No, you aren't going crazy. Yes, that picture is accurate. That is Mario, and he is indeed fighting an MS Paint shit monster. I should add that a MIDI rendition of The Phantom Menace battle music is played throughout this scenario. I should also add that this boss fight is broken and obtuse, and so far I can't figure out how to pass it. I think this segment encapsulates the experience of Mario's Adventure for me, and is pretty fucking hilarious. Super Marco (Mario's autistic cousin) is also entertaining in the same MST3K kind of way, and is tantamount to playing a platformer made by Andy Warhol circa 1986. Today is an exploration of amateur design, a meditation on the earnest and unintended Shit Games out there.
Mario's Adventure is a parody game made by Noyb when he was twelve, and his age shows. Graphics are either ripped from Mario games or drawn in MS Paint, and the music is Super Mario 64 tunes mixed with weird MIDI compositions. Noyb does the voiceovers himself and they're hilarious, in an ear-raping absurdist sort of way. I can only reach the sixth level, but within this half dozen I've played every bad design choice conceivable. Vague objectives? Check. Unresponsive and unintuitive controls? Check. Requisite shitty underwater and forced-scroll levels? Check and check. In one level you even have to replay two boring and easy sections indefinitely (asinine dialogue and all) since you die to a poorly designed boss immediately afterward. And then you face the shit monster. It's games as seen through the lens of a pre-adolescent, an unflinching reflection of substandard gameplay cliches that 'actual' developers cling to. There's a surreal and banal story interspersed between the levels, with all of the wit of a middle-schooler who thinks South Park and fart jokes epitomize comedy. The sum of all this is the game equivalent of Manos: The Hands of Fate, and in order to enjoy the game you should approach it in this campy manner.
Virtanen Games is best known for its unorthodox, Cactus-inspired Seven Minutes. Before they created that indie gem they developed some generic platformers, of which Super Marco is one. It's less esoteric than Mario's Adventure, but just as mediocre. Like countless other homebrew games it's a pastiche of the Super Mario franchise, and is highly derivative and kind of buggy. The graphics are half quirk, half placeholder art; the music is repetitive and doesn't even loop properly, resulting in stilted transitions that make the game 'skip' like a fucked up record. The controls are floaty, but that's all right because the game is pretty easy (outside of the occasional poorly placed spike pit). Like all of the consumeristic platformers out there you collect gold trinkets -- which are useless. The culmination of all of these elements result in a decidedly B-game; the equivalent of a movie with Vincent Price or Bruce Campbell attached. It's all of the tropes and cliches of the platformer genre mashed together without any charm or smart design driving the experience. It feels like an autistic post-modern take on an ancient genre, while in truth it's just a crappy game. How punk.
Some games, like Edmund McMillen's, are punk due to their content and attitude. These games are punk through execution; sloppy and ersatz copies of the mainstream made by aspiring young 'uns. To this I say rock on, but get to your No Wave era already.
Why play it then? I mean,
Why play it then?
I mean, with bad movies one has the excuse, perhaps, that it just runs without further effort from you. You can just laugh at it...but with a game, your putting effort into it. It's like throwing money into a project, then laughing at the project - your just laughing at yourself. Here your throwing effort into it.
Why Watch Plan 9 From Outer Space?
Because it's sometimes fascinating to watch a train wreck.
Yeah, but...
While I agree that bad games, like any bad art, can be enjoyable if they're bad enough, and furthermore that analysing exactly what makes a game bad (as you've done here pretty thoroughly) can help one understand, from a design perspective, what makes a game good, I'd still rather read reviews of games that are actually good in their own right.
Anyone with any interest in indie/freeware gaming has probably played more shitty platformers than they care to remember, and pointing the way to yet more seems a little redundant. I read Playthisthing to read insightful reviews of interesting games I might otherwise have missed, and most of the time I get what I'm looking for. For me at least, this review misses the point.
Having said all that, I feel strangely compelled to give these games a try. Does that totally undermine my point?
Well, ...
While I'm usually not down with the affected art-house douche-bag manner of review I've associated with the[Dustin|99th], I thought this one was hilarious. I'm only left to wonder whether more thought and effort went into the review than the games themselves.
I just want you to know you
I just want you to know you totally made my day when you called me an art-house douchebag =)
identity is a construct of silicon and carbon
I'm glad I could brighten your day =)
I hadn't really meant for it to be a critique of you as a person as much as it was about my own perceived tone or feel of your reviews. And it's not even that I find the substance of your reviews themselves lacking or inaccurate in any way... it's just that whenever I read them I have horrible flashbacks to film and literary analysis classes, and can't help thinking of the pretentious wanker skit in Monkey Dust. You wouldn't perchance be writing these with an English accent, would you? ;-)
In my defense I just turned
In my defense I just turned nineteen and I'm still getting through college. =p I homeschooled myself throughout high school (public education, particuraly in Alaska, is shit) so the majority of my English lessons came from all the transgressive fiction and philosophy essays I read as coursework. I'm still trying to find my 'style', if you will. My eariler pieces for the site are pretty rough, but I think I'm more comfortable with my writing than I was at the start of the year. No pretension intended... well, maybe a little. It's just that I feel strongly about games as a medium; hence my contributions to PTT. Take my Runman write-up for example, I really dug the game so I tried to convey that excitement as best as I could. All I'm saying is that I'm not looking for any cricket bats to the face, k? =)
In terms of that...you know
In terms of that...you know that fable about the hen who cuts the wheat and grinds the grain and nobody wants to help with that work, but everyone wants to eat some of the bread once it's done? Just be a little skeptical of anyone who wants to complain about bread they didn't put any work into making.
Except my post of course >:) Actually, seriously my post was wondering why you'd waste your time with it (rather than critiquing the review itself), but if your 19, I guess you have to encounter these things at some point. Good games are wasted on the young... >:)
XD
Haha, oh wow. I can honestly say I never expected this game to receive any critical commentary. As a trainwreck fan myself, I'm happy to hear my younger self made people laugh, even if it wasn't for the same reasons I thought they would when I was making it.
You are completely right about the bad design decisions. It really shows that I was attempting to learn how to make games while making it! Too bad the games I was imitating didn't have that excuse. XD
For those masochistic enough to try to reach the end, there is a completely illogical pattern to the shit monster boss. You have to pick up the "dud" shitballs (using space), and adjust the mirrors (using space while next to them) so that throwing the shitball (using Control) at the mirror to the bottom-right makes it bounce along each mirror in the order they appeared before hitting the flusher. It's safest to do this while the boss is laughing. There is absolutely no indication that is what you have to do, nor is it justified in any way. The shitballs even bounce differently off the same mirror rotated to the same angle depending on the phase of the boss! You're completely right that this one boss fight describes the game in a nutshell. When each level is prefaced by an entire screen of instructions explaining what has changed in the controls, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with the design.
Oh, and you can press "p" to restart a segment of the poopa troopa arena fight. As you would expect, this is not stated anywhere in the game. My younger self must have realized while testing how poorly designed a series of fights with unskippable cutscenes were if you lose, but decided to add in a cheat as a shoddy workaround.
cultural hiroshima
Callan is right, I was complaining about a free lunch, and there's little to be gained from getting distracted by the peanut gallery. I really didn't mean to be trolling or flaming or reviewing the reviewer, as meta-commentary rarely adds anything to the topic at hand, ya know? My apologies for intentions poorly executed, I'm just a cantankerous jaded designer, looking enviously in through the window at the indie scene, who sometimes yearns for the soothing down to earth voice of Greg in his reviews ;-)
Also, Noyb you rock, keep up the good work as well =D
Only on the net
Only on the internet can you write for free and be cruelly judged for it.
Much love everybody.
cruel intentions
pretty sure it can happen just about anywhere ;-)