Most Epic Video Game Scene

            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 12 and the topic is “Most Epic Video Game Scene”.

            I suppose epic is a relative term, and in a medium that can deliver everything from playing cat and mouse with a serial killer to having a fleet of starships coming in like the cavalry to save the day there are a lot of different emotions that could qualify as epic.  I decided to go with the missions that finally made me really like a game that I had been very iffy on (story wise) till that point.  The game is “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”.  And the chapters are “Shock and Awe” and “Aftermath”.

            “Outlaw be advised,” came the voice over the radio.  “We have a situation here, Over.”  The United States is engaged in a city wide fire fight as marines are shuttled from position to position relieving advance teams and removing ground forces, you have just retrieved one such advance team when the radio call comes in, Seal Team 6 has located a nuclear device and removal of all forces to the east of the city is signaled.  While pulling out, Cobra Pilot takes damage to the tail blades and crashes, and your team requests to go in to rescue the pilot as small arms fire coming from the cockpit is visible.

            “Be advised,” said the voice on the radio.  “You will not be at a safe distance in the event that nuke goes off.  Do you understand?”

            “Roger that,” replies Outlaw.  “We know what we are getting into.”

            What commences is a big damn hero moment, with a clock ticking down, enemies on all sides, the player runs into the thick of things, pulls free the downed pilot carries them back to the chopper, and we all take off.  Rescue mission successful.

            Then it all turns to shit, as you begin to pull back to a safe range, the radio warning calls out a nuclear threat, and before they can even repeat the warning a mushroom cloud fills the sky, knocking your copter out of the air.  Thousands of marines dead, likely civilian casualties in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

Unfortunately, this set a precedence of doing more and more over the top controversy in the series.

            A chapter break occurs and when we come back we crawl out of the chopper ruins and only have time to look over the wasteland before our character succumbs to the radiation and drops dead.  This happens at the end of the first 3^rd of the game, in a series of games that I think has 7 entries at this point.  Somehow the end of the game puts on more tension and it is pretty awesome.

            There is an old quote by Alfred Hitchcock about the nature of suspense in film one that I feel applies in this instance in a very literal sense.

             “There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean. 

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!" 

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”

Isn't this the look of a man who would fit right into a conversation about "Call of Duty"?

            These missions have a literal bomb that could go off at any time with the action happening in that context.  This makes every second more tense and every step feels longer.  The most important part is the explosion itself (I can hear you saying “duh” thru the internet, don’t “duh” me).  The explosion is significant not only as set piece in the story and the means by which the game kills your character, but because it shows that this game is not afraid of this kind of death and destruction.

Later on in the narrative, shocking moments and real danger will happen, and when it is time for the protagonists to take action, they could thwart the deaths of countless people (Hint: you do, and it is great).

           

            Share your own thoughts on this in the comments.  I know I am not the only person out there who cares about video games, and I am sure many people disagree with me.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Saddest Video Game Moment

            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 11 and the topic is “Saddest Video Game Moment”.

            This review contains spoilers for the Tell Tale video game “The Walking Dead”.  As it is one of the most critically lauded games in… probably of all time.  And it is both accessible to non-game players and fans of the show, if you have not played the game YOU REALLY SHOULD.  I know it is zombies and that topic could not be more done to death if they tried.  And I know the TV show is crap, but the game is good.  Please play the game.

Seriously, the TV show is crap.

            Hell, people who have played the game already know what scene I am talking about and agreeing with me (unless they are one of those people who claim that the “Final Fantasy” series isn’t full of crap in which case you are wondering why I did not pick the scene in which an overly cheerful woman gets killed by what looks like the front man to an emo punk band).

            Let’s start with an overall review that I threw up on Steam just the other day.

This game represents a lot of things, all of them good.

1. The use of original characters in the same universe helps avoid comparisons to the critically acclaimed comic, feeling like growth of the work rather than a retread (the TV show is a retread and I would describe it as inexplicable popular).
2. This is the game license that allowed Telltale to break out, previously producing fun adventure games they are now producing the best ones to wide acclaim with more content set in comic and fantasy universe known to the general public.
3. This is one of the most accessible games out there.  Where the game play is less reliant on skill and more reliant on making decisions that impact the story.  There are still stakes, but since all of them are about the characters' feelings and relationships it ultimately has a deep impact.  Your input makes you feel responsible for ending and makes it hit harder.  And it is sad.

            If I were to log a complain it is this: it is a modern adventure game based more around story than gameplay, it is one step removed from a “Chose Your Own Adventure” novel and thus you will not get a lot of traditional gameplay elements based on reflexes and accuracy (when those elements do show up the controls are not built for them so you may lose those sections frustratingly).

I will also say that the chapters are not uniformly good, with chapter 3 being the weakest, reason being that in an episodic game, it is an episodic chapter, there is no unifying story that tie all its parts together.  Chapter 3 is like they took all the standalone episodes in which “things happen” and put them in one place, whereas all of the other chapters have one big thing happen in several smaller parts.  It is fine, I like it, but compared to 2 and 5 (my picks for the best episodes) it stands out as weak, you could almost skip it entirely because so much of what happens in it could just be shrugged off as, “I guess that happened off screen” like all of the things a person assumes happens off screen in a TV series between seasons.  Again, it is still good, just not as good.

            Now to talk about the ending and this is the last part at which you can avoid SPOILERS.

            You are Lee Everett, formally a teacher and a murderer, when the dead started to walk you did your best to secure the safety of yourself and in doing so discovered a child, Clementine.  Over the course of 5 chapters, or 10-12 hours of playing what is a very well written story of survivors in a zombie wasteland you arrive at the destination you have sought the whole game.  The young girl you have been protecting learns the ultimate fate of her parents and you succumb to the zombie virus.  There is a choice to be made 1) you can choose to have her put you out of your misery or 2) you can spare her the grim task of dispatching your ass before you are too far gone by having her leave you to become a walker.  Either way, the little girl is all alone and you are dead.

"Yeah, that sounds pretty sad."

Clementine has been the sad little innocent in the story that Lee has done his best to protect, but in the end she has to lose all the innocence you tried to let her keep.  And after your death she wanders into a world full of monsters, cannibals, and the bleak uncertainty of a civilization that has completely collapsed.  It is incredible.

            Share your own thoughts on this in the comments.  I know I am not the only person out there who cares about video games, and I am sure many people disagree with me.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Best Cut Scenes

            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 10 and the topic is “Best Video Game Cut Scenes”.

            I do not like cut scenes.  I hummed and pondered to see what I could make the winner by default and I just don’t like them.  Frequently they take the place of something that could be played, and more often than not it is (and I stress this point heavily) BAD DIALOGUE translated from something that probably sounded clever in Japanese.

            One of the reasons I liked “Bio Shock” so much is that it pushed all of the bullshit stuff into audio logs and left almost nothing regulated to cut scenes.  And by bullshit I mean this kind of writing: “I am just going to just tell you this because there is no way to weave this kind of information into the narrative.”

There is always another light house.

I get that it is difficult to explain certain things via just what is being played, people often tell each other stories about themselves to inform their decisions about things that might appear cryptic or insane to those around them.  Sometimes people just sit in a room and listen to someone talk about factoids and events from around the world just to be more informed in general.  We like it when people have been to school, read some books, and occasionally watch the news.

Novels and movies are “cut scenes” in a sense, but therein lies the problem I have: Games need to be Played.  Even if it is just me picking what my character says, or the ability to move around to see what is happening from another angle or to check out the work they did detailing the room (kind of like how in real life some people like to look around as they talk to someone, taking in details and using them to get a sense of the person they are talking to).

Maybe some cuts scenes can be seen as a breather from the action helping to establish a slight skip in time so that you know your character has not been fighting one long 20-hour fire fight.  But they can do that while still allowing the player to walk around.  Hell, “Doom” is nothing but a long fire fight with monsters, and there are no decisions made by the player except where to go in what order, but I think the longest cut scene in the whole thing is two minutes, and even that involves you walking down a hall.  There is also a kind of issue with what a cut scene is.

This image encapsulates 99% of this game.  Well, more like 90%, the other 9% is the music.

To me a cut scene is a game play break that inserts non-playable narrative elements.  But I have looked up lists of top cut scenes (because I really couldn’t think of anything and figured I could try and get a fresh perspective) and one of the all-time highest listed is the original opening cinematic for World of Warcraft, and another was for Civilization V.  I don’t even consider those cut scenes.  Those things are cut scenes in the way a trailer is a movie.  They have several scenes arranged to set a mood, to help get you in the mindset of what is happening.  There is no narrative element to those openings.  And what is more, some lists have ending credits and commercials as cut scenes.  What?  Guys, FMV music videos are not cut scenes.

So I guess that is where I am on this topic.  I heartily dislike “Final Fantasy” and that gets a stupid amount of good vibes from the online community (why is watching someone else dance a cut scene?  Seriously, I know the character is sending off souls/ghosts to the afterlife, but why is that in a game?  Why is anything in the Final Fantasy universe a game?  Because with the level of linear stuff and the small amount of gameplay they are almost films).

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Favorite Video Game Protagonist

            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 9 and the topic is “Favorite Protagonist”.

            This one was not hard, as this protagonist just keeps showing up in game after game that I love to play, that is Me, the nameless protagonist from a laundry list of roleplaying games.

            Try as I might to escape my own feelings when it comes to playing video games, that in real life I would not rob from or murder innocents, in video games I am always the good guy.  I have never blown up the settlement of Megaton, I never have beaten the game on behalf of Caesar, I have never played a bastard.  And that is because, in video games I have the power to be the sort of hero that I wish I could be in real life.  I can help everyone, and if they would just listen to me I would be willing to help even the maniacs and monsters of the world, but instead I just have to make sure they don’t hurt anyone else.

            This is why I am going to talk about “Fallout New Vegas” (I have done this 4 times in the past, but this is a new thing to talk about, so stick with me).  In FNV, you do not spend time with your spouse and child, you do not spend time with Dad in the Vault, you are not the chosen one, and you are not someone who matters.  You are a mail man who was shot and left for dead in the middle of nowhere.  It is thru your actions that you rise to power and make your way in the world.  You are beset on all sides by armies and megalomaniacs who want to shape the world to what they think it should be.  You actually shape it.  You can save the day, free the people, or trample the innocent.  It is a game in which I am making the decisions and the game in which I felt most like I was the person in the world.  This feeling is chiefly why I hated the “Lonesome Road” DLC so much, because it tries to retroactively give you a backstory and in my opinion it fails.

Also, they fixed almost every game mechanic issue I had with 3.  For instance the guns slowly falling apart as you use them, they don't fall apart nearly as fast.  In 3 guns appear to have been made out of graham cracker tied together with toilet paper.

            When I first got the game I found the level of choice to be too daunting, I did not want to commit to anything because I didn’t want to close off opportunities.  I missed out on companions because I (much like in life) am kind of a loner.  And ultimately picking a side wasn’t much of a choice at all.  There is only one ending I could think of that the game did not give me the option to choose, and I am fine with that, there are limits to any narrative, and even in a world in which my decisions matter I frequently can’t make it all go the way I want it to.  I make do.

            There are plenty of characters whose stories I like to go thru, Alan Wake, Leon Kennedy (that one time he fought C’thulhu monsters in Spain anyway), Lee Everett, or Captain Martin Walker, but even when I make decisions for them, none of them are me, and what I want most from video games is the freedom to be myself in a fantastic world, and I think most people would agree with that, hence why the idea of VR and Holodecks are so appealing in fiction.  We want to be in the story.  I want to be the protagonist of my own adventure.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Worst Video Game Antagonist

            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 8 and the topic is “Worst Antagonist”.

            Originally there was no blog entry of “Worst Antagonist”.  Instead there was “Favorite game couple”.  As I hate video game romances, just look back on Kaiden in the “Annoying Supporting Character” blog entry, I dropped the category (I thought about running down each of the love interests in “Zelda: Ocarina of Time,” but that just seemed dumb the more I thought about it, if you disagree however, and want to see me talk about the “Love Interests of Time” in the future, please leave a comment and I will consider it).

There is an episode of Extra Credits that points to a lot of the troubles I have with video game romance plot, like how they are usually just the beginnings of a relationship and are often pretty thin overall.

Anyway, I decided to instead do an opposite entry to yesterdays’ awesome bad guy to provide contrast and for me to bang on about something I dislike.

            “You do not even know our tongue, do you?” it said contemptuously.  “Such arrogance, to dare take for yourself the name of Dovah!”  Alduin joins a long line of all powerful beings who want to blow up the universe because… They’re just a bunch of dicks.  In the world of “Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” Alduin is a dragon god who will wake the dead dragons of old and then eat all of time to reboot the universe.  You are the Viking Messiah, who can eat the souls of dragons and save the universe by yelling so loud at people they burst into flame.

More than a little Satan imagery mixed into this.

            When I worked in retail I would sometimes leave out little doodles of a dragon bigger than earth with the stupid line of “Beware of Space Dragons”.  The obvious joke being that the dragon was so far beyond humans that to beware it is meaningless.  Alduin is a space Dragon that you beat up after yelling mean things at it.  That is not an exaggeration, some ghost Vikings are there to help, but you seriously just yell angrily in a made up language (there is another thing I can bitch about at a later date) and then you hit him with something until he “dies”.

            I say “dies” because Alduin, being a god will return to blow up the universe at some point down the line, so this is all just a delay tactic.  Let’s ignore all of that though.  Magic is silly, so yelling a spell and Viking ghosts are not that stupid in context, it is all fun.  What is stupid is how laid back Alduin is about the whole end of the universe thing.

I generally disliked fighting dragons in “Skyrim” so much so that I just figured I wouldn’t bother.  I never did any of the quests related to dragons, and thus never saw any of them.  None.  I played past level 40 beating the hell out of DLC vampires and Alduin never came a knocking.  I couldn’t have been happier.  Sure I lost my ability to light people on fire by yelling, but so what, I didn’t have any random roaring interrupting my mountain strolling.

Call me Emo, but I have always been more a fan of vampires in fantasy than dragons.
Vampires have more interesting politics and being that they were once humans but have draw backs and powers they lend themselves to more things thematically. 

            You might be saying, “It is an RPG, play how you want to play.”  And I like that, I like choice, but I also like the idea that if I make the wrong choice, say for instance not fighting the apocalyptic plague of dragons, that choice will result in the world ending.  Not what happens instead, which is nothing.

In“Majora’s Mask” if Link doesn’t stop the Skull Kid in 3 days, the moon slams into the planet and kills everyone, that is what is at stake, and it is always counting down.  Alduin by contrast is an unstoppable dragon god… except you win by default if you never bother to fight him at all.  You don’t see him, you don’t fight his minions, he just isn’t around.  Banished by the player not giving a “Frin Bahlaan Aaz” what his Dovaah ass is up to.  THAT IS A WEAK VILLAIN.

            I hate the common bad guy type of, “I am an asshole and am going to blow up the universe”.  I dislike Galactus, I dislike the Anti-Monitor, I even dislike super weapons that keep cropping up that have the same effect.  I hate the Star Killer Base from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” so much that I had to look up its boring ass name for this blog.  Motivation is important, I may not like the motivation, but base drives are weak, coupling those drives with great power is also WEAK, it is just weak that is loud and self-important.

I will point to another example, one that is very appropriate because “Skyrim” was very much inspired by it.  The reason so little time is spent with the Wight Walkers on “Game of Thrones” is because their zombie hordes have no motivation, they are just a great mysterious evil, a back drop in front of which Cersei, Ramsey, Little Finger, and all the other complex characters can scheme.  Nobody actually cares about WINTER; it is the fact that WINTER IS COMING that makes everything else meaningful.

            ALDUIN IS THE WINTER THAT NEVER COMES. 

"Winter is--"
"Yeah, we know."

            I should point out, that for all of its faults I have spent nearly 400 hours playing “Skyrim” at time of writing.  What it lacks in immediacy it makes up for in just being so expansive.  It is a very full and rich world loaded down with adventures.  I highly recommend it on that basis, and I do not recommend the main story at all (it is boring).

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Favorite Video Game Antagonist

            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 7 and the topic is “Favorite Video Game Antagonist”.

            I still feel unnerved hearing the voice of this character because in many ways it is the best example of bad research, toward a bad end, and without regard for those the research is done upon.

            “This was a triumph,” the voice said.  “I’m making a note here: Huge Success.”  Generally considered to be the biggest surprise hit and instant classic so far this century (not just in games, but I would argue fiction in general) “Portal” is the story of a young woman in a testing facility sent thru a series of tests to measure the effectiveness of a new gun that manipulates wormholes, but all the observation areas are empty, and the cold voice over the intercom is obviously that of a computer with a tenuous grip on how to speak to humans, only the promise of cake as a reward for surviving the gamut of deadly tests is what it offers in motivation.  And if there is anything you know from being on the internet it is this fucking meme: The Cake is a Lie.

I prefer savory dishes anyway.

            That voice is GLaDOS a giant supercomputer left in charge of the testing facility after some hinted at but never fully illuminated incident.  The manufacturing facilities at its disposal allow for the creation and placement of turrets, missile launchers, and neuro toxins.  GLaDOS’ nature is left more ambiguous until the second game, and while it does offer some more fleshing out of the insane and the evil business that led to the creation of such a device, I do not feel those explanations do anything to diminish the machine’s menace.  A bad beginning doesn’t make horrifying conduct toward your victims any less horrifying.

            Deeper than just the story, is the metaphor of what she represents, she is creating a game with the goal to kill the player thru endless trials, she is making the video game you are playing.  You are playing a game that HATES YOU.  And that is hilarious.

This game started out as a princess fleeing a demon.

            GLaDOS makes it onto a lot of lists on line and was #1 on two of the lists I found.  “Portal” is a game that managed to win the lottery for having a unique and amazing game mechanic in the portals themselves.  It had visual personality.  It had humor.  And it had GLaDOS as the antagonist.  It is a must play game.  If I were not already talking about it so much hear I would have put the game under the “A Game Everyone Should Play” blog entry coming later this month.  If you haven’t played it, keep in mind it is inexpensive on Steam, you can play thru the whole thing in about 4-6 hours, and if you like it the sequel is much larger in the range of 20-30 hours and has more of everything the first had to offer.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

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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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.