Favorite Video Game Supporting Character

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and will be writing out entries, hopefully I can get all thirty days without any breaks, and if I manage to do that (since August has 31 days) I will think of an additional entry to write about.  I have done a 30-day challenge before, it for movies, but that was a while back, feel free to read those too if you like.

            Today is day 6 and the topic is “Best Video Game Supporting Character”.

            I am going to do the thing where I pick two characters I like for entirely different reasons to illustrate how broad a topic this is.  And because I play by my own rules.  I am a total rebel. A rebel with a blog.  Also, there is only so many ways to say a character is strong.  It is like that expression, “All happy families are happy in the same way, but all unhappy families have their own reasons.”  Good characters are typically good for the same reason, they work well with the protagonist on both a narrative level and (in games) mechanically.  I am going to start out with a rebuttal from yesterday with a character from “Mass Effect”.

            “Forgive the insubordination, but this old friend has an order for you,” he said with a sly grin.  “Go out there and give them hell.  You were born to do this.”  In the “Mass Effect” series a race of giant omnicidal sentient starships called Reapers are trying to destroy sentient life and civilization in the galaxy, they have done so in the past many times.  Garrus Vakarian is an ex-cop turned member of your starship crew, tasked to help you save the galaxy, and he is a badass.  Garrus is an astute, sniper, dinosaur man alien, who is funny, noble, loyal, and gets shit done.

Shepard: I couldn't do this without you Garrus.
Garrus: Sure you could.  Not as stylishly of course.

            The only time interacting with him isn’t solid comedy gold or some of the best comradery encouragement is when he is making sure the ship’s guns are so calibrated that they could shoot individual trees on distant planets.  I cannot emphasize how often I kept him in my party just to hear his one liners.  I have no complaints about him and watching his greatest hits via youtube clips is fun as hell.  Like I said, it is hard to bang on about positive things, so now I move to a character that is… Different.

            “Here we go.”  From the complete opposite end of the spectrum comes a guy that is as cowardly on the outside as he is brave on the inside.  Brave enough to face danger for the sake of his friends and the brother that will forever over shadow him.  Luigi, everyone’s second favorite plumber who fights magic killer turtles with the power of mushrooms.

"Just putting this out there, anybody else want to do some shrooms?

            While some might point out that Luigi is frequently a protagonist in his own games I must point out that he is a supporting player in (or even completely missing from) more games in the mushroom kingdom than just about anyone else.  He appeared in the manual for “Mario RPG” just to tell you he wasn’t in the game, and I can’t think of a single adventure in which he was the star that didn’t also have Mario in it (to put that in perspective, I think the new Toad video game doesn’t have Mario; Toad got a standalone title before Luigi).

It's like when they write in a strange scene with a video recording of a character, just so an actor gets his contractual episode appearance, even though it stands out like a sore thumb.

            However, I would like to point out that Luigi has loads more character than Mario, being fearful of the dangerous situations he is in and acting heroically in spite of that fear is already more personality than anything Mario has going for him.  There is also his unlockable presence in “Super Smash Brothers” which is best characterized as “Strange bordering on experimental”, his greatest power in “Brawl” was to dance to a psychedelic melody that put nearby opponents in a stupor.  What even is that?

I’ll tell you what it is, a perfect foil to all the other blandness of the various Mushroom Kingdom characters.  A juxtaposition that makes everything more interesting for its strange presence, strange in a world of magical killer turtles being battled with the power of mushrooms by plumbers and an army of fungus people… Sometimes in space, often in a lava castle.  It is a high bar to be the odd one out in that universe and for that Luigi deserves a medal.

I would also like to point out that originally this prompt was not “supporting character” just “character”, something I didn’t really like.  It is too broad, and again kind of redundant when you consider that a “Favorite Protagonist” is another prompt, so if someone liked Samus, and liked being Samus there is a bit of a crossover there.  I’m a very pedantic person sometimes.

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30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 23

            I decided to do the 30 day movie challenge as a blog series as it ties into my blog activities rather easily and I am once again not blogging my usual series with regularity in spite of saying that I would.

            Today is "A Movie that I watch when you're Sad".  Again, when I am mad or sad I do not hide from those feelings, I express them in writing, most of my mopey sad crap never sees the harsh light of the internet, but I still write it out and let my mind move past it.  So I don't watch a movie to escape a particular mood, so let me put out a movie that I am sad with (Not a movie that makes me sad, I already did that).  What have you got for me?  "Super Mario Bros"?  Wait, that was going to be tomorrow's entry about a movie that needs to be remade, why use it now?  You know what?  Let's just do this.

The creator claims no drug influences.  All I know is that this shit be tripping balls.

            Mario and Luigi are gaming's biggest icons, recognizable throughout the United States and Japan for the last 20 years they have outlasted Sonic the Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot as their parent companies' mascot.  And with a color scheme of red and blue, Mario joins the prominent super heroes of Optimus Prime, Spider-man, and Superman, to insure that pallet of color is the color of incorruptible good... Though considering how much crap has been made about each of those characters that is in one sense not true.  Take for instance "Super Mario Bros."

What a piece of shit.

            This movie, did nothing right.  And by nothing, I mean nothing.  Bad cast, art direction, bad music, bad plot, bad interpretation of the source material's mythology.  There is nothing to like or enjoy about this disgusting travesty of a film.  I would rather watch "Twilight", or "The Happening"  because at the very least I feel those movies are true to what the creators of them envisioned... They envisioned crap, but it was at the very least their crap.

Just in this image, take a guess at what anything in this is.  And I'll spot you Dennis Hopper.

            Okay, so the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, didn't kill the dinosaurs, instead it pushed them into a bleak alternate dimension where they evolved into humans, they use machines that de-evolve and super-evolve people into either doofish giant minions or super smart agents... None of this was in the game.  The rightful king of the world was de-evolved into fungus and is still sentient and crawling all over the world.  Princess Daisy (Not Princess Peach or Toadstool mind you, the established characters) has been hiding in our earth and has a bit of the meteor that if inserted into the meteor will merge the alternate earths, she doesn't know that she is from the alternate world.  Mario and Luigi get pulled into this by trying to save Daisy from a kidnapping by super-evolved agents.  So far, in this paragraph, the only thing from the games that are in this movie, are Mario and Luigi... Wrap your head around that.

You remember this from one of the 10,000 games, cartoons, or toys right?  No?  Cause it didn't fucking EXIST!

            Also I need to point out: de-evolve and super-evolve aren't things.  You can't be de-evolved into a monkey, or super-evolved into a super human, evolution doesn't work that way, this movie can't even get its sci-fi correct.  Why not just call it mutate?  You know, like with ooze in the Ninja Turtles, but instead use magic, which was established in the video games.  Maybe mutate mushrooms and turtles into monsters to fight Mario and Luigi after they fall into a magic kingdom of mushroom people hidden under New York?  Then you could have Princess Peach be there a lost girl who was adopted by the mushroom people after she was being chased by King Koopa, a dragon wizard that is menacing the toadstool kingdom just for the hell of it, and he lives in a castle surrounded by lava.  I just wrote a better setting than they did, and they could make it animated rather than live action, thus skipping the need to find actors who could pull off the rolls or compromise the art style.  It should be aimed at kids anyway.

Wipe those smiles off your faces you... You know what, you guys are actors and you have done enough good things to warrant a pass on this... But John Leguizamo still must answer for participating in "The Happening" and "Spawn".

Added August 8th, 2011:
To be fair and have a rebuttal (and I disagree with this guy on absolutely everything he is saying) I would offer this short video review by "Good Bad Flicks" on this film. It is worth watching just for the huge amount of history and behind the scenes stuff the guy has on the production of the movie which I find really cool.