Happy Birthday Mario!

This year, Nintendo’s Mario series of video games celebrates its 25th birthday, as well as the retention of worldwide popularity. The brainchild of Japanese designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario occupies a position in popular culture usually reserved for iconic pop stars and long-running TV series. And with 222 million games sold over the last quarter-decade, its commercial success certainly can’t be disputed.

So why is Mario so popular? His distinctive red cap, blue overalls and moustache may have been born out of the technical limitations of 80s games consoles (his Italian nationality comes from the fact that he has a moustache - no, seriously) but as a blank avatar for the player to project themselves onto, he is peerless.

Mario's USP has always been exploring the joy of movement, allowing players to navigate intricately-designed spatial challenges with a character who feels like an extension of your own body. Mario’s original name was simply "Jumpman", and for good reason - in later games, his cries of "yahoo!" with every leap are positively infectious. Not to mention Mario's colourful supporting cast - Luigi, Bowser, dinosaur-thing Yoshi - who despite their paper-thin characterisation have become as iconic as the star himself.

Most, however, know Mario et al best from the most popular of the (seemingly endless) spin-offs: Mario Kart, which has provided both hours of knockabout fun and an antithesis to boring driving simulators like Gran Turismo. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone that doesn't flinch at the sight of that dreaded blue shell.

The craftsmanship of the Mario games has meant they have stood the test of time, and are still receiving lavish critical praise and selling by the bucket-load. Stuffed full of imagination, tightly-designed levels and endless surprises, it’s difficult to overestimate the influence they have had on video games as an art-form.

The 1985 classic Super Mario Bros. was the beginning of shift from arcades into living rooms, with large and colourful graphics that - though difficult to believe now - looked like a cartoon come to life, spawning a variety of imitators (most notably Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog). In 1997, Super Mario 64 demonstrated what games could do with a third dimension, which in turn influenced another generation of 3D Mario rip-offs such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon.

The imitators will long be forgotten - but Mario games continue to thrill both children and adults alike.

Originally published in The Courier on the 8th November 2010.

"Fear 2: Project Origin" review

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (or, as humans might refer to it, "Fear 2") is not a game of subtleties, as you can probably gather from its title. Fear 2's aim is to scare you, and you play it if you want to be scared - perhaps not the most noble of ambitions, nor a particularly original one, but regardless one it set flat-out to achieve.

Well, actually that's not quite true. The true meat of the gameplay consists of a fairly bland first-person shooter that can't quite decide if it's Call of Duty or Halo. The identikit grunts (quite literally - most enemies are "replicas", a mindless army of clones distinguishable from the earlier human enemies only by their powerful weapons) are fairly satisfying to fight, but the most exciting variations they present are "guy with flamethrower" and "guy with a really big machine gun".

While the logic of featuring such a large quantity of mindless gunplay in a game marketed as a scary experience is questionable, the shooting at least contrasts well with the genuinely scary bits. Monolith pulls out all the stops, with claustrophobic dreamlands and bizarre graphical effects heaped on top of one another. While used sparingly, the infrequent visits from Alma Wade (the "icon-but-only-because-they-ripped-off-the Ring" cover star and very angry poltergeist) become predictable: the screen will turn orange and/or you'll see a swing in a field, and/or Alma will engage the player in a brief thumb war before being shaken off (yet again) with a simple QTE. The secret to great horror, someone once said, is the same as comedy: never repeat yourself. There's a good reason why, in "The Shining", those twins and the disgusting old woman only appear once.

That said, fights with supernatural enemies are tense, horrible affairs that successfully remove the feeling of empowerment the game's ridiculous arsenal provides, with masterful pacing that makes their initial reveals genuinely scary. Yet for all it gets right in these sections, it takes it all back with mounted turret set-pieces and, astonishingly, a handful of opportunities to pilot a giant mech suit.

The bar for horror games' stories was set high by Bioshock, which knew that the sight of a society cannibalising itself is far scarier than freaks jumping out the walls. Fear 2 tells a superficially similar story of science gone too far and how "we make our own monsters", but it's cliched and predictable to the point of self parody. Your team, meanwhile, consist of a bunch of characters so paper-thin it's a surprise they don't just float away in a gentle breeze, and who either provide the player with meaningless objectives ("Get to the nurse's office! Meet up with Snake Fist! Save Corporal Keegan!" - why are these necessary when the player is travelling through glorified corridors, anyway?), or just die occasionally throughout the story. It's a bad sign when the most memorable line in your game is "You're like free pizza in an anime convention!"

This isn't a bad game by any means: if you're looking for a dark, atmospheric and sometimes scary shooter, Fear 2 fills all of the criteria. It is, though, a success only if you switch your brain off beforehand.

E3 excitement

One of my favourite weeks of the year is the Electronic Entertainment Expo - E3 for short - in which pretty much every new video game and games console is announced. This year has been one of the best in recent memory, particularly due to the announcement of this little baby.

It may look like a regular Nintendo DS with a slightly wider screen, but the killer feature of the console is impossible to demonstrate on a computer screen. Basically, it can produce 3D images without glasses.

Now, I'll be the first to dismiss 3D as a passing fad within the movie industry, but in the case of video games it makes perfect sense. Navigating a three-dimensional world onscreen can sometimes be pretty difficult without depth perception. Of course, it could all be rubbish (although hands-on reports are fairly raving), but it'll be impossible to tell until the damn thing finally comes out!

Certainly, one thing's for sure: with Paper Mario, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter IV, Kid Icarus and remakes of Ocarina of Time and Starfox 64 already announced, it'll have an absolutely stunning software lineup.

Some other awesome announcements: a motion-plus Wii Zelda, a new 2D Rayman game and the fantastic-looking Scott Pilgrim game.

Emotionally affecting video games (???!)

I played Far Cry 2 long after it came out, mainly on the strength of recommendation of the gone-but-not-forgotten Idle Thumbs podcast.I'm not usually a big fan of first-person shooters, but since I love freeform adventure games I decided to give it a shot.

Without turning this post into a full-blown review of the game - suffice to say, I definitely recommend it (it's probably only a tenner these days) - I'd like to share a memory from my time in Far Cry 2's fictional, war-torn African country. Yeah, that's right, a memory. My favourite aspect of games is that, unlike books and films, where every viewer goes through an identical journey, in games it's personal.



Far Cry 2 is particularly personal, because the game has "buddies", who you work with throughout the game. They come to your rescue when you're hurt, and can also die if you don't come to their aid. My "best buddy" at the time was a guy called Hakim Echebbi, a Algerian with (like all the other buddies) shaky morals and a mysterious past.
[caption id="attachment_24" align="alignright" width="208" caption="Hakim, my 'best buddy'"][/caption]


I used to play with only one saved game, which had the unexpected effect of making what I would otherwise have treated as inconsequential, correctable mistakes into major plot points for my character.

So, the memory: it was a mission in which I was attempting to rescue an outspoken journalist from deportation. During an intense firefight with the mercenaries holding the journalist hostage, I was wounded. Hakim appeared from nowhere and dragged me to safety. Once I had recovered enough health, the two of us took on the remaining men, and eventually it seemed we had cleared the way to the airport hangar.

Suddenly, one of the men I thought we had killed took a pistol out and began shooting from the floor. He hit Hakim, who collapsed to the floor. Once I had taken out the straggler, I ran over to Hakim to heal him - but my efforts were in vain - the wound was mortal, and Hakim passed away in front of my eyes.

No worries - I'll just load up my last saved game, and make sure that Hakim doesn't get shot. Unfortunately, it had auto-saved mere seconds after the fatal shot, and so my second attempt at reviving Hakim was futile as well.

I didn't want to lose Hakim. He was my last remaining "buddy" in Far Cry 2 (and furthermore, he opened up the opportunity for otherwise unaccessible side-quests). So I loaded my saved game again, and rushed over to heal him - but again, no dice. Again and again, I tried to save this character made of data and polygons. But, like some sort of recurring nightmare, I watched him die over and over, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

Eventually, I came to the realisation that I had to accept Hakim was gone. Leaving his corpse in the middle of the airstrip, I went to free the journalist, with the hope that I maybe could do some good in this godforsaken country.

Prince of Persia movie

I played The Sands of Time a few years after everyone else, and thought it was great. The platforming, in particular, was sublime. The sequels, though, scared me away with their unnecessary dark tone and emphasis on combat. And as for the reboot... well, let's forget about that for now.

So, what do you do when a well-loved series loses its direction? You do what Tomb Raider did, of course, and turn it into a franchise-friendly summer blockbuster.



Jerry Bruckheimer, by the way, is behind some of the biggest (and worst) blockbusters in recent history. As well as Pirates of the Caribbean, he's also produced the National Treasure series, Black Hawk Down, Coyote Ugly, Top Gun, Bad Boys II and all of those CSI: Location shows. The man is a menace to culture, but unfortunately an absolute goldmine.

At least we get a direct sequel to the original game. Let's just hope it's more than just a quick cash-in by Ubi Soft.