Unfair Platform

It took me some time, and 214 lives to complete The Unfair Platformer. It may be one of the most evil games ever designed. It seems harmless enough, with green grass, blue skies, and innocuous blocks, and it certainly has the familiar elements platform gamers expect. But there are lies and traps before you even move far enough for the screen to scroll. Spikes pop out of blocks when least expected. At any time, sections of the floor might disappear. One level starts your character in midair, and by the time you realize you need to press an arrow key you've already fallen to your doom.

But, complete it I did, as repetition taught me valuable lessons. Don't jump on that third block. Collecting those coins will cause the ceiling to fall; leave them be. And whatever you do, don't try to go to Sunshine Mountain! Every death was a lesson, although knowing what to do and actually timing everything perfectly was another story. I suppose there's a metaphor in there for life, that failures can teach us what to right the next time, and that there's no guarantee of success even with that knowledge. I suppose it can teach us patience, and help us stay cool and avoid frustration. But really, it all reminds me of Super Mario Bros.

I remember watching people play this game in a department store with utter fascination, my first exposure to a true platformer, to a scrolling screen that gave the player an entire world to explore. I remember my joy when my folks finally caved and bought me an NES, and the hours I dedicated to playing. Most of all, I remember the frustration of pits I couldn't jump across, or merciless hammer tossing turtles.

It's a miracle those early platforms didn't drive kids insane. These days, memory cards or built-in hard drives on game systems allow players to save progress. You can play for a few minutes or a few hours, and come back any time and resume where you left off. As some game plots take 60 or more hours to unfold, this is a very good thing. But on the NES, you had to play straight through, which was tough if your mom only gave you a one hour limit before confiscating your controller. I doubt I would have gotten much homework done if it wasn't for my mom, though I didn't appreciate it at the time. I'd beg and plead for just five more minutes, but she knew I'd try to stack and turn 5 into 10, 10 into 15, and so on. So she'd usually pull the plug.

Super Mario Bros. takes a lot more than an hour to complete. It consists of 8 worlds divided into 4 sections apiece. Throughout the game there are various “warp zones”, pipes your little plumber hero could enter to skip over worlds. With proper planning, I could cut 32 sections down to about 8, and even then I needed just about an hour to get through them all. It helped when I discovered that holding down the “B” button and pressing start after losing all your lives would allow you to start from whichever section you just were in. It really helped when I learned of a difficult trick of jumping on a turtle shell on just the right step so you'd keep bouncing and accumulating extra lives, or “1UP”s. Rumor had it that if you exceeded 99, you'd hit 0 again and die instantly, but I never tested this.

It took a lot of trial and error until I had the sequence of events memorized. Between a small controller and a big thumb, I could simultaneously hold down one button that made my character run while rolling my thumb on to a second button to make jumps. The patterns were always the same with enemies, so I eventually knew when a bullet, hammer, or evil squid was coming my way. I can only imagine what the description of this game sounds like to people outside of my own generation. Turtles? Squid? Plumber? Hammer? I haven't even mentioned my favorites, the Goombas, or the fact that some of the turtles had wings and could fly.

Each world was harder than the previous one. There were sections in world 7 that were nearly impossible, but 8 was the killer. 8-1 wasn't too bad, but 8-2 was the longest level of the game, and every level was timed. If the timer hit 0, you lost a life. I realize the irony of losing something I clearly didn't have in high school if I was playing a game instead of dating or going to parties, but that's a topic for another time. 8-2 had to be executed perfectly, dodging bullets and jumping off the right points to reach the end in the designated time. This left 8-3 to conquer, a much shorter section riddled with giant bullets and hammer-throwing turtles. If you made it to 8-4, you found a dungeon, like every dash-four section of the game. Here's where it got really evil. If you didn't run through the precise sequence of platforms, it was an infinite loop. I think the pattern was “bottom-middle-top-repeat”, or the opposite of that. Then you had to choose the correct pipes to take, and the wrong choices could send you back to earlier parts of the level, all while that timer kept counting down. As with every dungeon level in the game, King Koopa(later known as Bowser) waited at the end of a bridge, throwing hammers and spitting fireballs. If you had fireballs of your own, gained by picking a special flower and not getting hit by any enemies along the way, you could hit him six or seven times to defeat him. Otherwise, you had to run across that bridge, dodging his attacks, and either jump over him or run under him while he was jumping. At the end of the bridge you'd grab this lever or axe-looking thing, and the bridge would retract, letting your enemy fall into the lava below. Continuing on, a princess would be waiting for you. As with your previous 7 rescue attempts, the dialogue copy over this princess would read “We're sorry, but your princess is in another castle” This time, thankfully for your sanity, it would add the words “just kidding” and you'd know you'd saved your princess at last.

It was a fun game that still spawns sequels today, and inspired other popular platform series featuring heroes like Sonic the Hedgehog or Megaman. The basic overall objective of these games was the same, navigating a cartoon character through different colorful sections while collecting things and defeating “bosses”. Where Mario collected coins, Sonic collected rings, and it was these rings that allowed Sonic to survive one attack or impact. He'd lose all his rings when hit, and as they flew in every direction you had to grab a few before getting hit a second, fatal time. Where Mario could swim underwater indefinitely, Sonic had to surface for air, or find an air bubble to gulp down. The music would get tense when a 5 second countdown would warn the player that Sonic needed air fast. Megaman meanwhile offered more flexibility, allowing the player to tackle boards in any order. This freedom was deceptive, because for every boss Megaman defeated, he'd gain that enemy robot's ability, which another boss might be weak against. So if you were going to fight a fire robot, it might have been a good idea to take out an ice robot first to assimilate his ability.

Games today are longer and more involved. Their plots are much more complex, and your objectives are often more involved than “run from point A to point B and don't get hit”. My nostalgia for Super Mario Bros. and other games like it will never die, though The Unfair Platformer reminded me how aggravated I got when my character did. In the end, it's not all that “unfair”, and follows the same principles as the games it pays homage to. With enough practice and experience, you can memorize the proper sequence of action to navigate each world. I guess that brings us full circle back to the real world, after all.