I really should update this place more often. I say that all the time, and then proceed to not do it. I did make a stab at it early this morning, but I was ill prepared for that entry and caught off guard by having discovered at the last moment I had missed my deadline by one day. I’ll explain shortly.
In any event, since the last (visible) update the summer has flown by, even if I can’t remember a single thing about the past three months. It all sort of runs together, and while I’m sure I’ll look back on this summer and will be able to choose the highlights, at this point it’s sort of a homogeneous wash. But so what if nothing meteoric happened—it’s not like I didn’t have fun with some stuff. I’ve decided to categorize the general developments under separate headings.
Computer
Around the beginning of June I experienced a seemingly arranged series of failures which resulted in my main production desktop becoming unbootable. I was able to extract all my data using the Live CD function of the Ubuntu Linux distro, at which point I decided to use the crisis to my benefit and install a third hard drive I had lying around (I believe I wrote about this once before). A complete system reimage and case swap later, and the old girl is purring along nicely.
I also moved the system from my bedroom to the storage room in which I’m actually spending the summer (the unbearable heat in my bedroom is bad for electronics, after all). I took my keyboard and recording hardware as well, so I’ve basically got my entire studio up there with me. Related to the computer issues, my keyboard is on the fritz. Notes sustain randomly or not at all, without any input from the pedal (which happens even when the pedal itself is disconnected). Additionally, I get random delay effects when using the internal sounds, which are likely read as extra MIDI data by Cubase. Usually turning the ‘board on and off many times in succession will get it working right for a little while, but then it goes back out of whack. I have no idea what happened, though I suspect a power surge. As long as I can get it working long enough for a single recording session, it’s not the end of the world.
Music
I’ve recorded several tracks with my newly-transplanted equipment. In the first instance, I added a second verse to a song I’d actually first come up with last summer. Bizarrely, it still lacks a chorus—I like the melody so much I don’t want to just throw anything into the chorus slot. Whatever I ultimately write needs to do the A-section justice, and it’s a tough act to follow.
Additionally, I also entered into the Microsoft Bing Jingle contest. Basically, contestants had to write and perform (on camera) a short original song about Microsoft’s new search engine—the resultant videos were to then be posted on YouTube and unleashed upon the general public. I was several days late entering the contest, though I still amassed a respectable view total. The number of views inexplicably increased almost four-fold after the contest ended, which tells me the video was featured in at least one article about the competition’s conclusion.
Anyway, here it is:
Anybody who likes the tune (which I must admit I wrote in less than half an hour) can download a high quality MP3 version here. Anybody here on YouTube traffic most likely knows all about all this, as you most likely linked here from the very video above. If that’s the case, I’d like you to know that I do have a small library of legitimate material, though it’s in various stages of incompleteness and it will likely be a while before any of it sees the light of day (or public scrutiny, in other words). If I gain a moderate following, I may feel inclined to post some of it for your general perusal.
I’m late! I missed it by a day! On August 9th, 2008, I began a course of events which would ultimately lead me to get a Nintendo Wii, which finally happened last week, almost a year later. It seemed pretty innocuous at first, as do all such turning points. In fact, I began by doing nothing different from what I had done several times before last summer, which was cruising YouTube in the early morning hours in a bid to ameliorate my chronic late-summer boredom. What follows is a story about everything that happened during and after the two-day period in which I was inculcated into the world of Mario.
YouTube is a truly wondrous place. They’ve got everything there. From having created an account in autumn 2006 I had come quite a ways, and YouTube had become an almost daily fixture for me. So it’s no surprise that, on several occasions last summer, YT was my method of choice to escape boredom. I had discovered the Flea Market Montgomery phenomenon several weeks before the day this story begins, and that proved quite entertaining. So it was with the hopes of finding something similarly iconic that I began combing the ‘Tube with the spontaneous query “stupid commercials.” I found some, all right, and from there I followed the Related Videos column through stupid video game commercials, to something that caught my eye: a Mario Kart 64 video.
This reminded me of something I had witnessed the previous summer: while I was helping a friend’s relatives move out of their house, their kids decided to set up an old Nintendo 64 console, and the game they chose was MK64. I remember laughing inwardly at the pitiful graphics—even with my limited (nonexistent) video game experience I could tell the graphics were horrible, and both the music and the character sounds struck me as not much better. It was one of those things I didn’t think much about at the time, but when I saw that YT video I was curious. I clicked on it. The poster had hacked the game to remove the collision detection from all the walls, as well as jacking up the speed. The result was an uncontrollable mess, which he made out to be the stuff of Mario Kart nightmares. I know what he’s talking about now, having had a few of those MK nightmares just recently.
Anyway, from there I kept consulting the Related Videos column, and I watched several cheat and hack videos, as well as a glitch from Mario Kart DS wherein none of the textures were drawn. One of the comments admonished, “You ran over Peach, jerk!” Knowing nothing about the Mario universe at the time (having never played a console game in my entire life up to this point), I had no idea whom this comment concerned. So I consulted Wikipedia, whereat I learned everything I ever wanted to know about Princess Peach.
Intrigued, I went back to YT and discovered something that called itself Mario Kart 64 Bloopers. I would eventually return to its poster’s channel (the infamous MarioMario54321) in the new year, but at the time the two videos of his I watched were a spring board to those of another account, whose lack of notoriety means I will not explicitly name it. It was this other series of videos through which I began my journey. He had an entire series of MK bloopers. I watched them and was surprised to find myself greatly entertained.
Checking out the rest of this fellow’s channel I saw he had even more of a different sort of blooper, using the game Super Mario 64. I began with his earliest videos and worked my way forward. The more I watched, the more entranced I became. This was something I had never seen before, and what I suppose really struck me was the creativity. This guy was using gameplay scenes from these two titles to tell original stories, with dialogue printed as subtitles. He also used isolated character voice samples and video game music, along with two of John “Scatman” Larkin’s most famous hits. I later discovered this was a meme: N64 games set to Scatman’s music.
I soaked it all up like a sponge, as though I had been waiting for over twenty years for something this engrossing. After a few less complex story arcs, he had posted several sweeping epics, which followed the more traditional Mario storyline: Princess Peach had been captured by Bowser, and Mario of course had to go save her. But he changed it up with different characters (achieved through palette shifts) and transportation scenes from MK64, as well as changes to the worlds themselves achieved through hacks. I became very excited when he went through most of the game worlds during one of these epics; it was like watching a very interesting adventure program, and I was fascinated with the different levels and wanted to see more.
There was one other interesting development: somewhere along the line I developed a crush on Princess Peach. It was the biggest thrill when I got to finally see her pixelated, low-polygon rendering at the end of SM64. This may have been the strangest facet of the whole thing, but the general picture was I was hooked on this stuff. To this day I can’t put my finger on what made the whole thing so interesting, but as time went on I learned more about the Mario universe and the games themselves. Interestingly, the idea of actually owning and playing them never crossed my mind for a long time; I was content to just watch other people play them and tell stories through gameplay scenes. There are thousands of such bloopers videos on YouTube, which became important when, about four months later, the fellow whose videos had started it all for me deleted his account.
I shopped around for a while for a replacement and, on a whim, tried to find those original bloopers videos I had watched before moving on to the ones that had gotten axed. That’s how I rediscovered MarioMario54321. He’s quite well known for his video selection, which is quite extensive. Through his videos I was able to find almost all the music the other fellow had used, which was a big help. Not to mention that the videos themselves, while quite different than the very first examples I had seen, were enormously entertaining.
Around this time I also got the bug to get a console of my own, if only to try and make up for lost time. I originally looked at a Nintendo DS, but ultimately decided on a Wii. The Virtual Console was what sold it for me—with this, I would actually be able to purchase those games I had watched countless others play yet had never played myself. My birthday is at the end of July, so in order to keep from actually having to buy this myself I had to wait until then to receive it as a gift. I wrote an entry about this in January, and I mentioned the idea multiple times since then, culminating in the prospect of a Wii Party (which never happened).
In the mean time, I had my friend bring over his real N64 (which I had never known he had), along with both MK64 and SM64. It may well rank as one of the most profound disappointments in all my life when I actually tried playing those games. True, it was the first time I had ever played, but I still expected it to be slightly more fun than that. As time went on, I got better at Mario Kart (and all but gave up on SM64). The problem was that, without persistent access to the console and games, there was no time I could practice except each Saturday when my friend visited. I also became somewhat bored with the whole phenomenon, which is what usually happens with over-saturation. I turned my attention to Mario Kart Wii, one of the games I hoped to one day own. I discovered one fellow who frequently posts Mario Kart videos and who had dozens devoted to the Wii version. I was particularly happy when he raced as Peach (though I resented the dumb blonde voice that was given her in the later Mario games), though the other blonde princess, Rosalina, was pretty cool to watch as well.
By this point, I was intimately acquainted with the Mario universe, thanks to YouTube and Wikipedia. I had also been following several gaming websites for any interesting news, and I had read a lot of game reviews over at Metacritic. I was essentially planning out my approach, so that when I finally made the plunge into the world of console gaming, I would know everything I could learn that didn’t require actually playing the games. And it paid off. I got my Wii a week ago, and the two games I got were Mario Kart Wii and Super Mario Galaxy. I’m quite good at the former already, though I’m still pitiful at platforming in the latter. Having Galaxy helped me unlock Rosalina in MK Wii, though, on account of a little interactivity Nintendo coded between the two games: if you have a Galaxy save file, all you need to do is race 50 times in MK Wii and you are given Rosalina as a “gift.” None of this was any surprise to me, and my “research” ahead of time was what determined which games I would get first. Rosalina is awesome! She’s my favorite racing character, though nobody will ever eclipse my fondness for Princess Peach.
And so now we come to today. As I said, I’m a day late. I started all this on August 9th last year, though I did watch more of the videos the second night as well. Fittingly, while spending the night at my friend’s house we played Mario Kart Wii on what was the true one-year anniversary of my first involvement in the Mario universe. Several days ago I purchased MK64 and SM64 from the Virtual Console, and earlier today—in honor of my year of Mario—I played both these games, which were together the genesis of what was a completely unexpected change of direction in my life. I went from being indifferent and even disdainful toward console gaming to owning a game console, all because of a random search of YouTube, the love of a fictional princess, and a desire to relive the childhood I never had, as it were. I toast Mario and Peach and the whole Mushroom Kingdom for bringing such joy to my life, and may they bring much more joy to it in the years to come.