Fine, I can do another section of this shit today. I admittedly don't want to right now, but fuck it c'est la vie:
One of the quirks that accompanies Shigeru Miyamoto’s position as an elder statesman of game development is that he holds the prioritization of interface (read: gameplay) above any other aspect of the process.
Here's Bob desperately upselling Miyamoto's quality. Like yeah, he pretty much never makes a super awful game, but he's also responsible for wrecking Star Fox, never getting a new F-Zero game, and why plots in general never develop even in franchises that could actually have them work (like Star Fox).
So Bob really goes on about the Prophet Miyamoto, he who gave him the Dimensional Sword of Thought for a while. I kid you not, this whole section is quite skippable, because Bob with all his lardy heart is copying what he's reading from Wikipedia. This entire section is just Bob being a yandere fanboy over the man he attributes to preventing his suicide.
He spergs about Miyamoto making Star Fox's basic plot design while forgetting the main reason he chose animals was "I didn't want it to be normal sci fi, with humans and robots and stuff".
He then spergs about how Galaxy got made. Blahblahblah gravity simulation, blahblahblah plagiarizing wikipedia. It's really fucking boring.
I guess you guys might find him defending and shilling Galaxy's methods by trying to downsell the other 3d games:
The jump and dodge gameplay that had defined the majority of the Mario series existed because hurdles and chasms were the only forms of geographic obstacle one could place in on a path that could only be traversed from left or right; but being able to move in all directions through fully-realized worlds can’t help but limit the necessity of Mario’s signature moveset. The more exploration-oriented “Super Mario 64” had piled on the new innovations to accommodate this, but by the time “Sunshine” rolled around it was more than clear that Mario was built for jumping and stomping first… and everything else second by a good distance.
So yeah, Bob downsells 64 and Sunshine because he personally believes Mario only works when he Bing Bing Wahoos. Ignoring that the parkour shit you did in 64 was fun as hell and why I love the game so much, as was using the water cannon from Sunshine to hover and shit.
By moving the action to a version of “Outer Space” that was inspired less by science fiction than it was by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” – with Mario traversing comically tiny planetoids and hitching a ride on shooting stars – “Galaxy” allowed the series to evolve into a kind of absolute-extreme version of the platforming ideal: Mario leaps from platform to platform above a literal black abyss on a path that is almost always fairly linear even if such straightforwardness is cleverly hidden by visual panache.
"Bookish" Bob decides to flex his smooth brain by getting how Mario Galaxy was developed from a book he never read. By referencing this, he show's he's wrong, because Galaxy's idea came from Mario 128.
Combine that with Bob desperately spamming words from his thesaurus and trying to mimic what he thinks critics sound like, he again shows that he only ever read strategy guides and comics. Seriously, read the bullshit I italicized.
That section is basically word salad. You can derive meaning from it, but it's all trash.
So yeah. Bob continues to babble and burble two dollar words to hide his stupidity and retardation about Bing Bing Wahoo: In Space! until this point.
I remember the first time I saw that part, presented as an E3 trailer for the game… it was like revisiting a memory and, for a change, having it feel better with the passage of time.
Bob admits he acted like Eric Butts to the trailer. He probably cried too, since remember he peaked when he was 9.
That same sequence also introduces the first and most intriguing new element to the Mario “canon” to come along in… possibly ever. We learn that the Mushroom Kingdom celebrates a kind of High Holy Day around the appearance of a specific Comet, which turns out to actually house the spaceship/observatory of Rosalina – an enigmatic figure who behaves very much like a kind of Goddess and serves as mother to extra-terrestrial beings who grow up to become stars and planets. (That observation ultimately became the second episode of “The Game OverThinker,” which I’ll speak to momentarily.)
Bob for the first time in the book hints that he has a mommy/queen fetish with this little autistic segment. Also you can tell from the tone of voice that he's happy that Bing Bing Wahoo has plot... despite him not even earlier talking about how Miyamoto don't give a shit about plot.
What a smoothbrain.
“Super Mario Galaxy” became a critical darling (the best reviewed Mario title in years) and one of the Wii’s biggest sellers… though, perhaps tellingly, not quite as big as Wii Sports or the group/family-oriented “Mario Kart Wii.” Still, it did well enough for Nintendo (and Miyamoto) to take the uncommon step of greenlighting an immediate, direct sequel based on the same engine, making 2010’s “Super Mario Galaxy 2” the first direct successor installment in the series since the original Japanese SMB2.
Here's Bob telling those of you who liked the Paper Mario games or Wario Land or Super Star Saga that your games are shit compared to Bing Bing Wahoo: In Space!
So yeah, that section sucks, and I don't have the motivation to reread anymore today since, you know, there's several sections of the Autobiography part left. While they're funnier, I just read this shit and it was mostly Bob being obtuse on purpose and plagiarizing wikipedia and other sources.
Speaking of boring, for those curious and delusional, here's how fucking boring the non-Autobiography part of the book is and why I'd have to livestream it:
How Boring Most of the Book is said:
Climbing up a flight of stairs, I find a narrow walkway lit by two candles. As I pass beneath, the tiny flames sprout legs, hop off, and begin to chase me! Hot Foot (who stops in his tracks if you face him, just like a Boo) makes his first appearance. It’s a great, simple retro-cartoon throwback visual that reaffirms the Mario series’ pop-cultural ties to the golden age of animation. The Fortress’s other new hazard (horizontal-attacking Thwomps) are significantly less delightful…
Midpoint is a row of pipes. By what feels an awful lot like muscle-memory at this point, I duck down the center one and land in a narrow underground passage. There’s a power-up in a row of Blocks – a Fire Flower. Amusingly, all the enemies down here with me (several Dry Bones and a Boo) are fireproof. Two invisible blocks lead the way out, leaving me at what I sense is near the end of the actual Fortress. For completion’s sake, I opt to backtrack just in case there’s anything interesting or useful I missed.
Good news: my backtracking earns me a Super Leaf. Bad news: trying to get back past the last horizontal Thwomp trap takes it away, leaving me relatively offense-less against Boom-Boom. At least this one doesn’t fly, for a change – though he’s a jumper, and the platform in the middle of the room makes my own jumping difficult… but I manage to take him down.
And this was just for one level in the game...
I really don't think people realize how fucking boring 75% of this book is.
