#371: Intergalactic

It was the youngest’s eighth birthday yesterday. We took a bunch of his friends to see The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, then brought them back to Hit Points Towers for food, a run around, and frankly unnecessary amounts of shouting (them) and disconsolate, futile tidying up (me).

You may relax: today’s newsletter is not a review of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. I’m sure you’ve read enough of those already, for one thing. For another, you might think a chin-stroking critical appraisal of an Easter holidays kiddo flick is a pointless exercise (correct, broadly, though I don't think something being notionally 'for kids' should excuse it from the critic's gaze; we take Mario games seriously, after all). But mostly it's because I fell asleep after about 20 minutes, and only woke up for the final battle. We bought 14 tickets for this thing, which I’m pretty sure makes it the most expensive nap I’ve ever had and honestly, I would do it again. But I cannot, in good conscience, call this a review. Not when I saw so little of it.

But why, and how, did I fall asleep in front of a movie in which I was more deeply invested than any other adult in the room? Was it that car alarm that blared for 30 seconds every two hours or so the night before, like fucking clockwork, starving the household of a decent night's sleep? A culprit, certainly. Was it just the natural order of things, a simple inevitability when you put a 47-year-old man in a comfortable chair in the middle of the day, forbid him from his phone, and dim the lights? Well yes, sure, I imagine so. But still! This wasn’t some generic animated kidslop designed solely to occupy the demonspawn for 90 minutes, despite what the critics might have told you. This was Mario. My Mario! Surely I could stay awake for that?

It’s something I thought a lot about yesterday while I was rescuing dropped popcorn from the dining-room rug, dredging Nerf darts from the lawn and making approximately 83 pots of tea for the grown-ups. And I honestly think I was just — and I realise the irony here, since I was notionally in charge of a gang of sugar-enhanced kids — overstimulated. For a Mario understander, the Galaxy movie is a sensory assault. It's a non-stop rush of references drawn from 40 years of videogames chained together at such frightening speed that I couldn't keep up with it. The scenery, the characters, the music, the sound effects... it’s just relentless, and I think my brain and body just couldn't handle it.

In his two-star review — one of the higher scores the film received from proper movie critics — The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin said he had “honestly felt less advertised at while watching actual adverts”. From the half-hour or so of it that I actually saw, I think The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the opposite of an ad, since it requires the viewer to know, and therefore already have bought, the games it so rapidly references. I’m sure some of the kids around me just watched a movie about a lad with a moustache, running and jumping and throwing things while occasionally cracking wise. I was sat there twitching, going, oh god it’s Gusty Garden Galaxy, it’s Kalamari Desert, it’s Mr Game & Watch and some Piantas and those little clockwork guys from... wait, where are they from? It’s on the tip of my- never mind they’re gone, here’s fuckin’ Birdo and the Odyssey frog and a sound effect I definitely recognise from Wonder and, and, and. This was not so much an advert as a montage of a lifetime's fanboyish consumerism, beamed into my eyeballs and earholes at light speed in a manner I’m sure Nintendo intended to be a love letter, but felt in the moment more like a murder weapon. Thank god I only fell asleep! If I'd watched the whole thing, I honestly think I might have died. Here lies Nathan Brown, the headstone would say. In the end he just knew too much about Mario.

MORE!

• Take-Two has apparently laid off its entire AI team, which has got me reassessing the whole layoffs-are-bad thing, if only for a while. Hard to have sympathy for people out of work when their jobs were all about eliminating the work of others, eh.
• Buried deep in the weeds of the latest Steam client update is a new feature that estimates a game’s likely framerate on the user’s hardware configuration. A useful way of reducing refund risk? Protection against people using Steam reviews, an increasingly precious commodity among indies in particular, to complain about technical performance? Who knows, Valve moves in mysterious ways. But a very good idea nonetheless.
• That rarest of beasts on planet videogames: a positive trend! Following the example of Among Us maker Innersloth, two newly monied indie studios are moving into publishing and investment. Peak developer Landfall has, in fairness, been publishing games for a while, but has officially spun out its internal division into a new company, Evil Landfall. Black Tabby Games, maker of Slay The Princess, is at it too, and its first signing is a banger: it’s publishing and fully funding Prove You’re Human, the new game from Sunset Visitor, developer of the stellar 1000XResist. High fives all round.
• Gunzilla Games, maker of blockchain-related nonsense and newish parent of Game Informer, has apparently failed to pay salaries on time. Some workers at the company’s Kyiv offices told GI.biz they hadn’t been paid for six months, while staff at its London studio have had problems with employer pension contributions.
• Another week in videogames; another terrible videogame-related idea. Sony has announced Playerbase, “a unique opportunity for PlayStation’s biggest fans to step into some of the biggest game worlds by having their likeness scanned.” Fill in a questionnaire, tell Sony all about how PlayStation has impacted your life — for the better, one presumes — and your gurning, pallid fizzog could soon feature in Gran Turismo 7. Where did I put that John Oliver ‘cool’ gif? I know it’s around here somewhere. Ah, here we are.

That’ll do! A pleasingly quiet week, what with Easter and all that. Hope you’ve all had a good one. There will be no newsletter next Friday, as I’ll be off in the countryside helping Hit Points Sr celebrate his 80th birthday. Back in your inboxes the week of April 20. Cheerio!