<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Malstrom's Articles News]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[seanmalstrom]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/author/seanmalstrom/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Email: You can&#8217;t play with God so I don&#8217;t worship&nbsp;games]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<div id="yiv146679616"><em><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/6903-Extra-Punctuation-On-Remakes-and-Nostalgia" target="_blank">[&#8230;](A guy from ABC TV&#8217;s Good Game) knows people who will buy and play every new Mario game regardless of perceived quality simply because &#8220;it&#8217;s Mario.&#8221; (Yahtzee)responded &#8211; in retrospect, a little too hastily &#8211; with &#8220;yeah, it&#8217;s like talking to people who believe in God.&#8221;[&#8230;]</p>
<p>Yahtzee´s full editorial</a></p>
<p>I&#8217;ve read it, and I found it, well, totally predictable.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a subtle difference between &#8220;believing in gaming&#8221;, like believing in mythology or religion, you can NOT play with (any) god, but you can play games.<br />
Gamers don&#8217;t &#8220;believe&#8221; in gaming, at least there is no &#8220;blind faith&#8221; (also called hype)<br />
There are still references to how Mario should stay in space floating and never returning back.</p>
<p>But Mario is not in deep space, far away from his fantasy world of faith in gaming, Mario is selling, very VERY near from him, in Australia, and everywhere else.</p>
<p>Mario is not a god, Miyamoto is not a god, japanese gamers didn&#8217;t buy Super Mario Galaxy, and since Super Mario World, the Mario Madness became &#8220;Sony Sanity&#8221; (ironic)<br />
And now this Mario is selling again, and japanese people don&#8217;t believe in gaming, they play games.</p>
<p>Now there is some projectionism from our &#8220;hardcore&#8221; writer, he thinks Super Mario Bros 5 is FOR NEW AUDIENCES! LOL<br />
And, he is quite sure, the only way to introduce Mario to new audiences is to <span style="text-decoration:underline;">make them buy the old ones full-price!</span></p>
<p>Nintendo did that on GBA, and was &#8220;quite&#8221; succesful, but then we must remember, Game Boy Advance was the ultimate example of sustaining the old GameBoy premises.</p>
<p>But the point is, calling Super Mario Bros 5 a &#8221; Cultural Masturbation&#8221; is quite daring to say the least.<br />
If Mario is a &#8220;cultural masturbation&#8221;, I am totally positively sure the &#8220;Hardcore&#8221; are just plain impotent.</p>
<p>You can&#8217;t go anywhere from space (Game Industry actual position)</p>
<p>I say to them, Mario went from space, back to the beginning, before entering the &#8220;Point of No Return&#8221;.<br />
Meanwhile, the Industry (and their forum dwellers and viral marketers) as a whole is past the point of no return, being slowly swallowed by a black hole.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the Event Horizon, as they reach it, the time will eventually stop for them and they will cease to exist.</em></p>
<p>Wow, Yahtzee has gone insane. It is really something how Mario 5 rattles these people off big time.</p>
<p>You&#8217;d think these &#8216;hardcore&#8217; types would love old-school games like Mario 5 and be thrilled that the old-school can still sell. But that is just it, isn&#8217;t it? Maybe the &#8216;hardcore&#8217; aren&#8217;t &#8216;old-school&#8217; at all.</p>
<p>If you ask the &#8216;hardcore&#8217; what an &#8216;old-school&#8217; game is, they will mention something from the first PlayStation or N64 or Saturn. To them, games from the 16-bit, 8-bit, Atari Era and such are not &#8216;old-school&#8217;, they are just &#8216;primitive&#8217; like stone age times. From their perspective, they see Mario 5 selling and think &#8220;Why is this stone age era game selling so well? Wow, people must be sooo stupid.&#8221;</p>
<p>Anyway, what is up with these guys bringing up religion from out of nowhere? You&#8217;ll see the emailer in the post above bring up religion as well.</p>
<p>Since fifteen to twenty years ago, I finally feel as if games are beginning to PROGRESS forward. Before, they kept playing with technology or diluting themselves with movie elements. Now after a decade or two of not going anywhere, it feels we are getting back to the revolution that is gaming.</p></div>
<p>// // </p>
]]></html></oembed>