Press Start!: Super Mario, Fingered By God!
It’s Friday. Praise the maker! And with the advent of Friday comes another edition of Press Start! It’s your look at the five things that caught my eye in gaming this week. What a busy fucking week it’s been in gaming, between the Tokyo Game Show, the launch of Halo, and the general progression towards the busiest season in pixels and polygons. As always, the disclaimer reads as follows: I have shitty tasty, and these five things are not reflective of the best or most important happenings of the week. Hit the comments box with what tickled your pink this week. We’re a community, let’s hug.
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#1: Super Mario Turns 25, Holy Shit.
The original Super Mario Bros. turned twenty-five this week. When I turned twenty-five, two years ago, I had barely lost my virginity and I was still an undergraduate. Needless to say, Super Mario has accomplished much more during his span on Earth. Twenty-five years of whipping his slave dinosaur, jumping into pipes, tripping balls on mushrooms, and continuing to fight for a princess who seriously isn’t ever going to give up the butt.
The man is something of a hero.
It’s hard to fathom a world without our favorite mustachioed fuck. The original Super Mario Bros. is iconic beyond reason. Somehow a quarter of a century later, we’re still humming the opening notes to the first few levels, and kids who didn’t grow up blowing in cartridges and the world of two-button controllers can appreciate the only plumber that’s ever been reasonably respected. It’s a trip, man.
I’ve grown up with this son of a bitch. Some of my earliest memories are watching my cousin play through the game, in a sort of confused splendor. I didn’t know what was going on in this dungeon levels, but I knew that the fireballs and that leaping lizard were clearly up to no good. As I got older, the boy-o stuck with me, and I can tell you with an open heart that I think I broke down and wept openly at the beauty that was Super Mario 64. My balls tingled, and maybe it was because I was thirteen, but that shit changed me.
If it weren’t for Mario, his clumsy fucking brother, a legion of douchey dinosaurs with airships, and a rotten ass Peach, I may not be penning this column today. I’d probably be doing something constructive, but what the fuck can you do.
Happy birthday, you fat fuck.
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#2: Asura’s Wrath Debuts At TGS; A God Fingering Looks Hot
The Tokyo Game Show was this week, and there was a general amount of hotness that was displayed. I have stopped paying attention to Japanese developers for the most part, and perhaps this convention flung the egg right onto my face. My bad! I grew up with Capcom, and Konami, and Squaresoft owning my soul. But over the years, I’ve drifted more towards Western developers, gradually coming to suck on the teat of studios such as BioWare and Bethesda with an outrageous passion. And a little bit of teeth.
This week at the TGS, Capcom dropped the trailer for Asura’s Wrath. It’s something of a spectacle, that reduced me to a slobbering mess. The most reductive means of describing it would be to call it the “Japanese equivalent of God of War” – and while that may be accurate to a degree, the amount of absurdity lost in that description is not acceptable. In the trailer, a dude is impaled with roughly ninety-three thousand spears, which you rip out via quick-time commands, and when that doesn’t stop him, his nemesis summons something. The god damn finger of a God, which rockets down through orbit towards him.
It’s the sort of insane concept that, frankly, really isn’t done much in the Western development world. (I’m sure you all have a dozen examples proven me wrong, sry.) My friend watched the trailer and told me it was “too anime”, and I already feel bad for the young child who finds his body behind the dumpster. I have a bit of a temper.
This shit has me percolating.
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#3: 72% of Parents Support Violent Game Restrictions, Refuse To Parent
Perhaps as old as Super Mario is the debate over violent video games. So it seems fitting that in the same week that Mr. Mario turns twenty-five, yet another survey comes out regarding the dastardly concept of video game violence. According to this poll by Common Sense Media, 72% of adults support restrictions that would prevent kids from buying violent video games.
Another poll, taken by myself, and administered by myself, found that I generally believe that 95% of us human beings (including me) probably should not smash sperm into egg and replicate. God forbid, if, after we make that most grand of mistakes, we should actually have to parent the hellspawn we ripped out of canal. That would be like, crazy, you know?
Now listen, I know there’s something to be said for preventing Little Todd the Pukestain from buying a video game that features ass-fucking and machine gun fire. I just think that an at-counter restriction should probably be the last line of defense. Maybe parents should a) prevent their kid from buying the game themselves and b) have the capacity to explain to them the different between a virtual and real world. Though, given the progress of society, and our continued integration with augmented-reality, this may require a Ph.D in cultural theory by the time Lil Caffeine Powered is wrought unto this world.
Just sayin’.
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#4: How Do You Cure Lovesick Girls? Shoot Them In The Tits
This week, Japanese developer Inti Creates answered for all of us the pressing question: how do you cure lovestruck teenage girls? You blast them in the ass. And in the tits. And crotch. With a phermone shot. Such is the premise of the shooter Gal Gun. Apparently the player wields a pheromone gun, and the only way to save this innocent chicks is to unsuspectingly molest them with it.
Good lord. Watching the video is something of a revelatory moment for me. Where I realize that perhaps I’m not as emotionally warped as I could be.
Apparently “curing lovestruck girls” is really coded word for “allowing horny men to molest the groins of underage women”, which sort of freaks me out. In the video, this Do-Gooder, who is doing the curing, somehow finds himself staring up from the floor directly into the crotch of a girl. Or blasting her chest as she recoils with this gun. When you really get down to it, the premise of this game sounds more like “You’re a rapist with a dart gun”, but there could be something I’m missing.
Judge for yourself.
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#5: Halo: Reach Rakes In $200 On Launch Day
There were a lot of Cheetos-covered dicksores lined up on Monday night for the midnight release of Halo: Reach. I should know, I was one of them. Like, a real lot of them. To the tune of $200 million dollars worth of us dildos. Microsoft was all over this number like a sumbitch, understandably jerking off all over itself with glee at the massive amount of dollar bills they were pulling in. They went so far as to call it the biggest launch opening for any game or movie. Ever. Pretty fucking insane, no?
Now, you can get into the nuts and bolts aspect of it, debating the cost of a movie ticket versus video game, and debate what’s more impressive, total gross or units/tickets moved. Then there’s domestic gross versus world wide. And then things get really complicated and I begin zoning out. It’s interesting, but that’s not what I’m going to do with you. I’m just going to say “Good god damn!, that’s a lot of people shooting machine guns!”
What I’m really interested to see is how Call of Duty: Black Ops does on its opening day. Consider that Black Ops is multiplatform, while Halo is stapled firmly to Xbox’s balls. If Reach could pull in $200 million on one platform, is Black Ops to going rape world since its across the 360 and PS3? Good lord.
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There you go. My list’o’shit. What’d you guys dig this week?