translators got to reuse Bowser's original name, Kuppa, instead of the admittedly stupid "Nokonoko" which would have only been good for "Nokonoko! Who's there? Luigi. Luigi who? The story of my life..." jokes.

Lakitu, the cloud rider tossing the so-obvious-they-don't-get-their-own-paragraph spiky Spinies, is an instance of the name having no roots in anything whatsoever as far as I can determine it. The sound is pretty euphonic, however, very cloudy and airy - or maybe this is just the perception of someone who has known this word for years upon years, and has strong neural connections between it and the concept of sky-related things. Fun fact: in the German version of Super Mario 64, the evil Lakitus are called "Lakito" to distinguish them from the friendly Lakitu cameramen.

The penultimate entry is the Piranha Plant - another of the "duh" variety, stemming from the ferocious piranha fish that rip stuff apart faster than you can yell "Crocodile Dundee" - did you know that a piranha caught on a fisher's hook can possibly get devoured by other piranhas passing by before the human can pull it out? Now that is what they call pure evil! Piranha Plants are also the most likely common Mario species to want to harm you, true to their word roots - and the least likely to be able to talk or have some sort of personality. Plants don't have brains, after all... (just like mushrooms, but this seems to be lost on the writers.)

And, closing the parade is Podoboo, who is, like the Lord Privy Seal, neither a podo nor a Boo. In fact, their name makes the least sense of all. It can't possibly be derived from the plain Japanese "Bubble" (probably related to the similar Zelda enemies), and that was years before Boos even appeared. They don't come in pods, either. Very mysterious, or maybe the translators simply got tired and/or drunk by the time they got to them.

This concludes our etymological expedition into the 8-bit realms of floating blocks - for now. Many open questions remain about other NES-era names - is Cobrat a combination of Cobra and rat, or co- and brat, or maybe even cob, bra and at? The world may never know.

~Waluigious: Tryinky, Trypinky, Tryblinky, Tryclyde?

In Which Pointless Ex Machina

Ever saw something in a game that looked, sounded, and smelled like a new gameplay element, but turned out to be a one-time occurrence with ultimately no point whatsoever?
This is what experts would call a "Pointless Ex Machina" - that is, if they cared. A new feature, object, item or mechanic that serves no purpose other than appearing once and then being lost to the ages, with no explanation or justification as to why it should be there. The example above is provided by Level 2-6 of New Super Mario Bros., where the pipe leading to the stage's last area is inexplicably clogged with a Piranha Plant-wearing cork. A jump-operated pump of sorts is the key to removing it - without even being visibly connected to the pipe, it somehow builds up enough pressure in it to shoot the obstruction into the vicinity of Space Zone.

What is really odd about this, however, is that this scenario never reappears in this game. The pump, cork and pipe animations are all lost on a 3-second bit of one particular level, and finito. Sure, it could be rationalized by saying the designers just did an excellent job and did not shy away from putting a lot of work into something this fleeting... but this would mean to ignore the omnipresent re-re-reusage of most everything else in the game. Maybe it was planned to become more widely utilized, but executive meddling came in or they didn't have an idea of how to make a level based on unclogging pipes interesting? Whatever it may have been, it ended as something very conspicuously unnecessary.

A different variety of Pointless Ex Machina are things that do have a purpose on first sight, but are so badly implemented and absurd that replacing or doing away with them entirely would have contributed to a much more rounded and less one-eyebrow-rousing experience.
Introducing the Poinks/Squoinks/no official name given round floaty pig guys from Super Mario Sunshine. They appear in only a handful of places and their whole existence consists of bobbing in mid-air and getting stuck to the FLUDD's Squirt Nozzle to be filled up with water and shot away. A sad life, that. But then again, they somehow reappear from thin air after being abused.

The only occasion Mario really needs to shoot a P/Squoink is to start the second battle against Petey "Attention Hog" Piranha in Bianco Hills - the rest of the time the rubbery spheres just get in the way, and keep on getting in the way until you switch the nozzle and move to another area. Later, the King Boo fight even acknowledges that they only annoy you and includes a bunch of them as a slot machine loss event. One question remains: why not have Petey getting woken up by some other means and sparing these tortured creatures the pain of hyperhydration?

Similar cases should not be confused with teaser items like the Kuribo's Shoe or stylistic choices like Yoshi's Story's tendency to have a new underused element in almost every stage - no, a Pointless Ex Machina is exactly what it says on the tin - unexpected, useless, and singular. Do you have any examples to share?

~Waluigious: Like that 360-degree vine in Beach Bowl Galaxy.

In Which Posts Start With "In Which" Again

It's me, Artemendo, the blog owner, I'm back, no big deal, now that's out of the way.

As a total and utter hater of April Fools' Day, I decided to do an inverse prank, that is, to make it seem like I was returning to regularly post in here, and then, POW! - in a twist, actually return and regularly post in here! My writing may be a little rusty and my grasp of the language loosened like the sweaty Wii Remote grip of a VC Lost Levels player, but that will not stop me from disguising my highly biased anti-Super Mario Land opinions and "Sonic sucks" rants as rigorously researched facts and keep spamming your RSS feed readers with more Mario crosswords and neologisms.

That is, until something is wrong with the connection/Blogger/the magnetic fields of the atmosphere again and the updates fall flat not unlike Paper Mario's death animation. I'm not even trying to make exaggerated claims this time - plus, I'm fairly certain no one reads this anyway. And now, on to new discoveries! Those minor details of long forgotten games aren't going to discuss themselves!


~Waluigious: Tricky traps and crafty contraptions!