So I have gotten Super Paper Mario this past week. Although, I haven’t been able to play much of it with all the homework piling up in these last couple of weeks, it has been a very fun and entertaining game. Like I had said before, the 2D to 3D perspective change is an amazing feature and I really feel more games should take advantage of it. Even the changing the perspective itself is amusing. For example, if you stand on a platform in 2D and switch to 3D you may all of a sudden not be on it any more and Mario give a little whelp of worry as he falls down. Even though he should still be on the platform no matter what dimension he switches to, it’s little touches like this that add to the overall humor of the game and the craziness of the Mario series as a whole.

Speaking of humor, I absolutely loved the presentation part of Bard’s Tale. Having played games like Diablo and Baulder’s Gate, seeing Bard’s Tale in action was hilarious. This idea of humor and parody I think further goes to prove how far along videogames are coming to start being taken as a serious textual study. A text has to be worthwhile in order for there to be a parody of it in the first place because otherwise no one would care for the parody or find it funny. With videogames reaching the point of having been around long enough to start becoming a strong part of culture it also becomes a part of textual parody. This can be seen with games like Super Paper Mario which parodies’ it’s own series, or Bard’s Tale parodying the Hack and Slash RPG genre, or Conker’s Bad Fur Day parodying games and other texts in general.

This beginning of the branching off in parodies is much like the forming of genres within a text. Videogames have been forming their own genres much like texts with mystery, comedy, suspense, science fiction, etc. It’s just recently that I have begun to notice this emerging of the parody, something that has been around in literature for a while now.