Stop N Swop's Eternal Mystery

I never liked this game.

There's something inherently mysterious about the Nintendo 64. Maybe it was because it was the first time I ever saw a game in full 3D. Maybe it was because so many games had tiny little secrets to fill up the extra space they hadn't planned on using. Or maybe it was because we owned at any one time, 3 N64 games and one of them was always Automobili Lamborgini. Probably the last one.

I was somewhere around 8 or 9 when I started to really get into the Nintendo 64, which is handy, because that's about when they started actually filling out their game library. (There were 9 US releases in 1996, the year the system came out...) I've said in other venues that I love older games because of the nostalgia that I felt, and the specifics of that nostalgia were the mystery of an unexplored world. Games like Link to the Past held my attention for so long because it seemed like there was always more to explore. By adding a new dimension to a game, my interest was exponentially peaked. Add on to the fact that I was fairly gullible and the internet was brand new in our house, I was able to extend the replay value of most games far beyond the normal time.


Here's something to consider, and something that I've had to face myself. There are no secrets in video games anymore. By a quick Google search or checking out GameFAQs, you can know every intimate detail of any game within a matter of days after the game's release. I was playing Ocarina of Time 3D on my nephew's 3DS (not owning one myself, mind you) and he gave me a few pointers on how to do some things. First I squelched my instinct to trump him. Yeah, I know that you have to shoot Gohoma with the slingshot. I've done it without a sword on my back! (Incidentally, I can't remember the last time I booted up OoT on the N64 without glitching away my sword...) He told me of a few secret places that, having owned this game for almost 15 years now I already knew. But it surprised me that he knew. He then explained to me that he saw it on Google...

This made me sad because his generation will never know of the wonders of finding secrets by yourself, by some douche-bag kid on the playground named R.J., or by sifting through billions of angelfire webpages to find them.

You asshole, R.J., you don't have ANY industry connections, do you?

I had extra hours of fun looking for cheats, secrets and glitches back when there was no certain, reliable source for game information. All while my brother was yelling at me because we had dial-up and he needed to make a phone call.

These were the codes for the unobtainable.

So, my friend's uncle works for Nintendo and he says that this is totally, real. In order to get the Triforce in Zelda, you have to play Saria's Song on the Fairy Ocarina 999 times and then get to Hyrule Castle by only doing backflips...

Codes like these were everywhere. Some of them, like the one mentioned above, were easily spotted as fake, even to a gullible 9 year old. (But, to my chagrin, I would for years claim that the Debug Code was a fake until PopFiction proved me wrong.) Sometimes they would offer something else, like a new sword, or a different color Epona. The stupidest one was a “secret ending” which more or less implied that Link and Zelda had sex. Which is rediculous, not because Nintendo would never allow something like that to be in one of their games, but because a princess and a common forest boy? Perish the thought!

Now, there was some logical reason that these codes existed, though even to me at 9, I thought was stretching logic a bit. First was that there was a Triforce shape on the Quest screen in the center of all the medalions. (They claimed that that would fill in). Second, in two out of 3 console Zelda games, the main point of the game was to obtain the Triforce. But most damning of all was the Unicorn Fountain picture and the Triforce from the treasure chest picture that Nintendo Power first displayed along with 98 other screenshots of the yet-unreleased Zelda 64. (Along with a beam-sword attack that would get dropped much to my disappointment.)

But while my search for new ways to lengthen my Zelda game play time took me to further horizons of stupidity than a 9 year old should be aware of, there was one game that intrigued my interest well into my adulthood: Banjo-Kazooie.

Her beak says no, but her eyes say yes...

Banjo-Kazooie, for those of you poor unfortunate souls who haven't played it, was the perfect platformer for the N64. The levels were varied enough, you had just the right amount of power-ups and attacks to fill out your roster, and there were just the right amount of collectibles. Something that Rare would take to extreme measures until they would parody it in the 360 game, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Plus, the songs are so catchy that even ponies can sing along.

Maybe if I smash my head against the ice for a few more hours...

About halfway through the game, you came to the obligatory snow level, which was Christmas themed. In a small cave at the back of the level was a tunnel that was blocked off by a wall of ice. Behind that wall was the mystical and fabled Ice Key. It would taunt you. Surely it was a puzzle. An enigma that you needed to solve. Let's see, there's fire in the cave, but I can't bring it over to melt the wall. Can I position Kazooie to shoot eggs at it? I can, with enough finagling, but they just bounce off. The variety of wall-breaking attacks in my arsenal either don't affect the wall or can't be attempted here. How the hell do I get that?!

Now, this was in a time when games were a lot more picky about space requirements. It didn't make sense for the game developers to include something and not make it usable or obtainable in the game. Or, at least, not for them to do that and then put it prominently on display somewhere in the game.

Of course, if you're a completionist like me and got all 100 Jiggies in the game, you were rewarded with something even more infuriating: A clip at the end of the game showing Banjo and Kazooie prancing tantilizingly close to the Ice Key and two large colored eggs. We were promised that they would be able to be collected in Banjo-Tooie, at which point seemed like a joke. Toting a sequel in a video game?! Now it's standard practice to turn any well-selling game into a trilogy. (Or, if you're Halo, into 6 games, a remake, and a new trilogy coming soon) But back then, to my juvenile mind, that seemed preposterous. That's like counting your chickens before they hatch. Sure, this game was fun, but there's no way that it was like Mario or Zelda. There was no guarantee that there would ever be a sequel.

Well, there was. It was even called Banjo-Tooie, as Rare looked at my little face and yelled, “SUCK IT!” (I'm still opposed to the name since it seems so glib.) I rented it and enjoyed it, and even was able to shoulder all the extra story and collectibles. All because I was promised that I could get the Ice Key and whatever the hell those eggs were. Well, I did and I didn't. I got the Ice Key, but not by entering Wozza's Cave from the front and passing that ice-door/wall thing as the clip from Banjo-Kazooie showed. I got it from a back door. I also got 4 eggs from little B-K N64 cartidges scuttling around the world. The unlockables for these were greatly disappointing. Don't get me wrong, I loved using Dragon Kazooie, but the rest of the unlockables weren't worth the wait. And even for a small child, I started to know what it felt like to have a game company lie to my face. (A feeling I would come to know very well)

I never ended up having to suck anything down.

Looking for relief and mollification that Rare had screwed the pooch on this one, I started to search for answers. My search would eventually lead me to the Rare Witch Project (now the much easier to type therwp.com). Here I found out that, just like everything else in Banjo-Kazooie, there was a code to unlock the Ice Key and six (WTF?) eggs in Banjo-Kazooie. My mind was blown, and being the skeptic to random codes I find online, I promptly rented the game and gave them a go. To my surprise they worked splendidly, but instead of satiating my curiosity, they only made me hungrier, a feat that 6 eggs has never once done in my life. (Four are usually my limit for breakfast at any time)

Suddenly, questions abounded. Why were there six eggs instead of the four that we saw in Banjo-Tooie? What was this mysterious Stop N Swop? And to what end or purpose were these originally planned for?
Now, only one of these has ever been answered satisfactorily. The Stop N Swop.

The original plan was to rely on the N64's RAM memory cache, which stayed active for about 40 seconds after the console was turned off. There's a patent made by Rare that details the idea of loading in a small bit of data into that residual RAM memory cache and keeping it active until the games were swapped out (I guess in Europe they spell it with an 'o') and the system started up again. The new data would trigger a flag in Banjo-Tooie which would unlock something and vice versa. Basically, linking the sequel to the prequel.
What happened (and is something that I might expand on in a later date) was that Nintendo was getting ready to get all the systems capable to run RAND-NET, something that would be crucial for the Disk Drive add-on that would be coming out shortly. (Lol) Part of this was to make the systems with more efficient RAM caches. The new version of N64 only had residual RAM of about 3 seconds, which more or less shot that plan to hell. (Also, it would eventually require more RAM to run the Disk Drive which is why we got the Expansion Pak) So, panicking, Rare decided to boldly pretend like this is what they had planned all along.

"See? The Ice Key and the *cough* four eggs!"

Now, as for their original plans, they're open to speculation. There is still rampant speculation as to whether or not there is anything that the eggs and Ice Key do in Banjo-Kazooie at all, other than open a new window in the pause menu. Of course, Rare, being classy, broke down shortly after the release of Banjo-Tooie and explained to the fans exactly what was going on...

Abstract math is hard...

Or, rather, they kept making cryptic statements on their Q&A section of their official webpage for years and goaded us even more by making a cryptic diagram on a blackboard in Grabbed by the Ghoulies depicting an Key + four eggs with ?'s in them = ???
Technically, the Ice Key and eggs were used in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts by linking it up with Banjo-Kazooie from the Xbox LIVE Arcade, you could unlock awesome powerups. And by awesome, I mean stupid decorations that no one could possibly want.

To beat the game, you must beat two other games twice.

The mystery goes deeper with the the eggs and Ice Key when running through snippets of code of Donkey Kong 64, hackers found the phrase “ICE KEY” hidden in the code, possibly meaning that there was going to be some connectivity with Donkey Kong 64 at some stage, too. Knowing the completion requirements for Donkey Kong 64, it was likely that you had to stop playing DK and finish Banjo-Kazooie 100% to continue in your progress.

I think at some point, Rare realized that their biggest mistake was trying to act like it never existed. By treating the Stop N Swop items like they weren't a thing, they dug themselves a deeper hole that made it less and less likely that the fans could be satiated by the real purposes of the eggs and Ice Key. No doubt that the powerups that you get in Banjo-Tooie were actually the powerups that you were intended to get with Stop N Swop, along with Bottle's Revenge, a dummied-out two-player co-op mode of Tooie. But as time went on it, and speculation became deeper and deeper, it was less likely that saying that what you got was the plan all along was going to go over well with the fans who meticulously pondered over every line of code in the original game.

To this day, though, I can't help but be awed by the sheer amount of intrigue and mystery that I felt when I first discovered that the eggs and Ice Key were obtainable in Banjo-Kazooie. It sparked a love of the strange in video games. Things that make me hiss at the screen, “Why do you even exist?!” things like blackjack at the ending screen of Final Fantasy IX. The Video Relaxant item in Earthbound. Yoshi on top of the castle in Super Mario 64. (Pointless prize of 99 lives, after you've done everything you possibly could in the game) To me, it's like they act like a beam of light coming from the cracks of a closed door. Mysteries that could only be understood if you were in the production team. It's largely the reason I want to get into game design. I'll be on the other side of that door. I'll be the one creating the puzzles and meta-games for obsessive players like myself to ponder and lose sleep over. I'll also do my best to make sure that the prize for solving the mystery is better than what the prize usually is: the ability to make a forum post that raises a few eyebrows.

Grim Reaper's Game

We've all heard the term “Nintendo Hard”. If you haven't then you're probably at the wrong site. (Google can help you find more on whatever boring subjects you'd prefer to read about) Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm a sucker for old school games. Honestly, though, I'm not a fan of the difficulty. I find it amusing at best but if you've read my previous articles, you know that I cheat a lot when it comes to beating any game that so much as looks at me funny. I'm a strange hybrid of gamer that prefers the nostalgia of retro gaming but thoroughly enjoys the benefits of games that have a “very easy” difficulty setting that in no way effects the outcome of the game.

I played it on "Narrative" and got the same ending as everyone else...

In my last article, I mentioned something called “artificial difficulty”. Some of you might be wondering what that was. (When you weren't wondering why I was displaying some rather creepy childhood cartoon crushes that I may or may not still maintain)

In games, you really have two kinds of difficulty. Kinds that you can control and kinds that you can't. For example: Bongo Bongo in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might be one of the harder bosses in that game. The reason is because he does a lot of damage and is kind of a pain in the butt to actually damage. This is the first kind of difficulty. You're in control of you character and the challenge comes from controlling your character in such a way that you can be victorious. Link dodge-rolls, shoots arrows, and attacks disembodied hands in just the way that you're accustomed to and if you lose, despite how much you might be yelling at the television through bitter, bitter tears of frustration, you ultimately have to admit that it was your fault that you lost.

Really Navi?!!! I just have to look at it with the Eye of Truth?!!! WHY DON'T YOU TRY TO DO IT THEN!!!!

The second kind of difficulty is what we call artificial difficulty. This is difficulty that you can't really control. This comes from poor game design. At the risk of beating a dead horse to undeath, creating some horrible My Little Pony: Zombies are Magic situation that will slowly sweep the nation's young-adult demographic, I'm going to refer back to the Sonic 06 example in his infuriating “Let's Speed It Up” segments.

Sonic is rushing down a linear road, going insanely fast. The challenge in this part should be the dodging of enemies and obstacles while keeping your ring count high. Sonic should be under your reasonable control, allowing you to rely on your wits and reflexes to complete this part. Anyone who has played this game understands that this isn't the case. The best wits and reflexes are thrown out the window when the game designers decided to put the camera in front of you instead of behind you, forcing you to watch the harmless terror behind you (glorious to see, but ultimately, benign) and taking your eyes off of the cars and debris which might be immediately in front of you, causing you to spill rings. Or, even worse, a pit-fall which instantly punishes you, the player, for what was ultimately the creator's screw-up. You're no longer in control of your destiny. You're at the hands of fate. And Fate, as we can recall from Chrono Cross, is a complete bitch in video games.

You killed Robo!

This is the kind of rookie mistake that Nintendo Hard games made. You'd think that this kind of crap couldn't have lasted long. This week I'll be reviewing the most infuriating Artificial Difficulty situation that survived for far too long.

Instant Death

This one is on the list because instant death is kind of a disproportionate punishment in most situations. The best of the worst examples of NES Hard games that best demonstrate this is Battletoads. Show me a man who has beaten the game, and I'll show you a man who knows that there really isn't that much “battling” for the toads to do in that game.

ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit!

I recently had the pleasure to try and tackle this game with a close friend. This was the first time that I would ever regret choosing a multi-player option in a game that wasn't a Mario Party game. (Only really applies when your friend up and leaves mid-game, forcing you to either wait for him to get back or restart the punishment all over again.) Everyone important knows about the infamous “hoverbikes” portion that consist of level three. One hit and you have died. The obstacles come at you really really fast that you either need millisecond reaction time, or have the entire course cataloged into muscle memory. (Just knowing where shit's coming from isn't good enough for the Battletoads.)

I wanted to know what came after that level for so long. So, after using cheats, and then realizing that cheats wouldn't help, gratuitous use of save states finally allowed me to see the rest of the game. I should point out here that this is why I regret choosing 2 Player: if you die in 2-Player, both of you have to restart that portion. So, unless me and my friend Jack got so synchronized that we could pilot two EVAs to take down the seventh Angel, we were doomed to repeat and repeat until luck allowed us to both make the jumps.

Well, much to my dismay, level 3 wasn't just a poorly planned level in comparison to the rest of the game; it was an appetizer for things to come. Out of the 12 levels that we had completed so far, only 3 involved actual battling. The rest were platforming nightmares that required you to know what was going to happen. The slightest error would result in your untimely death and many curses of frustration to the health bar that hadn't been touched in the past four hours.

This is artificial difficulty since just because I touched a spike, I'm doomed to repeat the entire ordeal over again. There is no forgiveness for error. And considering that after level 3, about 90% of all the following stages would be made of spikes, gas traps, or crushing platforms that all resulted in death. The enemies were no threat in comparison. (In case you wondering, the rest of the levels were 5% benign platforms, 4% empty space, and 1% enemies that you could actually fight)

In the old NES Hard games, this was understandable, since a great deal of games were ports from arcade games, and the purpose of arcade games was to make you spend as many quarters as humanely possible. You only got that by high life-turnover. While it took game developers a little while to catch on to the fact that playing at a home console was completely different from playing in an arcade, they all finally figured out that players rarely wanted to dish out $60 to be punished. 

But it kept going...

While the Sonic games kept pitfalls (which have always been an instant-death scenario) alive and well, the problem got worse in the 3D games, since there were a near-infinite amount of opportunities to fall into a pit. Most of this was because of the fact that the levels needed to seem like they were open spaces, just like the old Sega Genesis games did. But, they can't actually be open, so they needed a happy-medium: lots of open space in the nether in which every level hung. This made it so you were actively punished for trying to go off the beaten path by instant-death.

But, since I've said enough about Sonic to last at least a month, I'll use the best example I've ever had with this particular game design error:

Parasite Eve.

Back when Square could crap out a battle-system and label it 'innovative'

While a majority of the game was pretty nice and interesting, allowing for proper difficulty for the controls at the time, there was one moment that was unforgivable: the ending.

After defeating the three phases of the end boss, it was reduced to some blue, watery-looking skeleton thingy. They talked vaguely about how it was still dangerous, but, I brazenly walked right up to it. I now had a gun that did 9999 damage per shot, and even if the magic, phlebotinum bullets couldn't be used, my gun had dealt pretty sick damage before anyways. I'd be fine... Except that when I touched the beast, it devoured me instantly.

This being a Square RPG, I had to start back at the previous save point, which would be right before the boss-fight. So, I laugh at myself and beat the boss again. This time I run into the ship I'm on and head straight for the phone, figuring that if I'm going to die, I might as well save right now so I don't have to keep fighting the boss again. The phone was dead, not allowing me to save. The sad side-effect of this was that the time I used to run to use the phone had allowed the beast to catch up to me. He caught me and killed me. Again.

Lame, right? Well, I could laboriously detail every encounter in the ending, but to make a long story a little shorter, I died 7 times before ever seeing the ending. The ending sequence required you to know exactly what to do (rig the ship to explode) which was kind of counter-intuitive to what you wanted to do (run away from the monster slowly getting faster behind you).

There are still examples of this in games now, but luckily, most games have gotten better at not instantly killing you. Even the Resident Evil games have gotten better at that, although they did it at the expense of losing the “Survival Horror” part of the genre and slowly turned it into “zombie action shooter”. Don't get me wrong, I still love the series (and the fact that I go to work every day with my Tri-Cell messenger bag should be evidence of that), but it felt more like survival horror when an encounter with three, slowly-shambling zombies scared the crap out of you because you only had, like, 5 bullets and a boss fight was coming up soon.

She's about to become one hell of a Jill sandwich...

Best Evasion

Zelda has always been good about this one. If you fall, you lose a heart. If you get crushed, you lose a heart. In fact, I've played almost every Zelda game and I can't think of many (if any) situations that will instantly kill you. The only one that comes to mind is waiting until day 4 in Majora's Mask, and considering that you had 3 days leading up to that, it's not like that was completely unavoidable...

Procrastination is like masturbation: in the end, you'll kill everyone with the moon.

 As far as most games nowadays go, however, we've gone in the complete opposite direction with this, and while that's mostly a good thing, it does however eliminate the excitement that we used to have from old games. Earlier today I beat Castlevania: Bloodlines and my heartrate dramatically increased when fighting Dracula at the end. Compare to last night when I beat Fallout New Vegas and casually mowed down all of Caesar's Legion while listening to episodes of Scrubs.

So, now we have an interesting dilemma where the problem is the opposite: we don't get punished enough for our mistakes. We simply have to reload from our last save point. And since a lot of games now allow you to save wherever you want to, we've made it that much easier to enable my cheating. 

The only game that retained unreasonable punishment as a feature would have to be Steel Battalion. The game forced you to restart the entire game if you died or retreated from your mission. This, in my eyes, is excusable since it was going the extra mile to establish it as a mech-warrior simulator, including simulating what dying in a mech would mean, assuming that you had a bunch of clones or were reincarnated again and again as a mech pilot.

Welcome to life human clone #224, please report to basic training.

The Best Quest

I'd like to start off my blog this week a day late and by saying that I finally found a piece to my Sega Genesis' AC-in port. I had ended up jerry-rigging the missing piece with a bent push-pin, but maybe I'll desolder everything again to have the intended part back in place... Meh...

When I was five or six, I got literally the best thing I've ever gotten out of a cereal box before. (The cereal in Cinnamon Life cereal box is usually the second best thing.) I happily tore into the box to find this:

A whopping 50 hours of AOL!

 A free video game. Now, this was back in 1996, so it was before any random company could afford to get a game that was a shameless rip-off of another game. (Now, I'm pretty sure that the entire online cereal industry thrives off it.) The game was none other than, Chex Quest!

For those of you who never had a chance to play this wonderful game, let me tell you: it's a kiddie version of Doom with more references to nutrition and breakfast than space marines and demonology. However, this wasn't some cobbled-together rip off of Doom. That would imply that the company, Digital Cafe, had tried to imitate Doom's engine. ID Software actually handed them the tools to make it. Or rather, they licensed the Doom engine to them. (This was back before it was freeware.)

The game itself is pretty much like a G-rated Doom. The demons are now a race of gooey, snot-like aliens called "Flemoids".

Seen here ominously advancing...

The kick-ass space marine is now a kick-ass Chex marine (or as best as I could figure.) And most of the violence has been "zorched" away with the zorcher. A magical teleporting weapon that would harmlessly transport the Flemoid back to its home world. (Or so the nice cereal scientist guy would have us believe.)

"The screaming is a side-effect of the Zorcher, I assure that the Flemoid feels no pain at all..."

The thing that never made sense about all of this was that your melee weapon was a spoon...

Spoons: Not just for gouging anymore!

The cynic in me loves the fact that literally within minutes of explaining that only Zorchers could work against the Flemoids, the game breaks its own continuity and establishes that a normal spoon has the power to banish aliens back to their own world. While the cynic sneers at that, the nerd in me just giggles in excitement to what replaces the chainsaw weapon:

My friends, I introduce, the Boost-Spork. Possibly the best weapon to ever grace a computer screen. Never go head to head with a man who attaches a high-power motor to a spork.

The game is pretty straightforward. Scientists are trapped in a laboratory that happens to be where the aliens attack. Only one man (cereal) has the testicular fortitude (nutritional fortitude) to go in and kick some ass (zorch some ass).

This game is, was, and might forever be my favorite FPS.

The game was about five levels long, though in actuality, almost all of Doom was included in the files. Apparently, by using some cheat codes, you can access some of the Doom levels, but since the creators didn't use all of the sprites, many enemies were left blank. This is an aesthetic improvement from most of the enemies in Doom, but turns what was already a nightmarish game into full-on nightmare fuel, since many of the stronger enemies are completely invisible.

Even more fun can be had by swapping out the WAD files from the actual Doom, allowing you to play through Chex Quest as though it were other Doom levels, or even more fun, play through some Doom levels as though they were Chex Quest.

The game had something of a sequel-hook to get you involved with those 50 free hours of AOL: a sequel, Chex Quest 2 could be downloaded at a website that you could get the address to if you finished the game. Since this was right around the time most kids were actually getting dial-up in the home (if they were lucky) it was hard for me at the time to have to sit out the sequel for almost a full decade. Finally, after I reached an age where I could appreciate nostalgia, I started to look for the sequel only to find myself even more pleasantly surprised:

Finish the Fight!

 Charles Jacobi and Scott Holman, two people who worked on the original two games, decided to finish the originally planned trilogy on their own, much to my delight. In 2008, more than 10 years after the game came free in a breakfast cereal, the saga finally ended... Or did it?

Yes. Yes it did.

Looking back on things, the only problem I have with the series is that the enemies grow only when fed nutritious substances. This is horrifying to a bunch of vitamin-enriched "crunchy even in milk" beings. But, the problem is that everybody grows on nutritious substances. Even the Chex-Man himself!
While it makes sense that the bad guys would have a reason to target a nutrition base on Bazoik (hell, who wouldn't?) it also means that the very kids who are playing the game are essentially committing mass murder in their breakfast bowls every morning. My goal every morning is more or less the same as the Flemoids. I show up unexpectedly on the poor citizens of Pantria (The Pantry planet, close cousin to Food-Cupboardia), ransack their nutrition lab (which was cleverly defended with a plastic shielding underneath their hard "cardboardium" force fields) and devour them by the spoonful. Or handful if I'm going more for a snack than a legit meal.

Also, the problem with the weapons needs to be addressed, and kind of already has been in the sequels. The intro says that they recalibrate their Zorchers to tap into their teleportation matrix. You basically teleport the Flemoids back to their home planet. Presumably so they can regroup and tell everyone about the delicious sources of food they'd found. The sequels follow the same vein as the Doom games. You saved the far-away world only to realize that you forgot to lock the front door to your own world! At the end of the third game, you defeat the Lord of Flemoids. And by defeat, I mean to say, you just sent him back home. The same place that he had no qualms of leaving to invade your sorry-ass planet. There's nothing to stop him from doing it again, only this time he knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

Also, what the hell are Zorchers?

"What the hell is in my hand?"

The Zorchers are already commonplace things if we take the intro movie at face value. They aren't created specifically to fight off the aliens, they're just recalibrated. There are only a few options. One is that they serve some other purpose than self-defense, which would just be silly. The picture above shows a quad-barreled zorcher for rapid zorching. They come in bigger and heftier sizes. According to Urban Dictionary, the only other non-military use for a zorcher would be, apparently, "to suck the fart out of someone's butt" which I personally find quite distasteful in all senses of the word.

The only other options are all very militarized in nature. Honestly, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that cereal people would happen to have some terrible enemies and would need to defend themselves while blowing up their enemies simultaneously. But there's honestly no way to apply any serious thought to that notion without being overcome by hilarity when you think of the terrible and devastating wars that the Chexonians presumably fought.

"My Crunchling forces will destroy your cities and drink the blood of your people! As part of a complete and balanced breakfast."

 Even stranger is the fact that, although this is a civilian base on Bazoik, constructed only to grow things like fruits and vegetables and study nutrition, there seems to be some really heavy artillery sitting around. Like, smear the room with whatever used to be standing in it kind of artillery. Suddenly, it also strikes me as odd that they'd go all the way to a deserted planet to study mundane things like nutrition. I think that whatever the Chexonians were doing on Bazoik, the nutrition lab was a cover-up for insane military testing. Stuff like testing bio-chemical agents on cute puppies and/or building teleporters into Hell.

Hell-Portals aren't going to build themselves!

Or maybe they were too distracted by the rampant nutrition on their home-planet and needed to get away from it all so they could finally study it without moral qualms of breeding Chex with Kix (which would taste fantastic by the way...)

In the end, the games are pretty solid to play through, if not a little dated. The original version had an interesting glitch where if you tried to play the game on the hardest difficulty, you'd be hard-pressed to beat it, since the last room has so many enemies spawned that it will invariably crash the game if you actually look at them. The new version runs off of the ZDoom engine which allows for free Y-axis movement, so aiming up and jumping are allowed. You can find the entire trilogy here.

May the... Chex... be with... Aw, screw it, there's no way you can make a phrase that doesn't sound horrible...

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.