Warpless Midlife Mario, round 01

in

Seems my midlife crisis has manifested in a desire to beat the original SUPER MARIO BROS without using a warp zone by the time I hit 50. I'm 44 now, so I've got a bit of runway. Other than the "no warping" rule, I'm also - since I'm playing it on my little NES mini (pork chop Nintendo, as I fondly call it) in The Shed and with it, the option of saving and walking away - instituting a single-playthrough rule: once I start, I don't stop until I die or win, just like those long evenings of perpetual failure that ended 20 years later with a (warped) victory and subsequent blackout drunken revelry. So, in that spirit, round one:

wonder flower trip

in

SMW looks like lots of fun. Can’t wait:

Power-ups aren’t the only way players can transform. Super Mario Bros. Wonder also introduces eponymous plants that make things a little … trippy. A Wonder Flower might make Mario really, really big, or it might transform him into a Goomba. Sometimes they shift the very world itself, making pipes bend and slinky along. Mouri says that with so many Mario games behind them, they realized creating new things that surprise players was a challenge. They first played with the idea of items that warped you into different areas, until Tezuka offered some poignant criticism: “If you’re still just going to warp to a different area, it’s still the same. Why don’t you just change where you are right now?”

mario voice prediction

in

With the morning's news that Charles Martinet is retiring / being retired from the voice of Mario, I can't shake a sense of deja vu with James Earl Jones selling the rights to his Vader voice so it can be created via AI. Prediction: because Nintendo has 30 years worth of Martinet's voice recordings, the next Mario will be an AI Martinet.