Day 53 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots
Today’s game is Mario Galaxy. I decided today was my day to be productive for once, and I dumped all my Wii games ROMs for safe keeping, along with all my Blu-Ray discs. While I was testing the Wii Games to see if they worked, I got distracted by Mario Galaxy.
I chose this screenshot specifically because it shows off the water. Mario Galaxy is one of those games that has gorgeous water.
What a coincidence. Just yesterday I saw a video about how Mario Galaxy works from a technical perspective, and water was one of the topics.
As it turns out, the water effect was done by manipulating the floor texture with a noise pattern to make it squiggly, and then putting a transparent layer above. It looks pretty good and doesn't need much processing power.
This visual is uniquely soothing, reminds me of artist Cory Arcangel, who did an art piece with just the Super Mario clouds drifting on a television screen - hacking into the NES cartridge and getting rid of everything else - to much admiration.
I remember reading an art journalist applauding the Impressionistic feel of the thing, the way Arcangel brought a background object to the fore, and in the process transformed it into something new entirely, with a surprising character and strength of presence.
I started doing that for my entire library after setting up a Media Server and dumping my BluRays and DVDs a while ago. I figured having those backups would be good. The hard ones are going to be my N64 cartridges I think, since there’s now CFW for the N64 and there’s no way to connect it to the PC without an external device.
Not to sound greedy, but I was planning to keep these backups for myself. I don’t have anything rare, so anyone who wants the same games I have can easily get them from other places.