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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (04/07/2023)

Added 2023-04-07 23:38:34 +0000 UTC

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week, we’re going to cover the general news, but I’ll also start with a review of the Super Mario Bros. movie. Yes, let’s all jump back into a Chrysler Voyager and head to the 1993 movie theater for—wait there’s a new movie?

It’s-a Him, Mario

The Mario movie — this new one, by Illumination — was in some ways three decades in the making. Not in the James Cameron way, where he wrote script 30 years ago and has been shoving it in people’s faces forever until they finally made the blue water people movie, but in the way that it’s probably been percolating in different people’s minds for that long. I’m sure that, as aghast as Miyamoto was by the Max Headroom-style fever dream that was the 1993 original, he has been considering what ideas he wants to have for a second chance at a major theatrical Mario movie ever since.

And that’s kind of what this movie is, thirty years of ideas for what should go into a Mario movie without a narrative spine to keep it standing upright. It’s not that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has no story, it just has kind of a limp and jelly-like story that clearly takes a backseat to a cavalcade of references, music, and just things. All the things. By the end of the movie it’s not even really clear if most of the characters know or like each other, but you know they know what a fire flower is. You the viewer also know what every single mechanic from Mario Kart 8. You know there exists some kind of troubling reality where the NES launched without Super Mario Bros. in America, which creates a ton of unanswered questions.

The references are good! It’s an enjoyable time! But it really could have used an actual story! The first twenty minutes of the movie establish that the emotional core of the narrative is Mario & Luigi’s relationship. After that, they’re pulled apart, Luigi does nothing until the last five minutes, and Mario is mostly pulled by the arm from scene to scene. It’s a baffling script choice, because it feels like someone who has kind of vaguely sort of heard of the hero’s journey but doesn’t want to waste time looking it up on Wikipedia.

To which the usual refrain is that, it’s a kid’s movie, who cares? But Toy Story is a kid’s movie. The recent Puss-in-Boots is a kid’s movie. So is Coco, Encanto, The Iron Giant, even Spirited Away. You can argue that those are “all-ages” movies but I’d probably argue back that Super Mario Bros. aims more for 35-year-olds than it does 5-year-olds. It just doesn’t do a great job of satisfying either with a fully-fleshed out experience. This is not at all to say the movie isn’t worth a watch, just that it should be better.

I hadn’t eaten anything all day before we got to the movie theater because I was fasting the entire time, so I waited in line for half an hour through the previews to get a large popcorn and a drink. By the end of the movie, my partner and I had finished off the entire Question Block-shaped tin that was larger than my head full of empty-calorie nutritionless movie theater popcorn. It wasn’t a meal, but it was good enough for two hours, which could not have been a more perfect metaphor for the Super Mario Bros. movie.

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Fixes Most of Its Original Problems

The console ports of Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters are taking a lot of fan feedback into account over their original PC and Mobile release. The high-resolution font is being replaced with a pixel font that more closely resembles the original games, which I’m told was one of the first things planned for the console port when it was originally decided upon. There’s also music choices between original and remastered soundtracks and credits being added back into Final Fantasy VI’s opening so it’s not just Magitek Armor walking forward into the horizon for three minutes.

These are all improvements and you might think it’s wild that they were not in the original release. While not saying these are the specific reasons behind Pixel Remaster’s games not having them, sometimes developers and publishers scope per platform. That is to say, sometimes but not necessarily this time, they look at a PC and mobile release and imagine it will get (X) sales whether they do (Y) or not and thus decide to keep working on (Y) for a later port rather than just waiting a year+ to release everything at once.

It’s kind of like Early Access without being labeled as such and without ever actually guaranteeing that later fixes will apply retroactively. The (X) sales fund the (Y) features down the line and the continued development. For some games, not necessarily this one.

Capcom is Once Again Trying Live-Action Street Fighter Movies

Maybe this is the best possible week to announce a revival of gaming movies that tried and failed in the 90s, but Capcom announced that they were working with Legendary on a new live-action Street Fighter movie. It’s not only another stab at making a live-action Street Fighter movie, but another of Capcom’s concerted attempts in expanding their major IPs into film franchises.

They’re never going to get over how successful Resident Evil was for them in that arena.

Who knows, maybe this time it works. Capcom was partially at fault for the poor quality of the first movie, insisting that all the World Warriors make some kind of appearance in the movie, a problem that has likely been exacerbated over the years with dozens of new characters added to the series. The other issue is that Street Fighter is just inherently goofy and a movie that doesn’t recognize or lean into it is going to run into the same problems the Monster Hunter movie did. Take your world as seriously as the games do and not one iota more.

But we’ll see! I hope they make a game based on the movie again. The last one was such a failure that the actor who played T. Hawk literally left before they could film him to convert his footage into sprites. Just vanished off the set and went home. I love that story for some reason.

Microsoft Removes Emulator Use From Xbox Consoles

A loophole that allowed emulators to run on Xbox consoles, downloading them through the Xbox store for dev mode and then using them on the resource-lite retail mode, has been closed. Emulators no longer run on retail mode, though dev mode still works for the people that have access to it.

On Twitter, some accounts cited a Microsoft representative stating that Nintendo was the reason behind the change. Microsoft told IGN that’s not accurate. Weird, a Twitter Blue-verified account said it, doesn’t that mean anything to Microsoft?

The platform holder instead insists this is merely enforcing already existing policies that have been on the store since its inception. They did not outright say what prompted this sudden enforcement of those policies, however. As the IGN article notes, Xenia — an Xbox emulator itself — has become quite popular as a downloadable emulator on the store. It also, as of earlier this year, began supporting Xbox 360 games on the Series X version, letting users circumvent Microsoft’s own store where it sells a fair number of Xbox 360 games.

Not hard to see where the line was drawn for the company when you look at the timeline like that.