Month: December 2003

Mario 3 in 11 minutes

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Geek moment:

The web is on fire with accounts of the video of Super Mario 3 being beaten in 11 minutes, a game which traditionally takes several hours to complete. Keith Devens lists a number of mirrors of the video itself.

The video is very cool- the economy of movement is incredible, and not even the tiniest detail is overlooked- for example, the player “Morimoto” intentionally gets 3 mismatched cards, because if the cards had all been of one type, he would have gotten extra lives and a “congratulations!!” display, wasting precious seconds.

The way it was done was by running the game on an emulator at 1/30 speed, and saving and restoring repeatedly to “tune” the game to the absolute most streamlined game possible. The effort (and attention span) required to achieve this is incredible.

Oddly, there is a bit of a controversy over whether the game is “real” or not… even though the guy who did this, “Morimoto,” described this process on his EMU page at http://soramimi.egoism.jp/emu.htm. Here’s the Excite translation.

The web is on fire with accounts of the video of Super Mario 3 being beaten in 11 minutes, a game which traditionally takes several hours to complete.

No War With Quarac

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The September 2003 issue of J L A – issue 83.

There’s been a napalmetto attack on American soil. President Lex Luthor, a corporate puppet of his own company LexCorp, tells the public that the nation of Qurac was responsible, but offers no evidence whatsoever. There is loose talk of “WMDs.” The public buys it.

In Gotham (where Batman lives), the police beat up a bunch of peace protesters. They abuse their power and shut down the subways.

President Lex tells Superman “It’s unbecoming to question your president during times of international unrest.” Superman tells him it is not disloyal to want to know the truth.

I don’t know about you, but I have got to own this issue and everything leading up to it. I’m hoping LexCorp gets awarded a fat contract to reconstruct Qurac.
Later

I grabbed it- this issue is pretty great. It is a one-shot (it’s has a “Dallas” ending), so on the positive side it requires no previous issues to understand what is going on… but on the other hand, that also means no fat contracts for LexCorp, and the Luthor Administration won’t be outing the secret identities of its own agents (maybe even Superman) as the Bush Administration did with the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Ah well!

However the previous story arc (JLA issues 80-82) does have a group of white supremacists claiming to be the “real” America, wanting to cleanse the undesireables (non-whites) from the country… not quite as good an analogy for our present leadership, since there haven’t been any overtly racist remarks in the administration.

Unless you count Senate majority leader Trent Lott defending the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans for being Japanese (February 2003)… to justify preventing anyone with a Middle-Eastern name from ever flying again.

Or how about the nearly 50,000 votes thrown away by Republican officials in mostly-black counties in Florida during the 2000 election. This wasn’t so long ago.

Okay, maybe the parallel isn’t such a stretch.

The September 2003 issue of J L A ( issue 83) is pretty great. It is a one-shot with President Lex Luthor telling the public that the nation of “Qurac” was responsible for a terrorist attack, but offering no evidence whatsoever.

Rankin / Bass Productions

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Rankin / Bass Productions is the company that brought you all those cheesey Christmas specials with the stop-motion animation.

Here’s a list of TV Specials, including the one with the wooden Fred Astaire. For some reason I always think Dick Van Dyke did one, probably because of the enormous chin on the Fred Astaire puppet.

Rankin / Bass also did “Thundercats” and “The Hobbit.”
Web link of note: Rankin / Bass Productions
(At http://www.rankinbass.com)