Mother’s Month: Mother/Earth Bound/Earthbound Zero

At long last, PSC finally has some new content and I hope that what I have in store was worth the weeks of inactivity.  Today I am unveiling both the creation of a brand spanking new logo and the introduction of videos to the site.  For the first series of PSC videos, which will focus primarily on the history of video games, I will examine one of my favorite video game franchise, which happens to share the same name as the holiday many people in America observed this past Sunday: the RPG series Mother, better known in the West as EarthBound.

Mother is a fairly obscure series with a small, dedicated fanbase that has been trying to get Nintendo to release Mother and Mother 3 in the West for many years.  Last month, fans of the series had some of their prayers finally answered by Nintendo, when Satori Iwata announced on Nintendo Direct (around the 22:30 mark) that EarthBound/Mother 2 will finally make its Western Virtual Console debut (check out more information here).

In honor of the occasion, the next few weeks will be “Mother’s Month” at PSC as I will briefly analyze the Mother series, focusing on each of the three games in this unique series.

First, we will look at the original Mother, released in Japan for the Famicom, known in some Western circles as EarthBound Zero.  I hope you find the videos informative.

Getting Museums (and Visitors) into the Game: ARGs and Museums

I created this video presentation as part of an assignment during my time in the University of Delaware’s Museum Studies Program. The presentation examines Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and their uses in museums, examining how they have been implemented in the past, both in the private and non-profit sector, as well as some tips and possible pitfalls for museums looking to utilize video games as part of their content.

Even though I put this presentation together way back in 2011, I hope it will help anyone looking into some of the big issue related to bringing video games and museums together.  I have also included an annotated bibliography that went with the project, listing some useful websites for anyone interested in learning more.

 

Twilight of the Pokégods

Author’s Note: This article first appeared on Mech Taco on March 6, 2012, as another installment in my series on odd moments in video game history. 

Let us for a minute think of the late 1990s.  It was a simpler time for the Internet, back when there were search engines named after butlers and SOPA could be confused with some kind of Greek cleaning product.  It was a time when Pokémon was at the height of its mainstream popularity.  Red and Blue had come out in 1998, followed by Yellow a year later, to massive popular success.  Pokémon: The First Movie was a smash at the box office and the drive to “catch ‘em all” became the childhood obsession of the late nineties.

For fans of Pokémon, the late nineties were also time of wild speculation and rumor; fueled by the existence of legendary Pokémon such as Mew and glitches like MissingNo., there arose a wave of tales proclaiming the existence of other legendaries, and websites abounded enumerating the  means to obtain them.

It was the reign of the Pokégods.

Bear in mind these were the days before Gold and Silver, during the first generation of Pokémon games when some people were not satisfied with just catching them all.  Some were convinced (or willing to believe) that Nintendo had hidden other legendary Pokémon within Red and Blue, giving birth to the myths of the so-called Pokégods.  The Pokégods were Pokémon that were not part of the original 150 that supposedly existed within the games; because they were so well hidden, they supposedly were new legendaries with overpowered stats similar to other one-time-catch-only Pokémon like MewTwo.  They could only be obtained, so the legends and Angelfire websites went,  through completing a series of drawn out objectives, such as catching all 150 Pokémon AND beating the Elite 4 100 times AND talking to a particular NPC 100 times (the thirsty girl whom you give soft drinks to in the Celadon City Department Store was a popular target).

So, if I give you 88 more waters, you’ll give me a Mew? (Image Source: RAGECANDYBAR)

It’s easy to laugh at them now, scoffing with our historical hindsight at the gullibility of the first-generation trainers who attempted them.  As a young player immersed in Pokémon Red during the late nineties I read my fair share of “surefire” ways to catch them on one of a dozen websites, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I didn’t try one or two of them.  We may roll our eyes at the people who concocted schemes for getting players to seek out new worlds beyond Nintendo’s established Poké-geography.  But let’s not forget the context of the time.  This was still a relatively early stage of video game communities on the Internet, so it was tougher to refute the claims, especially when many sites presented supposed evidence of the Pokégods’ existence.  Moreover, the existence of MissingNo. and the item multiplier glitch gave credence to their possible existence.  If MissingoNo. is hiding along the shores of Cinnabar Island, what other untold mysteries could the games contain?  Also, considering the context of other games of the time, if Nintendo could make players run back and forth through Hyrule completing a series of inane tasks to obtain the Biggoron Sword, is it such a stretch to obtain legendary Pokémon through similar means?

Back in the late nineties, the websites with these so-called hidden tricks to get new legendary Pokémon were legion.  Now nearly a decade later they are much more sparse, as the myths have largely been exposed for the quackery they were.  The RAGECANDYBAR Pokégods Project is one of the few that exists, and the people over there have put together a pretty comprehensive history of the various rumors, trying to trace their origins, which as a historian I appreciate (another critical look at the Pokégod rumors can be found here).  Here are a few others I have come across that explain ways to get them, either through in-game means of through a GameShark or GameGenie; one site is a little more skeptical, informing those who may attempt them that “some of these might not work” yet attests that some of them do in fact work.

Some of the most prolific rumors circulated around Mew.  Nintendo gave Mew away at special events, and the only way to obtain one in the games otherwise was to use a GameGenie or GameShark to make one appear (although as I mentioned last time, players eventually found a way to legitimately catch Mew in the game).  There were many different supposed surefire tricks for unlocking Mew. Some speculated Mew was a reward for completing the Pokédex, although it turns out all you got was a pat on the head from Professor Oak and a diploma from Game Freak without a legendary Pokémon to show for your labors.

Finally, some recognition! (Image Source: YouTube)

Other rumors circulated around a mysterious truck parked near the S.S. Anne, with some suggesting that a Pokéball containing Mew was underneath it, provided you found a way to move the obstructing vehicle.  The indie singer songwriter Alex Day, in his semi-nostalgic, semi-nerd-ragey song “Pokémon what Happened to You?” wrote “I miss surfing to the truck and using Strength to try and move it.”  Other rumors also hinted at the existence of other Mew clones besides the legendary badass MewTwo (when I was first making my way through Red, my cousin claimed his cousin had something called MewSix; it all seems nonsense now but it didn’t hurt to believe).

Pikablu, later revealed by Nintendo as Marill, was also a target of many rumors, as the early reveal of images of Marill led players to believe it was another evolved form of Pikachu.  A line in Pokémon Red and Blue led credence to these myths, as one NPC on Cinnabar informed players that a recently-traded Raichu had evolved.  As a result numerous methods arose to either get to a secret area in the game where Pikablu could be caught or get Pikachu or Raichu to evolve into Pikablu.  There were also ways to supposedly find and catch Togepi, which had been revealed in the television show well before the release of Gold and Silver.

This mistranslation sparked many a sleepless night of web debate (Image Source: RAGECANDYBAR)

In addition to the “official” Pokémon revealed by Nintendo there was a menagerie of totally made up Pokégods that were either supposed to exist in Red and Blue or were supposedly scheduled to release alongside Marill/Pikablu and Togepi in Gold and Silver.  These included an evolved form of Flareon called Flareth, evolved forms of Venusaur, Charizard and Blastoise (Sapusaur, Charcolt, and Rainer, respectively), and an evolved form of Nidoking, appropriately named Nidogod (here’s a site that claims to have real GameShark codes to unlock all of them).  To catch them you had to do the same kinds of shenanigans that were endemic of all the fake Pokémon “codes,” such as catch all 150 Pokémon without using a GameShark/Game Genie, beating the Elite 4 x amount of times, obtaining some fake evolution stone such as the Ice Stone or Mist Stone, or traveling to some mythical town (one code I read years ago actually expected players to travel to something called the “Pikaland”).  My favorite of the fake Pokémon was probably Doomsay/Doomsday, which was supposed to be some kind of ghost type.  A pretty genuine looking (and completely badass) sprite accompanied rumors of Doomsday, lending credence to the fact that even if he wasn’t in Red and Blue, he may be in Gold and Silver (this of course never came to fruition and Doomsay/Doomsday was just a fan creation).  I also remember seeing an image of a rumored evolved form of Electrode, called Electron, that looked like a model of an atom.

Mighty Doomsay/Doomsday. Come on, Game Freak, get on that! (Image Source: RAGECANDYBAR)

Years have passed and the Pokégods have been all but forgotten.  However, this has not meant the end of rumors of fantastical worlds where players can catch otherwise uncatchable legendaries.  Following the release of Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald there were supposed codes and instructional videos on how to unlock super-rare Pokémon like Deoxys and Jirachi via the space station at Mossdeep City by somehow getting on the spaceship and heading to the moon.

No matter how many Pokémon Nintendo officially reveal, there will always be players who try to seek more.  The codes for the Pokégods are a testament to just how far some people will go to try to catch them all.

Catching MissingNo.

Author’s Note: This article first appeared on Mech Taco on February 8, 2012, as part of a series on oddities in video game history.

In Pokémon Red and Blue, if you spoke to the old man in Viridian City who shows you how to catch Pokémon, then flew to Cinnabar Island and surfed up and down the coast to the right of the Pokémon Center you would eventually encounter a Pokémon that never appeared in any Pokédex or episode of the television series.  Its appearance varied depending on a number of different factors, as anything from a skeleton of an Aerodactyl or Kabutops, a black ghost, or three columns of random pixels.   Although it was never intended to see the light of day, it became a popular member of the nearly six hundred fifty members of the Pokémenagerie despite not appearing anywhere in the Pokédex.

I am, of course, talking about MissingNo.

MissingNo., short for Missing Number (Pokémon #000), is a glitched Pokémon; more accurately it is less a Pokémon than a programming error triggered as the result of a combination of different factors. The game recognizes it as a dual Flying/Normal type with a high attack and extremely low defense (anything that hits it will knock it out in one hit).  It has three attacks: two Water Guns and Sky Attack. When caught, it appears on your party screen as a rapidly flashing person.  If you give it a Rare Candy, it will evolve into a Kangaskahn.

Because it is technically a glitch, catching it and keeping it in your party causes a number of different unwanted side effects.  The effects of catching MissingNo. include making your Pokémon appear glitchy in battle and making random sprites appear on your party and Hall of Fame screens. If caught at level zero, MissingNo. (and similar glitched Pokémon such as ‘M) can also corrupt your save file, forcing you to erase your data.

So why bother with MissingNo. at all?  In spite of all the nasty side effects, there are some significant benefits to hunting down the legendary glitch Pokémon.  For one, MissingNo. is not the only Pokémon you will encounter after your date with the Old Man; you will also run into Pokémon with extremely high levels, ranging anywhere from 130 to the two hundreds.  The types of superpowered Pokémon you encounter is determined by your trainer’s name, and there are guides that show you ways of guaranteeing certain Pokémon like Mewtwo.  For my copy of Pokémon Red, I encountered Snorlax and Golbat.  These Pokémon are safe to catch and your game will suffer no ill effects from having them.  After one battle they will revert to level 100.

More important, after you complete a battle with MissingNo. (either by defeating or catching it) you will gain 156 of whatever item you have in the sixth slot of your inventory.  This became a quick and easy way to get large numbers of useful items, such as Master Balls and Rare Candies.

Over the years MissingNo. became part of Pokémon fan culture.  People have made Pokémon cards in its likeness and it has appeared in fan art and web comics.  Moreover, its existence led players to search for more glitches in the games which has yielded interesting results, including a glitch allows you to legitimately find Mew without a GameShark or Game Genie.   For Pokémon trainers of a certain age, MissingNo. became as much a part of Pokémon as Pikachu.

MissingNo. is the most famous of the glitch Pokémon, but he’s far from the only one.  Here are a few other noteworthy ones:

h Poke – Another glitch from RBY.  Catching it will crash your game unless you have a Gengar in your Pokédex .  One of its attacks is HM02 (not Fly, “HM 02″), a mighty move that delivers a one-hit knockout and restores health for h Poke.
?????????? – A glitch Pokémon from Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald that looks like a question mark in a circle.  While it can be caught, it can only level up using Rare Candies. Also if the player tries to view ?????????’s Summary, the game will freeze.

Review: Mutant League Football (Electronic Arts, 1993)

Author’s Note: This review first appeared on Mech Taco on December 20, 2011, as part of a series on American football games available to play instead of Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL franchise.

Source: Amazon

It may come as a shock for some to learn that Electronic Arts, the company often criticized for creating football games lacking creativity, is actually responsible for one of the most original, entertaining football video games ever made.  Mutant League Football for the Sega Genesis was created by Michael Mendheim, a box art illustrator turned game designer who also created the 1989 NES game Fester’s Quest.  According to an interview with Gamasutra Mendheim developed Mutant League Football as an ultra-violent parody of televised sports.  Following its commercial release, the game gained some marketing popularity, including a sequel (Mutant League Hockey), a line of toys and a Saturday morning cartoon in which in an early episode has a character whose skin melts off after being exposed to radioactive gas.

Are you ready for some football?

The game is seven-on-seven football and based on the engine used in the early John Madden Football games.  Where the two titles differ significantly is in the violence.  In John Madden Football if a player gets injured, they may get taken off the field in a stretcher; in Mutant League Football they get carted off in a body bag, or possibly several small bags containing the various dismembered remains.  You read that right: Mutant League Football is a football game where the violence is so intense players get killed on the field.  Players have a stamina bar that goes down as players receive hits.  If it goes down chances are that player will soon explode in a shower of sixteen-bit meat confetti.  To make matters all the more perilous, the fields are overrun with hazards from stones that trip players up to bottomless pits to freaking landmines that kill players and leave a flaming hole in their wake.  Each team also has an array of deadly plays designed to transform opponents into tiny bits, from stat boots like super strength and speed to plays that mess with the controls or make all your players invisible to wiring a ball to explode in a play actually called “Ball Wired for Death.”

If you turn on the option for Reserves (and I recommend you do), as the game wears on and the body count rises you will begin to lose players on the field.  It is possible to play games where the opponent has two players left on defense or a quarterback but no running backs or wide receivers left alive.  Eventually if it gets bad enough the game will end in a forfeit because not enough players are among the living.

The most satisfying victory screen in all of sports gaming

However, the game is more than pure aggression.  There is also a significant amount of strategy.  When you play with the violence turned up, when you’re on offense you need to weigh whether building and sustaining a drive is worth the risk of losing your skill players.  It’s the only game where I really look forward to giving the ball back to the other team because it means the prospect of turning their skill players into hamburger meat.  In tight games I often find myself punting the ball away rather than risking my skill players and rely on my defense to systematically eliminate their offense and get points on turnovers.  As a result games can turn into wars of attrition, where you play until either you or your opponent doesn’t have any players left alive.

Above: A dramatization of a Jaguars game

Participating in the carnage that is the Mutant League are nineteen teams (sixteen regular teams and three all-star teams).  The teams have colorful names, from the pathetic Sixty Whiners to the Deathskin Razors, a team coached by the Devil.

Pictured: Bill Belichik’s mentor

Each team has their own star players with their unique strengths and weaknesses.  The rosters are filled with humans, trolls, skeletons, aliens, and even a team populated entirely by robots, which is either a metaphor for mechanization sucking the life of humanity or an excuse to have a team full of soulless machines who crave living flesh.

Two modes of play are available for the amateur bloodsport enthusiast: a single-game mode and a sixteen-team playoff where teams vie for the Mutant League Cup.  In case you don’t have time to sit down and go through an entire playoff, the game uses a password feature.   An added challenge to Playoff mode is deaths carry over from one game to another and a heavy death toll in one game can put you at a disadvantage in the next.  While playing a tournament with my personal favorite Deathskin Razors I got through a tough playoff game where I beat the opponent by virtue of the fact that the other team didn’t have enough players left alive.  At the beginning of the next game I was surprised to find that my training staff was not able to put my lost players back together again, and I soon found myself with a handful of half-broken players facing an onslaught of healthy, able-bodied War Slammers.  Two quarters and 70 points allowed later, you could practically hear the straggling survivors begging for death’s sweet embrace to carry them off from the carnage.

Mutant League Football is a game with a lot of charm.  The graphics are bright and colorful.  The camera is slightly closer to the ground than in Madden, allowing you to see the characters are well detailed.  Each of the stages looks great.  Some are pocked with craters while others have brightly colored turfs that make the ones at Boise State and Eastern Washington seem dull; one is even played on a field of ice where players slide around.  The sound effects are every bit as visceral as you would hope in a game where skeletons, aliens, and trolls try to make lunchmeat out of each other on the gridiron with lough bangs of explosions and the satisfying groan as a player lets out his last gasp before occupying several yards of field space.  In between deaths you’re treated to brief cutaways of players and coaches talking trash and on touchdowns you see a brief cut of mutated fans cheering on the action.  There is even a halftime show.

Gameplay is also technically sound.  The game has that issue that many football games had at the time where on passing plays the receivers appear on little TV screens at the top of the screen, which may be jarring for players used to more modern football games.  However, it is easy to get used to.  Rushing is also good and you are rewarded for following your blockers; however players have a tendency to bounce off defenders like pinballs.  Defense can get frantic as players scramble for the ball carrier but it never gets old to collide with a ball carrier and have them disintegrate into a hundred little bits upon impact.  Kicking is also pretty straightforward (press the C button once to start the power meter and again to set it), and it’s really rewarding to see that skull on the uprights bounce up and spin when you put one through.

The game was also ahead of its time as a football game.  In Mutant League Football, after you score a touchdown you can go for a 2-point conversion.  While that seems like a given today, the NFL didn’t introduce the option to go for two until 1994.

As I mentioned at the outset for me it doesn’t really get any better than this.  It’s simple and fun and no matter how many times I play it it never seems to get old.  Graphically it has also aged well and even in light of our space age football games of the present generation it is still fun to watch and just as much fun to play.

If you’re dying (see what I did there? #comedy) to play Mutant League Football it’s a pretty common game and you can find a copy online for a modest price.  If you don’t have a Genesis lying around (even though you know you really should) you really have only one option.  The game was ported to the PSP as part of the EA Replay collection, which includes a bunch of other great early EA Genesis games, including Jungle Strike, NHL 95 and all three Road Rash games.  However, if there ever was a series that I’d love to see a reboot it would definitely be this one.

Dissertation Notes: Unweaving “The Devil’s Web”

“Dissertation Notes” is the oh-so-clever name of my regular segment briefly highlighting the interesting, unusual, or thought-provoking materials I have come across while working on my dissertation.  Aimed at a broad audience that includes media scholars, general interest readers, and gamers looking to know more about their hobby/obsession, I intend to demonstrate through a variety of sources the complex history of video games in America and their complicated, at times hotly-contested, relationship with larger debates over leisure, technology, and mass culture.

In the weeks following the tragic school shooting in Newtown, CT, there have been renewed debates over the relationship between media violence, particularly as it is depicted in video games, and real-world acts of violence.  However, the moral panic over allegedly violent media has a long history, fervor over which seems to periodically billowing up and recede like the tides.  During the 1980s, there was a pervasive fear among a small but vocal collection of moral activists that there was a war going on for the minds and souls of children and teenagers more fierce than the Cold War.  Media groups such as the National Coalition on Television Violence and the Parents’ Music Resource Council led campaigns against the perceived negative influence of media, tying the consumption of popular media such as television and rock music with delinquency and violent crime.  In many respects, the campaign against violent video games in the early 1990s that led to the creation of the ESRB had its ideological origins in these earlier crusades.

One such media activist was Patricia Pulling.  On, June 9, 1982, Pulling and her husband returned to their Montpelier, VA, home to find their son Irving, Jr., (Bink) dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  In the aftermath, the grief-stricken Pulling searched for an explanation, settling on Bink’s frequent play of the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons as the cause for his suicide.  She connected D&D gameplay with an interest in the occult, arguing Bink committed suicide after a fellow player placed a “death curse” on him during a session.  Thus began Pulling’s campaign to thwart the powers of darkness and spare other parents the tragedy she endured.

B.A.D.D. pamphlet (Source: The Escapist)

After an unsuccessful lawsuit against Bink’s high school, Pulling founded “Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons.”  BADD distributed pamphlets and engaged in letter-writing campaigns to warn parents, teachers, and law enforcement officials of the insidious influence of the occult on teenagers.  BADD also partnered with NCTV to petition the Federal Trade Commission to require D&D producer TSR to print warning labels on all their RPG materials, warning parents of their possible corrupting influences.  Along the way she became a licensed private investigator and a self-styled “expert” on the occult and appeared on talk shows and at several criminal trials as an expert witness on “cult crimes.”

Cover of “The Devil’s Web” (Source: Amazon)

In 1989, Pulling teamed up with freelance writer Kathy Cawthon to compose her manifesto against D&D and the occult.  The provocatively-titled “The Devil’s Web: Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan?”  enumerated upon a vast Satanic conspiracy hell-bent on destroying traditional family values and luring impressionable teens into a world of sex, delinquency, violence, and death.  Pulling held this conspiracy responsible for a litany of murders, both solved and unsolved, as well as such acts as graffiti and cattle mutilation (if you are having trouble visualizing the thought process, check out Jack Chick’s 1984 comic “Dark Dungeons“).  Dungeons & Dragons and other “occult” media such as heavy metal music, according to Pulling, were just the first step on a dark road that led to violent crime:

“The child who is obsessed with occult entertainment may stop there, but he often moves on to satanic graffiti and cemetery vandalism.  From that point, he easily moves on to grave robbing for items needed for occult rituals, and he is just a step away from blood-letting.  Blood-letting begins with animal killings and mutilations and progresses to murder if intervention does not take place” (Pulling 41-2)

Despite her apocalyptic rhetoric, Pulling’s observations were largely based on conjecture, the testimonies of confessed murderers, and an extremely literal reading of D&D materials (for example, she interpreted the role of the Dungeon Master as a driving force of a campaign and arbiter of the game’s rules to mean something akin to a cult leader who forced players to sacrifice their free will).  The Devil’s Web prompted science fiction author Michael Stackpole to publish “The Pulling Report” in 1990, in which he refuted many of Pulling’s claims and called her alleged credentials into question.

There is so much to extrapolate from The Devil’s Web, more than I can do justice for in a brief blog post.  Her work reveals some of those anxieties over the role of mass media on teenagers and how some groups during the 1980s responded to what they perceived as a threat to the family unit and “traditional” moral values.  In their crusade against Satan, Pulling and her followers were at the extreme end, but there were others who took on similar campaigns as well.  I will be sure to elaborate on several more of them in the future.

New Changes Coming to PSC

With a new year comes the opportunity for new beginnings.  2013 also brings some new changes to PrimarySourceCode.

Among the new features for 2013 is a new regular segment that will offer a glimpse into my dissertation research on the cultural history of video games in America.  “Dissertation Notes” is the oh-so-clever name of my regular segment briefly highlighting the interesting, unusual, or thought-provoking materials I have come across while working on my dissertation.  Aimed at a broad audience that includes media scholars, general interest readers, and gamers looking to know more about their hobby/obsession, I intend to demonstrate through a variety of sources the complex history of video games in America and their complicated, at times hotly-contested, relationship with larger debates over leisure, technology, and mass culture.

Each article will briefly introduce a new source or idea related to the history of video games and provide some historical context.  By saying “related” I mean to include items that are not necessarily directly about video games but engage in the greater cultural discussions in which video games are included, such as leisure, technology, and mass media.  Hopefully, by the time I receive the Ph.D., we will all have gained a better understanding of the role video games have played in society and how they simultaneously shape and are shaped by a wide variety of cultural factors.

In other news, the video game news site MechTaco, of which I was previously a contributor, has since been retooled to focus on more on podcast-based rather than article-based content, so expect to see some of the articles I produced for them making their way here for those interested.  In addition to cross-listing PSC editorials at MechTaco, I also started some regular segments there.  “More than Madden” was to be a regular series of articles on alternatives EA’s Madden NFL series for American-football fans.  More pressing time demands elsewhere limited the series to one article on Mutant League Football, but there may be more articles on that subject if there is the time and inclination to do so.  “Catching MissingNo.,” meanwhile, was a series highlighting some of the odd moments in video game history.  Some of the ideas for it will be folded into Dissertation Notes, but there may still be a place for an “oddly enough” section that does not have to do with my research.

I am also planning a massive design of the visual appearance of the site from the current generic WordPress look to something more personalized and professional.  For the moment this is a work-in-progress, but hopefully there will be results coming soon.

What does the future hold?  We’ll just have to see.