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EarthBound: All my friends are in there

Daniel J. Hogan — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:02:21 +0000

I decided to try another play-through blog series, and this time it is EarthBound for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (both of my readers will remember my previous adventure, Final Fantasy VII Revisited). I have many, many fond memories of EarthBound. Sure, the graphics may appear very dated by today’s standards, but I am certain the humor and story will hold up pretty well. I first heard about EarthBound via the gaming magazine Nintendo Power — I had a subscription back in those glory days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, all the way through Nintendo 64.

I remember ads for Earthbound in Nintendo Power really grabbing my attention, there was one ad which discussed the effect on players, as if it were a medical study of some sort. One “player” was quoted as saying “all of my friends are in there” (or something close to it) upon being forced to turn the game off.

For some reason, this bit of advertising worked on me. I had to play this game. Any game so addicting must be good, right? EarthBound was released in the states a month and change before my 14th birthday, so once my coffers were laden with birthday cash, I promptly bought the game.

EarthBound was unique in that it came packaged with a player’s guide (which I still have). I don’t know why this was the case, other than perhaps Nintendo felt EarthBound was such a quirky game, they needed to lure folks in with something. EarthBound certainly was quirky for an RPG: it took place in 1990s America, the main characters were all kids, and it was not the typical fantasy setting for most RPGs of the time (you use ATMs for money and could order a pizza delivery over the phone).

And all of these reasons were why I loved EarthBound from the instant I started playing. I grew attached to the four main characters: Ness, Paula, Jeff and Poo. Unlike some other RPGs, you only used these four characters throughout the entire game. Swapping out party members with different abilities gets old for me after awhile, which I talked about at length during my FFVII play-through:

Maybe that is why EarthBound is another of my all time favorite RPGs: you get a set amount of characters and each has their own special ability. It may seem pretty vanilla to some, but it does help one become more attached to the characters (maybe).

Yes, the graphics were “cutesy” and “cartoony,” but it only added to the charm. It certainly complimented the humor, which spent plenty of time poking fun at American culture. But, any game with a Blues Brothers-like band (The Runaway Five) as supporting characters will always have a special place in my heart.

On the game’s humor, from Wikipedia:

Described by Gamasutra as “a warped, confused tribute to American culture, designed by people who’ve only experienced the country through books and movies” the quirky humor of the game is one of the chief reasons for its popularity.

And this:

Amongst the ranks of absurd enemies in the game Ness must face down New Age Retro Hippies, Pogo Punks, Extra Cranky Ladies, and Big Piles of Puke throughout his quest. Much of the dialogue and plot of the game pokes fun at traditional RPG and sci-fi clichés. Even the advertising campaign played off of its humor, with the slogan “This game stinks”, referring to the scratch and sniff stickers that were included in the Player’s Guide.

I remember those scratch and sniff stickers — and some of the humor in the Player’s Guide was just as fun as the game. It made for an entertaining read.

I am ready — and after playing the super-complex Front Mission 4 over the summer, I am eager for a simpler game to occupy my chilly Autumn evenings. It is time for psychic powers, baseball bats, Apple Kid, and Mr. Saturn.

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Read Gavin Craig’s week 1 post
Read Andrew Simone’s week 1 post

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Daniel J. Hogan is the geek half of Ginger and the Geek. He is also a photoblogger and host of the Magic of Eyri Podcast. He loves that there Ninten-doo. Follow him on Twitter, @danieljhogan.

EarthBound: Starting blind

Gavin Craig — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:01:48 +0000

In what is becoming a familiar position for me, I’m coming into this hopelessly, happily blind. I’ve never played EarthBound before. I’ve heard rumors and conspiracy theories about this strange game from a strange series, most of which has never been available in the US. (Maybe I’ll talk about the strange theories later, but suffice it to say for now that they tell you a lot about um, someone’s psychological state at some point in the game’s creation without telling you anything at all about what to expect from the game.)

So unlike Final Fantasy VII — where I was coming in with a fairly broad knowledge of the Final Fantasy series, and the major plot points of the game itself, and even a couple of hours of direct exposure to Cloud’s first adventures in Midgar — I’m totally, totally cold here.

But I’m stoked. EarthBound is the kind of game that people talk about like having played it gives you access to some sort of club. And I’m about to join that club. Even better, everything I’ve heard about it is weird. It’s an RPG that makes fun of American culture and includes the ability to phone in for pizza. There’s time travel, I think, and you have to kill this alien thing and I have no idea how that fits together with being able to phone in an order for a pizza. My mind is blown and I haven’t even turned on the game yet.

And the second reason that I’m stoked — beyond joining some weird, cool, elite “I’ve played EarthBound” club — is that I’m diving into a true full-on SNES role-playing game. RPGs are my first video game love, and I missed the SNES generation of video games — which IGN.com recently declared to be the greatest system for playing RPGs ever — almost in its entirety. I never owned an SNES. I didn’t have any friends or close family who owned an SNES. I had an NES in grade school, and played the N64 plenty in college, but during my high school years, it was almost as if video games didn’t exist. It’s a strange vacuum in my childhood, and I’m looking forward to filling it.

So let the weirdness begin!

Next week: I hit the “on” button.

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Read Daniel J. Hogan’s week 1 post
Read Andrew Simone’s week 1 post

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

In control

Gavin Craig — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:00:51 +0000

Every gamer has a favorite controller, and in many ways, it is the controller that makes the console. This is never more clearly the case than for the Nintendo Wii, which has nowhere near the horsepower of either the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3, but has outsold both based on a revolutionary controller design.

NES controller
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My own first long-term experience with a console controller was with the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which was a Christmas present in 1987 or so. Looking back, it’s almost hard to imagine interacting with a video game based on nothing more than a direction pad and two buttons (three if you count the Start button’s almost universal “pause” function). In fact, Super Mario Brothers is nearly a one-button game, the B button only having a function when Mario has consumed a fire flower (or to make Mario run extra fast, point being that you can play the game without it).

SNES controller
While I never owned a Super Nintendo (SNES), I remember being in awe of its controller. Even more than the Mode 7 almost-3D graphics, the X and Y buttons seemed to open new worlds of possibility. I shuddered to imagine the wonderous games that could make use of the additional possible functions. (The L and R shoulder buttons didn’t even register for me at the time.)

Original PlayStation 1 controller
Intriguingly, I have a hard time reconciling my fondness for the SNES controller to my reaction, much later, to the Sony PlayStation (PS1). For a long time, I avoided the PlayStation and other consoles of its generation because I found the PS1’s controller overwhelming, especially after it added the two analog direction sticks to the single digital direction pad. Taking a look at the PS1 controller now, it’s clearly a direct and not-particularly-distant descendant of the SNES controller. (There’s an enlightening developmental tree available here.) A, B, X, and Y have been replaced with shapes on the buttons, and there are two sets of shoulder buttons instead of one, but otherwise the layout is identical. This is not coincidental. Sony had been working with Nintendo on a new disc-drive console to replace the SNES, but when Nintendo decided to develop the N64 instead, Sony decided to recoup their investment by putting out their own machine.

N64 controller
Which brings us to the N64, which was in all fairness probably more responsible than the PS1 for my feeling of inability to master the new generation of controllers. The N64 controller, especially compared to the original PS1 controller, is revolutionary. It has both a digital direction pad and an analog joystick. It has six (6!) buttons on its face, two shoulder buttons, and a trigger-style Z button underneath(!) the controller. It is also clearly designed for an alien. I do not now, nor have I ever known anyone with three hands, and so I have never been able to figure out why the controller has three handles. I spent many happy hours playing GoldenEye 007 with this cotroller, and almost nothing else.

GameCube controller
In 2004 I finally obtained my second video game console (after the NES back in 1987), a Nintendo GameCube. The GameCube was Nintendo’s follow-up to the N64, and whatever your complaints with the system itself, the controller took the N64’s innovations and perfected them. The third handle is gone. The four confusing C buttons have become a single analog stick. It’s comfortable in the hand, and most importantly every button feels different. I cannot overemphasize this. I still get lost from time to time on my PS3 controller, even though its layout is nearly identical to the PS2 and PS1’s DualShock controller. On the GameCube controller, there’s no mistaking the differently-sized A and B buttons, and the X and Y (still in roughly the same spot as they were on the SNES controller) are a different shape entirely. It’s not pretty, but if I may steal a phrase from an excellent visual history of the Nintendo controller: the negative space created by a human hand gripping something is ugly. Controllers designed to fit in this shape kick ass. The wireless version of the GameCube controller, the WaveBird, adds a bit of bulk for the batteries, but remains my all-time favorite controller. I still use it whenever I can with my Wii.

DualShock 3 = yes

Xbox 360 controller = no
This, of course, is the logical end of the evolution I want to trace, but it clearly isn’t the end of the story. While the WaveBird is my favorite controller, I spend far more time using my PS3’s DualShock 3, and I have strong opinions about its usability as opposed to the Xbox’s controller, which I find confusing. I think the analog sticks are in the wrong place on the Xbox, even though I’ve come to realize that the Xbox controller has basically the same layout as my beloved WaveBird. I still argue that the C stick on the WaveBird is almost never used the same way as the right analog stick on the Xbox controller, especially in Halo, where it’s critical to movement, but I’ll concede that it’s an argument based on personal feel and use much more than design.

So that’s the narrative in a nutshell: Nintendo innovates, even when it doesn’t make sense, Sony still uses a perfected version of the classic SNES controller whose design goes all the way back to 1990. (The Xbox, by the way, basically stole its controller design from SEGA’s long lost Dreamcast system. Impress your friends with that tidbit.) And now we have the Nintento Wii and Sony’s soon-to-be-released Move controller, which deserve a separate consideration of their own. Later. When I can afford to pick up a Move controller. (We’re talking $100 for a starter bundle. Even a Wii remote with Motion Plus and a Nunchuck attachment will set you back $70, and a DualShock 3 is more than $50. Controllers are expensive.)

It’s a brave new world, my friends. Put your old controllers away. (Somewhere safe, so you can use them later.)

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.