Yesterday the always interesting Game | Life linked to an insanely fun flash game called The Impossible Quiz. Now I just did the same. As the title suggests, players work their way through a quiz consisting of questions that often feel impossible. And though some of the questions seem to lack any sort of internal logic (which is why, I assume, the game rewards players with the ability to skip single questions as they progress through it), most of them are really very clever.

I spent a about an hour with the quiz earlier, working my way to question 55. You can find answers to questions 1-54 in the comments. Feel free to add to them. (I’M PERFETLY AWARE NOBODY WILL.)

This just in: Command & Conquer 3 demo slick, fun.

I’ve been taking some time lately to play through games I like. A strange concept, I know, but I tend to ignore games I really enjoy in favor of games I feel I should be playing. As though, as a serious gamer I should be playing games in the gaming canon (and oh, do I hate “canon,” but that’s a topic for another time). Really, this is a relatively recent problem of mine, and one I’m only starting to combat by playing games for fun rather than out of some twisted sense of gamer responsibility.

Paper Mario 2, for example, is a game I played for about an hour a couple of years ago and then never touched again. Playing through it over the last couple of weeks I realized what a colossal mistake that was. Similarly, I’ve now started playing Burnout 3 in earnest. Glancing at my profile, I saw I had only played the game for 42 minutes since picking it up as part of Toys ‘R Us’ much appreciated semi-annual buy-two-get-one-free sale two years ago. It’s uncanny just how much the game resembles an F-Zero title, and if Criterion weren’t so tightly locked to EA’s teat, it’d be great to see them tackle a Wii installment of the franchise (assuming AM2 wasn’t busy, of course).

Looking back over the collection of games I’ve acquired over the last generation, I realize many of them were purchased out of a sense of necessity rather than for actual entertainment. Granted, I ended up loving most of them – who could have predicted that Resident Evil 4 would be one of the best games of the generation – but there are still plenty of “great” games that I genuinely didn’t like.

Shadow of the Colossus, for example, is a boring, boring game. The narrative (what little there is of it) may be subtle and charming, but the actual meat of the gameplay, you know, those colossi things, devolves to a handful of the same repeated techniques. They may look fantastic, but they’re a repetitive bore to fight/reverse dungeon upon. And then that insanely difficult last boss feels like it’s from a different game entirely. After the first three colossi I ended up GameFAQing my way through to the end because I felt I should. I definitely didn’t have any fun doing so.

ICO is still tops though.

Metroid Prime 2 was a disorganized mess. I still have no idea how Breath of Fire 5 works. I’m stupid, Capcom, I don’t get it. Rygar sucks, and it sucked before I played God of War. I’d rather watch Space Channel 5 than play it. The annoying, reinforcement-free random dungeons and lack of tension from any sort of over-arching time limit ruined Pikmin 2. Ruined it straight to boring. Oh, and Super Mario Sunshine had massive pacing problems.

So… I’m done. Final Fantasy VII was honestly a pretty good game, I love the Monster Rancher series, and here’s hoping Google cachés us today.

When Tribes: Vengeance first came out 34 years ago, I primarily purchased it because the demo was rockin’. But there was also the Vivendi-funded (or at least supported) full-fledged Starsiege mod, giant mechs and all.

On a whim, I checked the mod’s website today, which has sat quietly in my bookmarks for years now, to find that they’ve actually gone and set an “alpha tech release” loose upon the interwebs. Multiplayer either doesn’t work yet, or there just weren’t any servers up, so I spent some time running around a map by myself. And though vehicles and mechs seem unusable at the moment, they’re still perfectly spawnable and love being blown up by grenades. The visuals don’t seem to look as nice as any of the screenshots and pressing ‘c’ sends the player rocketing into the air for some undocumented reason, but it’s still an impressive little endeavor. Oh, and it’s not a Tribes mod any more. Now it’s graduated to full-on freeware. Though it still has a long way to go (the modders promise a “late 2007” release) it shows a great deal of potential. Hopefully I won’t be the only person who downloads the finished product in nine months.

I’m not sure if I already did an update on this very topic before The Last Redesign, and frankly, I’m too lazy to check. Because I’m doing one now. On this topic. The topic of video game instruction manuals.

Video game manuals are really an extension of the video game itself and a part of the product at large, but it’s a shame to see them so rarely treated as such. Instead, they’re usually bare-bones lists of basic controls and/or game goals (and the ever-important ‘notes’ section). Looking back over all the manuals I used to read on the return trip home from Toys ‘R Us, I can really only recall a few that stood out as uniquely interesting. Some manuals were filled with tons of fantastic artwork, such as Super Mario World’s depiction of every single move and ability in the game or Secret of Mana’s creepy clay figures of game characters. Others were needlessly exhaustive like Earthbound’s full-blown strategy guide or KoTOR’s slick, spiral bound enyclopia of a manual.

Diablo’s instruction manual has always been my personal favorite. The entire thing is a dark black and white, each page having a cloudy grey background and pitch-black sidebars saturated with artwork and quotations from the likes of Dante, Milton, and Nietzsche. The enemy descriptions and narrative comprise a full 50% of the manual, and most of it is literally useless to anyone who reads it, filled with dense references and allusions that don’t make sense until well into Diablo 2. Plus the whole thing is forwarded by a Chris Metzen poem titled “The Initiate.”

Diablo’s manual is part of the game. It sets the mood before the game is ever installed and is densely packed with information that illuminates not only the game itself, but its sequel as well. Looking over the remainder of my games collection, I can think of no other manual that comes even remotely close to Diablo’s achievement. In fact, as I stare at the shelf filled with last-generation’s titles, I realize I’ve only ever seen a handful of them, and of those only Katamari Damacy’s and Metal Gear Solid 3’s manuals leave any sort of lasting impression.

As I see it, the generally dull, unentertaining nature of video game instruction manuals is really a self-fulfilling prophecy. The manuals are boring because nobody reads them. Nobody reads them because the manuals are boring. And they’ve only managed to become more boring in recent years. Console manuals need to remain thin so they can fit in a DVD case and giant-sized manuals like Diablo’s no longer exist as PC titles now come in small, standardized boxes.

Additionally, there honestly isn’t much need for video game instruction manuals any more, if there ever even was. Almost every game these days has built-in 30-minute tutorials that assume the player has never touched a controller before in his or her life. Even those that don’t offer turotials generally come with some sort of in-game documentation or help menu. The rise of digital distribution through Steam, Direct-2-Drive, and Game Tap on the PC and XBLA, PSN, and the Virtual Console on the consoles leaves no room for physical instruction manuals. And let’s face it, nobody needs a manual to figure out how to play Worms (in 2009) or Adventure Island. Instruction manuals are really just an additional cost publishers would likely love to get rid of. Most of Vivendi’s games now ship with a single instruction sheet at most, Half-Life 2’s boxed version included.

With space limitations, at least when it comes to simple gameplay instructions, a thing of the past with the advent of optical media, there’s really no reason for developers not to just teach players how to play in-game. And though I suppose all we’re losing is a potential, and a rarely realized one at that, the loss is really rather minor. But where will we keep track of important information without dozens of manuals ending in ‘notes’ sections?

I wrote this earlier today in a fit of boredom, and figured I might as well post it as an update given the site’s current lack of content. Feel free to hate it.

From the onset, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door does little to differentiate itself from its competition. In fact, it stands as the very definition of run-of-the-mill. Within the first thirty minutes players discover that Princess Peach has been kidnapped yet again, that an ancient evil lies buried beneath the world, and that the planet’s only hope for salvation lies in the seven crystal stars, conveniently scattered equidistantly across the globe. As ever, it’s up to Mario and company to save the day.

But though the game does little to set itself apart from the rest of the RPG-pack in terms of narrative, the gameplay itself is uniquely smart and refreshing. Rather than mindlessly input the same attack command ad nauseum, wading through seemingly endless randomly-spawned hordes of evil, The Thousand Year Door, as with all games in the Mario RPG series, requires a far more active level of interaction from the player. In order to execute attacks and special abilities, players need to input the correct button sequence, perform the right joystick motions, or time button presses with split-second accuracy. This style of combat makes each battle (non-random, of course) far more active and enjoyable than the traditional fare.

Additionally, all of Paper Mario 2’s battles take place on a stage before a live audience, both of which grow over the course of the game. By appealing to the crowd, performing stylish moves, or chaining together successful attacks, players are able to gain the audience’s favor and fill their star points – allowing them to use increasingly powerful special moves against increasingly powerful enemies.

Thankfully, Mario won’t have to go it alone, taking on screen-filling bosses by himself. He’ll have a surprisingly large cast of party members at his disposal, though only one is usable at a time. Ranging from a sorority girl goomba to a salty bob-omb of the sea, each of Mario’s partners has a unique style of attack useful against different kinds of enemies, ensuring all of them see relatively equal use. Also, each character has a special ability which can be activated only outside of battle.

Though Mario spends a great deal of time battling the (adorably cute) minions of evil, he spends just as much time interacting with the environment around him. Unlike many role-playing games, The Thousand Year door is littered with Zelda-style dungeons and puzzles of a distinctively adventurey persuasion. As the title suggests, Mario himself is made of paper, allowing him to fold himself into a paper airplane or boat or to squeeze between thin, paper-sized openings. Combined with his partners’ unique abilities, players are left with a wide assortment of tools to use in solving the game’s many clever, if rarely particularly challenging, puzzles.

Obviously, Paper Mario 2 doesn’t just play great. Though the 3D backgrounds are generally sparse and sport low polygon counts, the game makes up for it with its beautiful 2D sprites and is never afraid to throw a hundred of them on screen at a time. The soundtrack is equally impressive, boasting plenty of new music that stands strong against old favorites from Mario’s past. And though the storyline itself never strays far from the beaten path, it keeps things interesting by matching the bright, vivid visuals with equally upbeat writing.

After players have a completed the game, a task which should take around 30 hours, The Thousand Year Door holds an impressive amount of extra content on its tiny disk. Unfortunately, none of it stands up to the quality of the main quest, instead devolving to fetch quests, grind-a-thons, and full-on repeats of events from earlier in the game. Still, there’s plenty of content waiting for players looking for it.

Paper Mario 2 is the sort of game that demands players give it that initial investment. At first it may seem like a rehash of the sort of games we’ve seen produced within the RPG genre since its conception, but it eventually blooms into something much more interactive and fulfilling than the generally distant role-playing gameplay. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year door is smart, fresh fun that does what any great game should: never wears out its welcome and leaves you wanting more.

I’ve never been particularly interested in comics books because the heavy hitters of the medium tend to be decades-old soap operas scraping the bottom of any and every barrel in sight in order to continue their perpetual narrative. Case in point, this week’s (month’s?) Spider-Man apparently has Peter Parker killing Marry Jane with his sperm. To quote the dialogue from the linked article, “Oh God, I’m sorry! The doctors didn’t understand how it happened! How you had been poisoned by radioactivity! How your body slowly became riddled with cancer! I did. I was… I am filled with radioactive blood. And not just blood. Every fluid. Touching me… loving me… Loving me killed you!”

Not even the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator could take credit for something this retarded.

The Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator is great. Its concept is hardly difficult to understand. Two things, perhaps related in some way or perhaps not, forcibly bound by some sort of idea. The sheer number of possibilities buried behind this simple bit of random generation borders on embarrassing for whoever’s responsible, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

Possible generated ideas run the gammot from inherently awesome (Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Gundamn Wing and Batman. The story should use starting a band as a plot device!) to painfully obvious (Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Nancy Drew and the National Football League. The story should use bondage as a plot device!).  Enjoy!

Tomorrow: more content ripped from weeks-old forum threads!

He just got done killing a dude made of burning rock and coming back from the dead… you’d think he could pull off a more impressive spell than Summon Sunshine or Rally Nation.