GoldbergBlog

Videogame Logic

So I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance this Saturday night because I’m such a cool, happening guy (just wait till I get my XBox 360; I’ll be spending my weekends playing Call of Duty with 12-year-olds who repeatedly call me a faggot, but the joke’s on them because I get off on having homosexual slurs hurled at me) and I reached this mission where I have to go get this airship back for a moogle. Okay, no problem. Oh, wait. One more thing: to get it, I have to fight in an area where unlike elsewhere in the game, if your characters die, they die for real (I guess they’re just knocked unconscious before or something). Good warning. But wait–I have to defeat the folks who stole the airship. So at the end of the battle, I realize I just murdered like four people for an airship. That’s unsettling.

And that’s videogame logic. It’s logic not decided so much to tell a story, but to allow for a fun game. But you just look at the world the wrong way and everything is ruined. Look at Mario: He has to go rescue the Princess from Bowser and traverse the Mushroom Kingdom to do so. Fair enough. But are all the enemies of the game part of Bowser’s army or are they just part of the natural ecosystem? Koopa Troopas are because if Bowser is King Koopa, it follows that the little turtles are his minions. But what about Goombas? Or Hammer Brothers? Or the ghosts? Yeah, all these characters will mess you up if they touch you, but in real life, so will bears, rattlesnakes, and other animals. But that doesn’t mean they’re out to get me. Do I really have to kill them all?

Of course, a lot clearly got lost in translation with Mario. Why is a plumber rescuing a princess from an giant turtle with spikes on his back? I feel like I’m missing a bit of exposition.

And yeah, a lot of people and a lot of games have gone back to try and fill in the gaps, but when you power up Super Mario Bros., you don’t get any of that. You don’t even really get what you’re going in the first place. You’re in a world full of bricks; coins are located around the world and if you get enough they give you the opportunity to come back from the dead and go back in time before you died; mushrooms make you larger and flowers make you shoot fireballs from your hands (as well as change the color of your clothes); and when you see little brown mushrooms with eyes walking towards you, you either have to jump on top of them or avoid them because if you touch them, you will leap off the screen and out of this reality. Is it just me or does anyone else think that when they decided to make this into a movie, they should have contacted David Lynch?

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