How to (Not) Spend Your Afternoon

So, it's Wednesday already, and I had no article for the week. I woke up to a disheartening phone call regarding a financial situation which started the day off just absolutely peachy.

Now, when deciding what game to write about, I usually choose one that I had noticed being terrible before hand and hadn't actually played all the way through. This time, I figured that I could kill two birds with one stone and eliminate a terrible game that's on my "haven't beaten" list of games I actually own.

Unfortunately, that game happened to be this:

Gravity is still just a theory.

 What brave person decided to mix the words "entertainment" and "education" into the bastard-word (bastord) "edutainment" was probably thinking something along the lines of an interactive museum display on dinosaurs where the dinosaurs come to life or something. Not a slow slog through the world of basic geography. The fact that you play as Luigi was probably supposed to be a selling point, but it would end up haunting his career until the ghosts of his dead popularity would chip in and buy him a mansion to pay him back.

This week, on Cribs...

The story is simple: Mario slips through some sort of inter dimensional portal (cleverly illustrated as a large gaping pit) and ends up in Antarctica where he sees Luigi already waiting for him with Yoshi. What ensues is illustrated below.

Bowser has gotten smarter and started to make "I Wanna Be The Guy"-esque traps to capture Mario outside of his Earth-side base. In a stunning move of brotherly love and sheer stupidity, Luigi enters the castle (that could be littered with even worse traps, like falling cherries or giant Mike Tysons) and tells the dinosaur that can eat anything to wait outside. Not only is that stupid, considering that Yoshi might be able to just gorge himself on enemies that Luigi might face, but it's also dickish behavior since Yoshi, being a dinosaur, is likely cold-blooded, and Luigi is basically telling him to freeze to death.

Well, Luigi enters the castle of doom and destruction. Traps waiting in every floor tile, an army of Koopa Troopas waiting to eviscerate him, and explosively violent Bob-Ombs and Chain-Chomps to completely obliterate Luigi at every turn!

Or, maybe a hallway with five doors... Uh... Evil, sinister doors that are the portal to a hellish landscape made up of suffering and sin! Pain and-

Oh... It's just Rome... I, uh... huh... Really? Nothing about endless torment? Well, at least there's a Koopa Troopa ready to tear into Luigi! He'd better be careful, or else-

Damn it!
Yep. Edutainment means no game overs. That Koopa just passed Luigi like anyone else you meet in Rome. Right, so after wandering around a city map that rivals Grand Theft Auto IV in accuracy

It's so life-like!

You discover that Bowser's insidious plan is to steal national landmarks... For some unexplored reason. Of course, the Koopas have yet to bring the artifacts back to Bowser, presumably because they're just as lost in the city streets as you tend to be. Jumping on the Koopas will make em pop like you did the spiral jump from Super Mario World. Three out of all of those Koopas have the artifacts on them. You'll recognize them by the way that you bounce after landing on them.

And by the way they explode.

I almost wish I were making that up. Hitting the right Koopa Troopa is one of the few moments that you feel anything similar to enjoyment. One will shoot off like a rocket, another will crack and crumble, and my favorite will explode with a hilariously large explosion. (It was hard to get a good screen cap of that, but the explosion gets much larger than that.)

A small white baggie on the ground in Italy... Yeah, that seems legit...

For example, that bag in front of Luigi there contains the Sistene Chapel roof. Not joking. The whole damn roof from the famous Vatican Building is located inside that small pouch 3/4 the size of Luigi's head. Being the good guy that he is, Luigi will bring it back to its rightful location and they'll be overjoyed to have their national treasure back in safe hands.

Actually, the nice lady at the booth will assume that the ceiling that you're packing around is a fake and demand that you prove its authenticity by answering a few questions about its history. What's that? You come from a magical land of talking mushrooms and dinosaur dictators? Well... Here's a pamphlet with all the information you'll need to answer my questions.

Okay, this is a different pamphlet...

Basically, any shmuck with this pamphlet is prepared to answer her questions. The funnier thing about this premise is the rewards offered for returning the items. A gladiator's spear was another artifact here in Rome (You return it to the Colosseum). See how that's a $2000 reward for returning what is, essentially, just an old death tool? Luigi should be rolling in the cash, considering that for about half of that, Rome could probably just make an imitation that looks exactly like the one that was stolen. But, if that's the going price for an average run-of-the-mill gladitorial spear, you have to wonder what kind of cash the Vatican is willing to part for their precious Sistene Chapel ceiling. I mean, they can't have devout catholics and tourists getting rained on! (I also hear that there's a pretty cool looking piece of graffiti on the underside of the ceiling) I quick guess would be like, $350,000 at the bare minimum, right? Actually, they'll give you $900 for it. Apparently, "Mario Teaches Understanding Economic Value of Priceless Artifacts" was still in the works, because any person with half a brain would know that $900 is a raw deal

Well, now is a good a time as any to bring up your tools menu:

The artifacts show which artifacts you have collected. (Intuitive, I think) However, if you have more than one, you have to make sure you have the right one selected to be able to turn it in. Otherwise, the information lady will say, "Sorry, we're not looking for X" which I think shows an extraordinary amount of social disunity. I show up to the Colosseum and try and use the Sistene Chapel ceiling? They don't even say, "Sorry, we're looking for a spear, but you know who is missing a ceiling?" Nope, just like any tourist information lady, any words that come out of their mouth are just other ways of, "Shut the hell up and go away."

Computer there keeps track of information on the area you've discovered by talking to people or reading pamphlets. By talking to people, you can discern your location, which will allow you to call Yoshi!

He would walk five hundred miles, and he would walk five hundred more...

By getting on Yoshi, you can travel faster and scare away the Prickly Pete (I think that's their name) that blocks the blue exit pipe. You're supposed to figure out where you are based on what people say to you, but usually I could figure it out by trial and error. I see pagodas. Lots of them. And the music sounds Chinese. I must be in China. Out of the two or three locations in China, where could I be? Let's see, do I know of any artifacts or landmarks in Hong Kong? I do. Let's try there.

After returning the three artifacts, mounting Yoshi, and escaping back to the South Pole, you're rewarded with a score counter and a password. What the hell the score is for, I have no clue, since there's no way of seeing what your current score is...

I would go through the tedium of telling you all of the places that you could go, but I honestly can't remember. After the second level, I stopped reading pamphlets and cranked up the emulator speed to 200%. I used save states to breeze through the quizzes which were pointlessly easy anyways. After the first five levels, it was time for a boss fight!

"You know about geography and 3rd grade history?! Now you must... Watch me run around a little."

Of course, since they're about as dangerous as Koopas, the boss fights become a lot like trying to kill a cockroach. They scurry around at random, you're probably going to have to step on them more than once, and they're really not all that dangerous to you. The most you could say about the fight is that you'd be annoyed that you have to do it, if it weren't for the fact that this is the closest you're going to get to an action sequence in this game.

Honestly, I was extremely worried. Around world 3, I started freaking out a bit. There are seven Koopa Kids. That logically follows that there are seven worlds. Eight, even, since that's been a staple since the first Super Mario Bros. game. 7 koopa kids plus Bowser himself. At this point I started to panic and decided to use a password to skip to the end... Only to find out that world 3 is the last world, so I loaded up my save state and finished the game like normal.

Unfortunately, after beating the third (and last) Koopa Kid, the showdown with Bowser is... a little anti-climatic...

Derpiest Bowser I've ever seen.

Luigi flips a switch that releases Mario from prison. Bowser jumps down between them. Luigi flips the switch again and the ground opens up and Bowser falls into a gigantic cannon. (Which is funny, since you already returned the largest cannon in the world to its rightful place in Moscow) He's shot out of his castle and into the Antarctic tundra where he freezes to death and shatters. Roll credits.

I couldn't make this up if I tried....

So thus ended my foray into Mario is Missing. I can cross it off my list of games I own but haven't beaten. It's quite a great collectors item, though. But this wasn't my whole afternoon. I thought what would make a great article was to feature several edutainment games. The next on the list was

Luigi Teaches How to Steal Your Brother's Girlfriend (Alternate Title)

I had actually played this one back in fourth grade. I hunted it down at demu.org only to find out that I'd probably need a MSDOS emulator to run it. I figured, screw it. It would be too hard to take screen caps anyways. But there were lots of other edutainment games I'd played. I briefly thought of Mario's Time Machine

Only I remembered that the SNES version is so crazy that I don't even really know how to play it and the NES version is pretty lackluster.

So I moved on to another game that wasn't Mario related...

The answer... is relative. (YEAAHHHH!)

I have this one for the NES but figured that since I already had my SNES emulator on my compy, might as well play the better version. The game is pretty simple. You're a Time Agent trying to stop a series of thefts in the past. You go and collect clues and stuff while bouncing all around time to find the culprit. (Spoiler alert: It's probably NOT going to be Carmen Sandiego.)

I'm a sucker for anything time travel related (hence why I have tried to play Mario's Time Machine more than once, sadly, to no avail) and so I signed up.

Basically, that contract says I work for them, but they're not even going to notify next of kin if Carmen has a gun.

I'm given a Chronoskimmer (Which is not the title for the next Chrono Trigger game.) and am allotted 40 hours to find the culprit. Every action I do uses up a couple of those hours. Talking to people, checking out my informant, scanning for clues, searching the culprit database for relevant matches, and (confusingly enough) traveling through time. This is one thing that I never understand. Be it from Doctor Who or Back to the Future, they're always rushing around against the clock. YOU'VE GOT A TIME MACHINE!!! You literally have all the time in the world. What the hell is with the 40 hour time limit on catching the culprit if I can literally just go back in time and tell myself where he or she was and save myself the hassle of investigation? Well, my own version of it is called save states which allow me to know what my informant is going to say before I actually talk to him. So that's pretty sweet.

I'd played this quite a bit on the NES and there were a few things that bugged me. One, the evidence I collect is actually hearsay and rumors I pick up from random witnesses. It's stuff like, "He had blue eyes" or "His hair was a dark brown". The more random stuff was "His favorite artist was a Dutch post-impressionist". Sadly enough, in the evidence list you have spaces for sex, eye color, hair color, favorite author and favorite artist. I understand edutainment constraints, but I've never seen a CSI or Law and Order episode where some random guy on the street happened to know nothing about the crime or what the suspect looked like, but did know that Rudyard Kipling was his favorite author. Even in Case Closed where that might be the whole crux of the plot doesn't have that kind of craziness! And that's a show about a teenage genius who's shrunk down to the body of an 8 year old by some magic poison! (It's a great show, by the way.)

The second problem I have is with the time constraint. I remember being literally one step away from catching the culprit. I had the warrant ready and all I had to do was deploy the Catch-Bot to apprehend the criminal. I use the action to apprehend the guy and that uses up my last few hours. I'm called back by the Chief and am chewed out for letting the criminal get away. I'm in a time machine. The bad guy is right in front of me and I can't get a single hour more on my time limit?

All in all this game gives you a kind of boring frustration that you can't really froth about since it's exactly what you expect from an edutainment game. Words can't really describe the exact amount of disappointment and irritation I got from playing these games today, but luckily, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego can help me out:

Yep. It's kind of like that.