I first picked up Super Paper Mario when I bought my Wii in about April of 2007, and I’m finally done! No, It’s not an epic^epic game, but it will run about 20 hours before you’re done, and that’s only if you so some of the optional stuff, so as Mario adventures typically go, it’s got some meat to it.

I’ll be blunt, the game is slow compared to Super Mario Galaxy (a real Mario adventure in my mind). This game is more text and dialogue driven than most platformers I know, and the difficulty level is also much lower. I imagine this is the Mario game that gamers get their girlfriends that “like videogames” but have never played or heard of Battletoads. 

The game starts off pretty exciting though, and the hooks are pretty fierce at that. Running, jumping, hitting blocks – all great Mario stuff. They even put new twists on old staples like the invincibility star. In SPM, collecting this powerup makes Mario grow to fill the screen, and he becomes his 8-bit sprite from the original Super Mario Bros.. While massive, Mario can plow through any obstacle and is unstoppable as enemies bounce off and a path of destruction is left in his wake. The first boss battle against a giant dragon is fairly epic too

Then world 2 starts, and there’s nothing really “new” until world 8. Along the way, you get additional powers like the ability to shrink and enter small spaces or become paper thin and float on the wind.  Most of the puzzles in the game use these new abilities, and while some of them are clever, most of them are fairly uninspired. I feel good for finding hidden chest and items though, so there’s a sense of accomplishment there – that’s good. There are also Cards for all the enemies and characters in the game. You can use Catch Cards to ensnare the soul of an enemy and place them on a card. Possessing a card doubles the amount of damage you do to that enemy, but other than that they are useless. Even more useless though is there are hundreds of enemies with a dozen types of  goomba, so the odds of having the right card in your deck is slim unless you’ve invested gold coins in buying Catch Cards.

There’s a level-up system that I wish was implemented in more games anymore. Your score increases as you kill enemies, and when it gets high enough, leveling up increases Attack, Defense, and Hitpoints. Nothing too deep or innovative, I know, but wish action and action-like games incorporated something like this more often. Also, as a Mariogame if you hop on a string of enemies without touching the ground, you get even more points – and more points still by shaking the Wii-mote a bit to add a flourish to your bounce.

Visually, this game is very clean and clear most of the time. Some things get muddy when flipping to the 3D, but 2D looks pretty damn gorgeous. Everything looks drawn in vectors with a turtle program and an Etch-a-Sketch, and is showcased upon entering a new world: The canvas starts blank, lines draw along outlines, the backdrop props up, colors fill in like a paint bucket, and then Mario enters the scene. I simply love the presentation there.

The controls work great in the 2D plane we’re all used to, but with the ability to flip into a 3D space, things get a little tricky. So very much of the game world is designed on a 2D plane (even though most of it is built and rendered as a projection from 3D to 2D), and the directional pad is only so versatile, movement here, especially jumping, is difficult.

Sound is what you’d expect from a Mario game – a lot of boings and smacks, so not annoying to the player as they’re all well-placed and paced. If you close your eyes though, the sound could get really annoying, so it might not be the best for a mix-tape. I’m not going to knock a lot of points off for this though – this game is a colorful platformer at heart. Charles Martinet once again reprises his role as Mario, so that’s pleasant.

I glossed over it before, but the chief complaint I have about the game is the story. This stilted mass of crap belongs in a bargain-bin RPG setting, not in my platformer thankyouverymuch. The scenes are long, the text windows are small so each speaker has several dialogs to click through, and the worst part is they’re unskippable. Gross, gross, gross. The most offending piece is, there are sometimes important clues for where to go or what to do next hidden in these sections, so if you don’t pay attention, you might wander around in the hub-level aimlessly.

A close second in my beefs with this game is the puzzle scripting and level design. I’m a huge proponent of figure-eights in level design – it minimalizes the amount of back-tracking required. Off the top of my head, Jak II  for PS2 (the sequel to Jak and Daxter) did it best in my opinion, but SPM is very poor in this regard. In one of the later worlds, the game has you searching for an item of an unspecified type from an unspecified set of items. Basically a needle in a haystack that could be of any size, and when a needle is found, I don’t know if it’s the right needle. Later on in the same level, game-progression relies on you remembering a previous wrong items’ effect. I Hope you remembered a item that went in the trial- failure bin; and if you did, hope you picked up two; oh wait, you only needed one before for the trial, so I hope you remembered where in the platforming maze you got it; No? hope you like annoying mazes, twice.

When I buy I game I usually keep it, as it has some redeemable value as a game. This one is going back to a retailer’s shelf for store credit.

This week’s been kind of heavy hasn’t it? With implications of intelligence and such along with my vengeful tree-hugging, let’s lighten the mood a bit.

I’m working on my backlog of games lately. I typically don’t have a lot of time to devote to video games, or I get sucked into games that don’t have an end like Quake Live and Team Fortress 2. I’ve finished Super Paper Mario for Wii (Yes, I know it’s old), and moved on to Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters for PS2 (Yes, another old one).

I’ll have a review for Super Paper Mario coming soon, but I’m looking back and seeing what else I haven’t tackled yet in the past few years. I was briefly considering Halo 3, but why? I was pretty on-top-of-things with the whole Gears of War, so I feel like I’ve gotten my fill of AAA shooters for a while now.

I need a puzzle game, I might pick up Puzzle Quest. We’ll see…

I know I’m a dirty hate-monger a lot of the time, but I’m being genuine here today. There are some concepts I feel I have to introduce first before I get to the meat though – don’t those people that say, “I told you that, so I could tell you this” grate on your nerves?

I’d like to first make a distinction between Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Intelligence. On its face, ‘artificial’ implies something fake, something not quite what it’s supposed to be emulating. ‘Synthetic’ on the other hand certainly is what it purports to be, but is something crafted or made. A polyester shirt is certainly a shirt, just as a holographic projection of anything fake. SI is something real, that is why I prefer to use it over AI.

There is a test called the Turing Test which is designed to determine whether an intelligence is human. Imagine two humans chatting with each other over an instant messaging program, and one of those humans is a judge. If the test-subject is human enough, the test-subject passes as human. The same could be true for a Synthetic or Artificial Intelligence. If the judge determines the interaction to be human enough, the subject passes the Turing Test. An Artificial Intelligence that can fool a judge into passing is still artificial, but a Synthetic Intelligence implies it is advanced enough to be indistinguishable from an Organic Intelligence

The way the Turing Test is designed, a human should have no trouble passing the test, but what about those humans with mental retardation (MR)? Provided they have the intelligence to operate the computer, might a subject with MR pass or fail? I really don’t know, and I think the idea is politically incorrect enough to never be tested. It may even fall within the category of people not wanting to know because there are uncomfortable moral implications if humans with MR indeed do not pass the test, most directly “Are mentally retarded humans even human?”

Which finally brings me to my main point: If a Synthetic Intelligence turns out to be mentally retarded, can they pass a Turing Test? My gut says “yes” because for all intents and purposes, from an intellectual level, they are human. Thinking a bit further though, if the intelligence is truly what it is, rather than a facsimile, it may not pass the test at all, and the only way we could know answer is if we empirically gathered data on MR Organic Intelligences.

Another way to answer the unsettling question is to actually develop SI that passes the test and then modify it to have MR and test this new intelligence. This raises a question though: Is this no better than an Artificial Intelligence with a Synthetic as a model? I think it all depends on how the intelligence is created. If it is dialed back from an existing intelligence, then it is artificial. If it is crafted and “grown” to be MR, then it is synthetic.

You may be smiling or frowning now, but if an intelligence is grown, how is the intelligence not organic? Are we playing God and is what we created really alive? If we are created, are we alive? Implications, implications.

A long time ago, I said I didn’t care about the environment, and, don’t get me wrong or lying here, I still think the same way, but I feel the urge to clarify some of my hatred for helping Mother Earth.

First, I don’t actively hate the planet; I simply have no regard for it. It is simply a massive chunk of rock floating in space that we, as humans, live on. If there are terrible things that must be done to get the things I need and want like beer and condoms, so be it.  The Earth be damned along with any other obstacle. That pretty much sums up my previous rant in different words.

To continue, I am absolutely willing to participate in ’save the whales’ escapades as long as I, personally, benefit from it – or if the indirect benefits serve the ends that I believe in like space travel, robot bodies, or something like that. Solar power immediately comes to mind, but that’s not the best, simplest example, and I’ll get to that. A good example is Xeriscaping.

If you’re not aware of what Xeriscaping is, it’s a method of landscaping your yard in a way that matches the local biosphere. Xeriscaping is pushed harder in drier climates where water is more scarce. The goal of Xeriscaping is to conserve water because you don’t have to water the yard at all and it still looks like it’s supposed to: total shit. I’m not sure what the tip-off was that I don’t like it, but it serves as a good example because it saves me yard work.

Also, I like the move away from paper forms and such. A lot of things can be done online and a major selling point is that it saves paper, which, in turn saves trees from the lumberyard. I don’t give a shit. I like paperless systems because it means I don’t have as much crap stacked up in physical file folders. Digital is so much easier for me.

Solar power research deserves its own rant though, so I’ll try to be brief here. Actually, once I think about it solar power research doesn’t really belong in this rant very much, but it might. It could belong here though if the resources required to fabricate solar cells harms the planet in some way. Personally, I don’t know – but if it did, I’d say “so what?” It furthers my interests.

I’ll participate in your gay tree-hugging parade and it may looklike I want to make the world a greener place, but no – I just want more and cooler stuff to make my life easier. I want my Xbox!

Ever since I saw it advertised on the side of a cross-town bus, I wanted to see the King Tutankhamen exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. It may sound silly, but I didn’t know the exhibit was in town until then. Now that Ame has some time off, it was a great opportunity to go downtown and see things.

I remember seeing Ramses (II maybe, I can’t recall) quite some time ago as a kid and it was pretty cool. I even remember the mummified remains on display behind the velvet rope and inside the case. It was truly a sight to remember.

Today was cool too, and I’m glad I went. All the items on display were real works of craftsmanship and I was amazed at how well the pieces were preserved. They were definitely old, to be sure, but they certainly didn’t look thousands of years old – merely hundreds. Some of the polished stone artifacts were still shiny after all this time. The gold inlays and etchings were of such fine detail, it would have required a master craftsman’s full attention.

To reiterate, it was amazing to see, but King Tut and his famous mask were not present. The exhibit should have been billed as “(some of) King Tut’s Stuff, and a lot of other things that his aunt and grandmother owned (…maybe).”