February 2009 Archives

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.

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1. Actually, the word “freelance” originally meant “mercenary.” ↑

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

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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. ↑

I went with an obscure choice at the A.V. Club this week, a throwback shoot-’em-up game from Japan. I’ve been playing some very hard games lately, but I don’t mind it. A lot of modern games are missing that intense challenge because they have too much time and money invested in the entire game to risk players giving up on it. Independent games are well-suited to fill that niche.

Spelunky is a game that’s different every time you play it, because the levels are semi-randomly generated on the fly. Beware, no matter how many times you die—and you will die a lot—you’ll always want to spelunk again. For more, read my review at the A.V. Club.