post any random Mario thought on your mind

[Flygon64]

The Game & Watch Gallery series is beautiful, they're like playable old cartoons to me. I love Nintendo's first party games on GB and GBC in general they're like aesthetic perfection to my brain, neuron activation, there's clear artifice to it all but it still feels alive to me, lots left to the imagination to fill in the gaps.

My favorite thing about R&D1's early output is that while there's games heavily inspired by contemporary schtuff of the time, Metroid being inspired by Alien, there's also things inspired by what these old Japanese men who grew up in rural areas experienced and loved in their younger years. Zelda was inspired by kid Shigeru's spelunking, Donkey Kong was influenced by Popeye cartoons, the games had these old cartoony styles evocative of anime they'd watch on a fuzzy tv set and gag comic strips they'd read at the playground or in their bedrooms after a hard day's work. No big mainstream video game company would release something like Duck Hunt in the current gaming landscape; I adore the humbleness of the technology and their ambitions.

As people develop better tools, scopes broadening is a fairly natural consequence, and a healthy one in theory but scope creep will continue to haunt devs to the end of time it seems. Nintendo's has been pushing out hollow crates filled with some shiny trinkets instead of sandboxes for a bit, Bananza and Mario Kart World don't look promising, The company's game design game has been falling off to be honest. I'll play one of their new titles for a couple hours but then I'll play it again and feel complete emptiness, wide as an ocean deep as a puddle, I loathe you open worlds.

The retro gaming journey I've been going on has been valuable in reassessing my feelings about video games, I think a lot of modern artistic industries' "products" have been degrading whilst commodification has intensified because of the bigger is better mindset. I don't think indies looking to the far past's video games for inspiration is a coincidence, there's many reasons, some good, some bad, one that I think is particularly insidious is the concept that game's peaked at that point of time they try to grasp at. These "Amish" developers who not only think this art form took a wrong turn they think it's crashed, yet, instead of trying to salvage it, try to replicate an old model... and don't strive to develop upon it further.

I'll leave this at that, this was supposed to be a short bit of autistic gushing for some pretty Gameboy games but I had to go articulate my feelings more, dreadful.

 

[Rolla Koopa]

Mario Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 with Luigi running around Tokyo between the world map and the fields, talking to people, trying to rescue Mario, and obtaining pieces of IRL information about places and things, makes me think of Mario is Missing.

 

[Marioro]

Going from GBA to portable Mario 64 with extra stars must've felt insane at the time.

 

[Wintertime Peach]

I can't believe that I'm saying this, but I think that I like SMB Wonder's "The Final Final Test Badge Marathon" level...Yes I know that it's a Perfect Run/Champion's Road style level, but I don't think it's as challenging as those levels, at least once you've gotten enough practice at it. And it has checkpoints unlike the other finale levels.

What makes this level fun is playing it with the online features enabled and having the live player shadows appear with you in the level. I've had multiple occasions where another player and I decide to get through the level together, and we wait for each other and help revive each other if one dies. One time there were even three of us getting through the level together. It felt really wholesome and I just really like helping other people out and reviving them with my standees to help them clear the level.

 

[Flygon64]

I really like the NES Mario games stronger combination of fairytale and urban aesthetics. You got Alice in Wonderland shrooms, chestnut people, fungi people, the evil ox dragon king's army travel the skies with their pirate airships, impossibly long vines that reach to a land of clouds... which come out of bricks, and you can travel to anywhere in the world... via its magical plumbing system! I know like warp pipes and brick blocks are still a thing but... that's it, I don't think the series had experimented with this approach enough in my opinion.

The franchise gradually became more self-referential, which is what happens when a series develops its own identity, but I feel that the fairytale elements died off because of that and I want to grief over the lost mythological flavor first. Like in SMB3 you come across the Takarabune straight up, you can gain the powers of a tanuki and turn into a Jizo statue, these bits of the game share one thing in common, established Japanese myth. This is what I mourn the most, when pieces of mythos and history from the developers' cultural background weren't exclusively reserved for a specific segment of the game like Odyssey. Nintendo mixed the generic European fantasy tropes with what THEY knew even if it wasn't something EVERYONE around the globe could recognize and did so casually.

The special frosting of the original trilogy's worldbuilding cake that makes it especially original is the americana, because of course these games went with two Italian American plumber brothers as protags from Mario Bros for SUPER Mario Bros. So? Bricks, pipes, blocks, a sort of city construction theme but imbued with that unique mix of fantastical attributes. This was done with purpose, this was a deliberate decision to smooth the transition, this wasn't taken as granted. The floating city of New Donk exists but what it brought to the table weren't made a staple, y'know what I mean? This brings me back to what I said about Odyssey earlier, not only were the fairytales isolated but also the urban flavor.

I think as these games grew more popular, fairytales were replaced completely by contemporary cartooniness and the bits of working class American city life subdued. Dunno, I can't say I hate the Mario World after the not even so drastic shift, it built its own great style, but it'd be neat to see'em tinker with what originally made some of the series most famous iconography again, that old blend. I blame replaying All Stars + SMW for all these words.