I thought I filled this hole with cement! I mean, yes, evidently I was wrong, but seriously! Do you know what it’s like getting caught in the same impromptu trap twice?! Call it frustrating, aggravating, humiliating, and just not very pretty. I was just catching up on some reading, set the book down to close the window, and BAM! The floor boards on an axle give way beneath my less-than-stellar weight.

There’s quite a bit of regret spinning through my mind right now. If I had gotten that window closed, I wouldn’t be up to my mustache in snow right now. There also wouldn’t be a squirrel in my refrigerator eating the pie I baked last night. It was even this awesome recipe for apple rhubarb pie I found on http://apatheticthursday.net! Lousy squirrel can’t appreciate the skill and effort that went into constructing it. Bothers me more than the snow. What’s a squirrel doing out and about when it’s snowing, anyway?

I wish I had that book back, too. I was just working my way up to the climactic scene! It was bothering me for a little while, but after I’ve been away from it, the ending is starting to become pretty clear to me. I’ve got it narrowed down to three possibilities. I figure that Professor Peru is going to come forward and admit to murdering the ambassador. If that doesn’t happen, that means the zoo keeper has been running an illegal brewery under the mountain, which will turn out to have been a land fill long ago. If neither of those cases are true, we get a big reality change, because that means the entire middle chronicle was really a dream imposed by the warlock, who turns out to the real deal after all. The only problem then is that I have no idea what kind of clue the arrow with a stone head found in the graveyard was. It’s pretty bizarre, but there isn’t much left that can surprise me.

*Sigh.*

You know, I’m remembering something out of Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga right now. It’s RPG-style, and they have standard statistics like HP, Attack power, Defense, and all that good stuff. Then there’s the odd-ball statistic: ‘Stache. That’s right, as you go, you can improve your mustaches. There’s even a nice coffee shop—Star Beans—where you can buy coffee that improves your mustache further. Actually, there were going to be guest appearances there by folks like Link and Star Fox and Wario and Captain Olimar, but they got cut. Link was even going to give you the Triforce, but they renamed it the “Great Force” instead. My point in all this is that a frozen mustache probably isn’t that high up there as far as statistics go.

Thinking back, I know I saw a cement truck come by and start pouring cement. Now I’m afraid to find out where it ended up. Next time I’ll make sure it goes to the right place. The only thing I wonder is how I’m going to get out of here and fill the basement up without Mario finding out. This time he’s only gone for as long as it takes to come back with a newspaper. This time, even if I slip through, though, the trampoline I used to get out is gone. This is going to take some serious brain power…

If anyone has an idea they can get to me before Mario gets back, I’m all ears.

I’m not going to lie, it’s really boring. It’s really, really boring.

It’s like a billion freaking years of nothing! I dare you to try it. I dare you to try it for 10 minutes. Go, grab an egg timer, turn off the TV, turn off your music, dim your monitor, set the timer for 10 minutes, close your eyes and wait. Wait until the timer goes off.

I’ll wait for you.

How was that? Did you last the whole 10 minutes? Did it seem like a year? Did you fall asleep? I challenge anyone to sleep for a year solid.

I just hope someone finds me soon. This got old a few months ago.

I don’t know how these incidents keep happening to me, but it’s ridiculous! They give me most everything except what I really want. I reach into the take-out bag, I find a bun slathered with ketchup and mustard—and pickles!—but no meat! Add to that an empty holder for fries, an empty box for onion rings, a cup with a straw and no soda or ice, and two stacks of napkins and you’ve got one insulting “meal”. I ask for popcorn with no butter at the movies along with a bunch of candy, and they give me a bucket of butter with no popcorn. As I sat down, before I realized what was in the bucket, I dropped all my candy in it. That was disappointing. I’ve even ordered a game online listed as having “no instruction book”. What did I get? I got an instruction book with no game! That’s the last time I order from “the_purple_prankster94″.

This time I just got a plain old mess. Inside my cardboard box was pepperoni, extra cheese, garlic, onions, green peppers, red peppers, chili peppers, fries, black olives, and anchovies (notice anything?). But no pizza! No tomato sauce, no normal cheese, nothing you could call pizza! And I hate to tell you how I found out what was in there. I carried the box to my kitchen upside down. It opened and my order fell to the floor _right_ where I was stepping. Seriously, my foot was coming down and gravity somehow caused that mess to win the race to the floor. Naturally, I slipped and landed in it on my back. Of course, there was no single solid mass holding everything together or anything, so I had to scrape everything I could salvage off the floor and onto my plate.

You can imagine how unpleasant it is trying to eat a pile of toppings without a solid pizza for a foundation. I tried adding some oregano part way through, and then I just dumped some tomato sauce all over it. I also broke out some of the vintage soda-lemonade mixture I’ve been experimenting with. None of this made up for the lack of actual pizza. They even got mud in it somehow! I couldn’t let it go to waste, of course, but it was still a rather dissatisfying thing to have for dinner. Next time you get a pizza (or anything, for that matter) that’s been put together properly, be sure to be a little extra thankful.

Let me tell you, snot and armor don’t mix well. When I sneeze inside my helmet there is snot everywhere. First off, I can’t see out my visor anymore. Hopefully I don’t need to see where I’m going or even where I’m shooting. Because it’s all a blur. That’s not all though. It gets worse. The snot is traveling so fast when it hits the visor it bounces back and instantly my eyes, my mouth and my ears are all full of snot which then oozes down my body and eventually pools on my feet.

I can’t tell you how good a nice hot shower feels after spending a day drenched in your own snot.

If anyone knows a good way kick a cold, drop me a line. I’m really tired of lubricating my suit with mucus.

 ”But the themes are very, very dark, not like sunny old Super Mario.”

Dark, you accuse me of having a “dark” theme? Excuse me, the entire HUMAN RACE IS BEING DESTROYED BY ENERGY SUCKING ALIENS!!!! That’ll make a great cheerful story. Yeah, “sunny old Super Mario,” unlike Mr. Mario, I’m not in the habit of spending my weekend golfing with beast who keeps steeling the princess. I don’t have a trust complex. I know who my enemies are and I kill them.

But what really irks me is this whole “dark” theme. What’s so dark about Super Metroid? You think “A Link to the Past” wasn’t dark? I thought the whole “Dark World” thing was really obvious. Fortunately for Mr. Linky, energy stealing aliens didn’t come and KILL EVERYONE OFF BEFORE HE GOT THERE!!! It’s not like I wanted to be stranded on a lone planet with millions of creatures trying to kill me.

Sure, I can see how the new Metroid Prime 2: Echos and maybe Prime 3: Corruption have a “darker” theme, but why not pick on Twilight Princess then? If that isn’t dark, I don’t know what is. I mean, it’s TWILIGHT for goodness sake.

“It didn’t have any dialog, and the puzzles had no real clues for you to figure them out.”

Super Metroid is totally a run around and shoot things game, there was nothing to figure out, unless you kept changing the controls and couldn’t remember what button did what. What more of a plot do you need? I mean, MegaMan just rand around shooting things for seemingly no good reason. Kirby goes around shoving everything he sets eyes on into his mouth (without washing it off first) what kind of plot is that? And I suppose you think that two monkeys can really take out an overweight crocodile by jumping on it’s head? I could have taken him out with 3 super misles. (I actually did once… that was… kinda fun.

Anyway, I think maybe you should actually play some of these games before you give your crappy opinion on them. Thanks for nothing.

I certainly didn’t like the SNES when it came out, believing that they were going completely radical with their fancy new graphics and such. Of course I was right; look at what that started. In retrospect, though, it’s definitely easier to enjoy than those new three dimensional puzzles they call games, because most of what’s there is pretty similar to what came before it. But didn’t it seem like a rip-off to you when they tried selling old games with new graphics? What could be more useless? (For more ranting, visit me in the original Donkey Kong Country game. And don’t press “B”.)

The Super Nintendo was an era of wonderful 2D games wrapped in the fruits of artists who were paid too much for their time. Perhaps the pinnacle of this was the Donkey Kong Country series. (Hey, don’t think I’m biased here; ever seen my instruction booklet comments for these games?) Instead of the redundancy of listing three titles from one series, I thought I’d just lump them together as one. How does that sound? So, my list for this system in no particular order is: Donkey Kong Country Series, Super Mario World, Kirby Super Star, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. In a trend similar to N64 games, I see a lot of titles with “Super” in them.

Let’s dodge a few mines real quick, shall we? “Evil old Cranky left out the Metroid game!” I know, I know, I’m a criminal. I’ll touch on that one later, I promise. It came down to choosing between that and the Zelda title. Which would you have preferred? “No fair! Mario got two places!” Yeah, and that son o’ mine got three. And two of them were games he barely bothered to appear in. Let’s face it—those boys know what they’re doing. I’m not looking for the most famous characters ever (who happen to be there); I’m looking for fun content. And I understand there’s this flame war going on about that psycho-whatzit kid and his Earthbound game. I’m not taking sides here, but something that influenced me was that Diddy can be completely excited about playing it when he starts, and by the time he beats that final bad thing, he’s sick of it. Personally I like a game that tells you when you’ve been playing too long and includes brushing your teeth as beneficial in battle. That’s all I’ll say on it.

So, where should we start? Let’s get this one out of the way: my son’s Donkey Kong Country series. The first one is perhaps the most bare to some of you, because there wasn’t anything to collect over time except bananas. It had hidden bonus areas though, which was a necessary staple of this game that I don’t believe I’ve seen anything quite like in other titles. But the bosses were lame. The unnecessary sequels are where things get interesting. They’ve got stronger, more interesting bosses, coins from the bonus rooms to help you reach the surprise final boss, and money you can collect and give me! I still think Dixie should’ve been the damsel in distress. …I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s my favorite thing they did in this series. On the File Select screen for Donkey Kong Country 3, press: L R R L R R L R L R. You will be prompted to enter a cheat. Enter the cheat TUFST (pronounced “toughest”). Select a new game, finish it, and find everything. When you see something like this on-line, it usually looks like a hoax. Take my word for it—this is genuine. I won’t spoil what happens.

Super Mario World introduced Yoshi and his ridiculously large tongue. It also gave several worlds two ways out. Yes sometimes you would go in circles this way, but there was a lot to find even without collectables. If a world was red on the map, it had two ways out. Remember that. It won’t help you with haunted houses, but remember it anyway. Then there was that Star Road, and then the secret within the Star Road. Things get real confusing after that; complete it at your own risk! Oh, and you think I’m getting forgetful in my old age? Seems Bowser’s children were forgotten after this one. Ah! And here’s a good one! When you go to face that final boss whose name escapes me at the moment, the place was ominously called “Front Door”. It was also a clue about the “Back Door” you could find. Not too shabby, eh?

Kirby Super Star was eight (or nine) games in one. I think this was brilliant. I only had to learn the controls one time (just one!), and I could play almost anything they threw at me. Two player simultaneous compatibility means more fun for more people. There was even an appearance from that Meta Knight fella folks seem to like. This idea is certainly a better alternative to trying to sell all those games individually!

So… We’re back to Zelda, are we? Well, this one was definitely easier to understand than that original Legend of Zelda, so you wimps had it easy. You could even buy tips to figure it out if those blinking marks on your map weren’t enough. And fairies healed you seven hearts—not eight. Seven makes a bit more sense, don’t you think? The bosses? Simple, but not easy. That’s what I think they should be.

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Super Mario RPG, but it was made in part by the same folks as Final Fantasy. Oh, yeah, I didn’t put that one Final Fantasy game in here (is it III or is it VI?!) because it just takes too long to get strong enough to conquer the challenges. It’s not bad besides that. But this game was sweet and simple—a good first RPG for anyone. It’s not like the Paper Mario series either, where 8 HP is a big deal. It’s an all-fire RPG with elements of Mario added in. But really, is there ANY good way to earn the Super Jacket? (If you’ve never tried it, you might not want to bother…)

Okay, okay, before anyone gets a good chance to organize the torches. Why didn’t Super Metroid make it? It didn’t have any dialog, and the puzzles had no real clues for you to figure them out. Sound pretty good so far right? Well, this game was the “Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels” for the Super Nintendo, and by that I mean the hardest game on the console. People loved how long it was, too. But the themes are very, very dark, not like sunny old Super Mario. I’m not going to forgive them for their animation when you run out of health, either. Don’t people abuse this sort of thing enough, already? Oh, yeah, and that final boss (which took me ages to reach) has one of the worst attacks I’ve ever seen. If you’re already too low on health, you’re already screwed. It’s also unavoidable, so there’s nothing you can do about it. It does phenomenal damage which I’m pretty sure the boss healed with. An attack this powerful isn’t bad by itself… as long as there’s something you can DO about it! Did I mention that it felt like it was missing a plot where one should have been? And not a title being to be found, either. Still, if you’re looking for a big, long challenge, you might just like it.

Well, I hope I’ve whet your appetite a bit, so try some of these not-so-oldies and give your hands a break from those less-than-intuitive broken-feeling control sticks. I think the Super Nintendo is the best place to find a good side-scroller, too. The NES has the widest variety of games I know about, so I’ll need some time for that one, but tune in next week, when I cover the best five games that have come out for the Gamecube!

I’m going to name what I believe are the best five N64 games out there, and what some of you might think are the best five ever. Now I’m aware there’s a number of those awful and confusing shooting games that are supposed to make you feel like you’re seeing it through your “hero’s” eyes, but luckily for me the opinions on those are so scattered it’s not worth trying to name one. The N64 was also incongruously short-changed when it came to role-playing games, which also were supposed to make you feel like you were whatever character you were playing, and none of them were any good anyway, so there aren’t any nominations there. And of course, there was no Metroid game, so that’s definitely not going to come back to bother me. Now I’m still going with the older the game the better, so that leaves us with this list of five: Super Mario 64, Star Fox 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64 (not necessarily in that order). Nothing quite like this set has come before or since.

Now before I continue, let me attempt to quell the rioters out there. You say there were sequels to these games? Not the same sequels that were originally planned. Ever heard of the Disk Drive? Went over like a lead balloon in Japan and was never released in the U.S. Worst mistake they ever made. Ah, but more on that in a minute. You say these games aren’t perfect? Well, no one ever accused them of it! A game’s only as good as the folks who program it. So, all you want, you can say to yourself, “You should be able to save!”, “Cranky should have kept his rocking chair!”, and “Luigi should be easier to find!” (Star Fox 64, Donkey Kong 64, and Banjo-Kazooie, respectively). I’m betting you’re still pretty satisfied with these games. “Oh, Cranky! Craaanky! What about Super Smash Brothers?” It has a sequel that most folks like better, and possibly another one coming out in February. …What’s that you say? Oh. Apparently due to some bubble-gum related incident, it’s coming out in March. At any rate, it might be the best N64 game ever, but it’s been trumped and not many folks play it as often as these ones.

But anyway, my list stands with those five mediocre games as the best this old new system has to offer. Now then, let me give you your opinion and tell you exactly what it is you like about these games so much. Super Mario 64 was the first game of its kind, and they must have done something right, because even if you’ve finished it with all those stars, you can just start it up, play, and have fun. I’d bet it’s because the levels are very large, but also easy to navigate quickly. Because of this, you don’t need an objective always in front of you. You can just make it up and play. Any game that captures this aspect means virtually endless hours of play. Banjo-Kazooie had a similar play style, although when you got the collectable things, you couldn’t set them back up. Still, it was just quick-paced enough that you could start over whenever you wanted. Plus, they built cheats right in, so you don’t have to pull out some third party piece of hardware when you get stuck! And the board game at the end was marvelous, revolutionary even! Donkey Kong 64 falls in this category too, although the levels were perhaps a touch more confined when it comes to navigation. Still, we gave you so much to find, so many critters to bash, so many mini-games, and even an appearance from me AND a Donkey Kong arcade game, you can’t help but love it. You could also earn cheats here, not by finding everything, but just by finding all those fairies. Unfortunately I broke my system trying to install that expansion thing they gave you with it. Very annoying.

Star Fox 64 and Zelda are in their own categories, I suppose. Let’s start with the easy one. Star Fox 64 defined replay value. The instruction book told you what you need to do to unlock harder paths, but your first time through you probably weren’t good enough to do it. Even so, you were able to finish the game, weren’t you? As you get better, the challenges become easier, and soon enough you’re setting up your own confusing matrix of stages you’ll be visiting. Plus, you get to bill the fella who hired you at the end. And they don’t expect you to read anything—they read it all for you!

So… Zelda, huh? Well, I’ll tell you this: as far as advertising VS delivery goes, this is the only Zelda game they’ve done right. Sure, they announced working on it two years early, but they didn’t really start advertising it until one year before its release. After this one it’s always three years in advance, so long you’ve lost interest by the time it comes out, and then it doesn’t have all the thrill of the original. What made Ocarina of Time so good? It couldn’t have been the fairy… Sure wasn’t the owl… Let’s see here—dungeons, easy to navigate world maps, side quests, mini-bosses, gear that tends to be used in only one or two places, a story (sort of), the fact that you could go anywhere you wanted again—hmm, this all looks like standard stuff. Wait, could it be? Yes! This game didn’t follow these standards, it set them! Not only that, but it made playing through all of it fun! Of course it had its own quirks, too. Surely you’ve all seen giant versions of those sand worm things, but how about a giant nighttime skeleton kid? Or a giant crow? They’re in there. The one thing I will complain about is I nearly doubled my age trying to get all those gold spiders (which turned out not to be a rip-off after all!).

Now let me ask you this: Wouldn’t you be excited if you heard—now or back then—that Super Mario 64 II was in the works? Or another Zelda like that one? That’s what the Disk Drive was going to accomplish. It would attach to the bottom, and you would put a game in the N64 and another cartridge (different shape) in the Disk Drive. The result would be a new game using the first one as a sort of basis. That means all the old worlds are there, but anything could be changed about them, and all kinds of new ones could be there too. If my studies are correct, they’d be able to release these just 2 years after the original, instead of going crazy, redesigning the entire thing, and releasing their “sequel” five years later. Two years is enough time for you to finish the game, get excited about the advertising, and get “all revved up” to play it when it comes out.

They actually finished the Zelda sequel, but never released it. That is, not until that “Master Quest” bonus disc thing. And not on the U.S. version. You heard me: somewhere right now, a little Japanese kid is pointing at the U.S. on a map and laughing his head off playing the real Master Quest. What kind of changes might there be? They didn’t tell me. But looking at the evidence, I’d say you get that Triforce, melt that frozen kingdom, go on some kind of mask side quest, and… something to do with Arwings.

Banjo-Tooie was going to be a Disk Drive game too. The version they finally settled on doesn’t quite make use of the super secret collectables of Banjo-Kazooie the way the original would have, but overall it’s not terribly disappointing. A Disk Drive version would mean you could go to the old worlds, collect the things, do new stuff, then go to the new part of the game and use the things. The sequel that exists is perhaps not as much fun as the original, but it does deserve an honorable mention here.

Those old games are looking pretty appealing right now, huh?

Join me next week, when I visit the top five Super Nintendo games!

What is with you people today!?!?! No one is ever going to win this race if one of you doesn’t turn around!! You’ve been at this for 30 minutes now!!! I don’t know if you haven noticed, but this is really pointless! This is never going to end!!! Someone just please turn around!

*sigh*

Why doesn’t anyone listen to me!?!?!?

Fine, you know what? If you want to play this same race for the rest of your life, traveling in a very small blue and red oval for years, that’s your own call. But I’m leaving! Yeah, you heard me. I’m out of here. You can keep track of your own laps, because I certainly have better things to do with my time. So take that!

I’ve suggested Earthbound Cubed, Earthbound Advance, Earthbound DS and Earthbound Wii. Each time Nintendo nods politely, like a grown up listening to a little child tell a story and tells me that they plan to save a spot for me in Smash Bros. I’ve even approached other companies to try to pitch Earthbound PSP and Earthbound 360. Even Dreamcast turned me down.

I say it’s time to chop off Mario and Zelda and Metroid and let some of the small little buds grow up and have a franchise.

However, one can only assume that they have the intelligence of a vegetable when you realize you have to pluck the things out of the ground before they can do anything and after you pluck them out they proceed to bash their heads against every solid object in sight. It’s no surprise that they all have applesauce for brains.

When scrounging around for pellets of compressed dehydrated Pikmin, or whatever they are, one might hope that the Pikmin would have a certain affinity or attraction to pellets of their own color. You know, the blue ones pick up the blue pellet and the red ones theirs, etc. This is sadly, never the case. If I find that I have a yellow pellet to take back to an onion, it will inevitably be taken by a blue or red Pikmin despite the fact I only called yellow ones to follow me. On the off chance it is grabbed by a yellow Pikmin, a blue one will undoubtably try to help out and in their wisdom they will carry it to the red onion.

Blue Pikmin are my favorite. I say this because you can take them anywhere you want without much worry. True, you must be careful of fire-ish things, but those are usually fairly easy to avoid. It’s true, red Pikmin are nice because they are a bit stronger, but bashing their heads against walls all day does something to their brains. It gives them a forgetfulness that is usually found in various species of canine. Just as a dog will forget everything it’s ever learned if it picks up the scent of a rabbit, one sight of an enemy and the red Pikmin will gleefully chase it into the water and promptly drown.  Yellow Pikmin, on the other hand are good for two things: blowing up large quantities of Pikmin and I don’t remember what the second thing was. Oh yes, blowing up themselves.

I may seem a bit harsh on the poor little critters, but trust me. If I didn’t have to babysit them all day long I could have escaped from the planet in under 10 days. Less then a week even! If they would only learn, just a little bit… just a tiny bit, I could simply set up chore lists for them to accomplish and have a set of each of them working all day at several landing sites and they could bring the pieces and set them right where I land my ship and I could go around and collect ship parts all day. Sadly, Pikmin do not learn. Not even a little bit. They are as stupid on day 30 as they are on day 1. I tried to teach them. I showed them examples. I did similar tasks with them over and over and over again. Each time they approached the ordeal as if it were an entirely new experience for them.

It’s hard to believe I survived 30 days with those creatures. It’s maddening, trying work with them. I think in 30 days I would be much more likely to die of a nervous breakdown then being exposed to Oxygen. Hopefully I’ll never have the chance to find out, right?