Typecast

Super Mario Bros. is really just about being defined by your job. Super Mario is a plumber who kills goombas by jumping on them to save the princess, but all anyone really mentions when they explain what he does is that he's a plumber. In exactly 0% of the games he's been in over the past two decades has he ever fixed anyone's plumbing. No one has ever called him on their cell phone to come over an unclog their toilet. He's officiated boxing matches, played tennis, gone to parties, brawled with lightning rodents and raced cars on rainbows, but he hasn't used a wrench to tigten a seal on a pipe. In the TV show starring the professional wreslter from the Cyndi Lauper videos and the movie no one wants the remember, his carer as a plumber is part of the premise, but it's nowhere in the games except for perhaps the earlies manuals. Even his brother, Luigi, who works with him is better known as an amature ghostbuster. The Three Stooges have had a more successful carreer as plumbers, even though Curly keeps getting himself trapped inside of the pipes. When you play Super Mario, the only reference to plumbing comes in the form of the pipes scattering the landscape, which oddly have fire-breathing Venus Flytraps growing out of them.
Mario is so much more than a plumber, but that's all anyone cares about. You have to have a title, and that's his.

GTA V Problems

A week after the GTA V Online release, I have yet to play more than ten minutes online with other players. Any session I find with online with other, living human beings I'm immediately booted from. My last session lasted only about one minute. I logged on, looked to see who else was in that world and saw only one other human. Then I was booted. Only one in about six attempts to log in lands me on a world with other players. The first character I created seems to have been permanently deleted from the main servers.I had to replace him with a new character and go through the first few trainging missions again. There's no telling if this won't happen again. I wasn't even able to connect for most of the past two days. I can't progress without playing with other living people.

GTA V Online: GTFO

GTA V Online debuted yesterday, despite the game having been out for weeks. It follows a similar open-world sandbox style of Red Dead: Redemption, with customizeable characters and a thin storyline. You pick your grandparents, your parents, how much you like like any one of them, and that determines your character. The game forces you to sit through opening credits when first starting, because it clearly wants to punish you. I ran one race, which presumably I was supposed to have been pitted against other living players, but instead I ran against the NPC LVL 99, Lamar. When that was finished, the game glitched the fuck out for about five minutes, showing me nothing but a cloudy white background. When things went back to normal, I saw a car fall ontop another car as it spawned and then the cutscene played twice. I found myself placed in a group with two other live players after entering the aforementioned car, on my way to kill some gangbangers. The one dude, of course, decided to shoot out the windows as we drove, despite it being unecessary. He would later run me over and pin me against a wall and a car outside a store as I tried to enter, because this is a game made for griefing. Another cutscene ensued after I died, telling me I could watch other players. After respawning, I decided, "Fuck it," and went to the strip club, getting two lap dances. I could have taken the stripper home, but I didn't have an apartment yet. Shrugging, I went off to the next mission, where I held up a store. Another player jumped in as I was robbing the place and tried to take my stash. I responded by quickly grabbing the loot and ducking out the door as he shot at me. I saw his car parked outside, and stole it and took off. It is, after all, GTA. He chased me halfway across the map, despite me doing hairpin turns and ridiculous jumps over overpasses. As I approached the next targetted mission, I saw him narrowing in on me. That was when I saw that I couldn't gain any progress in my mission because I was in another player's owned car. He legally owend that car I just stole. That was a real thing inside the game. He shot at me as I exited the car, and I shot back. None of our bullets seemed to even connect. We sort of just snuck by each other, got in our separate cars and went on our own ways. A moment later, I was kicked from the server. I griefed another player without even realizing it, even though he'd started the whole confrontation.
When I tried logging in again, the game informed me that I quit a job prematurely and was accuring a bad reputation, even though I hadn't willingly quit anything. I tried moving on to the next mission, all by my lonesome.
I was kicked from the server again, just as I was starting the next job. Again, when I came back the game toled me I was getting a bad rep. I hadn't so much as seen another human being. It warned me that if I kept it up, I could be banished to the realm of griefers. I tried starting the next job, but apparently I was the only person in that world, and couldn't progress without more players. So I tried jumping servers. Same problem. And again, with a warning each time.Basically, it was just me, alone in a city-sized world and nothing to do.