Since my deepest youth I always considered Super Mario World to be better than Super Mario Bros. 3; however, in the past few years, & ’specially recently as I’ve been looking @ Super Mario Bros. 3’s level design for ideas for my own sloppy mess o’ a game, that certainty has withered.

My reasons for preferring Super Mario World was ne’er quite fair: ’twas the 1st game I e’er played, coming out 1 month before I was born. It didn’t beat the All-Stars version o’ Super Mario Bros. 3 by much, — to the point that I’m not 100% sure All-Stars wasn’t the 1st game I played — but the fact that I started with both round the same time shows how I missed the point when Super Mario Bros. 3 1st came out, a year before Super Mario World, when ’twas perhaps mo’ revolutionary.

To my younger mind, Super Mario Bros. 3 was quaint in its limits: you couldn’t re-enter levels you’ve already beaten, you couldn’t move freely ’tween worlds without using scarce flutes, & you could only save to keep the progress since the beginning o’ the world you were in¹, as compared to Super Mario World, wherein you could save virtually anywhere so long as you could beat a Ghost House ’gain ( which meant going back to Donut Plains & beating “Donut Ghost House” ).

Some hate these additions ’cause they weaken the “challenge” o’ Super Mario World, but I ne’er cared that much for “challenge” — in this case, mere inconvenience. 1st, if one wanted, one could easily just ne’er save or ne’er go back to previous levels, or e’en go farther than vanilla Super Mario Bros. 3 by refusing to collect power-ups or gain any points ( ascetic run ). People also complain ’bout the cape allowing one to fly o’er entire levels for the same reason. ’Gain, nobody’s forcing them to use the cape feather to fly o’er levels. I’m befuddled as to how people can complain ’bout having the freedom to do something — as if they can’t trust themselves to use their toy the “correct way” & need some game designer dictator to tell them how the play.

This is why I ne’er liked the obsession video games have with “challenge”: what usually ends up to be an obsession with work & tedium. This is why I find so many games, ol’ & new, intolerable: they require the player to do so many chores to do the things they want to do, as if paying $40 or mo’ wasn’t ’nough to earn the right to have fun.

To be fair, this isn’t something that’s intrinsically linked with difficulty. For instance, tutorials, the scourge o’ modern games, is 1 o’ the most annoying & common chores². But making limits “challenging” doesn’t make them any less annoying as limits.

What I always liked ’bout video games was the feeling o’ exploration, which is something Super Mario World did wonderfully. No 2-D platformer has e’er created an o’erworld as memorable or as fun to explore. For Super Mario World, the fun wasn’t going straight from start to finish, but exploring levels for secrets. The secret exits were certainly the most memorable part o’ the game:

• The path to the “Top Secret Area” found by flying up to the ceiling @ the start o’ “Donut Ghost House”;



• the split path after the 1st level o’ “Vanilla Dome”;



• the secret exit to “Cheese Bridge” found by Yoshi jumping under the main gate to find ’nother gate hidden ’hind it, which lead to “Soda Lake”, the only level with Torpedo Teds;



• the secret exit to “Chocolate Island 2”, found by collecting a certain # o’ coins & going quickly ’nough;



• the secret exit to “Chocolate Island 3”, which was the only way to proceed, since the regular exit trollishly caused you to go in a pointless circle back to “Chocolate Island 3”.



• the split path in “Valley of Bowser” that led to a back door to Bowser’s Castle;



• the secret exit to “Valley of Bowser 4”, gotten by getting to the end without losing Yoshi so you can eat the key through the wall;



• &, ’course, the entire Star Road & Special World³.

Actually, 1 o’ the coolest things ’bout Super Mario World’s o’erworld was that the “worlds” weren’t cleanly divided as others, making it feel mo’ open & organic. There was something teasingly fun ’bout entering “Valley of Bowser” from “Donut Plains” for a single secret level found on a high cliff through a pipe, only to be unable to reach the rest o’ “Valley of Bowser”.

To be fair, Super Mario Bros. 3’s map wasn’t completely superfluous. In fact, in many ways, it had mo’ interactivity than Super Mario World’s, & ’twas the 1st Mario game to have a map:

• the many sliding image & memory minigames;



• The coin ships & white mushroom houses with obscure requirements to unlock them on the map.



• the Hammer/Boomerang/Sledge/Fire Bros. battles;



• the bridges & canoe in “Sea Side”;



• the way the airship moved to a different place on the map if you lost, which affected the strategic value o’ how you clear the path to it;



• the way “Sky Land” was split into 2 maps, found by passing through a spiral tower;



• & the way one could use the Hammer item to find secret corners o’ a world map.

The world map also had split paths sometimes; though these usually just allowed one to skip certain levels — & the completionist in me ne’er wants to do that.

Also, Super Mario Bros. 3’s worlds had mo’ meaningful themes, which made them somewhat mo’ memorable. World mostly has plain & cave worlds, with 1 forest world & 2 “anything goes” maps. Furthermo’, the cave world theme is rendered meaningless by the fact that there are cave levels in the plain worlds, too. Plus, they don’t e’en stick to the themes: cave worlds sometimes have outside levels in them, albeit @ night. This can make Super Mario World levels look samey, which I’ll get to when I talk ’bout aesthetics. While Super Mario Bros. 3’s themes are trite, — which is why their repetition in the New Super Mario Bros. games was annoying — @ the time having themed worlds was in itself still quite fresh, & it still managed to be rather clever with “Big Island” & “Pipe Maze” themes, as well as the artillery level themes.

Super Mario Bros. 3 also has a ton o’ fun quirks thrown into it, many o’ which don’t reappear in Super Mario World:

• The rare power-ups, such as the Tanuki Suit, Hammer Bros. Suit, the Frog Suit, & Kuribo’s Shoe;



• Boss Bass, which leaps up & eats you;



• the mother Goomba with all the baby Goombas that don’t harm you, only weaken your jumps;



• the pipe levels where you can go off 1 side o’ the screen & warp to the other side;



• those hopping bricks hiding ’mong regular blocks;



• the fact that the king gives you a different message if you have a Frog Suit or Tanuki Suit, referencing the fact that you looked transformed yourself;



• & all the aforementioned minigames.

Like with Earthbound, Super Mario Bros. 3 is full o’ all these li’l fun details that it’d take fore’er to try listing them all.

Controls & Gameplay

The controls & physics are ’nother target for contention, with the same common defenses for either: Super Mario World’s controls & physics were tighter & mo’ responsive, while Super Mario Bros. 3 were somewhat slippery ( though not as bad as some people make them out to be ). As with the other issues, Super Mario Bros. 3 defenders praise these mo’ slippery controls as adding to the challenge o’ the game.

I question this. I generally don’t think the challenge o’ a game should come from the unintuitiveness o’ controls or physics, but from the level design & puzzles themselves; however, one could question whether Super Mario Bros. 3’s controls are truly unintuitive or simply mo’ complicated to learn. Either way, people inflate the difference in controls, & I don’t consider it important myself.

Super Mario World also gave you a spin jump, which could be safely used on most dangers that’d normally hurt regular hops, such as Thwomps, Boos, & Balls & Chains. ’Gain, Super Mario Bros. 3 fans criticize this as neutering the challenge o’ the game, & while I don’t consider it a big problem, I do have to agree with them somewhat. Then ’gain, to be fair, as many hard Super Mario World rom hacks show, spin jumps hardly make it impossible to make things difficult. E’en if Super Mario World didn’t have spin jumps, it’d still probably be easier than Super Mario Bros. 3.

& as I mentioned before, Super Mario World gives you a cape, which can be used to fly o’er some levels, as opposed to the Raccoon Leaf & Tanuki Suit, which had limited flight ( mo’ like a super high jump & a glide ), & rare P-Wings & Jugem’s Clouds, which could be used to skip levels, & which could end up wasted if the player got game o’er & lost their level progress. Jugem’s Cloud, which outright let you skip levels, as opposed to P-Wings, which just let you have infinite flight, didn’t count a stage as beaten, so if you lost to the next stage, you’d get sent to the last beaten stage, which is before the skipped level, effectively wasting the Jugem’s Cloud. Due to the inability to return to past levels, Super Mario Bros. 3 was mo’ sparing with power-ups, though clever players could stock up on power-ups by exploiting a mechanic ironically meant to make things harder: the fact that game o’ers reset the world one’s on, while still letting players keep their items.

’Gain, while none o’ these issues are that important, I do have to give credit to the Super Mario Bros. 3 defenders. The scarceness o’ power-ups makes the rare & strong power-ups, like the Tanuki Suit & Hammer Bro Suit feel mo’ exciting & special, as well as making the mo’ mundane power-ups, like the fire flower, useful. In Super Mario World, there’s rarely a good reason not to have a cape, ’less one’s purposely going for challenge; in Super Mario Bros. 3, one may be stuck with vulgar fire flowers & mushrooms, challenging them to adapt. This is a challenge I can respect: one not done simply through inconvenience just ’cause I don’t have unlimited time, but due to different contexts. & the “exploit” I mentioned for stocking up items is actually mo’ clever than Super Mario World’s unsubtle method, & is a nice way to be easy to players who get game o’er. One could think o’ it as a less potent form o’ the “Super Guide” or “Shiny Leaf”, or whatever they called that thing the game gives you to humiliate you⁴.

All that said, people o’erstate this difficulty difference. While I agree with the grumbles gainst Super Mario Bros. 3’s inconveniences, such as lack o’ saves or the inability to just load up a beaten game & play whatever level one wants ( ’less one’s playing the Game Boy Advance port with its shitty graphics & sound ); but I’d ne’er call Super Mario Bros. 3 “‘controller through the window’ hard”, as some call it. Quite the opposite: as someone who’ll unabashedly admit that I suck @ games, ’specially NES games, I find it strange that people call Super Mario Bros. 3 hard, ’specially compared to just ’bout every other NES game, ’cept for maybe Kirby’s Adventure⁵.

In fact, ironically, Super Mario Bros. 3 had some elements that made it easier than World. For instance, the US versions o’ Super Mario Bros. 3 would make Mario or Luigi revert to big after being hit with a better power-up, unlike World.

Moreo’er, most o’ the “tricky” parts o’ Super Mario Bros. 3 are nullified — making them, as I said, mere inconveniences, rather than true challenges. The “threat” o’ game o’er in a game that disallows saving is nullified by the fact that the game just throws lives @ you. You’re guaranteed a life after beating 3 stages, & are likely to get 5 if you can repeat a simple run & jump rhythm that everyone & their gerbil knows @ the end goal. The game also throws power-ups @ you — so many that I usually scramble to use the crappier ones, like Starmen, after I find out that my inventory has filled up. In a twist o’ irony that’d turn Adam Smith on his head, the scarcity o’ the better power-ups like the Tanuki Suit & Hammer Bros Suit only make them not worth the trouble, making you appreciate how sufficient vulgar mushrooms, fire flowers, & raccoon leaves — e’en just good ol’ small Mario — are.

’Sides, you start to realize they’re not that useful, anyway — mo’ cool than anything else. The main challenge in Super Mario Bros. 3 are instadeath pits, not enemies. Hammer Bros. suits are useless for these, & the Tanuki Suit is no better @ dealing with these than the raccoon leaf. & unlike with those, this game throws raccoon leaves @ you.

I rather recently played through this game; & despite fucking round, being a complete klutz & dying all the time, I still made it from “Big Island” to “Ice Land” ⁶ ( warp whistlin’ ) with a life surplus & plenty o’ items. I was laughing @ how oft I was getting hit ’cause I just wasn’t caring & seeing the game give me yet ’nother raccoon leaf a could blocks afterward. For god’s sake, I think the 1st World 4 level has 2 raccoon leaves. You have to be not trying @ all to get hit twice in that level.

Level Design

I’m mixed on Super Mario Bros. 3’s level design: They’re shorter, & therefore tighter, whereas World’s can feel fillery sometimes. Some o’ them have exciting quirks that make them memorable: admittedly, no World level has anything as memorable as Kuribo’s Shoe, the race to get to the next star on a long plot o’ plants before your star runs out, the chomps that came out o’ alternating pipes, or Boss Bass. However, Super Mario Bros. 3 also had its share o’ forgettable levels, ’specially in “Sky Land”. 5-8 is pretty much, “Hey, ¿remember Lakitu?”, that could’ve easily existed in the original Super Mario Bros.; 5-9 is just a bunch o’ repetitive jumps with Fire Chomps constantly appearing; 5-6 was just a bunch o’ tiny jumps o’er Parabeetles copied & pasted round. Super Mario Bros. 3 also has tons o’ autoscrollers⁷, & they’re so slow & boring. Granted, a’least Super Mario Bros. 3’s are short; just the thought o’ going through “Donut Plains 2” twice bores me to a coma. Still, people who claim that Super Mario Bros. 3 was the “absolute king o’ level design” clearly have nostalgia glasses; anyone being honest would admit that both Bros. 3 & World have wrinkles in their level design that reveal their age.

Also, while airships are cooler looking than castles, Super Mario Bros. 3’s airship levels & bosses were samey, & the airships were all autoscrollers, while Super Mario World’s were much mo’ creative. While the airship levels were all simple “dodge a bunch o’ cannons”, Super Mario World used nets, moving blocks, Magikoopas who shoot colored shape magic, & that block snake. Whereas Super Mario Bros. 3 simply had its Koopa Kids bounce round on balls in a small room, Super Mario World had the pipe shell game for the Wendy & Lemmy bosses. & Super Mario Bros. 3’s Bowser fight could ne’er compete with World’s, which is probably the best Bowser fight in history: while 3’s Bowser is your size & simply jumps round & spits fire @ you till he breaks through the floor to the bottom, World’s is in a hulking clown car & swoops round dropping Mecha Koopas & large iron balls.

( Ironically, Super Mario Bros. 3’s boss levels & bosses are all much easier than Super Mario World’s, with perhaps the exception o’ the last airship in World 8. )

Graphics

While I always used to prefer Super Mario World in terms o’ gameplay, I always preferred Super Mario Bros. 3’s aesthetics ( e’en the NES version’s ), & still do, no question. Honestly, I always found Super Mario World looked kind o’ ugly: its color palettes are plainer & dingier than Super Mario Bros. 3’s, its sprites sometimes look funky ( don’t get me started on “Galoombas” ), & its level terrain looks plainer. While Super Mario Bros. 3 had checkered floors, wooden blocks suspended by cords, & colored blocks with screws in their corners, World had lots o’ brown dirt. World had truly terrible backgrounds, mostly just a bunch o’ plain hills with spots & simple, repetitive rocks that, though simple, also somehow looks cluttered @ the same time. They’re a tacky middle ’tween a stylish abstract that Super Mario Bros. 3 accomplishes & actual concrete detail. The NES version o’ Super Mario Bros. 3 was mo’ creative with backgrounds, & it didn’t e’en have a separate background layer to work with, such as the constellation o’ mushroom, fire flower, & star outlines in 8-1. In general, 8-1 & 8-2 look better than any Super Mario World level.

In fact, while I generally prefer Super Mario All-Stars’s aesthetics, e’en the NES Super Mario Bros. 3 had its charms. I have to admit that as I played the All-Stars version o’ Ice Land I began to miss the candy-cane-reminiscent striped backgrounds. Sure, they’re simple compared to the snowy hills; but they had a bizarre abstract heart to them that the mo’ mundane hills don’t have. The snowy hills & firs⁸, simple themselves with a plastic look, felt like they belonged in a normal cartoon world; the stripped background looks like it belongs in the warped world o’ Super Mario Bros. 3 with colored screw blocks & wooden blocks floating in the sky. Also, I preferred the screws in the corners o’ the ?-block in the NES version mo’ than the rounded blocks in the SNES version, which look misshapen, as if they were factory mistakes.

Music

While I love Super Mario World’s map themes — ’specially the def beats o’ “Vanilla Dome”, ( ¿Why has no rapper sampled this yet? ) the sinister “Valley of Bowser”, & the summery jingle o’ “Forest of Illusion” — its level songs can get grating after a while — ’specially since they’re all basically the same song, just with different tempos. Only its “Ghost House” & “Athletic” songs are likeable, & the latter’s still not as good as Super Mario Bros. 3’s. & while it’s nice to get a reprieve from the Super Mario Bros. underground theme, which Super Mario Bros. 3 reuses, Super Mario World’s replacement is blander, ¡& still sneaks a part o’ the other level songs in, as if we haven’t heard that fucking song ’nough! ¡Augh!

However, Super Mario World had better credits & title screen songs — some o’ the best o’ any game⁹, actually. Super Mario Bros. 3 didn’t e’en have a title screen song in the original NES game. Its final boss theme is also better.

That said, Super Mario Bros. 3 definitely has the better music, o’erall. I can’t think o’ a song I don’t like, & its least good track is better than most o’ the songs in Super Mario World.

Much like with the graphics, I generally prefer the All-Stars renditions. The NES versions are great, — ’gain, better than most o’ the Super Mario World SNES tracks — but the SNES versions are just beefed up with heavier bass & drums for mo’ foreboding sounds. “Airship”, “Boss Battle”, “Bowser”, “Castle of Koopa”, “Fortress”, “Desert Hill”, & “Pipe Maze” — god, “Pipe Maze” is great — ’specially benefit. E’en the o’erused underground theme benefits from the heavy echo effect.

Meanwhile, “Big Island” swells with lush orchestra & “Ice Land”’s echoes make for a mo’ daunting map.

That said, I think I do prefer the NES versions o’ “Athletic” & “Hammer Bros. Battle”, ironically due to the same feature that benefited the aforementioned tracks: I feel these songs are made cloudier by the heavier bass, whereas they sound sharper with the crisper buzz-crunch o’ the NES “piano” keys.

Some o’ the other songs a’least sound close to as good in the NES version. “Ice Land” lacks the foreboding echoes on the NES, but makes up for that with the additional twinkle sounds. Same goes for the click noises in the NES version o’ “Pipe Maze”. “Big Island” sounds a bit punchier, which admittedly fits the theme o’ the map better.

( You know, I ne’er understood the way these 2 Mario games handled music. It’s the opposite o’ how the Donkey Kong Country games did it: while those games had 1 map theme & many level themes, these 2 Mario games have a few level themes & a song for every map. The DKC style makes mo’ sense to me: you’ll be on the map for such a short amount o’ time, it’s rare you’ll get tired o’ its song, whereas you’re in levels for much longer. I would much rather listen to “Vanilla Dome” for 3 minutes than that cave song. )

Conclusion

I told you I hate conclusions.

¿So which do I judge is better? ¿What am I, the Grand Judge o’ Video Games? ¿Who cares what I decree?

Addendum

1 last advantage Super Mario World has o’er Super Mario Bros. 3: the ability to take lives from 1 player & give it to ’nother, which makes it much quicker to rid myself o’ Mario on a “2 player game” — a game wherein I, ’lone, play as the 2nd player, Luigi. As if I’d e’er want to play as shabby ol’ Mario — phhh.

I can’t believe I forgot to write ’bout Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak for my GBA tribute. Now’s the perfect time.

Long before that there My Li’l Pony: Friendship is Fatalities¹ & those there bronies, Hamtaro was the emasculating franchise for a younger me², who was ne’er that masculine, anyway. Back when everyone else was bitching ’bout Hamtaro ruining Toonami, I was complaining ’bout Tonami ruining Hamtaro—& I still stand by it.

Anyway, Nintendo—yes, Nintendo themselves, with Shigeru Miyamoto himself acting as director³—created 2 rather good Hamtaro games for the Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance. The 1st was Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! & was quite underrated. But this is a GBA tribute, & Valentine’s Day, so I’m not going to write ’bout it. ’Stead, let’s talk ’bout the mo’ popular sequel.

Both games had similar gameplay mechanics: they were both essentially adventure games, but with less emphasis on collecting & mixing items, & mo’ on collecting & using “Ham Chat.” “Ham Chat” was a special hamster language added onto English—or whatever language one was playing the game on. Pressing A on characters or things caused a prompt with a certain list o’ words to pop up. Selecting different words would cause different things to happen. However, if you didn’t know the word, it’d be just ?s, & you couldn’t select it. You learn words by hearing other characters use them. Thus, the way this mechanic worked was you went round learning words so you could learn mo’ words & advance the plot further.

In both games, you start with 4 main words which are the default: “Hamha,” which is just the basic “hello” & is used to start conversations with other characters; “Tack-Q,” which allows you to tackle forward; “Hif-Hif,” which allows you to sniff things, & is usually used for picking up items; & “Dig-Dug,” which was used for digging in dirt, & usually used for finding items in conspicuous dirt clumps or digging in warp holes.

One may ask why Hamtaro needs to learn the language a 2nd time after the 1st game. The sequel answers that: klutzy Hamtaro trips & falls into water, ruining his dictionary. ’Cause he has the memory o’ a trout, he has to relearn everything.

The main difference ’tween the 2 games is the plot: the 1st game had a simple plot wherein you just had to find all o’ the other “Ham-Hams” & convince them to return to Boss’s clubhouse for some surprise he wants to show off. It wasn’t much o’ a story, but it did give the player some control o’er what order to collect the Ham-Hams.

The 2nd game has a mo’ involved plot, albeit not one that’d e’er win a Nobel Prize: a hamster dressed up in a black devil costume named Spat hates love for no given reason & so tries to stir up trouble & break up relations. This is done through either subtle manipulation or good ol’ outright assassination attempts. Spat gets his name for his love to say “pfpth.” He also likes to laugh a lot, has the best music in the game, & is oft compared to Final Fantasy VI’s Kefka. He’s also the best character in the game.

’Nother difference ’tween Heartbreak & its predecessor is that you have 2 protagonists in this game, which are sometimes used for tag-team Ham-Chat moves, like “Hamlift,” wherein 1 lifts the other up to reach greater heights. The 2nd protagonist is Bijou, a character embroiled in 1 o’ Hamtaro’s many love triangles: the stoic brute with the heart o’ gold, Boss, is in love with her, but she’s in love with Hamtaro, who is the stock idiot hero too dumb to understand love. Like I said, Hamtaro’s not exactly Hemingway—& sadly was too early for the My Little Pony faux-intellectualist thematic analyses⁴ that litter the internet by those kinds o’ adults who strangely indulge in kids media while also being embarrassed by it, & rather than either getting o’er whatever preconceived notions they have or not watching the media, try to pretend the material is something it’s not.

While Heartbreak had a mo’ linear level progression, its level themes were a bit mo’ interesting: while Unite had mo’ domestic areas, like a school, a shop, a park, with a sky garden as the most exotic level, Heartbreak had a haunted manor, an amusement park, a jungle, & Spat’s very own tower, which made the story progression mo’ memorable. Then ’gain, I have a bit o’ nostalgia for the mo’ laid-back levels in the 1st game, too. Both had boring grasslands as the 1st level, too, but that’s by the Queen’s law, section 21 o’ the “Boring Beginning Act.”

Heartbreak also had mo’ minigames & 2 bosses, though the bosses weren’t much, & the minigames were oft annoying or filler. The bosses were mainly just timing a certain Ham-Chat technique @ the right time & in the right place, while avoiding things for the final boss. Meanwhile, you can make dances out o’ Ham-Chat words, find songs for said dances, & collect rocks so you can rub them into jewelry, which can be used to get accessories to wear on the title screen.

There’s also a dance competition that requires you to use some arcane combination o’ words to 100% complete the game. I think the only “hint” one could get for which words is that they’re some o’ the last words you learn, forcing this to be the last thing you unlock in the game.

Music

Spat’s Theme

It’s so good, it deserves to be mentioned twice.

Map

Catchy, but repetitive. Good thing you’ll only be on the map screen for a couple seconds @ a time.

Clubhouse

A hum-dum theme that fits the hum-dum tone o’ the clubhouse. Somewhat repetitive, too, though you may spend a li’l mo’ time here.

Sandy Bay

A catchy surf rock song for a surf-themed beach.

My subconscious tells me this song is a bit plagiaristic, but I can’t think o’ what it might be copying.

Boo Manor

Catchy for a slow, haunted theme. I ‘specially like the soft, sputtering percussions.

Moonlight

Not sure if I should give them credit for copying a song from Beethoven. Not a bad rendition, though.

I. EarthBound

I’ll actually start with EarthBound ’stead o’ Beginnings, not just ’cause that’s the 1st game most English-speakers played & ’cause that’s the most notable o’ the series (in both the western world & Japan), but ’cause some points I make here will be relevant for Beginnings.

Way back when I started this blog—which I’m surprised was only halfway through 2013 & not earlier, actually—I considered writing ’bout a’least the 1st 2 EarthBound games, but felt hesitant to write ’bout EarthBound itself, since it’s been written ’bout so much that it seemed redundant. Now 3 years later, when the game’s 1 o’ the highest selling games on the Virtual Console & everyone’s making Let’s Plays or art based on it, or making inferior ripoffs that don’t hold nearly the same magic¹, it seems e’en mo’ redundant.

Everyone always has their explanations for why this game’s beloved, & they’re mostly shallow—usually they mention a few nonintegral elements, like the “New Age Retro Hippie,”² e’en though that enemy only appears briefly for a limited time & is quite easy to miss. Then ’gain, rare elements can be quite notable, ’specially in RPGs. I think I mentioned in that Pokémon article how I thought the relative rarity o’ a lot o’ the 2nd generation Pokémon in the 2nd generation games actually made them mo’ interesting.

Certainly nobody’s e’er said ’twas the gameplay or mechanics, & that is, indeed, the reason given when someone considers the game o’errated. EarthBound has no customization & quite wonky character balance. Ness is pretty much the only truly good character, worsened by the fact that you play him far mo’ than any other character & that he gets a giant EXP boost near the end o’ the game; he not only has the best attack, defense, health, & healing magic, he also has magic attacks that are stronger than Paula’s, the usual offensive magic user, which is only slightly balanced by the fact that they cost much mo’ PP. The game also has lame Dragon Quest menus that had become outdated years ago.

Meanwhile, it’s usually acclaimed for its writing &—less oft, though I personally think it may be e’en mo’ important—it’s aesthetics. Its writing is, indeed, interesting, not just in that it has satire & humor,—something that’s not that rare in RPGs—but just in the way it’s written. E’en throwaway lines that weren’t particularly funny had that EarthBound style that made them sound completely different from other games.

The story itself was gleefully random. @ it’s core it’s the cliché “collect x # o’ McGuffins”; but rather than being epic crystals or badges, they’re footprints that reminded your character o’ childhood memories for no reason @ all. I’m actually not sure whence they were s’posed to have come or why they reminded Ness o’ anything. Actually, I’m going to admit that this game’s story made absolutely no sense to me & that I ne’er cared whether it did or not.

If you want an indication o’ how random this game’s plot was, here’s a bare sequence o’ events (obviously with omissions):

• Ness explores a meteor that happens to fall, which leads him to meet a time-traveling dung beetle (essentially Trunks from Dragon Ball Z) who tells him he has to defeat an alien monster ’cause Ness is 1 o’ “the chosen 1s.”



• In order to leave Onett, Ness has to defeat the police, who are mad @ you for stepping into an area you were explicitly given permission into by the mayor.



• After Twoson, you end up in a town taken o’er by a bunch o’ cultists dressed like KKK members with an obsession for the color blue. You must save some random girl from them.



• In Halloween-land Threed, which is taken o’er by the occult, you must get captured by zombies, lured by following what is probably a prostitute into a hotel. The only way to ’scape is by praying to a random boy in a snowy boarding school in Winters to come fly a space ship into your dungeon.



• Back in Threed, you must fight a possessed tent & defeat zombies with the zombie version o’ fly paper.



• To finally fix Threed, you must travel through a valley o’ big-nosed faces with feet & hair bows & then venture into some sewers by waiting in front o’ a waterfall for 3 minutes. In there you fight a giant pile o’ vomit.



• To free some jazz band called “The Runaway Five” with 6 members imitating the Blues Brothers in Fourside, you must explore a gold mine for a diamond, where you must fight 5 o’ the 3rd strongest moles. This part is literally only in the game ’cause the writer happened to have a hobby for gold mining @ the time & is literally only possible to navigate with a map from GameFAQs.



• You must go to the dept. store, where Paula will be kidnapped & you’ll have to fight through possessed records & cups o’ scalding hot coffee. These are some o’ the most dangerous enemies in the game.



• You must go to a cafe, where you will find a way into a neon bizzaro version o’ Fourside called “Moonside,” where “yes” is “no” & “no” is “yes” & you have to fight possessed fire hydrants & melted clocks, & then ’ventually an Evil Mani Mani statue. This is the best part o’ the game—or any RPG e’er.



• You must explore monkey caves to get a trout yogurt dispenser so you can get inside the Monotoli Building. When you defeat his Clumsy Robot who pretends to heal itself with bologna sandwiches by having that jazz band from before randomly come in & defeat it @ the last second, Monotoli will allow you to use his helicopter, only for it to be flown ’way by your next-door neighbor, despite him being a preteen @ oldest.



• In order to fly to Summers, you must fix the UFO Jeff crashed into your dungeon prison. This is actually the most logical part so far.

& that’s only half the game.

Actually, though I made fun o’ the obsession with the New Age Retro Hippie, I do think the strange enemies are some o’ the best part o’ the game, ’specially their verbose names. I’d recommend looking through a list with pictures.

In truth, what made EarthBound so great—& why I’m so leery ’bout all the ripoffs—is its originality, a quality that’s being sapped year after year, so that I’m not surprised it’s not that amazing anymo’. Not only that, but the sheer ’mount it had.

See, we have this tendency to try compacting great works o’ art into pithy sentences, not only ’cause it’s necessary to describe a work in a way shorter than the work itself to convince someone to undertake the work @ all, but also ’cause it just seems natural in our marketing-saturated world where e’en ordinary people nowadays seem to be talking mo’ & mo’ in “catchy” slogans than natural, honest language (read the average online review on places like GameFAQs or Amazon for examples o’ the former).

The problem is, I think we’ve gotten it backward: the best works o’ art can’t be described with those pithy “elevator speeches” ’cause they’re just full o’ so much content.

A common example would be Shakespeare. Try ’splaining Shakespeare’s quality through pithy descriptions; it’ll inevitably sound lame. It’ll most likely focus on the bare plot, despite Shakespeare’s plots all being trite (e’en for his time) & oft wholesale plagiarized. ’Less one goes line-by-line, looking @ all the ways he meter, rhyme, alliteration, theme, & wordplay, one will only get a shell o’ the quality.

The same applies to EarthBound. The hippie enemy is only ’bout .1% o’ what makes this game interesting: there’s dozens o’ other enemies just as interesting in their own ways, dozens o’ lines, dozens o’ interesting areas & plot points (& that list I typed earlier is, true to point, only a hollow shell o’ what’s actually contained in the game through those parts).

But if one were to have to sum-up EarthBound’s point o’ success, it’d not be some insignificant detail, like the hippie enemy or the fact that you have to call your mother when your character randomly gets the status afflictions “homesick,” or the fact that some random photographer pops in to take your picture while asking you to say, “Fuzzy Pickles,” or the fact that you can play it with 1 hand while eating pizza with the other, but how the game differs from other games & how this, ’bove all else, affects the player.

I actually came up with a clunky metaphor for this game’s impact, comparing it to the history o’ English poetry:

One could think o’ games like Final Fantasy & Dragon Quest as like the Shakespeares or Romantic poetry o’ RPGs, in glorious iambic pentameter. This is what people think o’ when they think o’ great epic poetry.

The Pokémon games can best be compared to Robert Frost, a mo’ mainstream poet. He’s probably the most well-known poet ’mong Americans a’least (all right: let’s limit this to the history o’ poetry in the US, since I’m clearly already way o’er my head). Walt Whitman could perhaps be ’nother comparison. It’s also a great comparison, since there are plenty o’ Americans who like Frost & Whitman, but don’t hardly know anything ’bout any other poetry, much as there are plenty o’ Pokémon fans who hardly play any other RPGs.

¿So what is EarthBound? EarthBound is the T. S. Eliot or e. e. cummings o’ RPGs—the modernism.

Though most would probably agree mo’ with the cummings comparison, since that’s probably the 1 out o’ the 2 that most know—& what they know ’bout him is his strange syntax—I would actually emphasize T. S. Eliot in impact.

@ the time, T. S.’s early poems (most who care think his later poems, like those in The Four Quartets, were rather mediocre), like “The Love Song o’ J. Alfred Prufrock,” were considered revolutionary. This was just after a time known as sort o’ a dark age in English poetry, when ’twas mostly reams o’ people regurgitating trite poetry, all in the same hokey iambic pentameter pattern that’d been used for centuries & almost all focusing on o’erwrought effusions ’bout nature, & patriotic pride, & other banally wholesome dreck³.

Then you have this poem that is neither iambic pentameter, nor the customary 8, 12, or 16 lines, nor has end rhymes. Then you have this poem talking ’bout grungy city streets—streets that “follow like a tedious argument”—with yellow fog & smoke that rub backs & muzzles into window panes, a yellow smoke that “[l]icked its tongue into the corners of the evening”—both o’ which I could imagine as EarthBound enemies. Here we have a poem that meshed apocalyptic thoughts o’ time & eldrtich imagery with tedious domestic get-togethers focusing on spoons, dresses, & cakes.

EarthBound has this effect. Nothing ’bout it fits with the RPGs o’ its time—from it’s checkerboarded menus, to its psychedelic neon backgrounds, to its equally psychedelic music, to its urban scenery, to its enemies that ranged from possessed bag ladies to possessed stop signs, to its use o’ pastels & high contrast o’ bright purples & blacks.

My favorite example is the naming screen. Perhaps that’s ’cause it’s the 1st time you actually play the game. Perhaps it’s ’cause o’ the music. While the title screen’s music was different from most RPGs, its apocalyptic, sci-fi flavor wasn’t that out there—I could imagine a Phantasy Star game having it. But the name selection music is unquestionably unmatched—it’s probably the most unique ’mong the whole game’s soundtrack. Here we have a song with samples from the theme song o’ Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the background, ’long odd beeps & boops that sound halfway ’tween sci-fi & horror. The instruments in general used are strange—oft in just how simple & toned-down they are. The childlike sound o’ a lot o’ the drums, is a particular example. ’Stead o’ the epic symphony you’d expect in a Final Fantasy or Dragon’s Quest, here you have a li’l kid playing a toy piano while TV noise plays in the background—& here you have “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky…” o’ RPGs.

Indeed, EarthBound almost felt somewhat subversive in its not taking itself seriously, but still putting itself up on the shelves next to stuffy-ol’ Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, & Chrono Trigger.

Actually, EarthBound could be subversive in general, now that I think ’bout it. ’Twas full o’ satire, largely aimed @ upper-class people: from corrupt policemen who do nothing but block pathways & try beating up children, to mayors who rely on children to do his work cleaning up the streets, to heartless rich people whose neglect & mistreatment o’ their children lead 1 o’ them to become a complete monster.

It actually reminds me o’ Kafka in the way it can mix some quite harsh black comedy with an otherwise light world. Much as Kafka’s work is full o’ innocent protagonists who are cruelly treated by the world, the heroes o’ this game, despite being unassumingly nice, can be told quite harsh things by a lot o’ the grown-ass adults throughout the game, oft in absurdly nonchalance ways. Probably the best example is the aforementioned rich bad parent, Aloysius Minch, who, after having his children returned to him by you, tells you, incidentally, that he wished your family would move ’way, since your loser poor father borrowed “maybe a hundred thousand dollars” (well, maybe not that much…) & he was sick o’ your family lowering the value o’ his property. That he would discuss such a decision with a child who obviously has no input makes it e’en mo’ absurd. But a’least Ness ne’er loses that smile o’ his.

Then ’gain, in general the EarthBound series as a whole seems to have this theme o’ friendly-seeming worlds with ugly undercurrents.

Music Recommendations:

(Note: You can download the entire soundtrack from Starmen.net,—as well as SNESMusic.org in lossless SPC format—which are probably higher quality than the YouTube videos I link to.)

¿Do I truly need to recommend music for this game? Everyone knows this game’s music is amazing—I’d say 2nd only to Super Mario RPG’s.

Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean we all agree on what music from this game is the best. I’m going to point out some o’ the unfairly underrated songs, as opposed to songs like “Pokey Means Business,”⁴ which everyone’s already heard praise for a million times.

Your Name, Please: Yes, this is the “Let us go then, you and I” song I mentioned earlier, & I’m listing it ’gain, ’cause it’s just that good & includes all o’ the best elements o’ what made EarthBound music so good & memorable: its strange instruments & stranger samples.

The Cliff that Time Forgot: Everyone loves to talk ’bout how pants-wettingly frightening the Giygas battle themes or “Cave of the Past” are, but I always found this song mo’ eerie⁵. Those songs are a bit too conventionally creepy, as if they’re trying too hard. This song’s creepy in just how weird & loud it is.

Threed, Zombie Central: It’s spooky Halloween music. Anything halloween is good in my webpage.

Apple Kid: I actually associate this song mo’ with the Onett police than Apple Kid, & it’s whilst encountering their lair that you 1st hear it. To me, this is like the anthem to the kind o’ strange citizens that inhabit EarthBound’s world. & damn is this just a bizarre, but quite low-key, song. It’s so low-key that I think, while most players certainly react to its eerie strangeness in-game, they hardly remember it as a song that one can listen to independently @ all, but mo’ as a piece o’ the atmosphere that blends in too well.

Zombie Paper: This is the lovechild o’ “Apple Kid” & “Threed, Zombie Central.”

Paula’s Theme: ’Gain, people like to mention Giygas’s music & “The Cave of the Past” as being the scariest songs, but I find this song not only creepier… it has quite a melancholic creepiness to it. It’s the perfect music for the scene in which a plays: a scene in which you have to save Paula, who is @ risk o’ being killed by the aforementioned blue-obsessed KKK wannabes. It’s perfect for representing a horror @ a possible sad outcome. If anything, its sadness, mixed with the bizarre horror that is mo’ @ home with EarthBound, makes it sound mo’ like a Mother 3 song (mo’ on that later).

’Course, I should note that this is actually a remix o’ an EarthBound Beginnings song, “Youngtown,” which is e’en mo’ melancholic, but not nearly as creepy, & in my opinion, not nearly as good.

Happy Happy Is Blue Blue: Speaking o’ the Happy-Happy gang, holy shit is this music weird as shit—1000 times mo’ than the songs I already mentioned.

Winters White: All right, I’ll say it: I prefer this song to “Snowman.” It seems to have a better balance o’ jolly & melancholic, which goes well with where it’s used, a time when Jeff most has a reason to feel mixed ’tween being somewhat sad ’bout leaving his ol’ life ’hind & somewhat optimistic ’bout what he’s embarking on.

Spooky: ¿What the hell was this song e’en used for? I think ’twas used after talking to eerie people, if I remember.

Moonside Swing: ’Cause it’s Moonside, & as I said, that’s the greatest scene in any RPG e’er. Literally the only flaw with that place is that you spend far too li’l time there.

Pokey: What I love ’bout this song is how it already clues you in that Pokey’s a villain. No heroic character—or e’en a neutral character—would have such a creepy song. Its clownish, meandering sinisterness perfectly matches Pokey’s insincere villainy.

Dangerous Caves: Such atmosphere…

Peaceful Rest Valley: I debated adding this, since I questioned if it’s truly that underrated. Then ’gain, I’m not sure if “Threed, Zombie Central” is, either.

It’s a rather grim song, ’specially with the booming beginning, despite also being rather soft in its instruments. It fits the area well: while “Peaceful Rest Valley” has a soothing name, & looks soothing, with its pastel colors, when you 1st enter it it’s rather dangerous. It’s where you 1st run into the infamous exploding trees, for instance, as well as Li’l UFOs that constantly give you colds (this game’s equivalent to poison) & Mobile Sprouts that can sap your PP.

Super Dry Dance: EarthBound was so clever that it found a way to turn a desert area—what are usually to me the most boring areas o’ video games—into something fresh by adding an urban spin to it⁶. For a highway stretching ’cross a desert, ¿what better music to accompany it than far’way radio music & noises meshed with the swoosh o’ sandstorms?

This was also a remix o’ a song from Beginnings, & like “Paula’s Theme,” was better in this game. The radio sound is what makes this song, & that’s sadly lacking from the NES version.

&, ’course, there’s the many battle themes, which are probably not nearly as underrated, but fuck it, they’re so good I’m listing them, anyway:

• Battle Against a Weak Opponent
• Battle Against a Weird Opponent
• Battle Against an Unsettling Opponent
• Battle Against a Mobile Opponent
• Battle Against a Machine
• Battle Against Belch
• Otherworldly Foe
• Kraken of the Sea
• & the absolute best: Sanctuary Guardian, the main boss theme, which is actually a remix o’ the Beginnings boss theme.

& the absolute best for last…

Someone’s Knocking at the Door: EarthBound wins the award for most authentic door-knocking sound o’ any video game.

II. EarthBound Beginnings

After such lavish praise, now it’s time to shit on EarthBound’s parent.

All the things I praised ’bout EarthBound are missing in Beginnings. While EarthBound is full o’ character, color, & imagination, Beginnings is depressingly empty, dull, & boring—e’en compared to other NES RPGs o’ its time.

’Stead o’ psychedelic light shows ’hind enemy battles, you get the same flat black void in Dragon Quest. The bright contrasts o’ neon purples & cool blacks are replaced by mostly whites & washed out primaries. While EarthBound had a cartoonish look, it still had texture & detail; Beginnings is full o’ flat colors—mostly white or almost-white peach—that make it look as if its graphics were unfinished. E’en the 1st Final Fantasy & Dragon Quest games had mo’ texture & color—& they came out a’least 3 years before Beginnings, which was a late NES game. For god’s sake, this came out after Mega Man 2. Just compare the 2. & just compare it to Final Fantasy 1 & Dragon Quest 1:

EarthBound Beginnings is 1 o’ the ugliest NES games there are. Only its enemy graphics are good—& they’re only just as good as Final Fantasy 1’s & Dragon Quest 1’s.

I guess, to be fair, there is kind o’ a neat effect they pull to add variety to monsters by laying sprites o’er their graphics to make them look different in mo’ ways than just being a different palette. For instance, while most dog enemies have naked necks, Stray Dog has a collar on its neck. But this isn’t much; & it’s certainly not impressive for 1990 NES technology.

It also has none o’ the psychedelic music, & far less o’ a variety, too. 1 thing I forgot to praise EarthBound for was the fact that it had mo’ than 1 song for regular enemy battles, which varied depending on the type o’ enemy you fought. Beginnings only has 4, 1 o’ which is also used for almost every boss, 1 o’ which is just a repetitive tone used for the final boss, & 1 o’ which is only used by a few rare enemies. A lot more o’ this music is the happy, poppy jingles that wouldn’t sound that out-there in other NES games.

Dialogue is far pared down, & a lot less funny or interesting—it sounds like trite RPG writing, which was what EarthBound was so good @ avoiding. Same goes for plot. The only parts I remember was 1 short scene where you explore a graveyard with Pippi Longstockings—who is tragically replaced by some o’ the worst characters in RPGs—& a scene where you get put in jail for going into an adult club & have your weapons confiscated (you can also heal your HP through the jail bed). These are the only proto-EarthBound scenes you get. Most o’ the time is spent traveling through eye-searingly bland grasslands, as well as a bland desert & god-awful factory maze trying to figure out what you’re s’posed to do, ’cause there’s li’l indication.

Nothing that happens in this game’s plot makes sense, which I mentioned applied to EarthBound, too; but e’en then, that game was better @ a’least telling you that you need to fight the police to leave Onett, get trout yogurt to get into the Montolli building, & so on. This game expects you to guess that you’re s’posed to look for a tiny cactus ’mong thousands that happens to have a face or where to find Canary Village, where 1 o’ the melodies needed to beat the game is. While EarthBound scattered its 8 steps rather evenly ’long the trail o’ the game, Beginnings puts them in random places, & has them put in jarringly unbalanced places: 3 o’ them you get right near the start & the last 2 you can’t get till near the very end. Much o’ the game’s elements don’t get much breadth: you’d think you’re s’posed to save the parents o’ Youngtown/Easter, but that’s not till beating the game. Within the game itself, it’s just a place to cross, & maybe learn Teleport by mind-reading a random baby.

Moreo’er, while EarthBound’s random plot elements were amusing or just cool to experience, Beginning’s are just boring. While that game has fighting the police & going to Moonside, this has exploring the most boring & bland factory just to blow up a rock in the way o’ a train station & wandering a desert & swamp that both feel unfinished.

People oft brag ’bout how this game had a larger map than EarthBound; well, it doesn’t use hardly any o’ it—it’s mostly all filler. It’s shocking how much o’ it isn’t used for anything other than red-herring space that leads to dead ends. Anyone who compared the 2 maps would see that while Beginnings’s was bigger in size, EarthBound’s—& Dragon Quest’s, for that matter—was far bigger in content. ¿Why brag ’bout the fact that I have to spend mo’ time wandering aimlessly through the same green cliffs & trees ’stead o’ doing actually interesting things?

I guess the Magicant was kind o’ interesting, both in its design, its look, & the enemies it had nearby. But, damn, did it have god awful music—& by “music,” I mean a cacophony o’ beeps & boops that sometimes steadied their drunken asses ’nough for a second or so to resemble a melody.

This all sounds frivilous so far, so let’s talk ’bout the meat o’ the game, the gameplay. While Beginnings’s graphics are mediocre & its writing OK, its gameplay is wretched. I mentioned that EarthBound wasn’t particularly good in gameplay & mechanics, but ’twas tolerable ’nough. ’Twas just meh.

But Beginnings is terrible—& no, that ’twas ol’ doesn’t change that. ’Gain, Final Fantasy 1 & Dragon Quest 1 are still fun today. Good NES games weren’t good “@ the time”; They’re still good or they ne’er were good. Honestly, e’en if Beginnings were the only video game @ the time, I’m sure if I were a kid then I would’ve preferred to play board games or read books.

I want to emphasize my comparison to Final Fantasy 1 & Dragon Quest 1 ’gain ’cause a common defense I hear is that you have to appreciate “ol’ school” RPGs to like EarthBound Beginnings. ’Cept Beginnings is nothing like ol’ school RPGs; it’s an utter pathetic joke compared to ol’ school RPGs. If anything, it’s focus on story (despite having li’l story) o’er gameplay makes it mo’ like modern RPGs, ’cept without the qualities that make modern RPGs bearable—which was why most waited till modern times to make them. It’s like trying to make a Where’s Waldo game for the NES⁷—it’s guaranteed to suck. Nobody can succeed @ that.

What made Final Fantasy & Dragon Quest fun was customization. ’Twas fun fiddling with your characters’ stats & classes. It made the grinding they forced you to do to hide how small the games were less tedious. Beginnings has none o’ this. Grinding in that game is mindless, since you have no control o’er your characters @ all.

But e’en then, Beginnings was badly balanced. I complained ’bout Ness in EarthBound being the only truly good character in that game, but a’least the other characters were decent ’nough; in this game, other than Pippi Longstocks & Teddy, both o’ whom are temporary, all the other characters are garbage. Loid is useless & has a dumbass misspelled name & it’s a true tragedy when he flies in to return to your party on Mt. Itoi. Ana is infuriating in how useful she would be if she weren’t useful. She’s the healing character, & the only 1 who learns how to revive other party members through magic. Too bad she’s always the 1st to die ’cause she has shit for defense & HP. To be fair, a lot o’ RPGs did this, having the healer, who should be defensive, have shitty defense & HP while the attacker has everything. This is why the best part in Final Fantasy is 3 Fighters & a Red Mage. & it still pisses me off ’cause it’s so dumb. The only games that got it right were the Pokémon games.

Beginnings also had an obnoxiously common random encounter rate, that made the huge maps only mo’ annoying. EarthBound doesn’t have random encounters—as no RPG should, since they’re the worst thing in video games—but enemies on the map, with actual skill involved in whether you fight them or not or whether you get an advantage or disadvantage.

I want to point out, too, that I played this all the way to the end. These opinions are not hastily-drawn from an hour’s worth o’ gameplay, but after struggling all the way to Mt. Itoi & enjoying almost none o’ it. Other than the few minutes o’ chuckling @ the aforementioned jail scene, the only part I remember having a li’l fun was fighting the car enemies in some area I don’t e’en remember anymo’. & e’en that only lasted a few mo’ minutes.

¿Are there good parts ’bout EarthBound Beginnings? Yeah. I feel like some o’ the story ’hind Beginnings was mildly interesting, though there isn’t much o’ it in the game. While the desert & haunted house in Spookane/Halloween were just empty padding, there was something to the tale o’ the Youngtown/Easter kids’ parents’ being captured by UFOs, e’en if it doesn’t play a significant part in the actually plotline o’ the game, & Lloyd’s background as a bullied kid with a fascination for explosions. None o’ it gets much breadth, though.

There’s e’en some mildly interesting or funny dialogue mixed in the general flood o’ bland exposition, mechanics explanations, & boring background info for characters nobody cares ’bout. There’s the mayor in Podunk who acts somewhat like the corrupt mayor in EarthBound’s Onett, asking a kid to do his work & caring mo’ ’bout his re-election than Pippi’s safety. There’s e’en a funny twist on the “¡But Thou Must!” trope wherein ’stead o’ constantly bugging you till you say yes, he just assumes you said yes regardless o’ what you answer. It doesn’t have the clever diction or style that EarthBound has, but it’s something. Also, while questionable as a gameplay element, punishing you for doing what you’re usually s’posed to do, the fact that you can sometimes catch a cold (this game’s version o’ poison) from other people is rather amusing.

I think reading a mo’ fleshed-out story as a novella—a novel would probably be too long—would be better than playing this as a game.

Beginnings also did have some good music, e’en if not as diverse or out-there as EarthBound’s. In fact, a few o’ the songs in this game that were later remade for that game, such as the hippie song & “Snowman,” are better in the original. Mt. Itoi’s music is amazing, & it’s a crime it wasn’t remixed in a later game. It’s easily the best song in the game. It fits the danger o’ that area.

Actually, as ass-backward as this may seem, I rather liked Mt. Itoi—a’least till I got sick o’ it. Yeah, it’s ridiculously hard; but a’least it’s @ the end. I feel like if the rest o’ the game were less annoying & your players were mo’ bearable to use, a hard final area would be a fun challenge. It works in other RPGs.

In fact, the challenge has nothing to do with this game’s problems. I know that ’cause I tried Mato’s Baby Ring in the fan translation he made for the GBA remake. It didn’t make the game much mo’ fun; the fact that I raced through the game only emphasized how empty ’twas in actual content, though it did, admittedly, make getting through the content much easier (which is why these screenshots are from the GBA version, ’cause fuck playing through this game ’gain on the NES version). When your game is nothing but empty grinding, getting rid o’ the grinding doesn’t make it better; adding actual content does.

That said, if one did want to get the content, I do recommend using the Easy Ring, as well as save states, a walkthrough, & an emulator with a turbo function (’cause good lord is this game unbearably slow naturally). They make the game so much o’ a joke that you’re hardly playing it—but that’s the point. None o’ the gameplay is good; only the dialogue & music. Plus save states can make some o’ the bullshit parts funny, like the aforementioned townspeople who give you colds or saying “no” too many times to Teddy when he asks to join causing your father to call you from outer space & warp you back to your home… for some reason. There’s no explanation @ all.

Music Recommendations:

(’Gain, you can download the whole soundtrack in MP3 format @ Starmen.net, as well as in lossless NSF format.)

Mt. Itoi: In addition to perfectly fitting the direness o’ the area in which it’s located, it’s also 1 o’ the most EarthBoundesque o’ songs on the NES.

Approaching Mt. Itoi: ’Nother EarthBoundesque song. The best way to describe it is “almost as good as Mt. Itoi, but not truly.”

Battle with a Dangerous Foe: Not as good as “Sanctuary Guardian” from EarthBound, but still fitting music for bosses &, well, dangerous foes.

Battle with a Flippant Foe: The main battle theme is quite catchy, too, though not nearly as good as any o’ the EarthBound battle themes.

Factory: This song’s also in EarthBound, but that game had ’nough music recommendations already. The NES version o’ this song gets props for not feeling pared down @ all compared to the newer version, despite being on the NES, which is impressive. For as disappointing, e’en for NES games, as Beginnings’s graphics were, its music was impressive for the NES.

Youngtown: I mentioned finding “Paula’s Theme” better, but this version is still quite creepy & depressing in its own right.

There’s also some spooky music:

• A Ghastly Site
• Cave of the Tail

III. Mother 3

According to Mato, Japanese players were apparently so let down by this game that they preferred Beginnings to it. Then ’gain, I’ve also heard claims that Japanese players preferred Final Fantasy IV to VI⁸, so maybe it’s just that the ones with bad taste are the most outspoken. For Mother 3 it could also just be that the western fans who don’t like the game can mo’ easily ignore it—that it’s not so much that westerners prefer the game so much as that the only people who actually talk ’bout it are people who actually like it.

Certainly Mother 3 is no 2nd EarthBound; but then, it’s impossible to make ’nother EarthBound, & as I complained ’bout throughout its review, people should stop trying, as it only waters down what made EarthBound so radical in the 1st place, & waters down the attempted copy e’en worse. That Mother 3 wasn’t an attempt to recreate its parent is a testament to its developers practical wisdom.

If anything’s a letdown, it’s probably Mother 3’s music. Though it’s mo’ ambitious than EarthBound, having far mo’ songs, it’s music is a lot less out-there; it sounds much mo’ like typical RPG music, & is just much less memorable. There’s certainly no song in Mother 3 that rivals “Your Name, Please” or “The Cliff that Time Forgot.” If anything, like I said in that game’s music review, I think Wario Land 4 had music mo’ resonant to EarthBound than Mother 3 (& thus better music), ’specially the bizarre “music” they had in the so-called sound test. Then ’gain, Wario Land 4 was also a mo’ surreal, kooky game, like EarthBound, whereas Mother 3 is a li’l mo’ serious. Admittedly, EarthBound’s weirder music probably wouldn’t fit in with this game.

That said, Mother 3’s music certainly wasn’t bad. While quite a bit o’ it was rather forgettable epic adventure music, they still found ways to be diverse & interesting. “Mr. Batty Twist” (which, sadly, is only used for 1 enemy that disappears after the 1st chapter) is somewhat o’ a return to the spacey kookiness o’ EarthBound’s battle music, somewhat reminiscent o’ “Battle Against a Weak Enemy.” Master Porky’s Theme’s warped horror, melancholy, & danger perfectly fits the final boss battle. I do think Natural Killer Cyborg was trying a bit too hard to be the next “Pokey Means Business,” though. Perfectly good song, still.

& in general, one could say that Mother 3 is less radical than EarthBound. For most o’ the game, a’least, it leaves the boisterous cities & neon lights for typical forests & small villages. The enemies, too, are mo’ naturalistic, though this game does have some weird, memorable enemies—’specially as the game goes on. A bestiary with possessed bathroom signs, living dictator statues, Rock Lobsters, & some unique creature that looks like a french fry & is suicidally depressed can’t be too bad.

Mother 3 also starts rather slowly. For the 1st 3 chapters you’re jerked round different characters without much time to learn ’bout them, a flaw shared by Final Fantasy IV. Japanese critics who complained ’bout the tragedies after tragedies have something o’ a point: Hinawa’s death on the 1st chapter comes much too soon to truly care, since you hardly know any o’ these characters; & Salsa’s story in chapter 3 is basically nothing but nonstop misery, with hardly anything else to define him. Defining characters purely by their tragedies is a typical literary error.

Then ’gain, maybe both critics & fans are taking the so-called serious parts o’ this game too seriously. I’m going to admit that I didn’t react nearly as emotionally to many o’ the scenes as many other people. For instance, I took Salsa’s story to be a bit more o’ black comedy than tragedy. Hinawa’s death literally has a silly joke included in it. Hell, to be honest, that drug trip scene in Tanetane Island that s’posedly the writer cried through as he wrote it, I thought ’twas s’posed to be funny. I mean, having a mailbox open & release a bunch o’ letters full o’ excess nothing is like a punchline straight out o’ Liō.

I mean, c’mon, ¿am I truly s’posed to take the following as “too much tragedy”:

Everyone’s here, Lucas. Everyone’s waiting to spit on you, throw rocks at you, and make your life hell. Who’s “Everyone”? … Everyone you love.

Inside the mailbox was absolutely nothing.

Nothing after nothing came bursting out.

Princess Kumatora isn’t a princess. She’s like a stick no one loves.

That sounds like stuff I’d write for 1 o’ my silly poems.

Then ’gain, maybe the Japanese fans had a lesser taste for bathos black comedy.

Some o’ the other o’erwrought elements could be taken to be rather humorous, too, such as the clumsy way the game tries to make you feel sorry for Fassad near the end by just placing a random mouse there, who tells you how nice Fassad was to him. It’s such a hokey bad-writing trope, but done in such a goofy way—¿why pick a random, nameless mouse?—that it can only be funny, as if the game itself is riffing on the trope.

One could say that Mother 3 was a bit too preachy. I mentioned that EarthBound satired powerful classes quite a bit, but ’twas mostly just out o’ anarchic mockery rather than any attempt to teach you morals (which matched its rather anarchic world). Granted, I disagree with TV Trope’s claim that Mother 3’s morals are hammered into your head (I also disagree with their o’eruse o’ emphasis, as if they’re gossipy preteens). The fact that they don’t e’en specify themselves what these “messages” are adds to that.

If anything, Itoi was most unsubtle in ways that are so obvious & clearly meant for character demonstration mo’ than morals, such as Fassad’s abuse o’ Salsa clearly meant as a way to show that Fassad is bad. As for the troubles o’ technology & urban flight, that’s left to be mo’ ambiguous. For instance, in Leder’s final speech in the game, he seems to criticize the townspeople for letting themselves become too innocent ’bout modernization, which made them fall victim to the unfamiliar technology ’gain. This makes sense, since having a video game made by a guy who spends much o’ his time blogging with people arguing that technology is evil ’cause it does nothing but break people apart would be the ultimate in hypocrisy. If anything, one could argue that the real problem o’ the game was that the townsfolk just didn’t think ’bout how they were using the technology, just staring blankly @ flashing screens.

Indeed, just look @ all the handwringing that goes on ’mong Starmen.net posters trying to understand this game’s moral. Most o’ the conclusions they derive are meaningless tripe like “it’s about life,” man, & “it’s the human condition.” What “human condition” is s’posed to e’en mean, I’m not sure. But it’s clear that most Mother 3 players online weren’t bashed hard ’nough on the head with Itoi’s “anvils.”

In terms o’ gameplay, though, Mother 3 is unquestionably better than EarthBound. It gets rid o’ the clunky Dragon-Quest option box that pops up when you press A & just has you interact directly with objects & people, like modern RPG; moving items into storage doesn’t require waiting for some guy to slowly drive o’er to you just to pick up only 3 items; they added a rhythm-based timed hits mechanic to battles to make them a li’l less vanilla. Best o’ all, the character balance is much better: Boney’s still pretty lame, but Duster can hit rather well, & Kumatora with her improved magic & attacks o’er Paula is competitive with Lucas, as opposed to EarthBound, where Ness was pretty much the only truly good character. The difficulty balance is also better for the most part, save for 1 following example. Contrast this with EarthBound, which actually seemed to start rather difficult (a’least once you reach Onett) & became a piewalk once you passed Fourside, with the sole exception o’ the Magicant & maybe the Fire Spring.

The only true low point o’ the game is chapter 3, where you play as a monkey named Salsa, who is terrible in terms o’ gameplay. That this chapter mostly takes place through a drab desert & makes you spend copious time leveling up your weak character by fighting the same few weak enemies & collecting poop to sell for items doesn’t help.

But the game doesn’t truly get interesting till chapter 5, where you have to travel through that huge highway & climb the memorable Thunder Tower. The absolute best parts are @ the very end, through the Empire Porky Building with its ridiculous setting diversity: a tower that goes through an animal exhibit, a toy room, bathrooms, a floor still under construction, some alien sci-fi floor, a golden room full o’ allusions to EarthBound, & then a foggy purple cave full o’ strange mineral monsters that seems reminiscent o’ The Cave of the Past. These last enemies are particular odd, ironically in their similarity to Final Fantasy enemies in a game that largely avoided that. & yet, they’re still bizarre, almost sci-fi enemies. It’s like Mother 3’s taking the piss out o’ Final Fantasy not by contrasting its weirdness to Final Fantasy’s stuffiness, by pointing out how strange those games could be, too.

This is a contrast to EarthBound, which was mostly good for the 1st half & very end, & had its worst elements in the best place: ’tween the middle & end, where its least ruinous. While that game had a strong beginning & end, Mother 3 only has a strong end, & a middling beginning—which is the worst time to have the weak parts. I wouldn’t be surprised if most o’ the people who didn’t like Mother 3 didn’t make it to that part, & I can’t blame them too much. I remember when I 1st played the game, I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as EarthBound during the 1st chapters, too.

Which means, maybe the critics do have a point: I can’t help but notice that the weaker parts o’ Mother 3 are mostly the nature-based parts,—the parts that feel like traditional RPGs, with forests & deserts & such—whereas the game starts to get interesting when it becomes mo’ industrialized & urbanized. That’s sort o’ like how Lord of the Rings’s best part is when the characters are in Mordor, since that desolate wasteland is a far cooler setting than boring ol’ forests & caves.

That said, for the most part I don’t think there’s much o’ a comparison ’tween EarthBound & Mother 3. I’ve always thought o’ them as completely different games for completely different moods.

Musical recommendations:

(Note: many battle themes have 2 variations, the 2nd 1 being mo’ difficult to keep rhythm with due to having mo’ glitches. While this may make gameplay mo’ interesting, for pure listening, I find the glitchless easy versions better.)

& as always, Starmen.net can hook you up with some MP3s & Oggs, or you could get these songs in MINIGFS format from GSF Central. However, neither o’ these are the best quality. There’s a program that can be used to rip music directly from GBA games, allowing for perfect quality without any fuzziness. There used to be a big torrent online where one could download the whole soundtrack in perfect quality, but it’s gone, though there is a YouTube playlist with them. Thus, ironically, in this case YouTube has the best quality versions.

• Mr. Batty Twist
• Master Porky’s Theme
• &, ah, fuck it: “Natural Killer Cyborg,” too.

“Fate”: This is a perfect example o’ how, though Mother 3’s music wasn’t as spacey as EarthBound’s, ’twas still quite diverse & original. Also, you wouldn’t expect battle music to be as somber as it is in Mother 3.

“Intense Guys”: This music always reminded me o’ Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, & Emerald music.

“Unfounded Revenge”: a song so good, ’twas remixed for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This version stays closer to its intended military tone.

Other fun military battle themes for the many Pigmask enemies:

• Astonishing March
• Wasteful Anthem (Also remixed for Brawl).
• Tragic Reconstruction (I don’t think this was used gainst a Pigmask enemy; but it has a military tone, anyway).
• Strong One (Masked Man): Also not a Pigmask song, but still military.

“Porky’s Porkies”: Strangely, while “Natural Killer Cyborg” seems to try too hard to be the rock part o’ “Porky Means Business,” this seems to be trying to hard to be the 1st 8-bit music part.

Here’s some generally fun, bouncy battle themes:

• Bothersome Guys
• Dangerous Guys
• Back Beat Battle
• Mischievous Blues
• Rock N Roll (Spicy): The only time I prefer the harder variation.

No Eating Crackers in the Cinema: I have nothing to say ’bout this song, other than that it’s jazzy as hell, so ’stead I’ll tell an irrelevant story ’bout this song: I made this shitty Super Mario World rom hack that used an SNES rendition o’ this song for 1 o’ the levels before I’d e’er played this game & e’en knew what this song was called, so always associated this song with that level, & was rather taken aback when I 1st heard it in full quality in this game proper.

A Certain Someone’s Memories: While most o’ the remixes o’ past songs are better in earlier games, I think this is the best rendition o’ this song, & it’s certainly in a mo’ memorable (pun not intended) scene than when it’s used in the previous games.

Big Shot’s Theme: This is 1 o’ the 2 DCMC songs, & this is the better 1. I always felt like I remembered this 1 being the 1 used in the memorable final scene with DCMC just before climbing the Empire Porky Building, but looking @ its place in the soundtrack chronology, it’s probably played in chapter 4 & the other 1’s probably in the final chapter.

Unsettling Preserve: I don’t e’en remember this song, but damn it’s catchy.

GENE163-1425: This battle theme is somewhat like EarthBound’s “Battle Against a Machine,” though not as good.

’Course, we need some spooky tunes:

• War of the Words: ¿What the fuck is this?
• Battle Against the Masked Man

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Footnotes:

Despite the “Sim” name, this wasn’t created by Maxis, but by Yoot Saito, a game developer also responsible for Seaman & Ōdama. & Maxis just bought to rights to publish it. Yoot later released an obscure sequel called Yoot Tower, & much later a Game Boy Advance remake simply called The Tower SP, published by none other than Sega, & a DS remake called The Tower DS, published some nobodies named DigiToys. Judging by the lack o’ a page for the DS remake on Wikipedia or GameFAQs, it seems nobody gives a shit ’bout it–I ne’er heard o’ it till just recently. But I did play the GBA remake a li’l, & a’least took a longer look @ Yoot Tower, which is much mo’ well-known–though not as much as Sim Tower.

Anyway, this is “a nostalgic look,” not “a historical look,” so I will continue to call it “Sim Tower,” since that was the form I played when I was young.

Sim Tower is mixed quality: while it has these pieces that fill me with immense nostalgic warmth, that’s usually mixed in with a lot o’ repetitive plopping down o’ rows o’ offices & apartments, or, god help me, having to manually adjust the rent o’ each place ’cause the tenants left in droves o’er high prices & have left me in the red.

The game starts mediocre & gradually gives you middlingly interesting toys with which to work, but this part has such easy goals & goes by quickly ‘nough that it doesn’t take long to get to 3 stars, where the game gives you all the cool shit, including the movie theater, the dance hall, the garbage disposal, & the parking lot. I don’t know why, but I just always found this stuff cool as a kid, e’en though from the player’s point o’ view, they might as well just be extra pictures to add to the mass o’ gray office spaces & peach apartment rooms. ¿Did choosing ‘tween classic & modern movies in the cinema e’er matter? ¿Who cares? ‘Twas fun to do it, anyway.

Then came 4 stars, & all you got was some lame metro station till you reached a much higher population than demanded before. Best o’ all, due to how the metro stations & security rooms were programmed, you could completely fuck yourself if you built a security station too low, since you couldn’t bulldoze a security station & couldn’t build a metro station ‘bove any other structure, & need to build a metro station to pass 4 stars. This actually happened to me once when I was young, & boy was it a delight.

I actually ne’er reached 5 stars nor the 100th floor, & I’ll ne’er try, ’cause adults don’t have that time anymo’. I did once reach up to 80 floors, though. Don’t remember whether that save ended ’cause I fucked something up with no way to fix it or if I just lost that save somehow. I certainly don’t have it anymo’.

Honestly, Sim Tower‘s true value to me is simply its aesthetics. I don’t know why, but there’s something endearing ’bout the pseudorealistic—& yet quite flat & abstract—graphics o’ all those offices & apartments & those lobbies with the tiny sofas full o’ tiny abstract people. & then you’d get to see the dance hall light up or see all the different designs for the fast food restaurants or all the li’l movies that play on the tiny cinema or the garbage place fill up with garbage. It reminds me o’ some toy I had a lot o’ fondness for as a kid, which looked like a pseudorealistic fast food restaurant. I wrote a poem ’bout that toy mo’ than a year ago & just realized that I ne’er bothered to post it.

Picture taken o’ a tower save from David Wolever, since fuck if I have the time to build a tower worth screencapping.

¡& then there’s the sounds! I say “sounds,” ’cause the game didn’t have what most would call music, but had a collection o’ ambient sounds that were as pleasing to hear as music, & much mo’ fitting for this game. Listening to this is like an injection o’ unfiltered nostalgia for me.

Also, Santa would fly by on the last day o’ the last quarter with a jingling sled & some terrorist would threaten to blow up parts o’ your tower if you didn’t pay him. It’s cool details like these that made this game memorable, e’en if it didn’t have the most entertaining gameplay.

“Surrealism,” like many art terms, has many vague definitions, so I’ll make up my own & stick to it throughout. If you, the reader, prefer to think o’ “surrealism” as something else, then feel free to replace that word with something else. It’s the concept that’s important.

To me, surrealism is something absurd, but still attached to reality in some way—only twisted to the point that it seems random, but makes sense if one digs into them. This is as opposed to what is commonly called absurdism, which was usually just purely arbitrary for the sake o’ arbitrary. A common way to make it in the past was to use dreams as inspiration, but I’d argue that the most common method is to mix concepts A & C—or D & so on—when there are connections ‘tween A & B & B & C, but otherwise no connections ‘tween A & C—making them seemingly irrelevant, & thus random, but have relevance if followed down the pipe.

The Super Mario Bros. series, I think, exemplifies this perfectly, creating a rich collection o’ elements somehow both seemingly arbitrary & fitting. It’s amazing the origins o’ many o’ its strangeness—& almost all o’ its strangeness has some obscure origin.

Mario & Luigi themselves are a perfect example. While many mascots, like Sonic, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Bubsy, & so on, were created mostly by marketing teams, Mario & Luigi might be some o’ the most antimarketing mascots e’er created. Only the most insane marketing team would decide that the mascots for a multimillion-$ industry aimed @ kids & young adults should be 2 Italian plumbers. ¿What demographics could that possibly be aimed for? But, ‘course, they weren’t aimed @ any particular demographics, as any good art isn’t, but is based on an amazing collection o’ happenstance history & technology.

¿Why are they Italian plumbers? ‘Cause Nintendo’s American landlord looked sort o’ like Mario—then called Jumpman. So they decided to name their character after him & give him what they probably presumed was his nationality, given that Mario is a common Italian name. Since Luigi is ‘nother common Italian name, they gave that to his brother.

¿But why did Mario look the way he did? ¡All technology! Specifically, the graphical limitations o’ ol’ games: Mario’s o’eralls were so it’d be easy to pick out his arms from his clothing; his moustache was so his nose could be picked out from the rest o’ his face; his hat was designed to avoid the trouble o’ animating hair as the character moved.

Luigi, too, was an element o’ graphical limitations—& a common 1, making it fitting that the emblems o’ video games as a whole would be its most iconic example. To save on memory & space, games would oft reuse graphics, but merely apply different palettes. Thus, an easy way to have a 2nd player was to just take the 1st player & give it a different palette. But the creators for the Super Mario series were imaginative ‘nough to create a rationale: these 2 were twin bros., hence why they look similar.

¿Why were the plumbers? Simple ’cause o’ 1 game, Mario Bros., whose main plot excuse was the 2 cleaning sewers o’ vicious enemies—1 out o’ many ho-hum blue-collar jobs the Mario Bros. had. But this 1, for some reason, stuck beyond this game, e’en after it stopped being relevant. Thus, e’en though it made sense for them to travel through pipes while still cleaning urban sewers, they still travel through pipes, e’en in the fantasy world o’ the Mushroom Kingdom, despite later games focusing mo’ on saving medieval princesses while traveling through idyllic acres. Thus we have this otherwise jarring mix o’ scenes you’d expect in The Lord of the Rings & a sewer system you’d expect to see in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Many o’ the enemies have their origins in random real-life events:

Doglike Chain Chomps (in Japan called “Wanwan,” the Japanese onomatopoeia for barking) are inspired by Miyamoto’s fear o’ a chained-up dog when he was young.

On-&-off Boos¹ were inspired by a designer’s wife, who was usually calm & polite, but once blew up @ her husband for working too late.

Goombas’ Japanese name, “Kuribō,” which means “chestnut people,” comes purely from the fact that 1 o’ the designers thought they looked mo’ like chestnuts than mushrooms, like they were s’posed to be.

Some elements were simple allusions stretched out. Miyamoto took a li’l scene in Alice in Wonderland involving Alice eating a mushroom to grow & shrink & made a whole world out o’ it. & then mixed that with the aforementioned infested sewers. & yet, ‘gain, it all feels natural.

& for westerners, that’s the most recognizable. Most allusions are to Japanese myths that most westerners only know ’bout due Super Mario games, such as the way leaves transform Mario & Luigi into tanuki².

‘Course, some aspects o’ the Mario series seemed to come from nowhere @ all. I don’t think there was e’er an explanation given for the existence o’ fire-spewing flowers, bouncing stars that make one flash & kill one’s enemies by touch, or feathers that make them spontaneously gain capes (to be fair, this last 1 does have the association ‘tween feathers & flight & capes & flight–¡that A & C connected through B ‘gain!).

¿& why’s everything have a face, including the hills & clouds?

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Footnotes:

[1] You could say they’re boolean, hur hur hur. Nobody’s made that joke before.

[2] A common complaint gainst newer Mario games that bring back “Tanooki” Mario & Luigi, like Super Mario 3D Land, is that they get it “wrong”; the leaf’s s’posed to turn them into raccoons, while the suit turns them into the “tanooki” form. Actually, this is only what the English translation o’ Super Mario Bros. 3 claimed–& we know how accurate translations were in the 90s. In the original Japanese version, “Raccoon Mario” was simply called “Tail Mario.” Mo’ importantly, the actual myths revolve round leaves being used by tanuki for their shapeshifting powers, not raccoons. It’s usually English translations that turn “tanuki” into “raccoon,” since Americans are familiar with raccoons, that being a species native to North America, while till recently hardly any English-speaking person had e’er heard o’ “tanuki”–save maybe those who read Andrew Lang’s translations o’ Japanese mythology. Contrariwise, raccoons only entered Japan recently,–inspired by western media–& have not nearly the cultural importance as tanuki.

In short, ironically “Raccoon Mario” is almost certainly not the “pure” version o’ the powerup they get ‘pon getting the leaf, but a name created by a somewhat inaccurate (to be fair, 1 that sacrificed accuracy for the sake o’ comprehensibility) translation that was not the original intention @ all. If anything, Super Mario 3D Land‘s new version is mo’ accurate to the myths on which it’s based.

So there. Super Mario 3D Land is relieved o’ any guilt for that made-up crime, & is now stuck with just the crimes o’ being bland, derivative, & repetitive.

Or, as it’s called in Europe: Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island.

Since I’ve been talking ’bout ol’ Game Boy Advance, I might as well write ’bout the other games for which I have strange nostalgic stories.

Though my family had a Genesis, we only had a few games, & only 1 o’ which I cared ’bout & involved Sonic: Sonic 3D Blast. As strange as it’ll sound, this was the only Sonic game I’d played or known ’bout for a while, till playing Sonic 3 a few years later. I didn’t play any o’ the other ol’ Sonic games till I was a young teen, on some GameCube collection.

‘Cause o’ this, this game has still been rather embedded in my mind as the iconic Sonic game; & in particular, the “Green Grove Zone Act 1” song is to me the prime Sonic song, not the forgettable “Green Hill Zone.”¹ But in truth, just ’bout every song in this game makes me ooze with nostalgia.

Seriously, the 1st 30 seconds o’ this video encapsulates a huge part o’ my childhood. Also, look @ the rest o’ that video to see some fine cutscene animation. That shit’s Pixar-quality.

So, having grown up adoring this game as a kid, I was surprised when I saw so many people on the internet not like this game so much—in fact, thinking this game is shit & blaming it for all the embarrassing lameness, furry fetishes, & shoddy sprite comics that apparently later plagued the series.

Here are just a few review headlines from GameFaqs:

• You could’ve worked on a real 3D Sonic game instead, Sega.
• Not a blast. Not 3D. Not really even Sonic. What the hell is it?
• Close, but no Cough Drop [ed: ¿What the fuck does that mean?]
• Not quite a blast – more a snap, crackle and pop
• Where the franchise first jumped the shark – in glorious “3D”
• It’s okay, but not up to the usual standard
• I guess Sonic Isometric Blast was not catchy enough [ed: this is a good point, to be fair]
• The most ridiculously average game I will ever play.
• A Mediocre Effort From Sonic Team and Traveller’s Tales
• Play it for the bosses. The rest sucks.
• Picking up birds isn’t fun in this game.. [sic]
• A great game, if you like headaches
• The Controls Suck
• Mediocrity never tasted so bland

There’s e’en a hack o’ this game that lets you remove the Flickies, whom you need to collect from defeated enemies to go through checkpoints & exits in the normal game. ¿Why? That’s the whole point: without the Flickies, it’s just a lame straightforward line to the exit, with no challenge @ all.

This ‘splains why I liked Sonic 3D Blast mo’ than Sonic fans. Sonic fans apparently despise exploration—or anything that gets in the way o’ going in the straight line. This game’s also much slower than the 2D games, which does sort o’ go gainst the main gimmick o’ the series. Granted, I quite like being able to tell where I’m going, so I didn’t mind that too much. Also, to be fair, the 1st Sonic the Hedgehog game had quite a few slow platforming sections, too. I mean, it wasn’t as if “Labyrinth Zone” was a rocket race. That level also had obnoxious music that droned on for the million minutes you had to spend in it—fuck that level.

Looking back, Sonic 3D Blast is mo’ like a mediocre Mario game than a Sonic game, which is why I rather liked it as a kid, since I always preferred Mario to Sonic. That said, I’ll admit it hasn’t aged well. While the game’s not so fast, Sonic’s movements still are, which makes him feel slippery & hard to control, ‘specially if you’re used to Mario’s steadier controls. (‘Gain, to be fair, the 1st Sonic the Hedgehog game had this exact problem). The isometrics mixed with these controls make actual platforming sections a huge pain in the ass.

But I still stand by this game’s soundtrack is some o’ the best Sonic music e’er—2nd only to maybe the Japanese soundtrack for Sonic CD.

Recommendations:

• “Title Theme”
• “Menu Theme”
• “Green Grove Zone Act 2”
• “Volcano Valley Zone Act 1”
• “Diamond Dust Zone Act 2”
• “Dr. Robotnik’s Theme”
• “Rusty Ruin Zone Act 2”
• “Bonus Theme” (Admittedly not as good as “Special Stage” from Sonic 3).

I’d only recommend watching a speed run o’ this game, honestly, if you don’t have any strange nostalgia for it. Otherwise, you probably won’t give a shit.

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While everyone always lists Kirby’s Adventure or Kirby Super Star or Kirby’s Air Ride as their vote for the best Kirby game, my favorite is Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. Granted, I can understand why a lot o’ people may not be so fond o’ it, since what I most like ’bout it is a quality a lot o’ people seem to not like in games: deep, labyrinthine worlds full o’ hidden collectibles. A witness to this is the fact that despite Kirby Super Star’s reputation, its subgame, “The Great Cave Offensive,” which is somewhat similar to Amazing Mirror—though much mo’ linear & with treasures that lean mo’ toward the aesthetic than the technical—is oft derided as tedious, whereas I consider it my favorite.

Amazing Mirror is a “Metroidvania,” & probably the best, though largely due to a special quirk o’ Kirby games. It has some o’ the most open-ended exploration o’ any Metroidvania: after a quick intro section & the 1st boss, you can pretty much go everywhere ‘cept the final zone. You can explore the “areas”—which are mo’ loose groupings o’ rooms, since one moves ‘tween “areas” through the same simple doors one uses to move ‘tween rooms within a “area”—in any order, beat all bosses but the 1st in any order. Rather than having to collect powerups in 1 section to reach the next, & so on, all puzzles are based on what ability Kirby has, which can be found in many places. For instance, the 2nd area has a route that leads directly to the 9th & final area—in fact, the only way to reach that area. It’s mo’ a giant world than separate areas.

The reason this works so well is ’cause Kirby games are so easy that the 9th area is hardly any harder than the 2nd area. That’s the downside to open-ended games: they make difficulty curves harder to carve—& those unfortunate greenhorns who’ve stumbled wrongly through the 1st Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy II have learned the importance o’ well-wrought difficulty curves.

That said, transport through these areas are made mo’ convenient & less repetitive by unlocking hub rooms, which lead back to the main hub where you start each game session.

As mentioned, the treasures in Amazing Mirror aren’t as interesting as getting seasonal hearts or a lucky cat or the bucket Wario drops on Mario & his friends’ heads, but they are actually useful to gameplay… sometimes. Sometimes they’re just spray cans that allow you to paint all o’er Kirby or tracks to the sound test; but some are hearts that give extra health points or maps for each area so one knows where one’s going.

Amazing Mirror also has my favorite ability o’ any game: the Smash ability, based on Kirby’s moveset from Super Smash Bros. Melee & won by beating & eating a Master Hand miniboss, which allows Kirby to do an upper cutter that can release a blade wave quite a distance forward & reach quite high up, a side hammer swipe that can break strong blocks to the side, & a downward stone ability that allows one to break strong blocks downward. The only ability mo’ robust for solving puzzles is Meta Knight’s sword, gotten after beating the game; & there is only 1 or 2 puzzles in the entire game that can’t be solved with Smash.

Amazing Mirror also had great aesthetics. The backgrounds are painterly beautiful (‘specially “Carrot Castle”’s & “Candy Constellation”’s & the sprites are fluidly cartoony without being crude.

Its music is some o’ my favorite Kirby music, with the following highlights:

• Rainbow Route
• Cabbage Cave (a remix o’ the “Forest” theme from Kirby’s Adventure that’s much better than the terrible Nightmare in Dream Land version)
• Olive Ocean
• Candy Constellation
• Hub
• Moonlight Mansion & Carrot Castle
• Pepperment Palace

Or as it’s called in Europe, Game & Watch Gallery Advance.

Before 4 e’en came out I enjoyed the 1st 3 for the Game Boy & Game Boy Color, & have fond memories o’ playing 3 while sick with the flu when very young.

I’ll admit I ne’er liked the classic versions o’ the games. It’s not just the fact that the music is just constant beeps & the graphics were pure black & white: the classic versions were so sparse to the point o’ making gameplay worse. Slow & jerky animation does not fit fast-paced action games well. Here it oft led to uncertainty o’er whether or not an action would be disastrous. “Helmet”’s a perfect example: when the raining junk falls in showers, one has no choice but to slip past some junk when its @ the bottom, which is risky, since due to the animation delay, one has no way to tell when that piece o’ junk will fall the next step & clock your character or won’t. Also, the shadows that signified other frames not used could be quite distracting & could be hard to tell from the filled-in frames. The modern versions also add li’l breaks & gameplay changes, such as bonuses one can get for playing well, that help break up the monotony o’ trying to get 1000 points in 1 playthrough. Said bonuses also make the points come mo’ quickly, which makes things less tedious as well.

That said, aesthetics are something worth mentioning. The graphics aren’t exactly stellar—though I found 4’s graphics to be rather colorful—but the music is quite catchy & underrated. I’d recommend trying some o’ them—’specially “Mario Bros.”, “Donkey Kong”, & “Rain Shower.”

Then ‘gain, admittedly, the modern versions oft strayed from the subject in which the game was named. “Mario’s Cement Factory” actually becomes a cookie factory; in “Fire Attack” you’re not being attacked by fire thrown by stereotypical depictions o’ Native Americans but by Bob-Ombs & Bullet Bills; & rain’s not the problem in “Rain Shower,” but paint balls being tossed by Bowser, who just loves to fuck round with everyone else for no reason, kingly responsibilities be damned. On the flip, though, I usually found these changes funner. ¿Who wouldn’t rather bake cookies that fill cement? ¿Who wouldn’t rather have colorful paint—with the different colors acting as helpful determiners for where they’re being thrown, too—o’er plain rain?

Game & Watch Gallery 4 rehashed a lot o’ modern games from the 1st 3—the most memorable, like “Fire,” “Mario Bros.,” “Chef,” “Donkey Kong,” & “Donkey Kong Jr.” The graphics & music were mostly the same—just higher quality. That said, 4 a’least rehashed the best, while leaving ‘hind most o’ the less memorable. It also had ’bout twice as many modern games, & probably mo’ than double the classic games, since it has an unlockable museum full o’ e’en mo’ classic games. Its new recreations are also better than 2 & 3’s, with “Rain Shower,” “Mario’s Cement Factory,” & “Boxing” being particular favorites. I’d like to think o’ 4 as the greatest hits o’ the series—which is fitting, since ’twas the last (no, I don’t count those sad ‘scuses, Game & Watch Collection 1 & 2 for the DS).

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The Games

Fire

This is the 1st I e’er played when truly young, on the 1st Game & Watch Gallery, & is the 1st I think o’ when I think o’ Game & Watch games.

Move Mario & Luigi holding the safety net left & right with the control pad or A & B to keep the infinite crowd o’ Toads, Yoshis, & DK Jrs. falling out o’ the burning castle from smashing into the ground, bouncing them ‘long the way to the carriage, which apparently has an unlimited capacity. Toads are the lightest, & thus spend the most time up in the air ‘tween landings; DK Jrs. are the heaviest, & thus fall back down mo’ frequently.

Despite the simplicity o’ this game, I think it may be 1 o’ the hardest: there are just so many that bounce round, forcing you to go back & forth to ensure you’re there when each character’s heading for the ground. It can also be hard to eyeball which o’ the many simultaneously-falling characters will hit the ground 1st; many times I move to save 1 character only for 1 character to hit the ground before. & sometimes characters will hit the ground @ the same time, forcing you to shift from 1 spot to ‘nother in 1 instant. Requires lightning reflexes.

Boxing

This 1, on the other hand, is stupidly easy to get 1000 points thanks to the AI’s sluggish movement. Just aim Luigi’s fists with the control pad & press A to punch your enemy’s face or stomach, aiming round their blocking fists while positioning one’s own fists to block one’s enemy’s attacks.

1st one fights Wiggler, then Big Boo, then Waluigi, & then it cycles back round. Beat 5 cycles to get all 5 stars—remarkably short compared to the 1000 points required in all the other games. I guess the fact that 1 loss causes automatic game o’er makes it a li’l harder—but consider how much harder it is to die in this game than every other, this is still unquestionably the easiest in the game.

Boxing’s hard mode is replaced by a 2-player mode, which means that if you’re playing the Virtual Console version or don’t have the means to play this 2-player, you’re screwed out o’ those 5 stars. However, if you can play 2-player, getting those 5 stars is easier than anything else in this game: just play 5 rounds. You don’t e’en have to win.

This is a new modern version, though the classic version appears in the 1st Game & Watch Gallery as an unlockable.

Rain Shower

Move the characters sitting on swings to avoid getting them splashed by the paint balls Bowser flings round. Colors indicate the position each ball will fall: green is nearest to the center, purple 2nd, black 3rd, & then blue 4th. As the game goes on, mo’ characters join swings to make things harder.

Like with many o’ these games, the main challenge comes from keeping track o’ so many things @ once while things are going quickly: you can only move lines on which characters are sitting left & right, & 2 lines stack ‘bove each other, as well as there being 2 sides for a sum o’ 4. One has to time shifting lines so that paint balls fall in holes ‘tween characters on both sides, which can be hard to keep track o’ & time when Bowser flings paint o’ varying positions all o’er, forcing one to jump all round. Not as hard as “Fire,” but close.

After every 100 points, the season changes & Mario can hit a switch to turn all paint balls being thrown into coins for quite a lot o’ points—as well as a breather.

‘Nother new modern version, though its classic version appears as an unlockable in 2.

Mario’s Cement Factory

Move Mario ‘long rising & falling elevators to reach switches to move batter ‘long 2 sets o’ pumps down to Toad or Yoshi without falling off an elevator (or letting it bump Mario’s head on the ceiling) or letting any pump fill up with mo’ than 3 batter piles. Complicating things are the boos that sneak into pumps out o’ nowhere, taking up batter space.

Despite all that, this 1 isn’t that hard, e’en with the limited mobility caused by the uncontrollable elevators. E’en @ its hardest, things move rather slowly, usually giving you plenty o’ time to react. Actually, the most problems probably come from trying to rush too much & o’ershooting elevators rather than from letting pumps get too full.

‘Nother new modern version, though the classic version appears in the 1st Game & Watch Gallery as an unlockable.

Donkey Kong Jr.

If you’re familiar with Donkey Kong Jr. for the arcade or NES, this is somewhat similar: move up each area & reach DK’s cage 4 times to free him & move on to the next level, while dodging (or landing on) the Goombas, Koopas, & Bullet Bills. Like in the original, you’ll sometimes have to move ‘long vines, which work similar to how they did in the original.

There are 3 levels: cave & grassland, sunset cliff full o’ vines, & starry cloud area. It then cycles from there.

This modern version 1st appeared in 3.

Donkey Kong 3

As Mario you must shoot bubbles in 3 rows to push the fireballs & boos toward DK while he does the same. In the meantime, you also have to take the time to keep your water pump full o’ water to have ammo. To win a round, have DK get hit by a fireball or boo, & gain a bunch o’ points; however, if you get hit, you lose a round. Lose 3 rounds & game o’er. The fireballs usually stay in place, while the boos will slowly float toward the player they’re nearest & sometimes block bubbles.

For some reason I remember this game being hard to do well in; but ‘pon recently trying it I found I was able to climb up into the 1500s without e’en trying. I think the trick is to just spurt bubbles as much as possible to get as much general pushback as possible & not to think too hard ’bout things & possibly miss falling ammo or chances to shoot. Though it seems that strategy is queen here, it’s actually mo’ reflexes. For instance, I found that grabbing every water drop & shooting straight in the middle every instant I can wins ’bout 4/5 times.

“Donkey Kong 3”’s B mode is & has always been 1 o’ the easiest in which to get 5 stars… if you have 2-player capability (sorry Virtual Console users).

Not only is this a new modern version, the classic version hadn’t e’en appeared in the series till 4.

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Unlockable Games

You start with the 1st 5 games available, but have to unlock the other 5 by collecting stars.

Chef

As Peach, catch the sunny-side eggs, fish, steak, lobster, & peppers that Mario & Luigi lazily just fling ‘hind them on her frying pan to heat them &, when they’re golden brown, let it fall where Yoshi’s standing so he eats it to get points. You get mo’ points if it’s golden brown, less points if you don’t cook it ‘nough or if it’s cooked so much that it’s burnt. Letting food hit the floor makes you lose a life.

Every 200 points the background switches back & forth from the initial kitchen to the courtyard.

Unlocked by getting 5 stars from any games.

This modern version 1st appeared in 2.

Mario Bros.

Move Mario up & down with the control pad & Luigi up & down with A & B to catch the cakes as they go up—or down if Bowser, the worst supervisor in the world, flips the switch just to be a dick—the conveyor belt. If they reach the truck Wario’s driving, you get a lot o’ points, while if they fall off, you lose a life.

I’d put this @ medium-level difficulty. I’ve gotten 5 stars in this on easy before, & mo’ than half in hard, but it’s not always guaranteed for me, like with “Mario’s Cement Factory,” & is much easier than “Fire” or “Donkey Kong 3.”

Unlocked by getting 20 stars from any games.

This modern version 1st appeared in 3.

Donkey Kong

Like “Donkey Kong Jr.,” this is similar to the original arcade game, but simplified: reach the top to save Peach without getting hit by barrels or other enemies.

A safer, but mo’ tedious, way to get points in this game is simply to wait @ the start & keep jumping o’er the barrels, since unlike the classic version or the original arcade game, there’s no fire-spurting oil can @ the start.

Unlocked by getting 35 stars from any games.

The modern version o’ this 1st appeared in 2.

Octopus

Move down the rope & ‘long the ground toward the treasure chest to grab money while dodging the octopus’s tentacles. The mo’ money you grab, the mo’ points you get ‘pon returning to the boat @ the top, where greedy but lazy Peach awaits; however, the mo’ money you have, the mo’ your movements are slowed.

Don’t wait too long in the safe boat, by the way: Peach is an asshole & pushes you out if you wait too long—e’en if a tentacle is right @ the start o’ the rope.

A rather difficult game, ‘specially if one’s impatient. What’s worse, there’s a luck factor to the octopus’s tentacle movement. I’m quite certain it’s possible to get boxed in right next to the chest with no way to ‘scape being grabbed.

Unlocked by getting 50 stars from any games.

This modern version 1st appeared in 1.

Fire Attack

As Wario, guard the 4 corners o’ your house from Bob-Ombs & Bullet Bills while eating tomatoes for extra points. 1 o’ the easiest, which makes me wonder why it’s the last to be unlocked.

Unlocked by getting 65 stars from any games.

New modern version; but the classic version appeared in 1.

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As you collect stars, you also unlock a museum & games in that. 1st you can only unlock games to look @; but later you unlock the ability to play the classic version. ‘Course, they’re not as fun as any o’ the modern games; but the last 1 you unlock, The Legend of Zelda, does have to be the best ‘mong all the classic Game & Watch games. If only they made a modern version o’ it… Maybe if Haley’s comet hits a lottery winner & Nintendo gets round to making Game & Watch Gallery 5—&, ‘gain, not that waste o’ cartridge space that is those Game & Watch Collection games.

Due to the success¹ o’ my recent review o’ a review, I decided to do ‘nother o’ an e’en mo’ ridiculous review I read a while ago.

I read ’bout this book by a guy whose name, Moviebob, is vaguely familiar to me—I guess he’s ‘nother 1 o’ those video reviewers &/or Let’s Players—that is described in some places as being like a “Let’s Play” in written form—which, now that I think ’bout it, is actually Let’s Play in its original form, if one actually knows the history o’ its development @ Something Awful…

But this seemed to be a mo’ in-depth, descriptive version, which interested me. I actually experimented with the idea o’ creating haiku or poems or stories that try to depict video game levels in words. However, sites like Fangamer, where it’s sold, & Good Reads seem to rate the book rather lowly, which makes me wary to pay $8, ’cause I’m cheap.

I thought I’d try stand-‘lone reviews, since I for some reason thought they’d be mo’… I dunno, ¿high quality? I can’t imagine why, considering my low satisfaction with reviews from high-profile gaming websites, whether it be Jeremy Parish @ 1up showing the world he thinks Donkey Kong Country demands you to collect every banana to get 100% or some creep @ Destructoid dedicating an entire review o’ Shantae & the Pirate’s Curse to telling the whole world how much he likes to masturbate to a pixelated middle-eastern stereotype dance & li’l ’bout the actual game’s gameplay.

But this review makes those look like they were written by Roger Ebert… or, a’least a Roger Ebert that actually liked video games & respected them as art.

I don’t know whether I should’ve been tipped off 1st when I realized this website was named “Reaxxion” (Tip: if you want to look badass, don’t take techniques from Linkin Park) or the fact that the page opened with 1 o’ those o’erused popups that pretends its not a popup asking me to sign up to receive their junk mail—I mean, find out the ¡3 ways I’m being lied to by the lamestream media, man! & this truly is the “lamestream” media, ’cause only the most bored fucks in the world would give a shit ’bout media surrounding electronic toys (which is why I’m dedicating an article to it). Maybe it should’ve been the fact that the reviewer’s image is a hand holding a gun & a personal description, “Just a man who isn’t sure if he wants to save the Princess or watch the Kingdom burn.” I hope you’re strapped up for some ¡edgy shit, yo!

O, but lets get into the review itself:

In much the same way a T-bone steak can be hard to properly grill, this is a hard book to review.

(Laughs). There are a list o’ trite ways to open a review that make me instantly groan, & a simile or metaphor is right up there with a famous quote.

Just as a T-bone steak is really two smaller steaks, this book is really two smaller books in one.

I think the way to make this immensely arduous task o’ reviewing a book that is truly 2 smaller books would be to review the book like one would review 2 smaller books. I’d hate to see this guy try reviewing Super Mario All-Stars: “¡I don’t get it! It’s just 1 game, but then it’s got many games in it. ¡What insanity!”

But apparently his solution is to start with good ol’ ad hominem attacks. & this is where the review, for me, veered from the tedious sloppiness o’ most o’ the web to “¿What the fuck’s this reviewer’s problem?” ¿You know what I want to know most before I read a book ’bout Super Mario Bros. 3? “¿What’s the writer’s political views? ¿Are they idiotic?” (Note: reviewer doesn’t elaborate on how Moviebob’s political views are “idiotic”) “¿What’s their views on some random woman who made some videos ’bout video games & some random people who obsessively hate her?”

Nowhere does this reviewer e’er state that Moviebob’s political/feminist views play a large part in this book ’bout a video game in which an Italian plumber hops on turtles in a fungal realm with sapient hills & clouds, nor do any other reviewers. ¡I’m almost o’ the belief that they hardly show up @ all!² Which makes me wonder why this reviewer brought up the subject @ all.

But let’s give this reviewer credit: he didn’t let vaguely idiotic political views or vaguely shitty behavior toward people who don’t agree with them hurt his professionalism, so he admits that he liked “some of [Moviebob’s] videos.” Which videos, he doesn’t say, ‘course. The point is that he wants to emphasize how much he doesn’t let Moviebob’s unrelated political views affect how much he likes or dislikes a book ’bout Mario, which is, ‘course, why he brings it up constantly. ‘Cause logic.

All right, so we’re 3 paragraphs in, & no relevant info has been given. If this were 1 o’ those corrupt lamestream websites ’bout video games with those corrupt editors, they might ask the reviewer to cut out such filler. But let’s give this review a chance: e’en The Grapes of Wrath takes a while to get good.

In the first main part Bob goes through a rather short history of Mario. It’s decent but forgettable as it’s nothing a Mario fan, even a casual one, isn’t likely to know.

All right, so we have actual relevant analysis. Granted, it’s not a crime that’s bad ‘nough to be “disappointing,” since pretty much any book o’ this type would probably have something like this for completion’s sake.

& then it veers back into ad hominem. He calls it “cringe worthy [sic]” that Moviebob as a teen refused to accept that the Super Mario Bros. movie was shitty & that he was disappointed ’bout Yoshi’s Island establishing Mario & Luigi being born in The Mushroom Kingdom ‘stead o’ Brooklyn. Considering there are adults that still obsess o’er these things, I think Moviebob looks good in comparison.

The rest of this section really doesn’t have that much to do with Mario. He goes on to basically give a short life story. I for one didn’t care for this bait and switch on Bob’s part. Just because no one in their right mind would pay to read your autobiography doesn’t mean you need to sneak that crap into a book on Mario 3.

(Laughs.) Well, I, for 1, don’t care for your bait-&-switch: just ’cause no one in their right mind would e’en load the page for free to see you rant ’bout wimpy feminist dorks doesn’t mean you need to sneak that crap into a review ’bout a book on Mario 3.

I’m sorry: Moviebob’s “idiotic” political views do push themselves in, apparently, when he mentions being punished for badly reviewing The Passion of Christ. This discussion takes up ’bout a page—less than 1% o’ the book.

The reviewer says we should assume that ’twas Moviebob’s fault due to “shitty behavior” that still goes unexplained, but we shouldn’t assume that the people who received this “shitty behavior” from Moviebob that this reviewer elides to didn’t do something to deserve it.

I mean, if we wanted to get into ad hominem attacks, this is the worst website to do it on, considering how controversial its owner is. ¿Why shouldn’t I assume these people aren’t making up these stories o’ “shitty behavior” & aren’t just writing this as a hit piece gainst someone with a different ideology? Nothing like Big Rigs calling Sonic 2006 shit.

The problem is, unlike this review, Moviebob ne’er hides this “bait-&-switch”: the Fangamer description clearly states, “A history of the Super Mario franchise, and of the author’s own history growing up alongside the legendary series [emphasis mine].” & that’s exactly what he does: most o’ it is him (admittedly babbling tritely) ’bout his experiences growing up with Mario. It also only takes up ’bout a 4th o’ the book, while taking up the majority o’ this review.

I actually had mixed views ’bout the way Moviebob handled this book. I actually prefer the personal aspects, since they weren’t just an inferior version o’ the Mario Wiki. After all, the only thing that makes this book different from the millions o’ other works ’bout Super Mario Bros. 3 is the fact that it’s written by him. On the other hand… yeah, it does get a li’l self-pitying—though, ironically, for the opposite reason this reviewer gives. The truth is, looking @ Moviebob’s description o’ his life… he seems perfectly ordinary. His worst problems growing up were apparently having ADD, getting mediocre grades, & being looked @ as uncool as a kid. So, he’s basically like a million other middle class white nerds. ¡The scandal!

This reviewer, meanwhile, has the opposite view: he praises the bland encyclopedic parts, while expressing his disgust @ the fact that Moviebob mentions anything ’bout things that actual adults deal with, like dying grandparents or buying a house… which ironically makes Moviebob look like the normal adult & this reviewer look like the weird 1… ‘cept he’s the one calling the other weird. So, he’s not only stupidly reviewing a book ’cause he doesn’t like people who mention having dying grandparents, he’s also doing so with no self-awareness.

& then we have this:

What sort of mental state leaves a person so afraid of having a little downtime?

One that isn’t a lazy bum.

I’m reminded of that line from a song by Pink: “The quiet scares me cause it screams the truth.”

(Laughs). So deep.

& then we get the conclusion, where he states that the book’s only problem apparently is that Moviebob is a “self-righteous socialist asshole,” unlike a self-righteous MRA asshole, like him. I want you to keep this point in mind for the next few parts.

The key point:

When he’s actually on topic it’s a decent read, but when he’s describing the hot mess that is his life it’s terrible. And why wouldn’t his life be a mess? He’s a social justice warrior. The whole social justice philosophy is all about embracing loserhood.

¿Did I read the same book this reviewer did? ‘Cause if so, this reviewer is apparently so privileged that middle-class-raised media reviewers who have family members who die & who got mediocre grades & were looked down @ as “uncool” in school are “hot messes.” Man, if that’s what he thinks a “hot mess” is, he should meet some o’ the people I’ve known—& they don’t e’en whine as much ’bout their problems.

I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine an MRA, or anyone, writing a book ’bout Super Mario Bros. 3 & not look like a loser. If he wants to read ’bout badasses with guns for dicks who ride hearses made o’ $ million bills, Fangamer isn’t the place to look, bud.

I would almost, and I stress ALMOST, recommend this book to all my fellow nerds. It could inspire you. Inspire you to hit the gym, ask that cute girl you know out, go in for that promotion at work.

OK, ¿now what relevance does this have to Super Mario Bros. 3? You were complaining ’bout how this is a bad book ’bout Super Mario Bros. 3, ¿but recommend that he work out? That’s sort o’ like how I become better @ reviewing rock music by entering hot-dog-eating contests. Maybe if this reviewer spent less time “hitting the gym,” as he claims, & returned to high school to learn how to construct coherent ideas he could write a better review.

I want to remind you that this reviewer criticized Moviebob for being “self-righteous” while anal-retentively scrutinizing him for not sharing specific personal interests that are completely irrelevant to the book he’s reviewing—¡’cause that’s totally tolerant & e’en-minded! That’s kind o’ like how I only read books written by people who have Black Sabbath on their MP3 playlist.

After all, you don’t want to end up like Movie Bob do you?

Wait, ¿is the crux o’ his review that this book is bad ’cause Moviebob’s fat? ¿Is that why he needs to “hit the gym”? ¿So the reviewer doesn’t have to imagine a fat guy tapping fingers on a keyboard whenever he reads this? Man, I’d hate to see his review o’ The Game o’ Thrones.

So, after… that, I was so intrigued by what a peculiar mess this review was & looked up this site & saw that it’s pretty much a half-assed “moral substitute” to the evil “liberal-biased” video game media that claims to be “fair-&-balanced,” while being e’en mo’ biased & worse than the mainstream. ¿Rememeber when Kotaku dedicated an entire review o’ a video game to how terrible ’twas ’cause its creator had a penis? ¿Remember when 1up panned a game ’cause its developers went bowling on Sundays.

But we’re not done laughing: this website has a set o’ community commandments that members o’ the cult must chant if they want to be allowed to write for such a prestigious establishment. I can only imagine that the writers here then go on to bitch ’bout violations o’ “freedom o’ speech” when other websites ban them from other places for infringing those places’ community rules.

1. Men do not become more violent, sexist, or racist because they play video games.

They’ll have to add the exception, “’less they’re drunk,” since I have an unquestionable counter example in that case.

I can’t be surprised that people who can’t spell “reaction” properly can’t understand the thinnest slice o’ subtlety & can’t tell the difference ‘tween a video game having bigoted content & magically making people bigoted. Based on that logic then, the fact that there are people who read Mein Kampf & didn’t transform into antisemites proves that Mein Kampf isn’t bigoted @ all.

Gamers should not be shamed for a hobby that does not cause harm to others.

Well, ‘less it makes them fat or have dying grandparents, or they like that hobby so much that they care ’bout the origin stories o’ them. Then they should be shamed immensely.

2. Video games are a form of entertainment that should be free of heavy-handed propaganda or ideology.

Well, damn, I guess I can’t like any World War II game or just ’bout any JRPG. ¡Damn Square & their attempts to brainwash our kids into believing in hope in a post-apocalyptic world!

3. Video game journalism should not use its influence to change or manipulate the nature of games against the wishes of the gaming public.

“Game reviews should not review games.” That’s kind o’ like that corrupt asshole, Roger Ebert, always pushing his biased opinion ’bout what movies I should watch. Um, ¿how do we objectively determine the wishes o’ the vague abstract concept known as the “gaming public”?

Um, ¿what ’bout when you said that “Parasite in City is a Great H-Game that is Full of Rape”? (Please don’t go to that link; you’ll regret it.) ¿Am I to believe that your telling me this game is great (that’s a relief: I always hate playing hentai games full o’ rape that have slippery controls) isn’t influencing the nature o’ gaming by encouraging people to buy it, & thus through the market encouraging companies to make it? ¿Or are great hentai games full o’ rape part o’ the wishes o’ the “gaming public”? ‘Cause I do know that rape is a subject that the public looks fondly on.

4. A clear line must be drawn between advertising and editorial content (read our ethics policy).

That’s a nice way to ‘splain ‘way the fact that nobody wanted to advertise on your site.

¿What ’bout site-runner, “Roosh” (the raddest names are those that are just sounds children make when riding a rollercoaster) whorishly splaying links to his off-site content in the footer, meshed together with the on-site links?

Site content must be free of bias or moneyed interests.

(Laughs.) As we saw earlier, this site is definitely free from bias.

5. Gamers share a collection of values and beliefs that denote an identity which should be treated with respectful consideration.

What those “values” & “beliefs” are that they s’posedly share isn’t delineated, nor is there any evidence given that all people who play video games have uploaded their minds into a single mind borg. I’m quite certain I’ve played games quite a few times, & I sure as fuck don’t share your used values, you filthy commies–Sorry, I should use the PC term: you self-righteous socialist assholes.

Gaming sites should serve gamers by providing them with the type of content they want to read (send us your comments).

Which no gaming site does, hence why no gaming site has comments sections, & hence why every gaming site has gone out o’ business from a lack o’ ad views.

Then ‘gain, if gamers tolerate hours o’ grinding in the 270th RPG, maybe they’ll tolerate reading articles they hate.

Heterosexual men should not be shamed for enjoying things designed to appeal to heterosexual men.

But transgenders should be shamed as much as possible. (Note: if you read that link, you’ll see that it has nothing to do with video games & is all political, including specific attacks ‘gainst “leftists” & “Democrats.” Ne’ertheless, Reaxxion is super fair-&-balanced & doesn’t indulge in biased propaganda @ all.)

There is non-harmful entertainment value in traditional story lines involving masculine men and feminine women.

But content that’s different is harmful, ’cause MRAs are spoiled babies who cry avalanches if a single book is written by a guy who doesn’t work out much or if a single game has a gay option, ’cause they don’t comprehend such things as “niche interests.” E’en worse, companies will continue to ignore this tenet ’cause they’re smart ‘nough to realize these evil other people still have money & that the only way to get these evil other people’s money is to give them what they want, not what MRAs, who already spent all their money on all the Dead or Alive & Tomb Raider games, want.

¿So how’s Reaxxion doing now, anyway? Well, it’s done updating. Apparently this site that was totally done for the passion o’ gaming & doing manly things wasn’t making ‘nough money, so fuck it, pull the plug. ¡Good to see that moneyed interests aren’t affecting things @ all! This is shocking coming from someone who admitted they hadn’t played video games since 2000.

Also, what’s this horseshit:

Reaxxion will not try to jam ideology down your throat like the existing gaming sites. We won’t tell you to go to the gym [emphasis mine]…

You had 1 promise, & you fucked up & let it slip through this review. I guess e’en Roosh didn’t read that review before publishing it. Can’t blame him (well, I can blame him publishing it, though).

So… We have a site that portrays itself as the… ¿Fox News o’ gaming sites? ¿& it’s run by a guy who doesn’t e’en play video games? ¿& he pretty much admits that he’s just exploiting video games as a propaganda device to push a certain agenda?:

I aim to protect the interests of heterosexual Western males, a category I’m in. [Excised large chunk o’ conspiracy rants gainst the vagina borg to prevent readers from falling asleep.] So while I don’t play video games, the idea of starting a pro-#gamergate site is compatible with my overall mission.

Note: I love how in that “a category I’m in” he outright admits that he only supports the political ideology he does ’cause it serves himself.

It’s like this “Roosh” guy predicted I’d start a blog that, for some reason I don’t e’en know, has both articles making fun o’ right-wing politics & making fun o’ bad video game content & created this whole site just so I’d have the perfect subject to mock—¡2 articles for the price o’ 1, baby!

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Footnotes:

‘Cause I’m a serious jackoff who writes ’bout bourgie toys, I don’t just criticize reviews that disagree with my tastes, such as this dumb ass review by some video game character that isn’t e’en real gainst the magnum opus that is Game & Watch Gallery 4, but also those reviews with arguments in which I agree. Thus, we have this review that argues that Wario Land 3 is the best game on the 3DS Virtual Console (sort o’), with which I agree.

Let’s start with some nice ad hominem:

Stephen Swift lives in Boston with the world’s tiniest and loudest cat.

Jonathan Swift should be choking in his grave to know that his great great great great great great great great great great grandson’s stooping to making cat jokes.

It starts by blabbering ’bout the 3DS’s eShop, while Swift contradicts himself: though he contrasts it with Steam, most o’ the games he mentions are on Steam, too.

Honestly, the fact that he praises the 3DS eShop’s kind o’ a flaw itself, since it sucks compared to the Wii-U’s—& e’en arguably the Wii’s. It doesn’t e’en have Game Boy Advance games, ‘less one was an early-adopter, for god’s sake. Hell, it’s e’en missing a bunch o’ NES games. I guess e’en the “New” 3DS wasn’t powerful ‘nough to play Earthbound Beginnings—though it can play its sequel (not like you’d want to play Beginnings, ‘specially when you can play the sequel…).

My for-real, hand-to-god, pick of the litter? Out of alllll of them?

I’m sorry, but no dictionary I know tells me that “alllll” is a word. I can’t accept financial advice from someone who can’t e’en correctly spell Kindergarten-level words. Once you learn not to treat typing articles like a fucking Shmup, then maybe I’ll pay attention.

It’s the vanilla Virtual Console port of Wario Land 3.

I was as surprised as you.

That level being “not surprised @ all,” since the big bold title o’ this article already kind o’ spoiled that precious fact, & you decided the fact yourself.

By the way, ¿how could he praise the 3DS for all these aspects nobody else knew ’bout, like that it has Cave Story, but not the fact that its Virtual Console games came in ice cream flavors, which e’en I didn’t know. Well, genius, ¿why would anyone prefer vanilla Wario Land 3 o’er, say, Chocolate Chip Mint Wario Land 3? ¿No answer? Not a very good review then.

His 1st few reasons after his strange Charlie-Brown-haired divider actually resemble good arguments, so we won’t talk ’bout them much—though I must praise his hilariously zany renames for Wario’s status conditions (¿What’s the name o’ that condition where Wario briefly clips into the ground, like in that 1st wacky animated GIF?)

That doesn’t stop him from speaking as obnoxiously as possible, since shouting @ people is always the best way to convince them. It’s good to see that Virtual Village writer on super-serious website writes ’bout the same as some jackoff on YouTube comments. Have some god damn respect, man.

I also question some o’ his arguments. For instance, I love how he says @ 1 point that Wario Land 3 is “soaking in Metroid” (ew), & then goes on to talk ’bout how it isn’t like Metroid. But e’en if his arguments aren’t entirely coherent, you can’t argue with such points as “It. Is. So. Dope. [the emphasis is all his credit].”

As for point #4, I disagree with his point that forcing tutorials on players & treating them like idiots is good. I’m also not sure what he means by “hands-off.” It’s certainly “hands-off” for the player, since they get to just sit & watch for a minute not being a “player.” That’s right up there in quality with books that force you to go a minute without being able to actually read them.

I also disagree with point #5—& apparently the reviewer does, too, since he followed such refined arguments as “It’s horrible,” with the e’en mo’ refined, “I LOVE IT.” I disagree 1st with the claim that forcing an irrelevant minigame to progress is somehow a contrast to modern game design, 2nd for his providing any praise for that tedious golf game, & 3rd with his irrelevant animated GIF o’ Wario being spliced & unspliced painfully o’er & o’er like a scene out o’ “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.” ¿Maybe that’s s’posed to represent the player’s feelings when she realizes she has to play that minigolf game for the 20th time? E’en I’d say that’s an exaggeration—a’least it’s not that fucking memory game from 2.

The organization o’ this article doesn’t e’en make sense. 5b is ’bout how “minibosses” (since they’re the only bosses, ‘cept for maybe the final boss, I question that word choice) defeat you by using your status conditions to push you out o’ the room, rather than kill you, since you can’t die in this game. That’s mo’ related to his 1st point, where he brought this fact up to begin with, than this point ’bout… ¿being “Warioian” ’bout not being like modern games? “Minibosses” that don’t kill you outright are hardly mo’ ol’-school than modern. & yeah, it’s “Warioian” in the sense that you defined—like Wario Land 3—’cause it’s in Wario Land 3. It’s great to see that Wario Land 3‘s bosses are designed round Wario Land 3‘s gameplay—like everything else in Wario Land 3.

O wait. But the minigolf game was “Warioian,” & that was described as being a complete departure from the regular game… which is apparently an aspect o’ Wario Land 3 design… to depart from Wario Land 3 design…

Point #6 is that you can be a cheating scrub & savestate through the game, which applies to all Virtual Console games & is probably needed less in this game than most games.

Point #7 makes fun o’ itself: “Replayability… in MY Metroidvania?????” Since we already learned that Wario Land 3 is “soaking in Metroid” while being completely different, this isn’t a surprise @ all. It’s also ‘nother aspect that is far from unique ’bout Wario Land 3. I can’t help but note that Swift seems to be excited ’bout things that are in just ’bout every video game. HOLY SHIT: YOU CAN GO BACK INTO LEVELS YOU ALREADY BEAT CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT.

Though point #8’s title is just a reiteration o’ the article’s thesis, it does approach a coherent argument that makes sense, though the “every floor tile serves a purpose” point returned to the flaw I just mentioned. Yeah, they all serve a purpose: they all keep you from falling off the screen, since the game has no death routine to call if you somehow do. Good thing the designers didn’t forget ’bout that & just let players fall off the screen & enter a glitchy minus world.

But point #9 veers off into a completely irrelevant subject, which partly contradicts his whole thesis. “It is only barely better than most other VC Gameboy [sic, ¿how the fuck can you misspell “Game Boy”?] Color titles.” ¿Then why are you singling it out if it’s not much mo’ special than the other games? Duh, logic: ¿what’s that? If Attack of the Friday Monsters is so great, ¿why aren’t you talking ’bout it? For instance, I’d like to know what the fuck a “Friday Monster” is e’en s’posed to be.

¿& why’s this review called “10 Reasons Wario Land 3 is the 3DS eShop’s Best Game [emphasis mine]” when you only listed 9? ¡I can’t take financial advice from someone who can’t e’en count!

Wario Land 3 reviews are ruined fore’er now. Great goin’ it, Swift.