winstein

Do you miss the days where Mario was sometimes prominently an announcer for things? Well, I can think of only three games where Mario is an announcer: Mario Kart 64, Mario Tennis 64, and that one Pac-Man game. But in all three, it's always very fun to listen to, and I think it adds quite a bit of charm, a wacky Mario flavor to the game. "Charm" is often poorly defined, but I can say it just brightens the mood a lot. Certainly, it's something, and the announcers in the later Mario Tennis games just lacked that weirdness and bias Mario showed (like when he fondly says "Luigi" in Mario Tennis).

Sometimes viewing things from another perspective could really help. For example, there are a lot of people who derive pleasure in the cynical distortion of Garfield and how it seems like the default (seems like a strong case of irony poisoning), and that makes me sad, but I reminded myself that there are also people who actually (as in, not ironically) like Garfield, to keep my mind off the "half-empty portion of the glass".

Actually, this applies to many things I like because I often feel that I am fond of the less popular side of things, so in a sense I felt isolated. Even when the topic is about Mario this is the case.

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Do you ever think the Year of Luigi was a pretty sub-par marketing tool to promote only one character? It appeared to be a good opportunity to elevate Daisy and Waluigi, two characters that appear to interact with Luigi quite a bit! But it didn't happen. We could've seen Daisy platforming with Luigi (I mean we got Daisy in Super Mario Run), Waluigi trying to sabotage the movement. Even Baby Luigi had an opportunity to get a bigger role in Yoshi's New Island, which came out around that time. But ultimately, I always thought it fizzled.

There are some music in games that would be like "This is the one that everybody will remember!", especially when you hear it at first glance. In my case, the one that comes to mind are Gourmet Race from Kirby Super Star, You're Not Alone from Final Fantasy IX and Splattack! from Splatoon 1.

However, some of the themes didn't catch my attention as something to remember by, so it seems a bit strange when it was the theme that people remember best. In my case, Forest Maze of Super Mario RPG comes to mind. Stickerbrush Symphony is another example only because I first heard it in isolation from the game that played it.

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Something that I immediately took notice when watching Kirby 64's cutscenes is not only how there's no spoken word in the cutscenes, but also how it showed Kirby's comedic side, such as how he hallucinated his friends as food, and how he took out a mobile phone out of nowhere.

In fact, this is what I really love about those Kirby games that does this, which includes not only from Kirby 64, but Kirby 3 also did this. The most recent game that I can think of that has this sort of presentation is Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, which is as close in tone to the numbered Kirby games as we could get.

In terms of the modern standard platformers, I think Triple Deluxe is the closest to that tone (but still far from what Rainbow Curse achieved) because I don't remember there being dialogue in that game, and the game has a much simpler superpower (Hypernova).

(Also, Kirby's animal friends and Adelaine should return more often)

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Sometimes I wonder if reclusive artists made the right choice in being secretive and outside of the public eye. The issue I noticed with more sociable artists is that they are more easily judged by their character compared to the reclusive artists, so much so that other people's enjoyment of their work are affected by them.

The inverse (artist with praiseworthy character raising others' opinion on their work) so far doesn't seem to be a famous case as far as I know. I mean, I personally have an example that I could name but I imagine the detractors would feel otherwise.

Makes me think that artists are better off private because there are seemingly better benefits with that decision.

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Here's something silly I came up with, inspired by this video (about Mario singing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious").

It's Marioware Incorporated Mega Microgame-ses!
And we have lots of game-ses that covers all the bases,
You can find them, buy them all wherever near your places!
Marioware Incorporated Mega Microgame-ses!

Um Wahoo Hoo-hoo Yahoo, um Let's-a-go!
Um Wahoo Hoo-hoo Yahoo, um Let's-a-go!
Um Wahoo Hoo-hoo Yahoo, um Let's-a-go!
Um Wahoo Hoo-hoo Yahoo, um Let's-a-go!

(I forgot how the second part sounded like so I put in a bit of guesswork with the original lyrics here)

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Here's a preview on what I am working on, and in the vein of the current avatar I have now, there will be a digital rendition of the picture I have drawn to be used as an avatar. Do pardon how unsightly this looks since I didn't like how scanned images of drawn pictures turned out.



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I get a kick out of renaming titles that replaces "M" with "W" and vice versa, since the naming of Wario in relation to Mario is my favourite renaming for an "evil" variation of a character, and certainly more original than adding "Evil" or "Nega" to the character's name.

So here are some examples:
- Winecraft
- The Legend of Zelda: Mind Maker
- Mild Gunman
- Super Wario Waker

I don't know if it's common or if it's normal, but I seem to be able to recall how I learned a good number of the words I have learned.

Here are some examples:
- Revive: Super Mario RPG has this word
- Heinous: Pokemon Leaf Green, a word describing Team Rocket
- Purloin: A Pokemon called "Purrloin" comes from this word
- Hyperventilate: Garfield comic strip on 14th July 2002
- Conceal: Medabots GBA RPG, a support type that increases evasion
- Inert: Bejeweled Twist, which is the description given to rock pieces since they cannot be destroyed through matching them
- Retire: Sonic R's choice of word if a player wants to end a race
- Convenient: I learned this word on computer class during primary school for typing lessons, and the word struck out to be because the "venie" part of the word reminded me of "genie"
- Goliath: Worms World Party; there is a mode called "David vs Goliath", where one worm start with high HP while the rest start with little HP.
- Prominence: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance; This is one of the Illusionist' attacks, who specialises in hitting every enemy on the field with magic. This is the fire-elemental one

I've posed a question to a few parties, which is the question of whether Sonic or Garfield got it worse in public perception. The majority of people who answered the question gone with Sonic, such as this Tumblr post. From what I have seen, only one person believed Garfield got it worse than Sonic if his reasoning were to be believed ("Garfield has always long been a symbol of selling out Even by big name artists"). The general reasoning is that Sonic's inconsistency, leading to a community that doesn't agree with the things they enjoyed with the character.

Even then, I still can't shake the feeling that Garfield got it worse because from what I have seen on the internet there appeared to have more visible appreciative fan art on Sonic while Garfield's more visible fan art are more of "anti-fan art", not to mention how Garfield's Twitter is plagued with unpleasant posts (it stopped getting regular posts, which I attribute it to that) that don't know how to keep it to themselves, while Sonic's Twitter has an overall more pleasant community.

Sometimes I wonder why people are more aware of the breadth of SEGA's IPs compared to Nintendo's IPs, even though the latter lasted longer. What I mean is, yes, SEGA is best known for Sonic and to a lesser extent Puyo Puyo and Yakuza, but people are also aware of their other IPs like NiGHTs, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon. In fact, there is a Wikipedia page that chronicles all of SEGA's IPs.

Nintendo on the other hand, had at one time got a complaint that they never made new IPs since Pikmin before Splatoon surprised people with its success that even convinced its naysayers. That is a misnomer given how many types of IPs they got out even between 2001 and 2015. Rhythm Heaven and Brain Age are among a few IPs that Nintendo had during those times, not to mention how overlooked the success of the Wii IP was. Of course there's also including famous ones like Mario, Legend of Zelda and Pokemon. In fact, this page chronicled a list of over 200 items in the list so it's not as if they are having a shortage of them, despite not every one of them reaching the heights of their best ones.

I suppose this is one thing that Smash does very well: it puts a lot of Nintendo's history into the spotlight, and while not every IP is represented by a playable character, they are still there to educate us on the amount of IPs that Nintendo do have.