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GASP! IGN and I agree on something: Super Mario 64 is better on the N64 than the DS. The article is part of their Insider whatsit that they sucker me into with low, low prices every E3, so if you weren’t similarly hoodwinked you’ll just have to believe me. The major point that we agree upon is that control on the DS is terrible compared to the original. It’s decent enough if I didn’t know any better, and quite usable by the uninitiated if its successful use by the witty and attractive Susan is any indication. I do find, however, that I prefer the graphics of the newer version, aliased and pixelated though they may be. The backgrounds and draw distance are both vastly improved. Textures don’t repeat as much and the ever-present N64 fog is nowhere to be seen. Most strikingly, the enemy models are more accurate, as I will show in these images shamelessly (or -fully?) stolen from IGN.

Hopefully those make up for the dearth of pictures recently. Regardless of which graphic style you like better (blurred beyond hope or pointy and jagged), it cannot be denied that the DS version of the enemies look more like they should.

As for the game itself, I’ve only played using Mario and Yoshi thus far so I can’t say much yet. I’ve found a couple of the levels that are new for the DS and defeated Bowser in the Dark World, but then got distracted by chasing bunnies around. Catching them unlocks a myriad of mini-games which I was initially entranced by. This wore off when I realized I needed to get a cover for the touch screen. I’m afraid I’ll scratch it up with some of the violent actions the games want me to perform (like in the curling mini-game). I’ve gotten use to a cover on my PDA, so now I press way too hard on touch screens. I heard that they’ve created some sort of unscratchable DVD coating. They need to start putting that on touch screen devices, stat.

As comics go, PIXEL (which I will henceforth stop refering to in all caps) is kind of strange. The comics are spartan and make sense only in reference to themselves (and other Pixel comics). They take great liberties with the concept of comedy, yet are almost always amusing. A whole world of pixels, vectors, polygons, and voxels has been created with clever and random connections. The entertainment value is bolstered by the structure of the dialogue (which is nearly Pokey-esque) and the haiku-like comments the author writes beneath each comic. The rest of his site isn’t half bad either.

Why, atoms of course! And what’s smaller than that? Protons, electrons, neutrons, gluons, gravitons, and even things that don’t end in -on like up quarks and tau neutrinos! And beyond that of course, there are strings, and then hopefully nothing else, otherwise M-theorists will have a lot more work to do. Woo, tangent.

What I didn’t know from my travels through the everyday world of things like cars and people, which are all very easy to take pictures of because untold megazillions of photons are bouncing off of them every second, is that somewhere along the line some smart people got together and figured out how to take pictures of atoms. And soon, they hope to go smaller than that! First of all, why didn’t anybody tell me we had actual pictures of atoms? Does this mean that they could actually isolate a single molecule of, say, caffeine and then slap that on shirt a la Think Geek? Further, if we will soon be able to image things half an angstrom in size, can I get a picture of a proton? Actually, I don’t think that would work. The nucleus of an atom is very small realtive to the whole atom, much smaller than even half an angstrom (which is very small indeed, two million times smaller than the width of a human hair. More if you have thick hair!).

What this has made me realize is, that while I know how small an atom is, I don’t truly comprehend it. It’s kind of the same thing with space. I know the size of the moon and how far away it is, and I can deal with that pretty well. Same with the planets (though Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm three times larger than Earth, is always astounding). It’s a bit trickier with the sun, but I can still get a good handle on that. But when we start talking about stars that are a thousand times larger than the sun, at distances so vast that light takes centuries or more to cover it, or nebula that span dozens of light-years, my brain stops trying to associate meaning to the sizes. I think it’s why I’m always dissapointed when I hear the sizes of colossally huge things like galaxies and say, “Two hundred thousand light-years isn’t that big.” Oh it’s plenty big, I just can’t wrap my head around it. And so it goes for the subatomic. “Protons aren’t that small. Why haven’t you given me a picture of one yet, science?” Well? I’m waiting.