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5.

having past games get hd remasters on switch would be nice. super mario 64 and the two galaxies would definitely be some of my picks, but i guess some of the rpgs might be good too. especially ttyd, it's so expensive to get that game legit now
 
I don't care what Nintendo does for Mario's 35th anniversary. They can do nothing and I'll be fine. Of course, if they do something, then I could be happier. But if it was only Nintendo Switch stuff, then it doesn't really matter to be in the first place. I chose the last option.
 
Option 5. I'm not talking about the rumored remasters--yeah, I know it would be awesome to play 64/Sunshine/Galaxy on Switch, but the former got a pretty good portable remake already, and the latter two aren't in desperate need of one at the moment. But I really want to see the five All-Stars games remastered in HD with the NSMB engine...heck, maybe even the Land games on top of that. I can see all of them benefitting heavily from it.
 
A new poll today, but also the last poll from your 10th Poll Committee! 😢

Well, it was a fun ride, and I am truly happy of your support throughout the year. Serving as your Poll Committee Chairperson was truly an honor and a great experience overall, and to be honest, just participating as a member of the Poll Committee is truly fun! To anyone considering becoming a member for the next term, be sure to apply, you will certainly not regret!

Now, let's look into the future for another exciting year with Hooded Pitohui (@Sayaka Kanamori) and Power Flotzo (@Ran Mitake) taking the lead. I am more than confident that they will bring the Poll Committee to new heights!

While, I am doing this speech, thanks @Jake Marshall for being such a wonderful pal during this adventure!

See you around, everyone! 👋

-NS

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What are your thoughts on lives and continues in video games?
  1. I feel like lives and continues are good in video games.
  2. I generally like lives and continues in video games, but sometimes they negatively affect the game.
  3. I usually do not mind lives and continues, as they do not affect my experience with the game.
  4. I dislike lives and continues, but they can be well implemented in certain circumstances.
  5. I strongly dislike lives and continues, and prefer games without it.
  6. I do not have an opinion on the subject.
 
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Option 2. Lives can be good to have, but in some games like Mario 3D Land and Kirby Star Allies, lives are in great abundance, to the point where when you beat the game, you'll have lots of lives left over. Its good to have your lives reset to the default number every time you start the game in Kirby, but Star Allies never resets the counter and I have around 400 or so lives in it because of how easy it is to find extra lives in the levels. This was why it didn't take me long to finish Star Allies, meanwhile in Triple Deluxe and Planet Robobot I was stuck on the final boss(though I did manage to finish the former).

No lives just makes a game too easy. Mario Odyssey has lots of coins in its worlds so you'll likely never encounter a game over screen. And Kirby's Epic Yarn has no way for you to die at all, though you do lose some of your beads when you get hit by enemies.

But in difficult games, those lives mean nothing. I lost thousands of lives and saw the game over screen a lot in Crash N. Sane Trilogy because it was my first Crash experience that wasn't a spin-off game, so naturally, it took me a while to get the hang of the controls. And even when I did get used to them, I still did terribly in the levels because of the enemies and not having any way to protect myself from them. Because of this, I only got through the first 2 levels of Crash 1, skipped over Crash 2, and only made it to the 3rd warp room's boss in Crash 3 before quitting the game for good. And I'm glad I did quit, as I do not want to touch another main series Crash game without the controls being changed up a lot and the difficulty being a lot less stressful for beginners and newcomers to the series to learn and enjoy.
 
It really depends on how games are handled. In games nowadays where you can save and continue from pretty much any point, lives and continues don't mean much. Game Over used to mean your game was over and had to start back at the very beginning rather than just the last save point.
 
I don't like lives. I don't see why a player should be punished for dying too many times, wouldn't the punishment for dying already be enough? Plus in some cases you'd lose progress on the level, and have to redo the entire thing, from the beginning, with even less lives then you started. In some cases, I find lives to only be a minor annoyance, such as when the game doesn't have too big of a punishment for losing all of them (in which case why are they there in the first place?), or when I find ways to get around the lives mechanic (for example I discovered most GBA games have a way to 'reset' the game, sending you back to the Title Screen, and as most games on the console only have a manual save function, I can reset back to the Title Screen if I die too many time to go back to 99 lives). If I'm actively trying to find ways to get around the lives mechanic, I think that sums up how much I don't like them.
 
imma say 3. however i don't think any of the options here fully cover my opinion, as i basically feel that: if the game forces you to reset a significant proportion of the game because you died to many times, that's bad, but if it's just like losing a checkpoint in a level i'm usually fine.

per game:

3d world - i used an infinite 1 up trick so no problem

3d land - it's so easy that even without infinite 1 up tricks i got 100% with about 300 lives

nsmbw and ds - as a kid i'd get a few continues but they don't mean anything really apart from losing a checkpoint so eh

smb1 and lost levels - poor, i don't like losing 3 levels worth of work for dying 3 times especially with wonky controls and generally being hard games, especially the lost levels, so i pretty much ended up using save states

smb2 - kinda similar to nsmbw and ds except the levels are longer and more challenging so it was more frustrating here

sml1 - again poor, here it forces you to restart the whole game unless you get over 10,000 points (i think, maybe i'm off by a factor of 10). i didn't use save states here because it wasn't as hard as smb1 or the lost levels and i managed to win without them but yeah i feel it would have been better if the game didn't punish you so harshly.

sml2 - this one is kinda unique in that it takes all the coins away from you. i feel this punishment is kinda on the harsh side but i rarely game overed so eh

galaxy 1 and 2 - both pretty easy games, especially galaxy 1, so it was rarely an issue, and i think the punishment is pretty fair. galaxy 2 has an infinite lives trick which i've used sometimes although definitely not always. also it seems kinda weird to me that both games reset your lives counter whenever you leave and reload your save file, i think it'd have worked better if they were conserved like in 3d land and 3d world for example.

mario 64 - fair, although this game doesn't really have checkpoints per se so i'm pretty sure that game overs don't mean anything most of the time.

sunshine - seems kinda fair, although e.g. with the secret levels it's more tedious than anything else to backtrack to return to them

overall i'm the kind of gamer who prefers games that are generally somewhat easy to those that are generally somewhat difficult so overall, i feel that they work well for the super mario series but only so long as the punishment is not too harsh especially if the game's difficulty is such that getting a game over is likely at some point
 
Option 3. In a lot of retro games they're just downright infuriating but in most modern Nintendo platformers they're abundant enough that the lives may as well not exist. Not a fan of it, but I'm generally indifferent to it when abundant 1-ups will generally stop it impacting my experience anyway.
 
Lives are vestigial, get rid of them.

I remember finding a lot of clever secrets in the NSMB games only to be disappointed that it contained 1-Up Mushrooms in it in a game overly abundant with lives. It would be so much better if they were replaced with an actual reward for getting them such as worthwhile collectibles or something.
 
Option 2: I feel like the lives make the game balanced, but sometimes they can make the game a lot harder. btw I feel like the continues are the worst. I mean honestly, the game would be so easy with them, at least in my opinion. I feel like the game would be equally challenging (and which is my favorite kind of game) without continues. Also Imagine the game with only one life and without continues, like this everytime you die its a game over.
 
Mak N sauce said:
Option 2: I feel like the lives make the game balanced, but sometimes they can make the game a lot harder. btw I feel like the continues are the worst. I mean honestly, the game would be so easy with them, at least in my opinion. I feel like the game would be equally challenging (and which is my favorite kind of game) without continues. Also Imagine the game with only one life and without continues, like this everytime you die its a game over.
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Well I mean every Nintendo platformer (and probably every platformer ever) has given you the option to quit after a Game Over and delete your save file, which essentially has the same effect as having no continues.

As far as only one life goes though, you can still just delete your save file if you ever die, so
 
Lives are an obsolete concept that should have been put to rest when it outlived its purpose. Lives were originally designed for arcade games to put a limiter on how much you could play for the price of a quarter (or whatever the machine took). After you blew away all your chances they made sure you had to put more money into the machine so you could continue playing. It was a necessary evil to enable the owners of said machines to make a profit while keeping them running.

When the video game market moved over to home consoles, controlling the quarter rate obviously became a non-issue. At that point, all that lives did was serve as a source of fake difficulty; a challenge designed not to test the player's skills but to arbitrarily pad out the game's running time by forcing players to repeat sections they've already cleared successfully. They are still accepted these days because they've been an established part of video games and went unchallenged for so long. But if one sits down and re-evaluates them, one willl realize all they add to the games they're in is tedium and bland repetition.

Though they might still have a place in some specialized challenge runs.

But for general gameplay, it's time for lives to die.
 
Lives in, like, typical Mario games is annoying totally not cuz i die alot but they can work ok sometimes....SOMETIMES.....like in WarioWare games the 4 "lives" adds to the rush, especially once you're going fast (and if it's endless, kinda....helps boot you off before you get bored lol)
 
Option 2. whether lives are good or not depends on the game. for example, in old games, getting a game over was way scarier than getting one nowadays, because you'd have to start all over. however nowadays a lot of times they just feel unnecessary and the only thing that happens is a much longer and more tedious death. in games like mario 64 or galaxy for example, all a game over does is bring you back to the hubworld and you'd have to go back to the level you were trying to beat, which just makes game overs more of a nuisance than something you'd be scared of. i mean yeah, this would make you NOT wanna get a game over, which is kinda the point, but in that case, then why have them at all? i think mario odyssey did a great job in that department, as game overs are flat out removed. now you can try a hard sub area or something over and over without having to worry about the long game over and i dunno, respawning somewhere like the odyssey and THEN going back to the sub area you were trying to beat. in games like rpgs however, since it doesn't work on lives, losing all your health just means game over. at least in those games it makes sense to have a game over, simply indicating that you lost the battle.

now even when it comes to platformers, game overs can be implemented well as long as they exist for a reason, but a lot of times i think it would be better if they just didn't have them, as mario odyssey showed us what a mario platformer without lives is like.
 
Your first poll from the Eleventh Poll Committee is now up!



Recent games have featured members of the main Mario cast wearing new outfits. Do you like seeing the characters wearing different clothes?
  • I enjoy seeing the regular cast in new outfits and would like this trend to continue.
  • I like seeing the characters in new outfits, but also like to see them in their usual clothes as well.
  • I have enjoyed the new outfits in these games but would prefer the characters revert to their original outfits in future games.
  • I prefer the characters' old outfits but don't mind occasionally seeing new ones.
  • I dislike new outfits for the characters and would prefer for them to keep their original ones in future games.
  • I have no opinion on the matter.


We've seen it in Mario Tennis Aces, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, and Super Mario Odyssey, our well-known Mario characters in alternative outfits. Personally, I wholly support it, and I hope to see more of it!
 
option 1: honestly, there's not a whole much about having our bois wearing new outfits or not. they're honestly the same characters, which is the thing that matters. I do dislike some of the outfits in super mario odyssey, but you could just change to the original one if you don't like them. you also could have weird and funny combinations like the clown hat and the SM64 outfit together. and just to be fair, bowser does look better in his wedding outfit. I would like to see more of this, as it doesn't bother me in any ways.
 
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