It is a fact that fish will not live where the water is too clear. But if there is duckweed or something, the fish will hide under its shadow and thrive. Thus, the lower classes will live in tranquility if certain matters are a bit overlooked or left unheard. This fact should be understood with regard to people's conduct.

-Hagakure, the book of the samurai

In yesterday's Guitar Hero 5 review someone who I won't bother naming left in his comment: “wow another reviewer paid off or the organization he works with.”

He has since commented again, and his c-blog is still up and running.

Allow me to italicize.
Someone accused a writer of this site of taking payments for favorable reviews, and Dtoid- and its community- let out a collective yawn. Nick Chester just laughed at him, and that was the end of it. No drama. No theatrics. No “ban-hammer Monday”. Just a little laugh and then on to messing around with a much more persistent troll.

And if something as stupid as that can be posted with barely a whimper, then maybe my half-baked ideas can find a home, too.

I'm going to level with you here. I hadn't been part of a gaming community for a long time between the closing of Antagonist, Inc. in 2001 and my discovery of Dtoid in 2008. The reason? I'm shy. I'm suggestible. I have the emotional maturity of a Sham-Wow. I simply can't handle the ridicule and suspicion that comes with joining your average game community. In most of these places, you walk in on thin ice. You're assumed troll as soon as you walk in, and cracking the social order takes an impossible amount of persistence, luck, and brown-nosing- more work than the reward could ever be worth.

In contrast, It takes a lot to get banned from Dtoid. You have to make yourself famous to get banned from Dtoid. You have to become a stock punchline to get banned from Dtoid. (See: Wiisucks, Bill Holbrook). Much more than any well-meaning lurker or newb could ever inflict. It's no coincidence that Destructoid now has the biggest, most varied, and most creative game community on the web.

When game communities suck, it's never because of the trolls. Trolls can be beaten. Trolls can be ignored. In the case of Antagonist Inc, trolling can even be turned to friendly discourse. When game communities suck, it's because they've closed themselves off to their own elites, freely banning trolls, critics, and other harmless jackasses, and thus creating a chilling effect on anyone new who dares try to add something of value.

Let trolls be trolls. Let newbs be newbs. The former will get bored and leave, the latter will become another grateful, productive member of the community. Let there be room for error, room for stupid, room for ignorance. Much like a flower, you can't expect a community to grow when you keep hitting it with a hammer.

Shirt.woot has started a new "classics" line, and first on the list is the very first shirt they ever released: this delightfully blister-inducing piece of work right here.



It's up until next Monday. If you want to pick it up, point your browser over to shirt.woot.com/classics.

Source: http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Cal-State-Student-Faces-10-Year-Prison-Term-for-Playing-with-Video-Games-52386872.html

Lloyd Crippen, recently admitted to Cal State Fullerton, appeared in federal court Monday after his home was raided by the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency had been acting on a tip provided by the Electronics Software Association, the video game equivalent of the RIAA, as well as the organizers of E3. Police found "more than a dozen Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony video game consoles", all of them modded to play pirated games. According to ICE deputy special agent Kevin Kozak, Crippen had been advertising the service online and accepting payments for console modding.

When contacted by the OC Register, Crippen only commented: “Somebody tipped them off and they came."

Crippen now faces up to 10 years of jail time from two counts of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. His arraignment is scheduled for August 10th.



Apparently, bringing litigation against small-time violators worked so well for the music industry, the games lobby decided to give it a shot. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this frightening case is that there's no charge of actually pirating games, it's the modding itself that's being punished. While it's doubtful that the feds will come for everyone with a modchip or a Homebrew Channel, the result of this trial may set a frightening precedent for what people are allowed to do with the things they buy.

Are we actually paying for ownership of game consoles, or just the right to use them? We're about to find out.

(The following is an excerpt from the Durai papers.)

We've made camp on the familiar plains of Lenalia Plateau. This simple layout of shallow grasses and rocky mounds has been our home away from home since the very beginning, and now, appropriately, serves as the spot upon which our collective will spend its final peaceful evening. Orbonne Monastery beckons to us just over the horizon, its facade stolid and grim, like a funeral dirge. Within a few hours, we will be inside, confronting the Lucavi in a battle that will surely decide the fate of all Ivalice and beyond. We few, we very fortunate few, will be witnesses to history, and I can only pray it is of our own making. Yet, as extraordinary as our circumstances are, it is my companions here that are truly worthy of history's note.

In my conversations with Ramza, I have learned that our leader believes our cause will remain eternally silent, and that, no matter the outcome, it will be the schemer Delita whose name resides in history. I sincerely hope he is incorrect, but unfortunately, hope is the only objection I can find. Blessedly, the people who join me around this campfire do not share my concern for this fact, or for the eye of posterity at all. We all have our own greater cause to serve, and in its pursuit, each one of us has become something truly remarkable. Indeed, as I look at the faces of my comrades, I can say with no doubt nor hesitation that the sixteen of us in this camp tonight compose the single, most powerful fighting force in recorded history.

There are those of us here whom enter with their own legends, their own stories which will surely blossom through the roots of history, and whom I myself have reported on in an earlier volume. Among the luminaries who remain here are Agrias, the Hokuten's noble swordswoman; Mustadio, the innovator of the gun; Meliadoul, the former Temple Knight; Beowulf and Reis, the star-crossed lovers; Cloud, the hero of another world; and Orlandu, the legendary T.G. Cid himself, and a man utterly unconvinced of his own reputation.

But then, there are we, the meager. When the story of our journey is ultimately written, I believe it is those of us who were here from the start who will slip through the cracks, our actions thoughtlessly joined with those of the man who found us, the “heretic” Ramza Beoulve, who I firmly believe future generations will one day consider the true hero of the Lion War.

Of the five of us who originally joined Ramza on that fateful day in Gariland, Kuwabara, the monk, has emerged as our most stalwart ally. A self-described “force of nature” in his days at the academy, this bull-demon of a man has since replaced his untamed ego with pure, humble spirit. His demeanor never wavers from gentle optimism, and his knowledge of nature and self has evolved to the point where even magic cannot duplicate his skills. True to his youthful boast, the very earth itself now rises to meet his command, and his spiritual force can kill or heal with a mere touch. Since his awakening at Sand Rat Cellar, he has been perhaps the least emotionally disinterested in the purpose of our mission, stating simply that the planet itself dictates his movements- and given that our fight has brought us to the crossroads of history itself, there is no reason to disbelieve him. His faith in himself and in all of us has been the rock upon which we have conducted our war on fate, on inevitability, on the belief that only nobles can control history, and so as the planet has guided him, so has he guided us.

If Kuwabara is our rock, then Aday, our wizard, is the river, always moving, expanding, consuming everything in his path. Once a town priest, Aday used to invoked the name of St. Ajora in all that he did, including the study of magic. This faith of his eventually turned him into a master of all four schools of traditional wizardry, an authority of all things arcane, and, to those of us who once believed, a beacon of the glory of St. Ajora. We imagined this would all change the night we read the Germonik scriptures, and learned the truth about Ivalice's savior. Indeed, we were correct for a time- Aday became despondent and depressed, his once-potent magical energies then hardly strong enough to light a candle. Then, somehow, he performed a miracle. Legend had spoken of a way to invoke and transfer magical energies through logic, rather than faith, however, this had always been dismissed as bunk by most magical scholars, and it had driven to insanity all those who attempted to discover it. Who better, then, to unlock its secrets than a man who'd already been driven insane?

While Aday remains unpredictably neurotic, at times frighteningly so, his newfound ability to use mathematics themselves to project his will is, frankly, otherworldly. He speaks entirely in equations and figures, and even claims to see numbers inside people, numbers which he then transfers through an impossible string of calculations- about six or seven notebooks full of them now- to come up with a resonance he can then use to affix any spell he can think of. The effects are horrifying- I have seen him invoke the power of Holy itself upon entire squadrons at once. It is the height of fortune that while his instability has brought him power, his commitment to us, however unspoken, has never wavered. I shudder to think of the horrible cost of going up against the power of the Calculators.

Perhaps least affected of all of us by the revelations of Germonik is Raine, the summoner. Since our days together in the academy, she has regarded everything- people, nations, causes- with an educated, haughty disgust. Naturally, then, she would gravitate toward the aether, developing relationships with the creatures within far stronger than any she'd deign worthy of a human being. Cynical, disagreeable, negative beyond all reason, she fights with us merely because she considers us “the least of many evils”. Yet, for all her sneering discontent, she fights as passionately as any one of us, bringing the power of the eidolons themselves to our cause. She has tamed the most powerful creatures in the extradimensional plane through her ferocious will, even the mightiest of myths, Zodiac himself. She communes with him now, likely telling him, as she tells everyone, how hopeless we are.

We encountered Zodiac in the Deep Darkness, a place that may as well be a second home to Madiera, our thief. Sly, curvaceous, and libertine, Madiera is pure temptation poured into a ninja's costume- one into which she is currently slicing strategic nicks and cuts, each one inviting the masculine eye, baring just the right swatch of her caramel flesh. While she is a master with daggers and knives, it is seduction which serves as her most potent weapon. With just a flip of her hair or a sway of her hips, she has convinced members of our enemies' side to drop their morals, their beliefs, even their financial interests, and fight in her defense, only for her to rob them of their worldly possessions and send the poor boys home with broken limbs and broken hearts. Kuwabara calls her cruel. Raine calls her shameless. I consider her a genius. Half of the powerful weaponry in our possession has come from her swift, elegant hands- but perhaps more than that, her penchant for pranks and practical jokes keeps us on our toes, and never fails to add much-needed levity to our dark path.

There were five of us meager souls when we departed the academy with Ramza, but I feel the need to include here our adopted sixth: Chanel, our eternal ray of sunshine, and our living reminder that those souls aligned against us are not always wicked. A desperate peasant girl for most of her life, she was recruited by Gafgarion for her competence with a bow and her uncanny resemblance to Princess Ovelia. She was the bait for his trap at the Golgorand gallows, and the only one left on the battlefield after her commander had fled and her allies lay dead or dying around her. She struck at us like a blinded panther, aimless arrows flying everywhere as Raine closed in to deliver the killing blow. Ramza, following behind, gazed into her eyes and saw a frightened soul, one too kind for the rigors of war, a stark reminder of the last time he saw an innocent girl die on the battlefield. Our commander ordered our retreat. He would meet us some hours later with the girl in tow, tears dried into her childish face, clinging to him for dear life. From this wretched soul, he would create the sweet, sunny dancer we now know today, a vibrant, indomitable spirit whose faith in our captain and our cause infects us all even in our darkest times. While Madiera uses her body as an effective tool, Chanel now uses hers as her sole weapon, one she uses to draw the life force itself out of our adversaries. The only thing I can compare it to is my own voice, the eldritch power of which I still have no comprehension. Her only sadness comes from her failed attempts to repay Ramza in kind. From where I sit, I can see her body sway with the wind, and I can tell from her frequent glance that she would much rather be performing in our leader's tent.

It may be for the best, though. Ramza tells of how he fights for the love of his sister alone, the kind of small concern which fuels us all. The fate of humanity, after all, is too enormous a burden to bear at all times, and so we each have found a microcosm of such to aid us in this war. Chanel, of course, prays that rescuing Alma will lead Ramza's tired eyes to her elegant waltz. Kuwabara considers himself an extension of the Earth, and has tied himself to its fate. Raine wishes to prove herself a worthy inhabitant of the espers' world. Madiera, ever the anarchist, fights for her right to petty rebellion, to deny the Lucavi their totalitarian rule. Aday seeks sanity in an insane world, and fights to stamp the ultimate Q.E.D. on his theorems. And myself? I don't particularly know. Maybe just the simple pleasure of chasing a certain nimble thief from town to town for the rest of my days. As for the others, I leave their stories for another day, to another witness to history.

By the time you read this, Olan, the confrontation will be over, and our fate- the world's fate- will already have been decided. Regardless of what becomes of us, I hope these words find you and humanity in good health, and that your efforts lead to a rightful place in history for we, the meager.

Your humble and obedient bard,
Radcliffe

Mario Adventure is a ROM hack for Super Mario Bros. 3. Actually, that's wrong. It's a fully-realized 2-D Mario game that only seems like a hack. It's that good, it's that ubiquitous, and it's the very first project that should come to mind when it comes to fan-made game mods. It was released in 2004, ancient by Internet standards, so there's a good chance that you may already have played it once or twice. Even so, it's such a well-developed and complete Mario experience that it still deserves to be brought up five years later. If you love classic Mario gameplay, you owe it to yourself to hunt down this ROM and plug it into your favorite NES emulator.


Epic battles such as this await

What makes Mario Adventure so good? It's all about the levels. The design and layout of the game's dozens of stages is clever and intuitive, satisfyingly difficult without being overly punishing. There are occasional times where you can feel like you're playing I Want To Be The Mario, with some portions that require guesswork or a leap of faith to overcome, but even these spots never come across as being cheap for their own sake. There are some areas where you'll have to dig deep into your Mario-playing lore to progress, a nice wink and nod to the game's target audience.


If you can figure out how to get out of here, you've done Mario proud

Like in SMB3, there are seven stages to traipse through before you get to Bowser's castle. The first five are faithful, well-worn archetypes- grassland, volcano, forest, ice/underwater, and outer space, all places you've been with Mario before, and all places with distinctive, unique terrain to cover. Worlds 6 and 7, however, are particularly worth notice.



World 6 is Colossal Classics, which remixes level designs from SMB1, SMB3 and the Lost Levels, and sends them all into Giant Land. The double-sized classic stages force you to find new ways to traverse familiar terrain, a quality of any good remake.


You're going to need bigger mushrooms

World 7 is Desert Dares, which puts an entirely new spin on the Mario experience. Awaiting you here are about three dozen mini-levels, each one requiring a clever trick, a specific path, or a distinct feat of platforming to complete. There are no instructions or hints to help you out, it's all up to you to find out if you need to limit your jumps or collect all the coins or do whatever else you need to complete the stage. You'll need a great deal of trial and error to pass this challenge. Good thing the game's way ahead of you on this one.


This one screen is the entire level. Good luck

If you've played any Mario game since Super Mario World, you know that the life count is a mere formality. A good player in any Mario game made in the past two decades can rack up extra lives in the triple digits before the end. So, Mario Adventure does what the main series needed to do a long time ago- ditches the 1up system altogether. Dying just sends you spiraling back to the beginning of the level, and you get as many lives as you need to complete each level. Coins are still as plentiful as they ever were, but now they're used to buy items at the Toad Houses.


Yes, Toad finally discovered capitalism

A few of the other mechanics have changed as well. Like in the Lost Levels, Piranha plants no longer always retreat into their pipes when you stand next to them, or even on top of them. Shyguys are back, but they now act exactly like Koopa Troopas, a good stomp turns them into kickable masks. The wandering Hammer Bros. on the map now take you to full stages loaded with all four brands of bros- the woefully-underused Fire Bros. well-represented among them, Most importantly, Boom-Boom has moved out of the fortresses and now awaits you at the end of nearly every level in the game. Thankfully, three quick stomps does the job as swiftly as it ever has.


ohshitohshitohshitohshit

Like with any worthwhile Mario game, there's some new items at your disposal. The super mushroom, invincibility star, and raccoon leaf are joined by a few welcome additions to the classic arsenal.


- Flowers now turn you into Fire Fire Mario, an upgraded version of the classic power with higher jumps and straight-flying fireballs that pass through obstacles.
- There's also the invisibility hat from Mario 64, a curious addition to a 2D game. Clearly hacked from the Tanooki suit (you can still whack enemies with a tail that isn't there), this power-up lets you disappear behind the background of the stage, keeping you safe from enemy harm. Naturally, this ability is more useful in some places than others- it's a godsend in water stages but totally worthless in the air. It's one of Mario Adventure's roughest edges, but it's an easy one to overlook.
- Ever wonder what would happen if Mario kept one of those magic wands for himself? Then you'd get Magic Mario, whose super-powered stomps and star-shots make this powerup a solid stand-in for the fan-favorite Hammer Bros. suit. Unlike the classic outfit, however, this power-up takes three hits before it vanishes.
- Finally, there's Kuribo's f'n Shoe. It's back, it's as badass as you remember, and now it comes with you between levels. Who loves you, baby?


Cry some moar, Boom-Boom

Of course, Mario Adventure isn't without its faults. The difficulty is steep by modern standards, you'll need to be a pretty adept Mario 3 veteran to stand a chance. That you have to find a hidden key in each world to progress to World 8 is more aggravating than innovative, and the game's weather system – the graphics cycle from morning through night, and occasionally coat a level in rain or ice – is only as novel as it is annoying. Still, these are faults that would be forgivable for an official Nintendo release, let alone the work of a single programmer.


WTF, Mother Nature

That's right, this game is the work of only one person- DahrkDaiz, whose work here speaks for itself. Mario Adventure is the product of sixteen solid months of work, including coding on notebook paper while working at a fast-food restaurant. DahrkDaiz was at one point working on a sequel prominently featuring Luigi, but that work unfortunately remains unfinished to this day. Still, in a community where promising coders and projects vanish on a weekly basis, there's a quality finished product here for posterity, which is more than can be said for the great majority of fan-made games.

If you haven't had the pleasure of playing Mario Adventure yet, the ROM isn't hard to find. Just run a Google search, or click right hereand scroll to the end of the article for a link.