Power-ups and Bickering

Capitalism!

Besides being the title of this blog, this is what we consider to be one of the core tenants of great cooperative gameplay. Arguing about who gets power-ups and life refills is something that we spent most of our childhood doing. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much of this yet. Joust was far too difficult, and too much attention was spent not killing each other to worry about getting points. Battle City and Ice Climbers had little interaction: the level driven structures of the games, combined with the lack of resources to compete for, made for very little discourse between us outside of commenting on the game. Exed Exes was too inane: our boredom mixed with the relative difficulty resulted very little attention being paid to jockeying for power-ups.

We hit our stride, for the first five games, with Mario Bros. Our previous familiarity with the game, combined with the mechanics, creates plenty of moments of joyful point stealing. Due to the fact that you get points for making the "kill" by running over a defeated enemy, and no points for actually defeating enemies, it is very easy to kill steal from your partner. When this is tied into the fact that points, which are rewarded for defeating enemies, grant extra lives, it means that jumping on your partners head to slow them down becomes personally useful. This extends to the bonus levels, where you are rewarded points based on the number of coins individually collected.

What works so well here, that doesn't occur in other games that we've played so far, is that we are able to get in each others way, make actions that interrupt one another, without completely ruining everything. Joust would have had some fun competition to get points in a hurry, if touching another player didn't equal instant death. Ice Climbers and Battle City lacked any kind of real competition against other players, making for struggle between the players and the game instead of each other. While this is cooperative gameplay by definition, it doesn't create the friendly struggle that is so endearing. Exed Exes, while having all the right elements, including power-ups, just fails to capture the attention at any meaningful level.

Game 6: Mario Bros. (1983)

The second game we played, Mario Bros., was by far the most enjoyable game of the first five that we've played. We still haven't hit the era where games are beatable, but just the fact that we do not instantly kill each other is a nice step up from Joust. While I look forward to being able to actually beat a game and be "done" with it, this was still fantastic to play. There are still a lot of weird little things in this game that will change in games over the next few years. For example, there is still no continuing. There is no boss, and you can not change your momentum while in the air. While the inertia in jumping is "realistic," it feels bizarre compared to later control schemes

JUMPUP!!

This game takes place in a Bizarro World version of Mario, where Mario and Luigi have not yet learned how to effectively jump on top of enemies. There are also no mushrooms, flowers, stars, toads, princesses or goombas. Just endless streams of proto-Koopas, flies, and crabs. I am not aware of any explanation of this, nor do I expect one to be forthcoming.

Nothing too bad.

But seriously, this game isn't that hard. Compared to Joust it is a walk in the park, in the sense that we did not needlessly kill each other. There is some awesome teamwork to be had here, in the sense you can bounce an enemy down to your partner and dispatch your foes easily. You can also bounce on each other, although that often comes off as an annoyance more than an asset. There is also competition for getting points, especially during the bonus levels. Points lead to extra lives, and this level competition is fun. The modern age of achievements and multiple game round stat tracking has dulled some of the fun of this; if I do better this round than the last it doesn't reflect anything outside of a development of my own skills.

So many points.

I wish I could say that I don't care about achievements, but this would be a blatant lie. I love to track my stats from round to round of something like Team Fortress 2, for example. It is an addiction, doubtlessly rooted in my love of baseball statistics growing up. The instant gratification that comes from obsessive stat tracking and watching bars fill up is far too rewarding to want to give up. While I appreciate classic games because of their depth of gameplay derived from simple rules, I do feel a lack of the reward treadmill and ending.

Do the Mario!

The sheer weirdness of this game is fun though. I like to imagine how this can be fit into the overall Mario "mythos." I like the idea that this is some kind of endless Karmic purgatory. Maybe this is the true final adventure of Mario: there is no end, there is no princess to kiss. Mario has been sent here for a lifetime of killing and destroying countless Koopa and Goomba lives. This is a sisyphean task set before the Mario Bros. by the gods of the underworld. There is no ending in sight, and the task only grows more difficult as Mario fulfills it. If he doesn't fulfill it fast enough, fireballs come out to attack him, until he finishes the current task, only to start once again on a similar, but slightly harder task. Incidentally, this theory explains 90%+ of the games from this era, where things like "endings" or "goals" were non-existent.

Wrap around hell.

This could also be a chronicle of Mario's death. One day, a plumber goes into the sewers to deal with a nascent turtle infestation, and eventually takes a wrong turn and gets lost. As he goes deeper and deeper into the serpentine corridors, the pungent odors start to affect his thinking, and the turtles appear to be the roughly the same size as him. His eyes, deprived of natural light, begin to see red and green fireballs, and the creatures around him take on unnatural hues. As he delves deeper into the pipes, he begins to see oceanic crabs and flies bigger than he is. Eventually, as he stumbles and slides through the labyrinthine passages, he begins to imagine his locomotive difficulties are caused by rapidly forming ice patches. He begins to hallucinate that he has an identical twin, who dresses and moves the same as he does and occasionally gets in his way. There is only one way out of this: death. Death is a sweet release, and leads to the idea that Super Mario Bros. is the reward. Mario, now in some sort of afterlife, is still entranced with dreams of plumbing, but now dreams in bold colors and creates a narrative to structure his life. His hallucinatory twin no longer is seen at the same time, but still exists to follow Mario's footsteps. I would like to think that the rest of the Mario Universe is the plumber's dying dream, a long hallucination after a treacherous and slow death at the hands of hallucinatory fireballs and flies.

Kick off ALL the pests?

Either way, this game, while featuring Mario and having some basic elements of Mario gameplay (jumping, turtles, enough inertia to slide), is also pretty weird and has a lot of things that won't be seen in a Mario game for years (flies, color coded "mad" enemies, crabs). It is the best game that we've played so far, which isn't saying much, but I would gladly play it again without a second thought.