What happened to the Geek On Stun guy? Can I pay him to post more? Lia?

I really love the mental image of some guy rushing the stage at GDC to get unreleased game content, if only because I think it proves a very salient point: Nerds want what they want real bad. To unweave a story from my Gossamer Skein of Personal Thoughts: When I read that Commodore 64 games were coming to European Virtual Consoles, my first, immediate thought was, “Well, shit, now I have to hack my Wii.” I’m probably not going to end up actually hacking anything — I don’t want to fuck up my chances of playing Smash Brawl online, and I really don’t like the thought of installing a barely-legal bootloader on a machine whose latest firmware update would detect changes and brick my system¹ — but the actual footwork involved with changing my system’s region code or spoofing my IP to pretend that I’m Dutch or whatever is at the bottom of potential concerns regarding unlocking any of my game consoles. Sitting up at 3 AM with a marblemouthed FAQ and a Torx wrench?² Sure, bring it on, so long as I can play Save New York or Bruce Lee afterwards.

The strength of a nerd’s love is intense, and I don’t just mean in the way that makes prom season uncomfortable. Consider the case of the Mother 3 community: Over the years, these guys have petitioned for even the barest scraps of new content — Mother 1 on GBC, continued development on Earthbound 64, or, more recently, an English-language localization and release of Mother 3. And when none of that helped — and only after none of that helped; when it became clear that it could not help — did they decide to just localize the fucking thing themselves. And all along the way, they’ve taken care to keep the games spoiler-free, going so far as to try and get the Mother 3 localization finished before Smash Brawl came out so that people wouldn’t accidentally spoil the laboriously-translated, hand-localized game by the one Nintendo actually ended up releasing. Like — this is more of a shit than I gave about my entire high school and college career, and these people are doing this in their spare times? If I took up squash, would I secretly discover that there are squash players dedicated to hacking their fucking rackets?³

The real beauty of this, too, is that the experiences that gamers go to these lengths to have are all fleeting and ephemeral. I spent over a hundred dollars and hours and hours of my time last year finding a copy of Vib Ribbon and a way to play it, sort of as a self-back-pat for securing a decent job and a respectable wage — claiming the spoils I’d earned by fulfilling a college-age desire, or something? — but I don’t play it any more than I do any other rhythm game; hell, I’ve played Audiosurf a bunch more, thanks to the robust leaderboard functionality that comes packaged in with it, and it does the procedurally-generated rhythm-game trackbuilding better, arguably, than Vib Ribbon ever could. (It also cost me — nnnrrghhhh!!! — $115 less to play.) And besides all that, right after I managed to get my J-region PSX set up and danced around some vector-drawn loop-the-loops to Silent Shout, triumphantly, fistpumping and wooting softly in the night: Sony announced they were planning to release the game as a PSN download.

But I don’t regret that purchase, because I own a tiny piece of culture, or history, or what have you — I was able to obtain an artifact from this medium that I inexplicably love, and interacting with it is satisfying and pleasureable. And this is — this has to be — what drives people to softmod their Xbox360s weeks after release, or to shell out half a million dollars for an unreleased Atari game, or to write a comprehensive sprite and level editor for a 15 year-old game. If I’d owned a PS3 when I heard about the Vib Ribbon DLC, I would have peed all over myself with glee — all that work I was planning to do, abstracted away! So this is why I’m mad at Nintendo for not just opening up their Virtual Console across all regions and slapping some disclaimers on it — if I have to sign a 14-page agreement to not sue them when I download some untranslated game from the Japanese VC store, so be it; I don’t care how they cover their ass if they can make that content available to the people who want it. And that’s really why I’m so enamored of the kid who bumrushed the stage at GDC: He saw something he wanted, a combination of two things he loved, somehow greater than both its constituent parts⁴, and he knew — from experience! — that there was only one way to be sure to get it: To take it by force.

¹ Ironically, the only thing that’s kept me from buying a PSP and immediately hacking the shit out of it has been Sony’s recent spate of exciting-sounding PSP releases and decent downloadable content — so long as it remained a console I would only buy to play SNES roms on, I was exciting about buying it, but as soon as I realized I would probably want to keep it around for its legitimate content, the dollar signs started adding up in my brain and I decided not to pay up for one, and at this point I probably won’t until the system retails for under $100 and I have to start scouring eBay for the decent legit games. The lesson here: Keep your releases more exciting than the hacker community’s developments.

² Or, in the case of the Xbox (which I finally got around to last summer), a mile of CAT5, a copy of MechAssault, and a USB< ->Xbox Memory Card dongle.

³ Google says nothing, but feel free to prove me wrong on this one.

⁴ Like, I love the shit out of Rock Band, but if you don’t think there was something even a little transcendent about the closing credits to Portal, then maybe you don’t really know how to love something.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt as though a video game this benign-looking has actively trolled me before.

If you’re wondering whether you should drop $30 on Professor Layton, I should warn you that the question you should really be pondering is, “Do I like shitty magicians and hanging out with old aunts.” Layton is a gorgeous game styled artistically after something between The Triplets of Belleville and a Miyazaki film, which is good, because it so happens this is the attention to design required to package up a 1935 edition of 150 Brain-Teasers For Today’s Inquisitive Youth as an expensive digital geegaw. As the internet has probably already told you, Layton is not a puzzle game, but a walking simulator constantly interrupted by puzzles, set in a town where literally every citizen wants to ask you about their 9- and 5-ounce measuring cups, or their set of tangrams, or whatever. Purchasing Layton involves staring hard at thirty dollars and swearing an oath to it that you consider a bundle of hoary logic puzzles just as important as the gin it was supposed to be traded for.

So, naturally, if you’re anything like me, you already own a copy.

Because guess what: To package up 150 word problems — the problems everyone hated in math class! — you have to give the reacharound to another sector of the brain. Whoever is responsible for Layton — Level 5, it looks like — has done an admirable job of shoving so many collectible items into this game that, at one point, you literally collect an item which helps you collect items. (If it turns out that the guy from the Thousand Arms team responsible for hiding Dating Points all over the place ended up working at Level 5, I wouldn’t be surprised. HEY-O! Anyway.) And that is sort of the great thing about this game: Every stupid “when do the trains meet” puzzle carries with it a sense of dread, not because the game itself demands it, but because you know if you fuck up the answer, you’re going to have to reload the game in order to get full marks, which means you have to sit through a minute and a half of unskippable dross. This knowledge has made me more meticulous in my puzzle consideration than any factor I can imagine being programmed into a cart; knowing that applying my critical thinking skills may save me a reload is an infinitely better impetus to do well than some pretend computer sword.

And, hell, I am really just being a crank here for crank’s sake, because completing little brainteaser puzzles is fun anyway, and it’s hard to be so mad at a game that is so fun even if it’s so transparent. I mean, I would recommend this game to basically anyone that likes to be intellectually challenged for five minutes at a time, and isn’t that really the nicest little backhanded compliment you’ve read all day.

_{and plus I have this baseless notion that if this game sells really well then maybe someone will make a Hotel Dusk 2}

So it’s time for the video game magnates of the world to congregate and smoke cigars in honor of making a killing off of a record-setting year. Yes yes, gentlemen, pat yourselves on the back and speculate about the future - wait, what:
“Israeli firm 3DV will be demonstrating its camera technology that can detect depth of movement. Gamers can swing an imaginary golf club or interact with a 3D world just by using their hands and arms and without the need for a controller.”
Oh my god you guys, be careful - remember?
(Also Striker from Burnout 3 is without a doubt cloned from this narrator)
“The conference also features a strong mobile gaming element. ‘We are seeing more and more big game companies take the space seriously. The sea change is that traditional game developers are less snarky about mobile and casual than they were because of the power of phones today.’”
I don’t give a damn how snarky you are about it - developers, you better understand how far you are behind actual portable consoles if you want to avoid creating lasting legacies based solely around parody sites again. I mean look at this.
I mean, you may succeed. That happens from time to time. Then again, even if you guys do manage to screw everything up by getting caught in a time warp back to bad ideas from the dark days of innovation, we can always count on the artists to turn it upside down and make something wonderful again. Keep giving us your best and worst, guys!

Ahem! Today…

Super Widget is one of many undistinguished side-scrollers for the SNES. The controls are slippery and it is pretty easy, but in 1993 I was obsessed with this game. “Why?” You may ask that. You would even be right to! It’s a long story. Around that time I got my very first pet. It was a hermit crab. Well, I had a turtle when I was in 2nd grade, but it died after 2 weeks (RIP Michaelangelo! You were the sweetest turtle. Too bad I accidentally fried you). Mr. Wimpy, on the other hand, lived for 3 glorious years. Now you don’t see it in this video, but one of Widget’s transformations was into a hermit crab, a hermit crab that bore a lovely, purple-faced resemblance to Mr. Wimpy. The other thing that’s awesome about Super Widget is that the power-ups are all basically identical except for the cryptic letters inscribed upon them. Seriously, I got that “M” probably stood for marine of some sort, but “S”? “L”? It has that magical combination of laziness and pure strangeness that’s sadly been lost in the post 16-bit world. The bosses were really poorly animated, but then you had things like the giant pig-satyr with the stick that spit things. Also, the music is really catchy. I still have a cartridge of this lying around, and sometimes I pop it in and relive those innocent days of yore, days of Mr. Wimpy, leggings, and giant “Save the Whales” t-shirts. So I guess the point is that Super Widget is a really, really bad game, but I love it anyway, because, hey, colors! And nostalgia! And hideous-yet-cute chimeras! Everyone loves chimeras! OK, maybe only I love chimeras.

n.b. my other favorite product tie-in game is Cool Spot, which unlike Super Widget is actually pretty good, and responsible for 900% of our household consumption of cool, refreshing 7-up!