Top: in Super Mario Bros., obtaining 10 or more lives will cause the life counter to behave oddly. The first digit will become a sprite of a crown and the second digit will behave normally from 10 to 19 lives (being Crown-0 for 10, Crown-1 for 11 etc.), but will become glitched and go through all the graphical tiles in the game after 20 lives (the counter in the screenshot is showing 109 lives). Given this behavior, it is easy to assume that the life counter is completely broken and that no part of this was intentional.
Bottom: in a 2010 interview with the gameâs director Shigeru Miyamoto, composer Koji Kondo and programmer Toshihiko Nakago, it was revealed that the crown sprite was actually intentional and was specifically requested by Miyamoto to be placed in the game, which was done at the very end of development. As such, the life counter in the game is a unique combination of intentional odd behavior (the crown appearing at 10 lives) and unintentional odd behavior (the second digit becoming glitched).
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Twenty years later, Mortal Kombat is still the best video game movie ever made.
And thatâs a shame.
I remember the summer of 1995 very well. My first year at college had gone so poorly no institution wanted me on their campus. My father got me a cushy summer job at his law firm only to see me blow nearly my entire paycheck on Magic The Gathering cards. And Mortal Kombat was, unquestionably, the coolest video game series around.
#this movieâs entire vibe is #âdrunk girls in a bathroom telling you that youâre prettyâ #but with a lot more murder and violence and thievery #and a goddamn hyena named bruce (@rob-anybody)
It all started with James Bond, the arbiter of worldliness and all things cool when I was just a kid stuck in suburbia. The movies were frequently shown on TV and I made it a point to watch them all over and over again. One of my early favorites was Live and Let Die: the theme song kicked ass, it was Roger Moore's first film so he would never look more handsome, and the movie was full of straight-up magic. The bad guys have a fortune teller on their side, and she can seemingly see everything James Bond will do, even from a great distance. The key to her abilities, aside from her being a virgin (which Bond *ahem* takes care of) was her use of tarot cards. Drawing randomly from this special deck of cards, she could literally see the past, the present, and the future.
I had never heard of tarot cards before but I knew I wanted them. I could not have been older than 12.
When I got my hands on a deck, likely from a book store at the mall, there was an instant level of disappointment. The tarot cards in the Live and Let Die had a very specific look to them, and I had presumed that was just how all tarot cards would look. The deck which I bought (received? I don't remember if my parents were in on this) looked different. All the cards were there, but the art I had expected was not. The biggest difference that stood out to me was the "Death" card: in Live and Let Die that card has a super badass drawing of Death-incarnate wearing a suit of armor while riding a Pale Horse as all manner of human beings knelt or simply fell before him. In my deck, Death looked like a cartoon skeleton without clothes or a horse as he literally reaped the grass with a scythe. I am not here to judge aesthetics, but if you see something in a movie and you end up buying something else, especially as a kid, that's not going to sit right.
(I have tried to use modern search engine tools to discover what kind of deck I had: it was easy to figure out that Live and Let Die used a kind of Rider-Waite-Smith deck, but I think I might have ended up with a variant on a Marseilles deck - exactly which variant, I could not say)
Artistically it was a let down but the appeal of the tarot cards only increased as I learned more about them. First, I discovered that the deck was huge with 78 different cards: the big-picture cards that were featured in the film with names like "The Lovers" and "The Fool" were part of the Major Arcana, but there was also a full set of Minor Arcana which resembled playing cards: four suits, lots of numbers, and several face cards. Secondly, every card had two different "readings," depending on which direction the card faced when drawn.
78 cards, all with two different meanings, meant memorization. As a kid, I was all about memorization. In elementary school my friend Sasha and I tried to memorize the Periodic Table and I think we made it to the lanthanides. When I discovered the joy of watching professional sports, I made a point of memorizing all the teams - by division - in all four major sports leagues. Then I started memorizing the championship winners (and the runners-up) of each major sports league for the last ten years...then the last 20. These tarot cards were going to be my new thing, I could feel it.
I started carrying the cards with me wherever I went. As a kid in school this was easy since I always had a backpack on so the size of the cards meant nothing. Sasha and I (we had watched Live and Let Die together, so this became a team obsession) each had our own deck and we both would take turns drawing cards and looking them up in the little booklet that came in the box. I can remember taking them with us on a school trip to Boston and when we weren't in awe of the historical sights (do I need to tell you we were both nerds?) we kept up our tarot studies while walking around town. On one occasion, just as we drew a card and the booklet said it meant "danger," a car honked its horn at us. We were walking in the middle of the street! Clearly, the magic was real.
The tiny booklet also included a recommended layout when "reading" the cards. The lady in the movie just turned them over one at a time and everything made sense to her, but instead these instructions had us laying out ten different cards in a pattern where each card has a different relationship to the reader. Today I can tell you this pattern is called a "celtic cross" and it is only one of many, many shapes and patterns that can be used, but preteen me did not have that information. I had clear directions: to read the cards I had to flip over ten of them and explain them all.
Before I knew it, before either of us were really ready to be doing anything like this, I remember both of us became tarot card readers at our synagogue for a Purim festival. At the time I didn't think anything was weird, but in hindsight I am impressed that no one raised an objection to kids bringing such a thing into the synagogue so we could be fortune tellers. I should say that we were members of a Reform Temple and I cannot recall ever hearing words like "blasphemy" or "occult" used by our rabbi or anyone else in authority; it stood in contrast to all those self-described Christians I would see on TV who were mad about evolution being taught in schools, talking animals existing as characters in children's books, or anything else we might read in a Chick Tract (which come to think of it, we also discovered around this time while riding Metro-North trains into New York City).
My tarot reading habit did not last; Sasha and I had a falling out of sorts and other things just became more important than these strange cards. My deck sat on a shelf in my room for years until I moved out of my childhood home. I cannot say for certain but it more than likely did not leave with me. But my curiosity surrounding the tarot would linger in my mind and resurface soon enough just as my next big obsession would come along and reveal itself to be tarot-adjacent: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
When I discovered JoJo via a fan-subtitled bootleg VHS in the late 1990s, I had no idea the six episodes of anime I just saw covered only one small part of an ongoing (to this day!) manga. The story, as presented on the tape, started in the middle of the action. A lot of it did not make sense, but I latched onto one element right away: every character had superpowers which were embodied - literally - in a spiritual version of themselves on screen and all these alter-egos had tarot-related names: Star Platinum. Hierophant Green. THE WORLD. There wasn't much connection between the card names and the powers they possessed, but it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. If I had still owned a deck I might have started imagining other powers for the other cards not shown on screen (not knowing that they were all represented in some fashion in the original manga).
Leap forward another - gosh, twenty years? - and my tarot fascination never really went away. When I see a Kickstarter or an Etsy page for a new take on tarot cards, I often take a peek at what ideas are on display. A lot of them are just...porn-y. Some are cute. But I'm old(er) now, I don't have the raw enthusiasm I did when I was in 7th grade and the prospect of magic playing cards just made perfect sense. I see daily horoscopes on Japanese TV which I recognize aren't "real," how could I scoff at one kind of fortune telling and then pick up a deck of tarot cards?
Except...who cares if it's "real." What does it matter if these cards are, ultimately, a random assortment of quality art? It's been three entire decades since I first saw them and I'm still deeply intrigued. Part of being old(er) is coming to terms with your own tastes and biases; I no longer need to apologize or feel shame for liking old pop songs or macho action movies and if I've always had a feeling that tarot cards are cool, that feeling is correct.
There's also the feeling that I know so little about tarot cards that I cannot possibly pass judgement on people who use them. I recently started testing a Body Positivity mobile app that uses tarot cards as a means to spark self-reflection and, well, body positivity. The tarot cards in the app are not "real," they're not even physical. They're just drawings on a screen. But the drawings are nice, and if flipping a virtual card over can have a real impact on my own mind, who's to say what flipping real cards over could do?
Even though I felt a need to write all this down, I'm not actually seeking permission here. I already made up my mind and bought a brand-new deck of tarot cards. It's here, next to me. Iâve opened them. I try to draw a few cards whenever I have a chance, but I don't know where this reignited interest will take me. Will I start memorizing them all, again? Will I have another car-honking-its-horn-at-me moment? Maybe I'll just enjoy them aesthetically (they are very nice-looking if I may say so). I don't know what will come next any more than these cards do, but I know I like having them here and I want to know more. At the very least, tarot cards have already taught me an important lesson: I know better than to try and read them while walking in the middle of the road.
----
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Shiren the Wanderer 5 coming to Switch this year âÂ
The last time we saw an English version of Shiren with this 2D style on a Nintendo system was 15 years ago for the original gameâs DS re-release! (Iâm not counting the Wii/PSP release for Shiren 3 and its 3D graphics)
Spike Chunsoft will release Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate, an enhanced port of the 2015 PS Vita release (itself a port of the 2010 DS game) with extra dungeons, to Switch and Steam sometime this year.Â
Holy shit, I wrote a lot about the DS game a decade ago. I was really excited about this plump cat with a rifle.
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I joined Tumblr 10 YEARS AGO (this month!) when my old blog stopped functioning and I learned pretty quickly that blogging isnât the thing to do here
and yet...I remained.
What a year, month, week itâs been. It feels a bit trite to talk about new levels in N++ considering everything people have been enduring lately â hopefully youâre joining us in fighting against racism, inequality and injustice by reading, listening and donating money if you can, and time and energy if you canât. Black Lives Matter, and itâs past time to make lasting changes to the systems we live within. This issue is not localized to the US or to North America, it affects every single country and person on the planet. Here is a list of places you can donate to help:
The community that has built up around the N series of games is a good one, and we believe you are a compassionate and caring group of people, who will step up and commit to action. Now is the time. Thank you :)
âThe underlying concept of this map is so simple that I canât believe that this is the first map Iâve seen making use of it. Unlocking bounceblocks as a means of reaching places you previously is especially neat because it increases the number of ways you can move through the level as you progress, not just the number of places you can reach. Plus, using bounceblocks to get around is really fun, so the main concept is a real winner already. Throw in a signature HamSandwich-tileset that is as visually striking as his tiles always are and some perfectly placed Gauss turrets to keep you on your toes, and the result is one of my favourite maps of 2020.â -lifdoff
the icen geysers of Old Nox by NewGirl+
âCombining great presentation and a real brain bender of a puzzle to both work out and execute, the icen geysers of Old Nox is one of the most brilliant concept maps I have ever played, and a true testament to the limitless creativity the map editor and the systems of N++ offer. Requiring tight timing, tactical thinking and a fair bit of planning ahead, this simple looking map is a challenge to even the most veteran players - all while amazingly striking visually to boot. Head down to Old Nox today and show the world what a true ninja is made of!â -lifdoff
escape wavefold by Sonora Hotnights
âSonora Hotnights (also known as mahi_mahi) has a very distinct style of mapping - so much so, that when I first played one of his maps in N++, I immediately thought to myself "This reminds me of mahi_mahiâs maps from Nv1.4â. That style, for me, ultimately comes down to a very clever use of space in how they contrast very dense and very sparse sections while still remaining cohesive. escape wavefold is a textbook example of this, contrasting three cramped spaces with lots of objects and enemies with large areas with almost no threat at all, while still keeping the player engaged from starting point to exit.â -lifdoff
Invasion by lifdof
"An imposing alien structure dominates the whole of this map. Â Keep a steady nerve, ride the storm, and take on this terrifying mine jumper - lifdoffâs Invasion.â -NiceDay
The Art of Kiting by Zarah
âKRAs (keep rocket alive) are a small but distinct subgenre of N maps, and Iâve always enjoyed them when made well. At their best, they combine the fast paced nature, requirement of tight movement and omnipresent threat of death of good action maps with great overall flow and even puzzle elements where you have to work out exactly how you have to approach a seemingly innocuous looking obstacle to ensure that not only the ninja, but also the rocket trailing him make it through in one piece. This map is the only KRA Iâve played with multiple rockets and it gets away with this daunting proposition by eschewing the traditional tight halls in favor of more or less open space, resulting in what is sure to be the most thrilling ninja-rocket-dance of the decade.â -lifdoff
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