Super Mario World
Thoughts From The Artful Gamer
By Toronto Thumbs Staff - May 13th, 2009
Not everything we do is reactionary to the news of the gaming world. Sometimes we sit down to plan out special features and collaborations with others. Unfortunately, there are occasions where things don’t go according to plan.
Chris Lepine, who runs the excellent gaming website The Artful Gamer, had agreed to work with us on assembling thoughts on a game we all have warm fuzzy feelings for: Super Mario World. We bandied about many ideas for a feature, but due to the constant influx of news that had to be dealt with by our small staff and the fact that E3 is now just weeks away, our planned collaborative efforts to discuss the game fell through.
Chris, however, still managed to come through, and just days after announcing his public disappearance on his own website, he sent through his thoughts on Super Mario World in a medium we haven’t seen from our contributors: mixed words with text. If your monitor resolution is too low to read the piece, you can click and drag to scroll it or download the image directly.
As this was going to be a bigger collaborative effort, I would love to hear your own thoughts on this game. Feel free to leave them below.
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As much as I love Link to the Past and Metroid Prime I’ve consistently listed Mario World as my favorite game of all time, and this is in the face of Prince of Persia:Sands of Time.
I don’t know it’s one of the least frustrating games I know. SoT was more frustrating (at times) and that game pretty much told you what to do (in one of the most beautiful gimmicks I’ve ever played).
Last time I played SMW must have been maybe 2 years ago when I downloaded a ROM. That first maybe hour was so much fun I picked it up for GBA and it’s on my shelf in my backlog. That initial hour was great and playing the game back when it came out was awesome. It’s just a really good game.
I worry a lot about the old games I loved and whether they were really as good as I remember. Was Super Mario RPG really a good game or did I just have fun reading about it in Nintendo power and that one weekend I rented it? With SMW I never have those doubts at least not while I’m playing it. I sometimes wonder if my joy is at least partially rooted in the fact that I remember every single secret in the game and I’m enjoying what I’ll get to more than the actual game currently. Do I like the game because I know where the multicolor turtle shell is or because I’m having fun while I build up to that point.
I figure there’s nothing I can do about it from this perspective. Either which way my love and enjoyment of the game is real. As a form of experiment I can look at a game like Ocarina of Time. I heard it was the greatest game of all time but I never had a 64. I picked up the gamecube disc late in the gamecube timeline and despite all the hype I was able to scale back my perspective and enjoy the game for what it is and pronounce my own judgment. I’m not sure it has the replay value that SMW has but it does have initial play value. My judgment was that it was freaking brilliant. I had fun. LOTs of fun, and this is why I play video games.
I was a sega kid growing up, from the master system through to the Saturn (even a gamegear and the Sega CD), and never owned a Nintendo console until a Gamecube in 2003. As such I never had the pleasure of playing it in the comfort of my home until, maybe in 2001, I played through it and SMW2 with my wife on an emulator. One of the few shared game experiences, outside of Rock Band and my brief (slash, her enduring) stint with WoW. Was a great deal of fun, and I still enjoy playing single player games where you just pass the controller around when you die as much as I enjoy actual multiplayer titles .
In terms of feeling an actual and enduring impact from a game? A few come to mind: Ico, Portal, Half Life 2, Sonic 2 and Sonic CD, Gunstar Heroes (I did enjoy the fruit roll-up as well) all come to mind. Will I replay them? I almost never do with old or new games. I replayed Gunstar Heroes only because I never beat it when I originally owned it.
Nowadays I have a hard time getting engrossed in a game for the exact reasons that Chris mentions. If I play Valkyria Chronicles, it’ll be for 2 hours, max, before real life gets in the way. As such I’m currently playing through VC, Braid, L4D, TF2, Motorstorm, Flower, Everyday Shooter, Bioshock, HL2: Ep 2 (stuck on a glitch now), Castlevania SOTN, Eden, and Persona 4. Not sure which, if any, I’ll manage to “finish (if the game allows it), and I do sometimes wish I could just spend a full 12 hours on a single game. I’m VERY happy for games like Portal and Ico that are compact and have no fat on the bones. A few days is all it took to be incredibly satisfied, and I really am looking forward to more Portal/GlaDOS and TRIco.
Wait a sec… wife leaves for a week in a week… party at my place!
maybe I misread the piece but I will concur that it’s hard to get into games nowadays because a)there’s a lot more of a rush of good games. Even if we had a lot of quality games back in the day there was no internet so you weren’t bombarded with a rush to play 15 AAA games in a span of three months. Maybe games 1-3 were popular then the rise of 3-6 and so forth.
b) real life is frustrating. I don’t even bother trying to play Fallout 3 because I’m going to want 2-3 hours of personal time to play it which may or may not include 1/2 hours of re-acclimation time at this point. I don’t want to even think of the 45-60 minutes I’d need to get back into the groove of one of my gamecube RPGs like Tales of Symphonia.
but still these aren’t factors that affect the game (new or old) or my ability to derive enjoyment from them, or judge them.
Excellent editorial, I would love to seem more like this.
I think the fact of the matter is, the video game industry is still very new compared to most other entertainment mediums. It is still very much growing and learning from the mistakes of the past. Games these days are removing various frustrations such as poor enemy and level design, and adding various new features to make the game more enjoyable, such as checkpoints and autosaving. Games are becoming much more streamlined. As game budgets are getting bigger, so are production values, and the fact that there is a larger investment in the project means that companies must reduce the chance as best they can that the game will flop. As for the amount of games coming out these days compared to back then, there is significantly more competition, so again, the game must actually be GOOD if the developers intend to make any money.
Games back then, no matter how memorable they were, were simple worse. They seemed good at the time simply because we had nothing to compared them to. Even taking a look at a bad game that comes out these days and compared it to a good game from the past, and it still probably has fewer frustrations simply because it has learned from game design mistakes made in the past. Like it or not, arguably every aspect of games are better now than they used to be, and they will only continue to improve over time. The only thing I personally think is getting worse are game soundtracks. There are some out there that are still good, but most are trying too hard to create a big sweeping high budget blockbuster movie score, yet many 8-bit beeps and boops are infinitely more memorable. They are taking the heart out of songwriting and basically doing what movies do, which is really sad. Video games are their own medium, and should have music unique to that medium. Have you ever heard any 8-bit music in movies before? Or any movie with a soundtrack anything like Mario? No. Then why take movie scores and put them into video games? Keep it unique to the medium.
As for the memories of childhood games, the human mind tends to remember only the good that happened in the past and omit the majority of negativity. You tend to remember the good a lot more than you remember the bad, that’s just how it works. But perhaps it is better that they be left as memories rather than playing them again only to be frustrated and realize how poorly designed most of those games are compared to what we have today.
@Darkfiber – You raise some good points about game developers learning from game design pholosophies of the past. And I gotta agree – there are classic games I used to love but now cannot stomach for how unplayable they have become with time.
That said, there are still a good number of games that I still find very enjoyable, and this may just be because I liked them before or because I’m trying to prove something to myself (I can beat Shinobi on one life!, et cetera).
A reflection like Chris’s piece is sometimes all we need to help us take a step back from the moment and really think about things – and that’s what you guys have done in the comments so far.
Although I’m a bit late to the party, I just wanted to thank you all for the thoughtful comments, and especially to the Toronto Thumbs crew for posting my little editorial piece here.
SMW remains one of my bittersweet childhood romances that I keep coming back to year after year. There’s something wildly unique about it, even in comparison to Nintendo’s huge library of Mario.* games.
I can sympathize with the core of your article. As gamers get older, they will find there is less time to spend on games, whether it’s the favorite games of their youth, or the biggest name title coming out now.
However, I find the best solution to the problem is to simply step out of the rush. There is no real reason to keep pace with all new releases. To do so is to stretch your time (and often times, finances) to the breaking point.
Personally, I haven’t bought a new game at launch in almost a year. Instead of going after the newest games, I play the games I actually want to play. Whether it’s an old favorite of my youth, or a more recent classic I simply never played before. The experience has been both liberating and relaxing.
My blog response:
“The gamers, the dreamers; our hell!”
http://nsae-evolution.blogspot.com/2009/07/gamers-dreamers-our-hell.html