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I Wonder . . .

“What Happened to Pauline?”

Remember the game Donkey Kong? In that game, we had the plucky little hero named Jumpman, who’s a carpenter trying to scale a few half-built buildings to save his girlfriend Pauline from the crazy Kong. Well, Jumpman became a plumber named Mario, and Donkey Kong became, well, Donkey Kong. But, the damsel in distress? Where did she go? In all of his succeeding games, Mario is trying to save Princess Peach.

I’m pretty sure that Mario got dumped. Sure he might have saved Pauline, but you gotta wonder why she had been singled out in the first place. And, was it Mario’s shoddy carpentry that gave the Kongster a place to hide in the first place? I mean, if Mario had been able to bring the building to completion on time, he wouldn’t have had to worry about jumping over flaming barrels, pulling pins, and grabbing hammers. Come on, had Mario and his shifty, as yet unseen brother Luigi, actually finished their project, Mario could have just taken the elevator up to the top floor, shot Donkey Kong in the back, and rescued the girl.

I think what happened is this:

Mario and Pauline are at some swanky Redmond, Washington restaurant. They’re having some after dinner coffee and playing footsies under the table. All of the sudden, a ravenous and steroid riddled gorilla (escaped from the zoo) barges into the quiet dining establishment looking for something to nosh on. The only occupied table at this late hour is the Mario table. With nothing to eat, the Kong does the only other thing he can think of . . . kidnap the girl with the hopes that her boyfriend will try to bribe him with bananas.

Now we have the Donkey Kong games.

After Mario saves Pauline from the knuckle-dragger they try to put their lives back together to a time before this harrowing experience. She suffers from PTSD, and he is slowly withdrawing into a fantasy world of man eating plants, huge sewer pipes, and hammer throwing turtles.

Pauline, seeing her former lover just becoming a mere cartoon of his tough-guy carpenter self, decides to cut bait and work on building up another relationship. Word is that she hooked up with Cody from the Final Fight series.

Sparks of Inspiration

Meddy Christmas

Only posted because Senna Sakura is the real-life equivalent of EVERY videogame vixen ever made. If there was a Japanese version of Tomb Raider, she would be the Lara Croft.

Have a great holiday, everyone!

More RESET in January . . . I've made my birthday the drop-dead date to have the first draft done. We'll see how that one goes!

Toasty!

Feel the wrath of Shao Kahn!

Okay. On the right path. Mortal Kombat II has been RESET. Next up, Crazy Taxi. Any other suggestions for the "What They Should Have Done" chapter?

Perspective

I've decided on how I'm going to write the 10 "What they should have done" pieces for RESET. I'm just going to randomly spin the cursor on the XBazooka and pick a game from Mame . . . write a quick "Betcha didn't know" intro to it, and then turn the focus of hindsight on it.

First up: Missile Command.

Hot Coffee

This article originally appeared in Pieces of Eight last July. It has been edited and placed here on Reset . . . in its proper place in the universe. Enjoy. Again.

***

For those of you not in the know, you should read up on IGN and Gamespot about the infamous "Hot Coffee" mod in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Here's a quick snippet from the Gamespot article in case you're too lazy to clickie clickie.

"After a few seconds, the minigame proceeds to semi-explicit simulated copulation. Although players can change the camera angle with the circle button, as well as cycle though three sexual positions with the square button, no genitalia are ever seen. To win, players must maintain a steady rhythm with the left analog stick to build up an "excitement meter" on the right of the screen. Fill the meter and Denise becomes very excited, telling CJ he is "the man" before the game congratulates you with the words "Nice guys finish last!" Let the meter drop to empty and the game admonishes you with "Failure to satisfy a woman is a CRIME!"
Given that the minigame is about as raunchy as an episode of Sex and the City, cannot be accessed without entering a long string of cheat codes, and takes several hours of effort to access, charges that San Andreas is "pornographic" may seem extreme to some. However, its existence does appear to contradict Rockstar Games' carefully worded statement blaming hacker mischief for the existence of the Hot Coffee mod."

So let me get this straight . . . no genitals are exposed (not even a nipple!). I've seen more hardcore writing in Maxim Magazine, and hotter on screen action during prime time TV (how many times can Charlie Sheen talk about his dork at 9pm before locusts erupt from the skies anyway?) and this game is now considered Adults Only? I gotta tell ya, I got more of a semi-chub watching Katie "I am not a spaz" Holmes' erect nipples in the penultimate scene of Batman Begins than I got from playing San Andreas. And that movie was rated PG.

Just so we can all be clear. The GTA series has always enjoyed a "Mature" rating which is the ESRB equivalent of an R rated movie. It receives that rating based on violent content, and the assumed presence of sexuality. There's no nudity. I think that's a fair rating, as you have to be 17 years old to purchase an M rated game. AO, however is the Adults Only rating given to games with sexually explicit content (mainly for Japanese Dating Sims, and Hentai games) akin to the MPAA's X rating. You have to be 18 years old to buy an AO rated game. One year difference.

I suppose that by aging someone 12 months, you make it okay for them to witness fully clothed simulated sex acts. What's more offending to me is that legislators seem to be missing the point. Actually three points.

1. Hot Coffee is not available right out of the box. You have to modify your game by either downloading a patch, or using a series of code inputs to watch CJ dry-hump his girlfriends. The code was written and then Rockstar North decided to not use that mode in the game, so they made it inaccessible during regular gameplay. The code was left in (albeit hidden) so as to not cause system bugs . . . so they buried the mode. People don't realize that once a portion of a game has been written, it is tested for bugs (glitches, freeze-ups, parts of the game that don't interact well with other parts of the game). It's like taking a paragraph where each sentence built on, and relied upon, the sentence before it. If you were to remove a sentence from the paragraph, it might have catastrophic consequences to the paragraph as a whole. That is why the Hot Coffee coding was left on the disk. Once Rockstar realized that they weren't going to use that mode, they didn't have time to delete the code, and retest all of those affected portions of the game. Had they wanted people to unlock it, R*N would have leaked the codes themselves after the game was released in October 2004. They kept quiet.
2. I think that people should be more alarmed by the fact that during regular gameplay you can wreck your car into a Police car, haul the cop out, and beat him to death with a 20 inch double headed pink rubber dildo. I could see that as being worse than watching a pretend fellatio scene. Pick your battles. By blasting the sex rather than the violence you come off as uptight Puritanical prudes who were both confused and angered by your first pubic hair.
3. Are we really that concerned about warping a 17-year old's mind by letting him/her watch a fully clothed sex act? That's the same 17-year old that saw the movie Saw last year and saw a character saw off his own foot on screen. That's the same 17-year old that watches BET after dark. How many high school juniors do you think have had sex? The R rating, the "Explicit Lyrics" sticker, and the M rating have set their cutoffs all at 17. How is GTA worse than the others?

Videogames have historically taken the brunt of blame for society's ills: vandalism, theft, teenage pregnancy, and school shootings. But here's a secret . . . that stuff was already going on before the NES came out. And it'll keep happening whether or not Wal-Mart decides to sell GTA: San Andreas. The 17-year old limit is well-defined, clear, and cuts across all media. Don't mess with it. I was one of the few in favor of the video game rating system introduced by SEGA in 1993, and I still think it's a good idea. I just don't think the content in GTA:SA is equal to that seen in an X Rated movie. Changing M to AO is like changing R to X - - it starts a slippery slope.