Space and Structure in the Super Marioverse, Part 1

Since it was released, I've been trying to decide what I think of Super Mario Galaxy. I know that it's at least a very good game, and it exhibits the usual creativity and quality of the Super Mario games, but is it maybe even something more? Is it actually a revolution in the platform genre, as a number of reviews have said—and as the game's Famitsu (38/40), Metacritic (97), and Game Rankings (97.4) scores may suggest?

If you follow this blog, then you know that I'm probably not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about Super Mario Galaxy without first discussing its aged forebears, so I'll dispense with the pretext right now and get on with what this essay is really about, which happens to be Super Mario Bros. SMB certainly wasn't the first platform game—the first, um, good one was Donkey Kong, which followed a couple of less remarkable pioneers—nor was it actually the first scrolling platform game (and let's just leave it at that), but it was the game that happened to popularize the genre, and it has the added distinction of making it obvious to the American business world that home console gaming was a viable, permanently marketable, um, thing. As much as I do love the VCS, it's important to note that Atari had not managed to convince people of this by 1983.

I've written about this before, and I've said that I think a lot of this had to do with the way that early NES games distinguished themselves from the arcade experience in crucial ways, though admittedly I focused more on aspects of play control than the trajectory of gameplay. But let me reiterate that what post-SMB console games offered was not the arcade model, the iterative, short game with levels that the player experienced repeatedly and, most importantly, with no end to the procession of levels, unless it was a hardware-imposed kill screen. SMB was the catalyzing agent that popularized a new model of game design: games with actual goals. We might as well call these teleological games.

As is completely appropriate for an early representative of this "paradigm," SMB exhibited the marks of where video games had been as well as where they were going. While SMB had thirty-two distinct levels, grouped into eight worlds of four levels each, it is true that the levels were only slight variations on five basic types: simple outdoor levels, underground levels, high outdoor levels with advanced platforming challenges, water levels, and castle levels. As such, there was some repetition, but it was not the same precise iteration seen in titles like Donkey Kong or Gorf. And whereas these games would simply repeat the cycle of levels without any resolution (DK did have a minimal storyline, but this only played out in the first two levels), SMB was plainly over after the last of its thirty-two levels were completed. There was even a mechanism that marked the final castle level out as something different: rather than the Mushroom Retainers who appeared seven times before—and my six-year-old self, clueless as to the number of times I'd have to find out that the Princess was in another castle, came to hate these guys—Mario discovered Princess "Toadstool" herself, and that was that.

This became, I think, the prevailing paradigm for game designs throughout the console's life, and I think it's safe to say that, for the most part, this has been the case ever since. The titles most often associated with the NES, including the Castlevania, Mega Man, Legend of Zelda, Dragon "Warrior," and Super Mario Bros. franchises, as well as Final Fantasy and Metroid, followed this design model.

What this meant, though, was that games had to show not just the distinction between beginnings and endings but the whole spectrum of locales in between these two endpoints. SMB might only have had five distinct level types, but it used those types in ways that suggested change and progress: outdoor levels were often given a black rather than a blue background, suggesting a transition from day to night, and level 6-3 even changed the color of everything including the bricks, the tufty raised platforms, and the castle at the end, to shades of white and light gray, suggesting a thick snowfall; levels 3-1, 3-2, 5-1, 5-2, and 7-1 had trees with white-colored tops and white pipes that suggested, I guess, a lighter dusting of snow. All of this made levels seem more distinct during the experience of gameplay, and it gave context to the consistent four-level cycle that always culminated in a (futile) attempt to save the Princess from another castle.

For me, then, the move from "world" to "world" felt like a progression from region to region (province to province?) within the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario traveled gradually through the four stages of each "world," and when he reached each castle, always inexplicably in the "world's" most remote location, he discovered that, yes, he had to keep moving. The large castles that always appeared at the beginning of levels numbered 1 (excepting 1-1 for obvious reasons and, bizarrely, 5-1) gave a sense of continuity to the proceedings, and it reinforced the impression that Mario was on some sort of quest that, for all its repetition, was advancing in some sense.

So Super Mario Bros. was something of a tenuous first step. Only minimal differentiation existed between levels, but there was nevertheless a great deal of difference between Super Mario Bros. and earlier level-based games like Donkey Kong. Super Mario Bros. also distinguished itself from its few earlier competitors in the side-scrolling platform genre, like Pac-Land, by exploiting a repetitive pattern in such a way that its ludic and (admittedly thin) narrative qualities appeared to blend seamlessly.

Still, the world that Super Mario Bros. took place in was a product of cooperation, a construct of the player's mind just as much as it was a part of the game's program. It would still be some time before the Super Mario Bros. games managed to present a world that made sense on its own terms, and it is the progress towards this point, and the movement away from it that I think has occurred since, that I've set out to explore throughout the present series of essays. The next part will continue with the next two games, and there are a number of other issues I'm looking forward to bringing out, too. Please anticipate it (and, in honor of Chris Kohler's wit: bow).

All images come from Ian Albert's brilliant webpage, where the author presents several video game maps created from in-game graphics. Just like Nintendo Power, only all nice and stuff.

The Alienation Effect? Part 1

So, today's malarkey comes from an old post I never finished up on my (not very developed) 1up blog. About a year ago, I finished a play-through of Super Paper Mario with my wife, and a few things occurred to me during and after that experience that I thought I'd discuss here.

So, my wife is not a huge video game fan. Certainly she enjoys them. And damn, is she ever good at some of them. She worked up perfect 100% ratings on every single level in Yoshi's Island back when that was a "current game," which really is no mean feat. The Mario All-Stars saves left over from her junior high years tell the tale of a person who once racked up some 70 (!) extra lives in between levels of Super Mario Bros. 2 before finishing the game. When asked about Super Mario World, she nonchalantly claims not to remember having gotten very far in it, yet one of her saves from that game preserves a completely (yes, 100%) unlocked world map. She's been all the way through A Link to the Past and gathered every item, even the ones you don't need and have to really look for. All four bottles! Everything. I just mean that she doesn't lack for skill, and when she starts a game, she finishes it—all the way. But I think the angle she comes at video games from must be a bit different from mine.

Ugh, now that's going to sound like an awful pun. The thing is that she just doesn't always react well to real 3D games. When The Wind Waker came out, she gamely played along with me up to the Forsaken Fortress, where of course, after countless moblin run-ins, she swore off Zelda games forever, until I played past that and let her try her hand at the Forest Haven. She found the little interior area around the Deku Tree completely disorienting, and at that point her patience really did run out. Fair enough. For someone who's never really adjusted to 3D games, that is a confusing, monotonous area, filled as it is with water, branches, lily pads, floating lights--not the easiest place for getting your 3D sea legs.

"3D sea legs." What does that remind me of? Oh yes! It reminds me that my wife has played and loved Escape from Monkey Island, as well as Grim Fandango and Eternal Darkness, and she's perfectly adept at those games. She's also pretty good at Grand Theft Auto III, and she sort of likes that one. Maybe the problem lies in the constant (and sometimes drastic) shifts along the height axis in games like The Wind Waker? I mean, it is true that Eternal Darkness, Escape from Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango work from a fixed perspective, so that might explain those, but what about GTA3? Maybe the driving is intuitive.

Anyway, I'm on the other side of the spectrum. I'll play almost anything if I have the right console/hardware and enough time (guess which of those is more problematic). I was playing King's Quest II with my mom when I was still pre-literate, really before I had enough of a mental visual dictionary to translate the blocky graphics into real objects in my head. I mean, I did okay for the most part, but there were some things on that KQ2 screen I could not comprehend. Trident? Seahorse? Cauldron of chicken soup?

(Okay, I'm being disingenuous. That's not chicken soup.)

I've played lots of stuff from almost every genre that's arisen since then, and I'm at least okay at most of them. Well, I love, but absolutely suck at, Civilization. But I don't have a fundamental inability to play this or that type of game.

Well, my wife definitely has a preference for old-tyme side-scrollers (and top-down adventures). Super Paper Mario was like a dream come true for her. She is thrilled about Fez, and I can't wait to see if she likes Cave Story when it comes to Wii (I haven't tried her on the desktop experience, though perhaps I should). I'm also going to play Braid when it comes to PC, and I think she'll like that, too. And I love side-scrollers and other 2D games too, but I've played and loved so many other kinds of games that I would have thought I had no particular preference for the older style.

But you know what? I think I might.

When we bought our Wii a year and some months ago, I logged lots of time on Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy and Resident Evil 4 and all that, but I really found myself spending just as much time—probably lots more time—playing Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Super Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3, Zelda II, and other mostly 16- and 8-bit games. I played those games for inordinate, embarrassing amounts of time. Then I bought a PSP and, between that and my DS, I've barely been able to claw my way out from RPGs and Metroidvanias (sorry!).

So before I close this first installment out (I have much more to say, as well as an actual theory to posit, in part 2 and, if it comes to that, part 3), I'll just pose this question: what's going on here? Am I giving in to nostalgia? Have I spent so much time playing games with my wife that I'm picking up her preferences? Or is it something else entirely?

And of course I could just be reading too much into this. It was huge for me just to be able to play old games on a real TV screen again.

Today's top image (a dizzy bokoblin to represent my wife getting dizzy from playing WW) comes from wiiconsumer.wordpress.com. The KQ2 image is from adventureclassicgaming.com.