Nathan Davis Jan 29, 2012

it was ok 's review

Well this should be an interesting review if nothing else.



My wife picked this pick up for me for Christmas knowing that I enjoy computer and business history books. Most of the content I was pretty familiar with from either David Sheff’s excellent book “Game over” or any number of articles I’ve dug up on the Internet. Still, it’s fun to go through and do a review of material sometimes, right? Less so with Super Mario.

Right off the bat it’s obvious that the author is a well practiced and skilled magazine writer. Ultimately that’s what this book really feels like; one really long magazine article. There’s certainly room in the world of literature for the more informal style of the magazine author, but this style, in general, becomes problematic when the need to reach a deadline supersedes the need to write something accurately and authoritatievly. There were several passages where I found myself thinking “Oh yeah, I remember reading that article on such-and-such website too, but he’s not really giving the whole story.” Worse then being incomplete, much of the information was flat out wrong. Each time I encountered a factual error, I’d dog-ear the page. What follows is all the errors that stood out to me on a quick read through. Also, to be fair, there were a 5 items I thought were errors but upon further investigation the author turned out to be correct.



Page 82 – the author describes some of the early variations on Super Mario Brothers – such as All Night Nippon – and some hacked versions of the rom for the arcade version. He also references the rom hack “Super KKK brothers” with the implication being that this version came out in the 80s. Most of the hacks listed came out in the late 90s with the advent of NES emulators and rom hacking tools. Not an outright error, but a poorly explained section.



Page 82 – “They discovered Mario could get an extra life if he jumped high enough on the level-ending flagpole.”

In the original Super Mario Brothers, getting higher on the flagpole only netted you extra points. Getting an extra life was introduced Super Mario Brothers 2 (JPN) and also later used in the DS game New Super Mario Brothers. Since at this point in the book only Super Mario Brothers had been discussed, it implies this is the game that had that trick.



Page 88 – the author is describing the conversion of Doki Doki Panic to Super Mario 2. “Yume Kojo’s plot of someone attacking dreams was replaced by Bowser attacking the kingdom for a second time.”

In Mario 2 the final boss is Wart, not Bowser, and the game takes place in the dreamworld of Subcon, not the Mushroom kingdom.



Page 97 – “Nintendo also expanded on its own fan club newsletter, secretly working on what would be Nintendo Power magazine. … Everyone in the fan club got a free subscription.”

Every member of the fan club got a free copy of the first issue, but not a free subscription. Interestingly enough he mentions that Dragon Warrior sold better in Japan due to a write up in Nintendo Power, but doesn’t mention that a free copy of Dragon Warrior was given away with subscriptions to Nintendo power one year.



Page 111 – “The genesis sold for $189, nearly double the NES price. It was backwards compatible with the master system, which wasn’t much of a feature since few in America had one.”

This is an interesting one where he’s not strictly incorrect, just incomplete. The Sega genesis contained two processors, the Motorola 68000 and the Z80 microprocessor. The most commonly used configuration was to have the 68000 do the game calculations (Graphics/logic) while the Z80 did the sound (music/sound effects). The Z80 was specifically added to the system as it was the same chip used in the Master system, Sega’s previous console. The system could set the 68000 into standby mode and run the Z80 in compatibility mode to run Master System games. This dual CPU setup is very similar to the way the PS2, GBA and Wii perform backwards compatibility. The sticking point, and the error the book makes, is it required a pin adaptor (sold separately) to insert the Master System games into the Genesis.



Page 122 – this is nitpicking I freely admit. The author is discussing the design of the new Super Nintendo Controller. “But if a designer needed six distinct buttons for six distinct actions (Think Street Fighter II), the SNES could do that. The Genesis couldn’t.”

The Genesis controller bus architecture did, in fact, allow for six buttoned controllers. Sega later released a six button controller that was compatible with the then new Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition. If you’re going to reference SF2, and this weakness of the Genesis, the six button controller is fairly relevant.



Page 123 - “What the SNES couldn’t do, though, was lift. The genesis has a beefier processor, which let Sega games run as fast as its spiny mascot. The SNES would never be able to do that, and wisely it didn’t try.”

At the risk of devolving into an fanboy flame war, this is just silly more then anything else. Two points. First, the speed of the CPU (in a game console) has very little to do with how fast objects can scroll across the screen. In a typical game the CPU is used to run AI, game logic, and control the various sub-systems. The actual process of rendering the on-screen graphics and scrolling them quickly and smoothly is handled by the video chip (PPU on the SNES and the YM7101 on the Genesis). The ability to quickly, and smoothly, scroll images across the screen has far more to do with the 2d video chips used in each system and their ability to load and display tiles. The Genesis was powerful, but not quite as powerful as the SNES. The SNES, very generally speaking, had a more powerful video system that allowed for more sprites, more scrolling and graphical effects to be achieved in hardware. It is analogous to buying a modern gaming PC with a slower CPU but a much faster video card.

Even this difference in “video cards” is largely moot as there isn’t a huge difference to a console between walking at 1 screen per minute and 10 screens per minute - so long as the data is either in memory or can be quickly loaded across the bus to memory. It just depends on how the game is coded. To say the SNES was incapable of making a Sonic game because the CPU was a lower clock speed is just uninformed and resonates with “Sega has blast Processing and Nintendon’t!”

Second, and more anecdotal in nature, Speedy Gonzalez and Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally were two games on the SNES that emulated the Sonic gameplay style quite comfortably.



Page 124 – [discussing the design of the new Super Mario World.] “The other guiding principle was to show off what the SNES could. Certain yellow bricks spun when hit, an animation the NES would have been hard-pressed to do convincingly. “

Not at all. The spin animation is achieved by swapping out a non-animated background tile with an animated background tile. Super Mario 3 actually did the same thing in reverse when you’d hit a Question block. The animated tile was swapped for a non-animated tile. Both sets of animated tiles had 3 frames of animation and no trouble displaying dozens of them on screen. Later NES hacks would replicate this feature.



Page 125 “While Mario Stayed the same size, Yoshi started out small, and needed to be made bigger by his signature attack: gulping down enemies.”

The Small/Big Mario gameplay element was retained for this game. Also, the first time Yoshi is introduced he starts out full size. Only later game play levels, and only for specially colored Yoshis, would introduce the game play mechanic where you have to feed Yoshi 3 enemies before he’s big enough to ride.



Page 133 “Topping the wish was a two-player racing game. But simply doubling the Mode 7 via split screen would make the races comically slow: no way this would ever pass as F-zero 2. But slower would work fine for a go-kart race, where no one’s expecting speed.”

This is more confused than untrue. The SNES could, in fact, run an F-zero type racer split screen, but the reduced field-of-view made it difficult to distinguish the track at faster speeds. Mario Kart is paced for the size of the screen space. Furthermore, various hacks can be applied to Mario Kart to get the game scrolling at F-Zero speeds.

Interestingly enough, the SNES can normally only display one rotated background at a time. So Mario Kart included a DSP chip in the cartridge to handle the second players screen.



Page 148 – “They also crank out Super Mario All-Stars, A SNES game collecting the first three Super Mario NES titles.”

Mario All Stars collects the first *four* NES titles. Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario The Lost Levels (JPN: Super Mario Brothers 2), Super Mario 2 (JPN: Super Mario USA) and Super Mario 3. Worse yet, he would later say “Mario all-stars collects 4 or 5 games.”

Correction: A version of Marie All-Stars was later released that included Super Mario World. So saying "4 or 5 games" is completely accurate.



Page 150 “In 1994, not many people had heard of Moore’s Law – Intel Cofounder Gordon Moore’s prediction from way back in 1965 the transistor usage could double every 2 years.”

This one I wanted to post because I actually got it wrong myself when I underlined this section. I’ll let Wikipedia’s entry speak for itself “Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware: the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to David House, an Intel executive, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and them being faster).”



Page 152 - “SEGA countered in 1991, saying a CD-ROM system would be ready that year attachable to any Genesis. But it only expanded the size of the game, not the quality of the graphics. “

Not true. The SEGA CD contained a second 68000 CPU, same processor as the Genesis, but it ran at 12.5 mhz to the Genesis 7.67mhz. Either CPU could be used to run the game code, so some games (such as Sonic CD) would be able to use the faster 68000 to generate a mode 7 style effect for bonus stages. Having two CPUs was used by various games to improve/speed up the graphics and game play in various ways.



Page 156 – “Philips and Sony, pinky-swearing that no one would get between their friendship again, patched things up. They collaborated once again on a new form for a CD-Based technology, the DVD, in the hopes it would become a global standard. It of course did.”

This whole section was just awful. Easily the worst part of the entire book. The author is apparently so bored by the business history feud that was the Nintendo/Sony/Phillips CD-Rom add on debacle, that he feels the need to explain the entire thing in a overworked love story metaphor. Worse yet, he never even mentions the fact that Sony and Nintendo are Japanese companies, whereas Phillips was European company (Dutch, to be specific) and that it was considered a social faux pas for Nintendo to dump a local company for a Gaijin company.

But whatever. The specific gaffe here is that Sony and Phillips developed the MMCD (Multimedia Compact Disc) specification and it was the rival of the Super Density disc (Developed by a host of other companies.). IBM actually pulled Sony and Phillips into the fold and got them to agree to a derivative of the SD disc; the DVD.



Page 160 - “Yamauchi want Mario’s face to appear as often as possible, anywhere it could. To encourage this, he took the counterintutive step of prohibiting any Zelda or Link merchandising. If someone wanted a Nintendo character for a doll or mug, it was Mario or Nothing.”

This isn’t entirely incorrect. Though it’s nothing I’d ever heard of before. I found a couple of online interviews making allusions to this order. Either way, this order didn’t last long and Zelda was licensed for cereal, board games, trash cans, all within a few years of the first game being released. It seems odd that the author would go on to mention the Mario products from that same time frame, but make the implication that the Zelda never existed.



Page 167 - [discussing the game Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island] “Miyamoto used the Super FX chip to augment the game’s graphics, but in subtle ways: some villains were 3-D, and the chip helped the graphics have finer resolution.”

The Super FX chip is a RISC based mathematical co-processor. It has NOTHING to do with the resolution output by the PPU nor the resolution of various sprites.

What it was used for, with this title, was to render some 3d environmental hazards (NOT 3d enemies), rotate and resize sprites without using a mode 7 effect, and apply distortion effects to various sprites for an animation style dubbed “Morphmation.”

Maybe I’m just nitpicking minor details here - who really cares if the special chip made higher resolution graphics or if it was actually used for a new animation style? The trouble is that this very passage, and much of this book, is devoted to how Nintendo and Miyamoto used existing hardware to create new and artistic ideas without needing top-end hardawre. It’s ridiculous to be discussing this, then say “this chip was used to make higher resolution graphics.”



Page 178 - [discussing Super Mario RPG] - “The SNES, boosted by the super FX chip, would display everything isometrically.” -

Super Mario RPG utilized the SA-1 chip, not the super FX chip. The Super FX chip functioned as a math co-processor, whereas the SA-1 was a general purpose CPU that was clocked higher then the SNES main CPU. It was used for a number of graphics and game logic enhancements.



Page 180 - [Discussing the merits of a CD versus ROM based game consoles and specifically how a rom cartridge based system would have less texture memory available] - “One way to avoid the texture-shading problem was to use something call Gourad shading, which resulted in a bouncy, cartoonish look.”

Sort of... It’s true that proper shading can help flesh out the look of an object above and beyond what the texture originally shows. This isn’t wrong per se, but it’s confused what the purpose of each element is used for. Gourad shading is merely an interpolation calculation that is applied to polygons with real time lighting. This shading process smooths out the lighting across multiple polygons producing a more uniform and less flat look. Texturing is applied before the lighting process.



Page 209 - “F-Zero: Maximum velocity was MIyamoto’s Mode 7 SNES launch game, with a little polish.”

This line does seem to be largely editorial, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least mention that the title had brand new tracks and not ports of the SNES tracks. But, again, his comment seems to be largely editorial about the quality of the title.



Page 222 - “Go is a devilishly complex game, in which an opponents all-black can be turned snow white with just a few perfectly placed white stones.”

In Go, when a section of stones are surrounded, they are captured and removed from the board not flipped to the opposite color. I believe the author is thinking of Othello (AKA Reversi on Windows 3.1).



Page 231 - [discussing the first generation Nintendo DS] - “Puzzlingly, there wasn’t room for a headphone jack: anyone who wanted to listen on a train had to buy a headphone adaptor.”

This is true of the Game Boy Advance SP, but not the DS. The DS launch system had a ⅛ inch standard headphone jack at launch.





Page 237 - discussing Sony’s new PSP game console - “Its memory was big: it had 16GB of flash storage.”

Not sure what he was thinking of here. The PSP-1000 had 32mb of flash memory and could accept a 16gb (or larger) memory memory stick. The PSP-go would later launch with 16gb of flash memory built in.



Page 241 - [discussing the new Wii console] - “It was designed to be small and sleek, no bigger then three DVD cases, and so efficient it didn’t need a cooling fan.”

One could make the argument the Wii doesn’t need a cooling fan, nevertheless it does have one.



Page 247 - [discussing the Mii creator on the Wii] - “There are strange omissions- no red hair? No Dark Skin Tones? No Body customizations other then height and width?”

Check the Mii editor for yourself. There are dark and light skin tones.



I’ll confess that my familiarity with video games is much stronger in the 8 & 16 bit era, so who knows how many other errors slipped by unnoticed? That’s the part that’s most troubling about this book is how can I trust anything, even the narrative, if the author can’t be bothered to research the materiel properly? I will say that his analysis of Nintendo’s profitability is pretty spot on from the perspective of re-hashing games and offers a perspective I hadn’t considered. Otherwise it’s a sloppy bit of magazine grade writing that looks like a rough draft at best.