GOOGLE RON PAUL (and the wario land series)

I was roughly ten years old when I got Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.  If you've ever played it, you should know that it has one of the most drastic late-game difficulty spikes ever seen.  Unlike most Mario games (when I would get to the end of the third world or so and declare myself the victor because otherwise I would have to come to grips that my motor skills were shit), the majority of the game is seriously piss easy.  The structure of the game is that Mario has the freedom to visit six different worlds to get six golden coins so he can open his castle, which has been co-opted by his evil dick double Wario.  Almost all of the levels were extremely forgiving, frequently throwing power-ups, extra lives, and coins at you while you dodged simple obstacles.  At the end of every world, you faced a boss with the same devistating pattern:

1. Do a really obvious and telegraphed attack
2. Drop down low for like five seconds so Mario can jump on your head
3. Repeat three times.

Granted, the easy difficulty was the side-effect of the non-linear gameplay, as giving the player the option to visit any world first means that you can make any particular world difficult, as this would potentially frustrate some unlucky 10-year-old.  So, eventually you get all the golden coins, and go into Wario castle, being only one stage from completing this game.

One thing about Mario Land 2 is that the physics are noticeably different from how most other Mario games function.  Most notable is the jumping, as Mario tends to sink in his descent, and just seems more bulky in general.  Not to paraphrase Tim "youarenotamusician" Rogers, but the nature of Mario's friction is just weird.  Of course, this isn't a problem in everything up to Wario's castle, but then suddenly the game reverts to pure fuck you mode and suddenly you're noticing that the movements that you used to beat similar sections in other Mario games are fucking you over because Mario isn't moving the same way.  The castle is probably easier in design that most Mario final stages, if just for the fact that there are multiple power-ups, but now you have to rely on Mario's revised jumping to complete sections that aren't baby simple.

Then you get to Wario, and things just get ugly.  While it's not really saying much, Wario is easily the most difficult boss in the Mario series.  He has three forms, and while the first and third aren't really that difficult compared to his castle, the second is a fucking nightmare.  Wario will acquire the bunny ears powerup that Mario had through the game, which are basically the equivalent of the Raccoon Suit from Mario 3, giving him insane jumps and forcing you to carefully hit him on the head during his ground slams.  Die, and WHOOPS BACK TO THE START OF THE CASTLE HA HA FUCK YOU.


(note this guy is not a ten-year-old, or at least I hope not)

Mario Land 2 was a good game, but for me, the big benefit from it was the introduction to Wario, which soon led to Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land and the Wario Land series in general.  Except for Link's Awakening and Kirby's Dreamland 2, Wario Land was easily my favorite Gameboy title as a kid.  And as I say that, I also realize that Wario and his game series is the reason that Democrats are scared about November 2010.

Wario's appeal as a game character, especially coming from Nintendo, is that he is basically a huge prick who is interested only in making bank.  There's no other game character as unrepentently awful as him; even when former villains like Bowser are controlled by the player, the character is altered in that we now see that while they're bad guys, they have a soft side too.  Wario just wants money, and while he's not some ridiculous anti-hero like every other 360 or PS3 protagonist, that's honestly for the better.  Wario's just a guy you love to hate, and his lack of REAL ISSUES means that you don't have to imagine how many people have made terrible internet music videos about him.

It doesn't help that the Wario games are really fucking fun.  While internet nerds apparently feel the need to play Mario 3 and Super Mario World an infinite number of times, the Wario series has always been pretty unappreciated.  While it's not as polished as those two other games, there's something amazingly fun about controlling a fat, greedy man who, instead of neutrally jumping on enemies, knocks them off the screen with bum rushes.  The same weird jumping physics that infuritated me with Mario Land 2 actually work with Wario, and the game's difficulty curve doesn't suddenly throw acid at your face at the end (if anything, the game gets easier at the final section).  Taking a cue from Super Mario World, Wario Land and subsequent sequels featured a wide array of diverging stage paths and alterable scenery.

But this is all boring game review stuff.  Was Never a Fan is a serious review site, and I'm interested in tackling the big questions.  Questions liek, what is the moral theme of the Wario series?  That's not actually a big question, though, as I already know the answer.  Simply put, Wario is the America we have currently been living with since the Clinton Presidency, and what currently we face as Proud Americans.

Wait, you say as you close your futanari h-doujin, suddenly perplexed, Wario is a japanese thing!  The name even comes from some weird play on Japanese words from Mario's name!  Don't you think you're reading things a little too forced?

Consider this.  Mario Land 2 was released on October 2, 1992 in Japan, and November 2, 1992, a mere week before the election that changed America forever.  Mario is already sort of a conservative hero, having instituted several regime changes and refusing to alter what already works.  Suddenly, there's a regime change, and the Mushroom Kingdom is being ruled by a fat, lascivious man whose only concern is amassing wealth and providing social services to the lazy underclass (how else do you think Wario commanded all those goombahs and giant ants to try to kill Mario?  Follow the signs, people).



Of course, Wario was eventually thwarted (perhaps a foreseeing of the 1994 midterm elections), but not defeated, as he simply came to a compromise with Mario: I'll let you control stuff for awhile, as long as I can just continue getting money for everyone.  I'm not sure where the villains of Wario Land fit into this (the female Captain Syrup and the unfortunately named Brown Sugar Pirates), maybe it's Hillary or Milosevic.  What matters is that Wario Land is all about acquiring wealth, Clinton/Wario tricking the American Man into believing that, now that he is rich because he just found a chest with a whale figurine in it, it doesn't really matter that you are empathizing with a man who has no real empathy to others.


(note that both Wario commercials feature hypnosis.  I don't think there's anyone who would deny that Clinton's speaking ability was the functional equivalent of a weird moustached guy waving a golden coin in front of our face)

Then came Wario Land 2, which diverged further from the Mario formula in that Wario could literally not be killed in the game.  In fact, Wario's various powers came at the hands of being hit by certain enemies: getting smashed by a giant weight makes a pancake Wario that can float into small gaps, getting stung by a bee will inflate Wario's cheeks, allowing him to floating around.  Wario Land 2 was naturally released in mid-1998, during the full swing of the impeachment hearings.  Like Wario's travails against his enemies, Clinton emerged from the proceedings only in a sort of "well everyone knows that I'm horny" form, and is still fully capable of reducing conservatives into a sort of frothing terror

(from a game standpoint, while Wario Land 2 is pretty fun, the fact that you can't die does harm being able to enjoy it for long periods, as the only real challenge is finding secret coin rooms and new plotline paths, of which only the latter has any real point in the game, since you will literally be drowning in coins by the mid-point of the game).

I have no idea about Wario Land 3, as I never played it.  Game Boy Color is for babies.  MUCH LIKE CLINTON.

google captain syrup