
candlesayshi
- June 26th, 19:20
Ok, heads up... making a geek post. So, if that's not your thing, pass right by.
First of all, I feel that Super Mario Sunshine is terribly underrated. I feel the the general conception of it is that it was just filler to have a Mario game on the Gamecube, or that it's a "gimmick" game, because of the addition of the little FLUDD water pump, but fuck man. This is not a casual walk in the park game. Some parts of it are absolutely fucking brutal. Like, the levels where Shadow Mario takes FLUDD from Mario and you have to get through this very cool platforming part above a bottomless pit while the classic Mario theme plays. Holy shit. Those parts are frustratingly, controller-breakingly, addictive levels, and there's usually an easily attainable 1-up in an early part of these levels, as if to give you hope that you got a free 1-up and not that you'll be getting that same 1-up upwards of thirty times as you continously die and have to go back through all over again.
Also, those parts are really a lot of fun and completely awesome, because when you do actually beat them, you feel such a great satisfaction with yourself. For a quick thing, here's the typical rundown of one of those levels: Run over to some floating alternatly flipping platforms and jump across them, do a back flip, and wall jump over a chasm and grab on to the wall where you have to wall jump diagonally to reach the next platform, run across there and jump on top of a turning cube, while running on the surface to make sure you stay on top, jump off the cube and grab on to a rope, get up on the rope and jump off of it at the right time to land on top of a turning cog, and start moving to stay on top of it, then jump across three more of those cogs, and time it right so that you leap off onto a rotating bridge just as it passes in front of you... etc etc...
It takes a lot of skill, practice, and patience to get through those parts, and I think that if Nintendo did an entire DS/DSiWare/WiiWare game that was only levels like those that just got progressively harder it would be a huge f'n hit, and people will see it as a "return to form" of the running/jumping/know-your-tricks-or-die Mario gameplay.
Dear Nintendo, please do this game....
Anyway, the other thing I feel like saying.... I have to reluctantly say that I am not a big fan of Stan Lee's writing style. I've been going back through the Spider-Man 2099 comics (which were written by Peter David, at least before everything went nuts at Marvel), and Spider-Man is really well done in that respect, it really draws you in and does a great job of building the characters, like the Spider-Man of 2099 (Miguel O'Hara)... he is very importantly not just a rehash of Peter Parker's character, sure he does the wisecracks and whatnot like PP does, but the writing in 2099 really does a great job of building this character so that you kind of understand why he is the way he is, like his sensitive, jealous, and slightly gullible younger brother Gabriel, his abusive father, and mother that lives in a mental asylum, and his oppressive job working as a researcher for the Alchemax Corporation . You understand why Miguel is the way he is because (aside from the superpowers, of course) he's a very believable, well-rounded character, in love with technology and science, and slightly misanthropic and untrusting of others.
Anyway, getting back to what I was saying. I got through Spider-Man 2099 all the way up to the first crossover story arc "The Fall of the Hammer," and I decided to stop there, so that I could read the other 2099 comics to get up to speed. Part two of "The Fall of the Hammer" is in Ravage 2099 #15. So, I decided to read that one next. Now, Ravage was a completely new character in the 2099 Universe, created and written by Stan Lee. Imagine the excitement. Stan Lee created some of the greatest superheroes of the entire comic universe, and I had never read Ravage the first time when I was younger. So, I didn't know what to expect. Needless to say, I was terribly disappointed. Every character in that comic is completely wooden, and so stereotypical of characters they represent. It's sad really. It's as if since Stan Lee started long ago, the rest of the comics world evolved beyond him while he stood still. Ravage is first of all an predictable, wooden stereotypical hero, like I said. To put this in perspective, let me pull out Ravage 2099 #3 and type up the first page of the comic: "Street fight! Violence, rage, and sudden death! Not uncommon in 2099! But this street fight is different! Its repurcussions will echo for years to come!" That's all you got!? Ugh. I'm sorry Stan, I respect what you've done in the past, but I just cannot believe how terrible this is. I decided to skip Ravage, and I moved on to Doom 2099, which I have to admit, is fucking incredible. It takes a little bit of knowledge of the character to understand his passion, but it's pulled off excellent. In this one, Doctor Doom (or is it? Scandalous!) materializes in Latveria to find his castle in ruins and Latveria under the rule of an oppressive cyborg name Tiger Wylde, and after a first unsuccessful battle, starts to pull together a team to take back his country. It's really great so far, and I really wish I would have read this one the first time when I was younger, too.