Mario Kart Wii tournaments underway

In the bag: Starting small
Picture this: Back in 1980, some snot-nosed punk (and ComputerLandretail employee) named Richard Garriott coded a little RPG for theApple II, which he called Akalabeth: World of Doom. Lacking the funds or theconnections to get it published in any
The Worldwide Tournament feature of Mario Kart Wii is a neat addition, but one that we couldn't talk about in the full review as it didn't launch alongside the game. Late last week, the first worldwide tournament began and I decided to participate.
Warnings for the tournament arrived quickly: a message was sent to myWii Message Board informing me that a tournament was underway and myMario Kart channel quickly changed to a full-blown alert about thetournament. Progress and updates can be posted to your Message Board,as well.

I clicked over to the Tournament section of the online menu. Once youpick your racer and vehicle, you're thrown into a 100CC match on apredetermined course, which is in some cases slightly altered from itsoriginal form. For example, my first race on the Mario Circuit was mademore interesting as the usually-tethered Chomps were running around thecourse. You participate in the run against 11 NPCs as you would in thesingle player mode. Tournaments appear to run for a four-day span overa weekend—the current one ended today—and feature only one course andno real online racing.
Upon completing the race, you submit your time over the Nintendo Wi-FiConnection. This can be done multiple times during the Tournamentperiod. After submitting your record, you can view your time on a linegraph in relation to your friends' times, regional times, and worldwidetimes.
Essentially, the Tournament boils down to a time trial contest. Thelack of direct human competition makes things less exciting than theycould have been, but racing enthusiasts should dig the added dimensionthat worldwide ranking brings to the quest for the best time. I'mworking my Wii Wheel hard to get those good times, and I hope to see some Arsians leading the pack.
sort of professional capacity, Garriotthand-copied a stack of labeled disks and instructions, stuck 'em all in plasticbaggies, and personally peddled them to software stores. That is, until wordof Akalabeth spread like wildfire and California Pacific Computer Companypicked up the publishing rights. Thus did Garriott's alter-ego, Lord British, riseto power.
Today, of course, the Ultima series that Akalabeth spawned spans over adozen critically acclaimed products. Garriott himself went on to become aworld-famous game designer; he currently owns his own castle in Texas, andhe's taken multiple trips into the Earth's orbit. In fact, we were unable to reachGarriott for comment as part of this feature since (as of this writing) he's overin Russia prepping for a trip to the International Space Station in October.Not bad for a career that started with a simple little game that came ina plastic bag.

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Jam-packed: The Infocom years
Once upon a time, graphics weren'tsomething people took for granted.Infocom's text-only interactive fictionnever suffered for the lack of them,though few modern gamers can appreciateall those words, since we've become abunch of murder-happy rageaholics withthe attention spans of coked-up ferrets. Orso we're told.
But really, they weren't so minimal as allthat. Infocom titles came with a bizarrerange of pack-in doodads called "feelies."They ranged from the slightly silly, likethe 3D comic book and glasses of LeatherGoddesses of Phobos, to the absolutelynecessary, like the map and game piecesused to keep track of all your robots inSuspended. Again, these often doubled asa form of copy protection. Wishbringerincluded a sealed letter that matched theone you were tasked to deliver in the game.The game instructs you when to open it,but the contents were not disclosed withinthe game itself. Others were awesomely useless:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy includeda set of black, nontransparent cardboard"Peril Sensitive Sunglasses." Cool, yes, butthese days it seems like a great length togo to for a joke. Less dramatic -- but equallyimpressive -- were all the uncompromisinglyin-universe pamphlets, ID cards, tourist brochures,and correspondence that doubled asgame manuals. The immersion they fosteredmakes playing without 'em feel like onlyabout half the experience.

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Manual-o-rama: Serious games are serious business
If you think World of WarCraft-obsessed raiders get way too seriousabout their games, you've got it all wrong. Atone time, many games -- particularly flight simulators,hex-based historical war games, and godgames -- came packed with (or, as you can see fromthe illustration, in) entire binders bursting withmaps, grids, diagrams, procedural instructions, andother paraphernalia designed to help ensure youwere the best you possibly could be at pretendingto do whatever it is you were doing. Back then, if itdidn't have what amounted to a 200-page technicalmanual, it wasn't a real game.
The "read-along" game was a particularly annoyingtangent: Instead of displaying vital story elementsin the game itself, some older RPGs (SSI wasnotably guilty of this) would, at various points,insist that you follow along by reading a particularpassage of fiction from the included documentation.Thankfully, these strange, immersion-breakingmethods of copy protection are a thing of the past.But contemporary games like Falcon 4.0 and manyof AGEOD's boxed editions still include plenty ofthe beloved old-time bells and whistles.

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Rock 'n' roll: EA's greatest hits
Thousands of years ago, Trip Hawkins and a fewothers broke away from Apple to form a newcompany that would become known as Electronic Arts;EA's first great innovation was its then-revolutionarypolicy of not treating their employees like crap.Standard practice at the time was to actually avoid givingcredit to game programmers to avoid head-hunting,and while other breakaways like Activision and Imagicmade progress in the area of not-being-jerks-to-designers,EA went even further.
The company likened its employees to rock stars, creditingtheir work and even going so far as to include their photographson packaging and magazine ads, all while giving thema generous share of the profits. This policy was reflected bythe company's name: Electronic Arts' developers were artists.This is most evident in the design of the game boxes themselves,which resembled vinyl LP sleeves. Graced with art thatranged from beautiful to just plain indescribably weird, eachpackage even went so far as to include interior gatefolds featuringarty black-and-white photos and profiles of the designers.Pretentious? Maybe, but unlike the Ion Storm developer-image debaclemore than a decade.
1987-1993: The Golden Years

Code wheels of doom: Crazy copy protection
Software piracy breeds paranoia, and this was true evenway back when. Most disk-based copy protection provedeasily crackable and hence ineffective, so developers resortedto manual-based measures. In the most simplistic cases, a gamemight merely request a specific phrase from the instructions -- say, the second word from the fifth paragraph on the ninthpage. A few Sierra games got exceedingly weird; The Colonel'sBequest came with a foldout poster that had an infrared viewingwindow and demanded that you match a specified character tohis fingerprints (printed on the poster) before beginning play.King's Quest III -- one of the most outlandish examples -- forcedplayers to type entire passages from the documentation, wordfor word, error-free, on pain of a "game over" screen.
Conversely, the sharp minds at LucasArts often designedtheir copy-protection schemes around more logical and indepthpuzzles. The first two Monkey Island games had thoseinfernal phrase-matching code wheels, and Maniac Mansion'smechanism echoed the aforementioned infrared strip scheme.Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade famously came with awell-crafted mock Grail Diary pack-in designed to mimicthe movie's; Indy (and the player) follow clues throughoutthe game, matching descriptions of the elusive Holy Grail toaccounts laid out in the diary and eventually deducing thecorrect Grail during the game's final puzzle. Loom's Book ofPatterns took a similar tack, assisting players with puzzles overthe course of the entire game. Sometimes fun and occasionallyinfuriating (don't lose those manuals!), old-school copy protectionis (if you ask us) far preferable to today's StarForce- andSecuROM-powered "safety measures."

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Questing for goodies: Sierra sets a new standard
Oakhurst, California-based adventure-game titan Sierra On-Lineruled the lion's share of the PC-gaming market from the early 1980sinto the mid-1990s. From humble beginnings with 1979's Mystery House(which added then-revolutionary graphics to the traditional text-basedadventure) and through the company's meteoric rise by way ofnow-classicfranchises like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Police Quest, Sierra always had a way with product delivery. As was commonfor this era, decorative box sleeves and unconventional pack-in literature(which, as with Infocom's games before them, typically doubled as documentationand copy protection) characterized the majority of Sierra's hits:Space Quest II's Space Piston comic, Police Quest's procedural guides andcity maps, the Quest for Glory games' Famous Adventurer's CorrespondenceSchool handbooks, and Leisure Suit Larry 5's Playspy men's-magazine spoofare just a few good examples.
And like EA, Sierra was one of the earliest companies to celebrify its topdesigners; the images of people like Roberta Williams, Al Lowe, Jane Jensen,Jim Walls, Scott Murphy, and Mark Crowe graced these game boxes, actingas both marketing bullet-points and seals of quality. Sierra's success in themid-1990s also brought about a subscription-based house magazine calledInterAction -- sort of a PC-gaming equivalent to Nintendo Power preachingto the company's devoted customer base. Alas, Sierra's "fun" way of productpresentation eventually died out over the back half of the 1990s in the nameof cheaper manufacturing costs. Yay, capitalism!

1994-2000: Identity crisis!

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The Age of CD-ROM ...Is Upon Us!
The CD-ROMcraze took off inthe early 1990s, and bygolly, game publishersmade sure we knewabout it. Back then,when they weren'tshoving the new mediain our faces by teasingthe discs through clearwindows on the boxes(see photo), theywere inventing newbuzzwords to communicateexactly what sort of horsepower our PCs would needto boot these cutting-edge games. In the days before folkslearned how to read system requirements, software was ratedaccording to multimedia PC levels. An MPC1-compliant PC(16MHz CPU, 2MB RAM, 30MB hard drive, 256-color videocard,1x CD-ROM, 8-bit soundcard, and Windows 3.0) was sufficientto play games with an MPC1 designation, and so on. It lasteda whopping six years (making it all the way to MPC3) beforeeveryone stopped caring.

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Dorks and dragons: Cloth maps and action figures -- actually not that cool
Some games got just a little too dorky (you know, other than thenerdy war games that came stuffed with hex maps and battleplans). Though this isn't exclusive to a particular era in time, earlyMMOs like Ultima Online and EverQuest are particularly guilty, throwingin everything from painstakingly illustrated cloth maps to (inthe case of UO expansion Lord Blackthorn's Revenge) unpaintedaction-figure molds. Other than acting as stop signs for potentialromantic partners, these crazy props served no practicalpurpose (the maps often were notated in whatever crazysymbol-language their game world utilized). Remember theill-fated Ultima IX: Ascension? In addition to conforming tothe organization-defying box-design pitfalls outlined above,U9's gigantic container housed a cloth map, ye olde spellbookreplicas, a small deck of tarot cards, and a certificateof authenticity signed by series creator Richard "Lord British"Garriott himself. If that sort of collection doesn't get you labeled "Kingof the Hardcore Geeks" by everyone you know, we're not sure what will.

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Shape shifting: Why won't they just fit on the damn shelf?
The mid- to late 1990sfeatured a brief and --for game-store owners, atleast -- irritating flirtationwith irregular box shapes. Onone hand, having a triangular, trapezoidal,octagonal, or whatever the-hell shaped boxmight make yourgame stand out ona shelf. On the otherhand, eventually it'd bejust part of a growing nest ofcompeting angletangles. Better still,getting them on the shelf at all in a space-efficientway became a puzzle in itself. Theydidn?t just stand out -- they fell off. Take oddities likethe incomprehensible hyper-origami of the Marathon box:It looked cool, but it didn't stack or store well. The lamentablecondition of GFW's archive copy bears testament to this.

2001-Present: Packaging Trends Take a Nosedive

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Collector's corner: Special (and not-so-special) editions
Every now and then, a publisher still goes balls-to-the-wall with itsmarquee games. Blizzard's big World of WarCraft collectors' boxesinclude mouse pads, behind-the-scenes DVDs, and heavy hardcover art books.And Civilization Chronicles -- a truly impressivelabor of love -- collects Sid Meier's entire Civseries in a sturdy case, including every expansion(updated for modern PCs), a book chroniclingthe series' history, and a DVD chock fullof interviews. But these kinds of deluxe treatmentsdon't happen very often -- most so-called"Collectors' Editions" really aren't. One recentexample: Sins of a Solar Empire's CE box touts atech-tree poster and a hotkey card. Huh?
MMO special editions are particularly prone tosuperfluousness. In-game bonus can't grant anundue advantage to a player, thus prevalence of useless but presumablyenvy-inspiringspecial-edition petsand cloaks. The othertypical inclusion is a gamesoundtrack; that would be a perkfor just about any game that isn't an MMO. A massivegame could possess the greatest musical score ever created inhuman history, but after 100 hours of killing boars, it's the last thingmost players want to hear when they're not playing.

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Mass market: Stick the disc in a sleeve and call it a day
Nowadays, you're lucky if the typical PC game comeswith anything more than a flimsy black-and-white manual,a couple of discs in paper sleeves, and a cheap cardboardpacking frame. In an era where just about every multi-million dollargame release puts a publisher's bottom line at risk,the only good corner is a cut corner. It's undoubtedly justthe nostalgia talking, but we shed a tear for the days whena few tchotchkes and a nice box were the rule rather thanthe exception. Nowadays, we just wind up paying an extra$20 for the "privilege"of owning a biggerpiece of cardboard anda flimsy book filledwith crappy conceptillustrations. And withdownload-on-demandservices like Steam fastbecoming stable PCgamingsuperstores,it can't be long until"bargain bin" becomessynonymous with"deluxe edition."
The future looms large