What 'The Expendables' and 'Mari0' have in common.

I had two options: either watch 'The Expendables' or play 'Mari0': a free-to-play game combining the wonder of Super Mario Bros. and Portal.

I won't lie, my attention was split. The Expendables is by far one of the most gratuitous alpha-male-pleasing pugilism-porn films I have ever seen. Watching Stallone chop off someone's hand with a bowie knife is just something you can't ignore. However Mari0 was just too intriguing for me not to give my full attention, so I waited for a gap in the wafer-thin plot to give it a go.

Manly men, ready to do manly things, like killing and dealing with emotions poorly.

For those who don't know, Mari0 is a creation from Stabyourself.net: a two man independent games company. Had it not been for a chance find, I wouldn't know about them at all. This game though instantly grabbed my attention. Mario with a portal gun? It is just one of those geeky concepts that was designed to excite the fandom masses, very much like The Expendables for that matter.

I think we can all appreciate why this will be funny.

The controls are a comfortable WASD affair, but with the addition of the mouse for the portal gun. There isn't really any other way it could of been done. However as soon as I started playing I started to wonder IF it should have been done. There's a sprint button, like in the original Super Mario Bros, but you never seem to use it because you have the means to teleport. Considering that Mario is pretty much the great great grandfather of platforming games, the portal gun does some what take away from his fame with it's shiny new generation thinking.

Exhibit A. Notice how this situation does not require portals.

Naturally I felt allegiance to both of these elements, and wanted to see them used in unison. The problem is that for every problem that can be solved with portals, a brand new problem can also be made with them! Goombas flying through the air, koopa shells appearing right where you don't want them, and simple jumps made infinitely harder because you decided to line up a tour-de-force of geometry and physics. Mario never needed portals to get the job done, and it was one of the greatest selling games of all time when Mario's only special kit was a trusty pair of brown shoes and a resourceful utilisation of mycology.


So, what does this game have in common with Stallone's kill-fest? Both of them are too much of good things. I love action films, but watching The Expendables felt like watching little boys incessantly shoot each other with sticks with the added horror of them then blowing up. It doesn't matter who's the goodies or the baddies, and violence is entirely mitigated by how determined that kid is to keep on inflicting it. As for video games I adore platformers, but Mari0 does seem to encourage you to just dick about rather than really enjoy the finesse of either games that it's based on. It's too much of what you want and not enough reason to question it.

I can't really say whether it's good or not yet, as I have faith that the more I play it,the more I'll get into it. It can be downloaded for free here. For the mean time though I'm very tempted to just play Super Mario or Portal, rather than both. Or maybe I'll just watch Rocky.