The best thing about 2D Mario, is that you can make just about every 3D Mario game before it ever comes out with the original blueprints. Is Nintendo taking too long to make Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii? No problem, order some pixel cranes and bits and bytes bulldozers, and destroy the very ground Mario walks on. And challenge him to find a way through space. How does he do it? He's seen Pirates of the Caribbean III already, he knows that the answer to any impossible problem is as simple as riding on a turtle's back.

Every week there's a new site with a new crazy 2D Mario video claiming to find the absolutely hardest Mario game ever, but I think Siliconera has finally found the craziest of them all. A world where no floor or ceiling exists, turtles float, and simple plumbing pipes go through interstellar black holes to new levels in another Super Paper Mario dimension. At this rate, it won't be long until Mario finds a warp pipe to just about every Nintendo game ever made. The day Epona trips over a pipe protruding from Hyrule's ground, is the day I stop paying for video games forever. Link truly would be the Hero of Time, with all the games within his reach for free. I never trusted that Malon guy for a second. I always knew he was up to no good.

Last August, LucasArts teamed up with the independent developer Day 1 studios, and were excited about something, but wouldn't tell us what. Day 1 studios brought F.E.A.R. to the Xbox 360 and MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf to Xbox. The only detail they offered though was that it would be a new intellectual property for next generation consoles. Thankfully, LucasArts has finally decided to announce their new game to the public, and told us that Fracture will be coming to both the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the Summer of 2008 if all goes well.

Ok, so what's the game about? This makes me so fucking happy - if you've been reading for a while you'll know that my biggest gripe with next gen is how long we'll have to wait for game teams to be bold and start pursuing advanced destructible environments. Fracture's taking a step in the direction I can't wait to see games move in, and instead of destroying the environment, they're offering "terrain deformation" - they give you weapons and tools that let you send shockwaves through the environment and affect its terrain. I can't fucking wait to play this game.

Ok, so that still gives you no idea what the game is about. It takes place in the year 2161, after the a huge ass earthquake splits United States into two different landmasses. The east is known as the Atlantic Alliance, and is teaming up with Europe, and the west starts the Republic of Pacifica and has ties with Asia. By now you already know where I'm going with this - war. You play as Mason Briggs, a Atlantic Alliance soldier, and you work heavily with cybernetic augmentation, while the west prefers genetic engineering to grow and army of soldiers to do their deeds of destruction for them. Playing as Briggs, the gameplay strategy revolves around altering the altitude of the landscape up or down in different situations.

In all honesty, even though the video above and the pictures below look pretty cool, the game will probably suck. I'm just glad to see someone finally making the jump and encourage others to follow in that area of game design. This way we won't have to wait for Call of Duty 8 to allow you to make craters, and then see the rest of the industry decide it's finally time to start exploring that kind of coding. Now it'll be catch up time and the rest should be eager to give destructible environments more consideration and attention.