I wrote a review of Star Ocean: The Last Hope for Crispy Gamer, and it sucked. The game, that is. The review? Why, it was transcendent! I bitched about lazy, misogynistic game making. Bafflingly, Crispy did not post the above screenshot of a 16-year-old catgirl exposing her pubis to the sex-starved teenage gamers who adore her. Me, I’m more taken with the blond guy’s pose, on the right. Exactly what emotion is conveyed by turning your body into a giant “X”?
I also produce the “Internet’s Fastest Game Reviews” videos for Crispy Gamer. I don’t star in these, but I’m starring in a different series on the site soon, so those of you holding out for Teti beefcake will not be denied much longer (but I will not be exposing my pubis, sorry). In the meantime, enjoy these ridiculously quick nuggets of game criticism brought to you by my friend Scott Jones.
- Puzzle Farter
- Deadly Creatures
- 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
- House of the Dead
- Street Fighter IV
- Fallout 3
- Skate 2
- Killzone 2
My work at The A.V. Club continues unabated, of course. Last week, I went to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. I coordinated the coverage and put together a write-up of each day in tandem with the estimable Chris Dahlen. Check out the AVC at GDC page to read those write-ups and an interview I conducted with Crayon Physics Deluxe creator Petri Purho.
I also reviewed Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Opera Omnia, and Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. That last one apparently isn’t selling too well, which is a shame. Buy it.
Today is the 9,999th day of my life. Number 10,000 has me excited. I’m even throwing a small party, and I never do birthday parties and the like. (The only trouble is that the 10,000th day of my life falls on April 1, so I have to convince people that this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. It’s not.) According to Wikipedia, nothing interesting happened the day I was born, but on the day after, Luke and Laura got married on General Hospital. So I got here just in time.
The Civilization series of games have always thrilled me. They’re turn-based strategy games, which means that you get a turn to adjust policy and shuffle your people around on the world map, and then your rival(s) get a turn. Et cetera. The games are complex. The history of a civilization can take days of real-world time to finish. I’m always amazed when I come to the end of the game and see that all my conquest, defeat, rising, and falling took place in the course of a few hundred turns. That’s it? How is that possible that I achieved so much in so few turns?
It’s tempting to think the opposite way on this 10,000th-day thing. Ten thousand is a big number. Perhaps the natural thought is, “I should have achieved a lot more by now.” But no, I feel the same way about 10,000 days as I do about Civilization’s 500 turns. On Day 1, I was a dumb, stupid infant who soiled himself regularly. On Day 9,999, I am a smart adult who almost never does. I’ve come a long way, baby.
Around Day 1,400 or so, I used a computer for the first time. On Day 4,947, I lost in the sixth round of the National Spelling Bee after misspelling “antonomasia.” On Day 2,161, Bob Barker walked out on stage with gray hair, so I realized that heroes age. On Day 5,985, I wrote a letter to the first girl I fell in love with, begging her not to forget about me while she was on a months-long camping trip. It didn’t work.
On Day 7,868, my dad hugged me after I received an award, and he spoke of his recently dead father, and I understood why people work all their lives to make their parents proud. On Day 6,369, I saw George Carlin live and could not wipe away the tears of laughter fast enough. On Day 8,689, Jon Stewart slapped my back and said, “Nice job, Teti!” I would not have guessed that on Day 9,167, I would leave The Daily Show without knowing entirely why.
On Day 9,378, my best friend from high school wrote me a note saying, “every time I think about how we’ve grown apart it kills me,” but what really killed us was the knowledge that we could never return to Day 5,203, when we goofed off so much in Spanish class that we were sent to the dean’s office, or Day 6,166, when we went bowling. Somewhere around Day 4,100, my big brother played Super Mario Kart for the first time, beat me, and then declared he would retire undefeated. He never played me again. I learned the art of committing to a bit.
On Day 7,019, an envelope slipped out of a stack of newspapers that a New York CNN staffer named Carolyn was taking to the trash. The envelope contained my résumé. Had Carolyn held the stack of newspapers with her other hand, my next 3,000 days would have been something different.
On Day 7,268, I met a pretty girl in a Belle & Sebastian T-shirt. My first thought was, “She’s out of my league.” On Day 8,419, I asked the girl to marry me. It worked.
Day 10,000 will be a good day.
I wrote a piece for Crispy Gamer this week about glitches from video-game history that, in my opinion, actually made the games better.
I’ve watched this video of the Super Mario Bros. minus-world bug a number of times now. I find myself anthropomorphizing the game, standing in awe of it, feeling sorry for it. Look at the glitch and its aftermath from the program’s perspective. How does it continue to work after everything goes so FUBAR? I can’t help but admire the fact that it doesn’t simply give up and crash (i.e., off itself—not “Hello, world!” but “Goodbye, cruel world!”). There seems to be a stubborn, resilient intelligence at work. The game’s entire world is thrown out of whack—the rules are thrown out—but it tries to soldier on, fights to make sense of its situation.
This imagined psychodrama has two different endings. In the Japanese version, the game succeeds in working its way out of the crisis. If Mario completes the three glitched minus worlds, you are returned to the title screen and everything is mercifully returned to normal. But in the U.S. version—this is the haunting part—the minus world is an endless underwater stage that loops back on itself. Neither Mario nor the game can escape this glitch-induced purgatory.
Of course, you could say that the only thing at work here is a few shifted memory registers and some abnormal pixels; there’s no underlying meaning to any of it. Careful how far you take that line of thinking, though. You may not like where you end up.
I hate to write about the site on the site because it’s not usually a very good use of anybody’s time. But obviously, things have cooled down a touch around here lately. So here’s what’s up.
The weekend posts are no more. They were fun, but if I can’t do them every week, they don’t make much sense to me. Lately, I have not been able to do them every week.
As for the rest of the site, a funny thing has happened over the past year. People have been asking me to write for them, sometimes for the TV, sometimes for the web, and they’ve been offering to pay me in exchange for my trouble. I’d done this before, in the form of a 9-to-5 job, but never like this. They call me a “freelancer.” I prefer to think of myself as a writing mercenary1, as mercenaries are more badass and wear cooler clothes. (Don’t believe me? Watch any movie ever to feature mercenaries, then come back and try to tell me they aren’t working it. Go on, I’ll wait.)
Geek Out New York is a labor of love, and it continues because the world always needs more love. At the same time, my pocket always needs more money, so the mercenary duties have to come first sometimes. I know you understand, sweet America.
As always, I recommend you subscribe to the feed. It alerts you when a new post goes up. Handy.
My recent successes are due in no small part to the support I’ve received from GONY readers; thank you. Of course, I also blame you for my recent failures, especially my rejection from So You Think You Can Dance Season 5. So it’s a mixed bag.
Mayowa of My Pleasure, Miss! sent an interesting email in reply to the MacUser May ’96 retrospective. I probably should have noted in the original piece, as Mayowa reminded me, that you can use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to resurrect many of the dead links. That includes treasures like Mark Kantrowitz’s Travel Periodicals, which turns out to be just as boring as you expected.
Another nice tidbit in Mayowa’s email was a link to this 1996 MSN “Welcome to the Internet” tutorial. My favorite part is the third page, “The Big Picture: Why Should I Care?” Yeah! Why should I care about this dumb Internet thing? Leave me alone, computer people! Family Matters is on!
But wait, says MSN, the Internet is actually a magical place. Imagine the possibilities:
Because it is very easy to publish on the web, many individuals have set up personal “home pages,” pages about themselves and their interests, pictures of themselves, and more. Some even have pointers to what they are wearing in the office that day or their pet.
Well, why didn’t you say so? Sign me up!1
-
Note: While this imagined exchange is a facetious joke, I realized, after reading it over, that it’s also a fairly accurate account of the Internet’s development over the last decade. ↑
All contents copyright © 2007-2009 John Teti.
