Admit it, guys. If you’re about my age, you have to admit it: As much as we love to make fun of Star Wars Episode I today, back in the day when we were kids we totally ate it up.
I did.
I think I had a Jar Jar Binks plushie.
Of course, if you’re like me, you also thought that the podracing scene was the best part of the movie by far, because crazy homebrew vehicles > wimpy lightsabers any day.
…well, now that I’ve got every nerd in the universe out to destroy me, let’s move on to the Nintendo 64 game that this spawned: Star Wars Episode I Racer.
I gotta say; this was one of the better racing games I played. The tracks were challenging (some of the later ones were very challenging) and the game really gives you a sense of speed that isn’t often matched.
Also driving through the canyon on Tatooine is fairly similar to driving down the highway in northern Idaho. True story.
One of my favorite parts of the game, though, is the sound design, because it was unintentionally hilarious. Examples include: your character saying things at the wrong time:
…or characters saying the same line multiple times in a row.
Watto: “Have you seen… my chance cube? Have you seen… my chance cube? Have you seen… my chance cube?”
YES WATTO I THINK WE’VE SEEN YOUR CHANCE CUBE GOSH.
Seriously though, this game was good. Definitely one of the better racing games I’ve played, and probably the best thing that came out of Star Wars Episode I.
…well, except for those battle droids that say “Roger roger”. I liked those.
Disclaimer: You may or may not want to listen to me since I may or may not actually know what I’m talking about.
WRITE/DRAW/WHATEVER YOUR THING IS EVERY SINGLE DAY
Guys lemme tell you a story. Once upon I time I was about… 15 years old? And I decided I wanted to be an animator, for Disney. Now you have to understand something very important, and that very important thing is as follows: I COULDN’T DRAW. I wish I knew where my old stuff was so I could scan it in and show it to you to prove it. But I don’t know where it is so I can’t. Regardless, the point remains: I couldn’t draw. Once I decided I wanted to go into animation, I pulled out a sketchbook and tried to draw something. It was **awful**.
So you know what I did?
I started to draw
every
single
day
for months and months that eventually melted into years. I filled up sketchbooks every few months. I spent hours and hours a day drawing.
Slowly, I started to improve. It was a step by step process. I remember learning how to use basic shapes and things like circles to “build” characters from and I remember how much better everything got after that. Even then I still had a long way to go. But I was getting better and better and pretty soon my work was very much improved from how it had been that fateful day when I decided to “learn to draw”.
So by that time (I was about 17 or 18) I figured, what do artists do? They do art school stuff! So I took AP Art in high school. Looking back on it I was woefully unprepared, I’d only been really drawing for a couple of years after all, but I was game and took it anyway. At the end of the year I rounded up what I thought was my best stuff and sent it off to the AP scoring people.
A few months later I got my score: a 1. The lowest score possible.
I was insulted, and bitter.
I mean, really bitter.
So I quit drawing.
…
Yep, that’s right. Cause I got offended rather than choose to improve.
I didn’t start “really drawing” again for a good few years after that. In that short time since then I’ve seen how much I’ve improved and I wonder how much I would’ve improved if I hadn’t quit the first time.
DON’T FREAKING QUIT
I hate to break it to you but you aren’t going to become a crazy-awesome artist or the next bestselling author or the next chart-topping musician in two years. Probably not even five years. I know we all have fantasies of that sort of thing, heck, I have those fantasies all the time, but it’s just not feasible.
THIS DOESN’T EXCUSE YOU FROM TRYING EVERY DAY AND/OR MAKING A PLAN BECAUSE “OH IT’S JUST GOING TO TAKE TEN YEARS ANYWAY”
It’s really easy to procrastinate this stuff. Guess what: if you keep procrastinating you are never going to get to where you want to be.
If you are a creative person, I mean really truly one of those people who feels like they are going to die if they don’t do that thing they do (you will know what I’m talking about if you are)– well, chances are very good you’re prone to procrastination and/or getting discouraged early, since that seems to walk hand-in-hand with creativity, but you have to realize that this whole thing is just 95% perseverance. 95% realizing that yes, you’re going to have that crappy job for the next ten years but it only has to be ten years if you’re willing to put in the extra-curricular work on plying your craft.
Do I sound like a bad motivational poster yet?
No?
How about now?
Okay, terrible jokes aside, I’ve had tons and tons of creative friends lately who are getting discouraged. I’m not going to tell you “don’t get discouraged” because everyone gets discouraged. I get discouraged. It’s a part of the process.
I am going to say: be careful. Don’t let “being discouraged” turn into “never getting anything done”.
If you believe you have something special to show the world, then you do.
A wise man once said that 80% of people in the creative world quit before “making it”.
To which I have two things to say:
One: Don’t be one of those 80%,
and
Two: Man, imagine all the cool stuff we’d have right now if they didn’t quit.
Some four or five years ago an unassuming Flash game featuring bunnies and bells and relaxing music took the internet by storm.
If you somehow missed out on this fad a few years back, and you just clicked on the link, then your day is now gone. I’m sorry. It’ll be worth it, though. Easy to learn and fiendishly addictive.
Ever been gripped with an idea or thought that you sort of halfway think is nuts but it turns into a project that you work on anyway, because it’s all you think about?
For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.
So for those who have been following the saga of the book I wrote last year, well– it’s finished. As in, it’s about as polished as I think I’m going to get it. Now I’ve reached the hard part, which is submitting queries to agents and publishers. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And getting rejection letters.
Adjusting to this process and train of thought has been a difficult thing to do. Welcome to a world where you, as a writer, are another brick in a wall. Where the highly personal and creative process that was writing your book has to make way for marketing and pigeonholing and making sure you meet a certain standard so the High and Mighty Publishers might possibly bother to glance in your direction.
(Who me, bitter?)
That’s how it works, though, and you have to live with it. Coming to grips with this was extremely difficult for me to do and I spent a lot of time dwelling on the whole inherent… well, “wrongness of it all” is a strong phrase, but there you go. It best describes my feelings, I suppose. I remember one day at work at the pet store, I was staring into the cricket bin and suddenly I felt a weird kinship with the insects that I was selling as lizard food. Crickets, often glorified in fable as being special by way of possessing the glorious gift of song– here they were, thousands of them in a bin, being sold for quite literally a dime a dozen, with no one giving them a second glance. Suddenly I realized that I knew what it felt like to “be a cricket”.
So one fitful night a few days later I couldn’t sleep for some reason. I would fall asleep for a few moments and then wake up tossing and turning, only to have the process repeat itself. It was a pretty terrible night all around. Something unusual was happening, though: every time I woke up I’d enter that bizarre phase between wakefulness and sleep where your thoughts and dreams all sort of tumble into one big ball of hallucinations, and every time that happened more and more of a new story would vividly appear to me. A new story that took the cricket metaphor and everything else I was feeling at the time and wrapped it up into a neat little package.
I woke up the next morning and after letting the previous night percolate in my brain a little, I went over to my computer and in twenty minutes I’d typed up a complete outline to what is going to be NaNo 2010. The entire story and its themes were, quite honestly, something I’d dreamed up, and yet the whole thing was surprisingly consistent. The things your unconscious self will come up with if you let it, huh?
Since then I’ve polished the story up and added more themes– visiting the Washington coast seemed to add a whole new layer of inspiration– and now I am really excited to write this up. This is a very personal and very quirky story– think Pixar meets Tim Burton meets Where the Wild Things Are– but every time I think about I just start counting down the days til November because gosh, I need to write this story.
Inspiration, it would seem, sometimes comes from the most difficult circumstances and the lowliest critters.
You know, there’s really not a whole lot to say about Dr. Mario except for the following:
1.) Most Addictive Puzzle Game Ever (okay, okay, maaaaybe second to Tetris Attack),
and 2.) Catchiest Music Ever. Ever.
P.S.: Cannot be unheard:
I? am Dr. Mario and I am saving lives
I look different in this game (I lost my hat, got a coat, doctor light, stethoscope)
I am Dr. Mario and I prescribe high fives
Laughter’s the best medicine so BWA HA HA HA! You fell down!
In the Mushroom Kingdom I’m the finest doc by far
I got my degree by watching House and Scrubs and E.R.
Brightly colored pills
They’ll cure all your ills
Just as long as you’ve got fever or the chills
(Yeah, this is a day late. Sorreh. Was having site issues most of yesterday and then had to work all day. Anyways, let’s cut to the chase:)
You’d think that a repetitive game with even more repetitive music (the Ghostbusters theme song on loop) wouldn’t be very exciting, but then, you’ve probably never played Ghostbusters.
And honestly, if you’ve never heard the theme song belted out in glorious SID, then you’re missing out on some Serious Awesomeality. (Awesomeality is now a word.)
And you gotta admit: getting those voices to come out of a Commodore 64 is impressive.
So let’s talk about the gameplay. You start out by building your own ghostbusting car pretty much from scratch– if you’ve beaten the game enough times you have enough virtual dough to get shinier cars, giving this game a very early form of replay value– and then you are plunked onto a map of the city:
Where your new goal is to drive around to the blinking buildings and trap ghosts. (Don’t cross the streams!) Every so often your ghost traps fill up and you have to go back to Headquarters to clear ’em out, but other than that… it’s blinking buildings for you, buddy.
This is basically how the game goes for quite some time. It starts out fairly tame, but gets more difficult as time goes on and you have to juggle more and more blinking buildings. Things REALLY get exciting when the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man decides to stomp all over everything. He can be stopped if you’re really quick– like, “jam the correct key on your keyboard within a half second when you realize what’s going on” quick– and this is enough to set you on MASSIVE TWITCH MODE for the entire second half of the game because the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man could show up ANY SECOND NOW.
And you don't want that.
The game gets more and more fastpaced and frenzied as a key and lock start chasing each other around the map. Eventually they get to Zuul, and you have to run your guys to safety underneath the bouncing Marshmallow Man. Have fun with this, because the hit detection is basically random and if you don’t get at least two of three guys through then you go directly to Game Over, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
So earlier this week I was thinking, man, I am a Writing-Idea Machine. I have so much to write about. So many ideas. I came up with this crazy plot to participate in NaNoWriMo every year for the rest of my life, because I obviously have 65 books inside of me just waiting to get out. No problem. Right?
So then of course I spend all morning trying to figure out what to blog about.
Face, meet palm.
Anyways, then I thought, I should tell you about some of the crazy crap I used to write about when I was a kid. Cause I wrote a lot back then, too.
1.) Cute Cartoon Bunnies Get Stabbed. I have no idea where this one came from. I made little picture books in spiral bound notebooks, and I had these two recurring rabbit characters named Billy and Mookie. They actually lived in a pretty clever little house filled with cute monsters that provided most of their “technology”. For example, they had a little monster that sat on their windowsill and held up a screen to block out the sun, and when they wanted to open the window they’d pull on his tail and he’d set the screen down.
So obviously one of the picture books involved one bunny coming home to find the other bunny laying on the floor with a dagger in his heart.
Yeah I dunno where I was going with that one.
2.) Cute Cartoon Bunnies Go to Jail: Another time they went to jail. They were innocent, but I guess the justice system in their world isn’t exactly all its cracked up to be.
3.) “The Friendly Candidates”: Back in the days of Clinton/Bush/Perot the TV was nothing but an endless stream of smear tactics. Leave it to me to write a book where U.S. presidential candidates actually liked each other and gave each other encouragement. Ahh, cute lil’ optimistic me.
4.) “Gerbil Adventures”: Gerbils go on crazy adventures throughout the house. These stories actually weren’t too bad.
5.) “My Life”: When I was about eight or ten years old I wrote a fictional autobiography for school. Apparently when I was 8 I thought I was going to grow up to be a vet and also have like, 10 kids. (Mostly because I had fun giving them all interesting names.)
6.) Thomas the Tank Engine Fan Fiction: Yup.
7.) Anthropomorphic Toys: Guys, you have no idea how much I wrote about my toys. See, I managed to convince myself that my toys would come to life when I left the room, Toy Story style (although this was years before Toy Story… I blame the Muppets’ “The Christmas Toy”.) So I gave them all sorts of adventures. First in short stories, and later in two full length novels. Did I mention that I was like… 18 by that point? Who me, Peter Pan?
(If you are, for some bizarre reason, interested in hearing more about said novels, I once rambled about them rather in depth over at my LJ.)
8.) The Tortoise Wins the Race, the Hare Sues Because of Emotional Damage: When I was a freshman in high school one of our assignments was to re-write a fable or fairy tail in a satirical way. I redid the Tortoise and the Hare in a way that I still think was pretty clever, but NO ONE in my class “got it”. Stupid muggles.
9.) Ender’s Game Excerpts Rewritten With the Characters As Furries: I want to say Ender was a squirrel but I can’t remember. P.S. I’m in ur library, ruining ur sci-fi
10.) Yoshi’s Island Novelization: The best part was the super long prologue that went into hilarious unnecessary detail regarding Yoshi culture. (Was possibly influenced by the official “Gremlins” novelization, which went into hilarious unnecessary detail regarding Mogwai culture.)
…ya know, on second thought, maybe we should keep me far away from writing.
So there you are as a kid, minding your own business at the video rental place, and hey look, a new Mario game to rent! Awesome, right?
Yeah, until you bring it home and realize that this game is… well, let’s just say it’s not your average Mario game. For starters, you play as Luigi. Which is fine and all, except that the entire premise of the game is to travel around random real-world cities, collect vaguely-historical items, and take them to Princess Peach (I called her the “I Lady” as a kid because she sat in a booth that had a big letter “I” on it) so she could quiz you on… I dunno, educational stuff.
Now, I have nothing wrong with educational games. I think they can be very effective ways to get people to learn. Here’s the thing though; I don’t think I learned anything from this game, except that it was pretty dumb. I mean, if you’re gonna be an educational game, at least have rivers to ford or numbers to munch. You know?
Actually I was a dirty traitor who liked Word Munchers better.
Anyways, my only memory of “Mario is Missing” is that it was a disappointing game that involved talking to the “I Lady” a disproportionate number of times. If it taught me anything, I certainly don’t remember it.
Fortunately we can all be comforted by the fact that Nintendo had nothing to do with this game; it was made by an outside company. And we all know what sort of things happen when outside companies have fun with Nintendo characters:
Yup.
P.S. Turns out there was a sequel-of-sorts to this game, called “Mario’s Time Machine”. Creepy Bowser/Ganon Hybrid is disappoint:
