I’d like to begin by thanking everyone for coming to celebrate Mario’s life. Mario was the most joyfully buoyant person I’ve ever known and I know many of you would agree. He had an incredible legacy, thirty-five years of it, and it’s with great sadness I stand here today following his untimely death at the hands of Nintendo yesterday.
Mario is a video game icon. From bothering an ape almost 40 years ago as the imaginatively named “Jumpman” to travelling around to stop what would have likely been a beautiful wedding, the portly plumber has been an integral part of our lives for a long time. It’s undoubtable that he has range also, appearing across almost every game genre from adventure to sports.
Being a child of the 80s, I grew up with Mario, beginning with the phenomenal Super Mario Bros. on dad’s NES. I didn’t appreciate truly how well it was designed when I was young, but I played the first three main games practically to death. But that’s not what I wanted to focus on here, I wanted to talk about when the series transcended beyond mere games for me –
Super Mario World.
Mario and his friends have been getting into sports-related scrapes for years, duking it out across tennis, football, golf and several trips to the Olympics. As long as you don’t think to much about the odd canonical implications of them, they’re often really fun games. So enter the latest sportsball free-for-all Mario Tennis Aces for Switch! But is it advantage Nintendo, or a disappointing double fault?
Mario Party as a franchise has a bloodied legacy across the ages, likely causing more fights amongst family and friends than Monopoly, Operation and Kerplunk combined. The last couple of games have been weak in comparison to the whole, with Mario Party 10 being incredibly lacklustre. Now that we have the Switch though, Nintendo are giving it another try with their eleventh main entry; Super Mario Party.
The gravy train of the Nintendo Switch just keeps on rolling, with a strong year ahead for Nintendo already, and that’s only the games confirmed at the moment. First out of the gate for the first party presence this year is New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe, a collective port of both of the games in that franchise from the Wii U.
This review was originally posted on Nintendo Scene on 26th October 2017.
The Nintendo Switch launched in March this year, and it has had an incredible year so far, but it’s hard to deny that it did feel like something was missing. Obviously, when Nintendo has a new console, it isn’t long until a new Mario title comes to it, and the Switch was missing it’s outing with Nintendo’s premier ex-plumber. It’s pretty much undeniable that Super Mario Odyssey impressed from it’s first showing, but then again Mario has a formula that is very hard to get wrong, no matter the format or setting but hadn’t set the world alight in a few instalments. What is needed was a new set of features that truly excited the player base again, and it looked like the latest attempt was going to be a sentient hat. This all said, how is Super Mario Odyssey?
Reu The Gamer 