We Play You Play: Super Mario Bros 3

This is a head gun podcast.

All right, team, Super Mario Bros.

3.

This is very exciting.

Obviously, the reaction to Super Mario 2 in the States didn't go so great.

So, we're gonna try to pitch on some new power-ups, some new things that Mario can do in this one to get us back to our roots.

So, who's we're taking any ideas?

Who's got something?

Hey, hi.

Can I go?

Yeah, no, this is an oh.

Everyone has the floor.

Okay, great.

Hi, my name is Dougette.

I'm not sure if I've already been fired from this job and I'm returning to the campus.

I just want to make sure that I know that you know that I know that maybe I'm not supposed to be here.

But I've got some ideas.

There's a lot of, there's low retention here.

We got a lot of turnover.

So that could have been somebody else.

Yeah.

Great.

So I got some ideas.

We're Mario Brothers 3.

And my first idea is the toilet suit.

The toilet suit.

I'm just going to say if this is where I'm going to be able to do it.

Hold on.

Let me explain.

Mario, you know, hits a block and a little, a little, like, what looks like a little plunger comes up at the top because, you know, the power-up should never actually be the outfit.

And he grabs a plunger and he turns into like a...

He's got like a body of a toilet.

And his legs are sticking out the top and his head's sticking out like where the tank is.

Oh, so he's like stuck in it.

I mean, he is.

He is toilet.

He's not stuck in it.

That's a...

I mean, I've been stuck in a toilet before, and that's not what it looks like.

So he's not going to be able to get a title.

I don't even know what question is.

He's going to take it in front of him.

And whenever he sees an enemy, he opens up the lid.

And then, like, sh like poops fly out at the enemies

and they run away.

It doesn't kill the enemies, but they run off screen.

Well, you know,

against my better judgment, I'm going to write it down.

It's an idea.

I don't know that we'll use it, but maybe

something will inspire us from there.

You're not going to use that.

Well, you're going to put them in a shoe or something?

I can't.

Hey, buddy, where's your go?

Excuse me.

Is it flair open for ideas?

Yeah, I can't do it.

Can you pitch an idea too?

Can anyone pitch an idea?

Too polite.

Yeah, we got to get some ideas.

Because I think the U.S.

reaction to Super Mario Bros.

2 was because it was too weird.

You know, people were like, what's going on with this game?

It needs to be a little bit more grounded, less fantastic.

Also, I'm pitching the skin suit.

It's a suit made of skin from a bunch of slain enemies.

And they all get collected and sewn together.

And you wear them to cover up Mario's body.

I don't even know what that...

What that means.

You collect a skin flute and you wear the skin suit.

But like, how would you even depict it?

That one should go on the board with the toilet suit.

I think we got two good ideas.

I guess I have to put it on the board, but I don't know that

we could have a skin suit.

Like, maybe he wears the skin of an animal.

Maybe that's a direction we could go in.

But I don't know.

That's weird.

Sounds weird.

Did you say yikes?

That's like a

graphic, man.

It's like serial killer behavior, dismembering an animal and wearing it.

Weird.

This guy's weird.

I'm not weird.

This guy's weird.

I have another idea.

Okay.

You know, one of the breakout characters from Super Mario Bros.

2, the reskin dokey dokie panic was the babomb.

Yeah, that's right.

I think we could have

a babom suit.

Okay.

Like you turn into like a little Mario babom.

And then

you can hold down the B button, and if you hold it down to charge up, you can explode.

And then if you explode, you get a poem read by Robert Oppenheimer about

what it means to take so many lives.

You want Mario to say, I am become death?

No, Oppenheimer is going to say that.

That's his thing.

So Oppenheimer is coming in the game, too.

We could put him in there.

Look.

I got one.

I love that one.

You love it.

I also love that one.

I love it.

Well, you said that.

I know it's my idea, but I also love it.

I love it.

All right.

So, this one,

this one is

like a special suspenders.

Okay.

You hit the block.

And those suspenders come out the top, right?

And you put on, Mario puts on the suspenders.

Woohoo!

And then every time you press the A button, he looks to camera and he says, I know what you've done.

I gotta say, the ideas that I've heard in this room today are so far

not weirder than Super Mario Bros.

2.

We have to make this.

I love it.

Should we get back to work here at Denny's?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kind of the orders are piling up in the kitchen.

Moons over Miami ain't going to cook themselves.

And we need a Grand Slam breakfast on wheels, please.

We wag our raccoon tails to take flight and kill the sun with a Koopa shell as we play U-Play Pioneering Platformer Super Mario Bros.

3 this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

That's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back.

Bucket.

Wow.

Wow.

She said it.

We're here on the premiere, the premiere video game podcast.

And

I don't want to be impenetrable.

I want people to listen to this show who've never listened to it before and be like, hey, this seems like a good time between some friends.

I don't think there was anything impenetrable about the first five minutes of the show.

No, no.

Very accessible.

Everybody gets it so far.

Huh.

Heather, how are you?

Thank you for rejoining us.

Thank you for making time for this.

We should mention that you are recording this in your bed.

Yes, I am in bed recovering from,

I don't know, there's no reason to like sugarcoat this.

I'm recovering from my first round of chemotherapy, which I don't know if you guys have heard about this, uh, this treatment, but um, I read up on the on the history of chemotherapy, and the truth, the truth is that in World War I, when they, when the Germans started using chemical weapons on the on the Allies,

they determined that certain toxins would change the ability of cancer in the corpses to like generate.

And so that's like where they came up with the idea of chemotherapy was from like the worst warfare that, I mean, one of the worst warfares.

We've done a lot.

But yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm post-round one of chemo coming in hot

both physically.

And also, uh, I think this is fun to know.

Um, when you've done chemotherapy,

your partners and loved ones are not allowed to use the same toilet as you because

the toxins coming out of your body are so intense that it could hurt other people.

So you got your own shitter.

Is that what we're saying?

So I've got a, they've, they've, I have a, I have a, like a, a bundle of sticks in the backyard, and I just go and relieve myself over those sticks.

Yeah.

You're doing it heather style, I see.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's pretty wild.

There's, I've learned so much about, uh, I have the most incredible care team, the most incredible,

you know, wife

and mom.

My mom is in town to help get me through this, but I don't have an enormous amount of chemotherapy ahead of me.

So I'm feeling pretty as good as can about having to do it.

Hey, all right, there you go.

Yeah, that's that's great.

We're, you know, just thinking about you a lot, so I'm glad that it's it's it's going as good as it can, despite it not being good at all.

Yeah, not good at all.

Again, yeah, cannot be clearer.

That would be missing multiple episodes of the show because, you know, there's times where I like I'm just in bed going,

um, and then although we could use that for an intro, yeah, if you should.

Yeah, we we could.

If at any point the Resident Evil merchant didn't show up, we could just like record me moaning, and it would probably fill the same sort of psychological void as

his presence.

We're going to be talking about Super Mario Bros.

3 today, one of the greatest and most impactful video games of all time.

We're going to dig into that in one second.

We are going to get to the what are you playing segment where we're going to talk about some games we're playing right now.

But before we do that, I did want to, Heather, I did want you to recap what you were saying for us beforehand, since, since you're sharing, which is that you are eating by doctor's orders a lot of red meat right now.

Wait,

why do you want me to share that?

Because it's interesting.

You don't have to.

What the fuck?

It's interesting.

Yeah.

So.

No, no, you're totally talking about your cursed toilet.

I thought you'd be willing to talk about your diet a little bit.

Yeah, so you're putting this thing to work.

Is that where we're here?

One of the things that

one of the things that you have to do when you're in chemotherapy is you have to, so chemotherapy sort of knocks down all of your natural resiliency because it's killing off all of the fast-growing cells in your body.

So it wipes out your white blood cells and it wipes out a significant number of your red blood cells also.

And

so by doctor's orders, in order to get my

iron content and my red blood cell count up, I'm eating a lot of red meat and spinach.

Oh, wow.

So it's been...

I mean, I love red meat, so that's great.

I can't imagine the difficulty of doing something like this if you were a vegan because the

it's so protein forward.

Um, and uh, yeah, it's um,

I don't know, it's it's it's it's nice to eat a cheeseburger and be like, I am doing a great thing for my body.

Because normally you don't have that.

There's like always this sort of like nebulous background guilt about

eating a cheeseburger.

And I don't have that now.

I have like a power-up sound happening in my head with every burger bite I take.

And also, I should say, I'm not exclusively eating red meat.

Right.

Like, I'm just red meat forward for the time being.

I'm also eating, you know, like sweet potatoes and like all these, so like you eat all of this like really, really nutritious food that I think is going to

change my food perspective moving forward.

Because I'm never really appreciative of like just sitting down and eating an avocado for example

or like sitting down and eating like a bowl of blueberries i cut out um i cut out refined sugar uh because that's really bad for you across the board um so we and i did that about uh a month and a half ago so now all fruit tastes like candy again It's great.

Wow.

But yeah, I'm glad, Nick, that this stood out to you so much that you were like, oh, she should tell the listeners that she's eating beef all the time.

I thought it was interesting.

Look, we got,

Nick and I have been banking episodes.

We need stuff to talk about.

This is good.

Oh, man.

I missed you guys.

I know we missed you.

I'm going to miss you probably next week, but

I'm so happy for the times that I do get to be here.

And I also hope that me talking about chemo isn't a downer for a fucking listener.

Cause if I was like, oh, I can't wait for my favorite video game podcast.

Yeah.

And one of the hosts got on and was like, I really like shit.

I really like a dog.

I really like shit.

I think people will appreciate it because we know that there are listeners in our Discord that have experienced the very same thing.

So I think it's a relatable thing.

It's more relatable than it seems, I'm sure.

So people probably do appreciate hearing it.

Okay, well,

cool.

Shout out to you guys.

Sorry, we've all been through it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Marcos, that's all of you.

Nick, I noticed something just a moment ago.

Actually, we're both wearing chainsaw man t-shirts.

That's right.

I got my power shirt.

I just got one that has chainsaw man on it.

Look at us.

Huh.

That's

not as good as the meat stuff, I guess, but just kind of thought I'd bring it up.

See, we're running out of things.

We're doing great.

We're thriving.

And in fact, I think it's time to get on topic here with a question we always ask at the top of these episodes: what are you playing?

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

I have discovered here in the year of our Lord 2023,

I really have wanted to play like calming games like during this time.

Like

I've been able, my ability to play Fortnite has been very minimalized by how

difficult it is to watch something that visually aggressive

because I sometimes will get kind of nauseous or dizzy or whatever.

So I thought, oh man, once I start chemotherapy, I'm going to have so much time to play Fortnite because nobody's going to be asking anything of me.

And it turns out I can't play Fortnite for like more than an hour at a time

uh is like my max amount of fortnite and for for listeners who don't play that's only two rounds like each round is about a half hour give or take so i play two rounds of fortnite maximum like every few days and i'm out um but i've been really craving a quiet like sweet like comforting game um and one of the things that i've been playing is um these old game boy advanced games called bit generations

which are very simple, stripped-down, Nintendo-produced, I'll call them art games for the Game Boy Advance, which I don't believe were actually released in the United States on cartridge, but were released maybe on like the Wii or something.

And I've been playing this great puzzle game,

which name escapes me because my brain is fried from being poisoned.

But if I describe it, then you can look it up.

It is a puzzle game where, and I know, you can imagine how bad I feel that I'm like choosing to play a puzzle game.

I'm like, I'm actually shocked by this.

Like, this is very out of character.

It is no joke.

But it's a very soothing puzzle game.

So, like, Tetris or Tetris is like, you align shapes, and columns is you align colors.

In this bit generations puzzle game, you align the way that you, there's like a grid of colored cubes on your screen, and you can affect the hue of the blocks.

So, you highlight a block, and uh, the highlight color of the block is

the shade to which you are transforming the shade, the hue of the block.

So, if you have a green highlighter and the color of the block is red, then it shifts it towards green by one

by one notch.

And if

the highlight remains green, then you can continue to shift it towards green until eventually you have multiple blocks of green that will then clear.

But your ability to shift the hue is limited.

So you kind of have to plan out while you're playing, like, oh, now it's orange, now it's red.

I'm going to highlight that block and shift it towards red or shift it towards orange.

Oh, now it's green.

I'm going to shift this one over towards green, et cetera.

It is

soothing in a way that like both columns and Tetris are not because it feels

incremental.

It doesn't feel like a binary experience.

Like this is...

lining up and therefore it is clear.

It feels like I'm going to adjust some things and that adjustment will bring me closer to clearing the level.

And I really, really like it.

And I've been playing that on Analog Pocket.

And

did either of you look up what this game is called?

I saw a couple of options that one is one is Coloris, Coloris.

That might be it.

But there's another one called Dial Hex or Roto Hex.

They both both description side.

I think it's Coloris.

Got it.

It's excellent.

The other thing I've discovered here in the year 2023 of Our Lord is that if you want to play Chrono Trigger, which i keep being like oh that's one of my favorite soothing games that motherfucking game is not available hardly anywhere you can play it on ios in the remastered version which is upsetting like it's upsetting to play those remastered versions i don't know why square enix won't just give us the actual game so then i downloaded a ROM for my um no first i looked on it on switch for it couldn't play it on switch then i was like oh it must have been released on ps5 not available on PS5.

You can't play Chrono Trigger on any modern platform except Steam or iOS.

And those are, they're not great ways to play Chrono Trigger.

The Steam port is like, it's kind of janky.

I think it has the weird font.

I could be wrong about that, but I think it kind of has that ugly font,

which no one cares for.

But yeah,

it's a game that

would be nice if it was like the DS version was like a really great package.

It would be nice if there were like a version like that was available on Switch.

Well, I so I so I have the DS version and so I got my 3DS out and I had my analog pocket out.

I loaded up the ROM on Pocket and I loaded up the

DS version on my 3DS

and I was shocked

that the

clarity of the game on the DS is kind of gross,

especially compared to the analog pocket straight up rom presentation of a super nes game so i've been playing it on the pocket i expected the font to be too small to read not the case i've expected i expected there to be visual difficulty because one of the things they talked about why chrono trigger never received a game boy advance release was that the screen would be too small for optimum experience and that's why they waited until the ds came out so that it could split up some of that ui element i i i really like it on the pocket.

I think it's excellent.

So yeah, Chrono Trigger, Caloris, and dabbling once again in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance have been my comfort games.

Wow.

Here in this bed that I've been in for most of the last week.

How about you guys?

What have you been playing?

I mean, those all sound really great.

And

I can't believe that you're starting Chrono Trigger again in a year where I said I was going to do that and beat it and have not even tried to start it.

I should give that a spin before.

I got time.

You also got like the, you know, you've got an analog pocket.

I got an analog pocket.

I have it on there.

Yeah.

Play the damn thing.

I got time.

The year's not quite over just yet.

But I've been playing.

I mentioned this last week on the show.

I started Alan Wake, the original Alan Wake.

Oh.

Are you playing the the remaster?

I'm playing the remaster, yes.

And I am liking it.

It's come up.

I've been out with some friends recently, and it's come up that I've been playing this game, and they're asking me, how do I like it?

And I'm often saying, I don't know, but I can't stop, like, I can't stop playing it.

Because it has, like, the gameplay is, like, fun enough, but it is also, like, scary.

Right?

And so I'm not, like, enjoying that part of it, but like, it's, it's scary in a way that I can manage.

But also it has this like I've tried to watch Twin Peaks like four times and I like can't, I just can't do it.

Yeah.

And so it has

it feels like all the stuff I don't like about or I don't connect with Twin Peaks about.

It's that stuff's in here too, or it's just kind of like weird and I don't know why.

And it's,

so that part of it I'm not loving either, but I'm also compelled by it in a way that I can't really quite figure out.

I do intend to finish it.

I'm about halfway through at this point.

And it is that thing, Heather, that we've talked about on the show too, which it's like somebody's wife is always dead.

Sure.

And it's like this guy is like, I'm trying to find my wife.

And I'm like, okay.

And aren't we all

Matt?

Aren't we all trying to get married and fall in love with our wives?

So I'm playing this wife guy game right now.

and

it is cool.

You get like, it's very limited like the resources that you get.

You often get only a gun and a flashlight or like some sort of light mechanism to banish these dark spirits away that they're trying to get you.

And you're also, you're a writer, so he self-narrates a lot.

And I'm always just like, shut the fuck up, dude.

Shut up.

He talks so much.

But the thing that's also interesting about it, and I know that this game is beloved, and a lot of people really like it,

I think the performances in the game are interesting.

Because it does sort of feel like everyone is in a different game, kind of.

Where

Alan is sort of

this way, performing this way, and then another character in the same scene will be like, I'm in a completely different scene, kind of.

And it

feels very strange.

But that's like that Twin Peaks energy a little bit.

But

I guess I like it enough that I'm more interested in playing the second one now, too.

Yeah, I've never played one of these remedy games before, and people seem to really like them.

I've heard

a lot of Alan Wake 2 enthusiasm, even from Alan Wake 1 skeptics.

So I think

whether the game connects with you or not, it maybe will.

I've been thinking about playing Alan Wake 2.

Our friend of the show, past guest Eva Anderson, was texting me about it.

She's having a good time with it.

Yeah,

I am interested

in checking it out, but

I probably will finish it.

Also, Heather, I should say I'm playing it exclusively on my PlayStation Portal.

I'm playing it non-stop on my PlayStation Portal.

Yeah.

Yes.

I talked about this last week.

Yeah,

it's playing really well, but I'm telling you,

it's a little too scary to play at night in bed when you're trying to snuggle up.

It's a little too scary for nighttime.

But I'm because there are legitimate jump scares in it.

That's something that I don't think I've mentioned that there are just actual jump scares, like screen,

like full-screen jump scares.

That's fucking rude.

It's just for a coward like me, not ideal.

No, you don't want to be doing that while you're sharing a bed with your partner.

No, no, no, because she doesn't even love that I'm doing this.

Add me screaming?

But that's it for me.

You know, I'm still chugging away at Super Mario Wonder, but I have stopped to play the game that we're playing in this episode and to prioritize a little bit of Alan Wake time as well.

Can I say something about the wife guy trope?

Sure.

Which is that, and this is sort of unprompted, but sort of prompted, my wife Mary does not listen to the show.

So I'm doing this because

my wife is the best wife in the whole world.

Yeah.

And shots fired at my wife.

Yeah.

Shots fired at my future wife.

She did something this week that you guys helped with.

And

I wanted to say thank you.

And I'm sorry, I'm probably going to get emotional.

It's okay.

She got a tattoo that you guys helped her design,

which is a Legend of Zelda linked that passed hearts full up with health.

And in the font from the game, my initials, so that she could, so that she was always hoping for my full health.

And you guys helped her with that.

And it's one of the most incredible things that anybody has ever done for me.

And I know that you guys were a part of that.

And I wanted to say thank you.

Of course, Heather.

We love you.

Of course.

She was incredible.

I have the best wife and I have the best friends.

And thank you guys so much.

Well, you're the best, Heather.

You're the best.

We said this very same thing to Mary.

How lucky are we that we all have this like same, like, cool person that we love?

Like, it's so great.

Thanks, guys.

It's the best.

No, it's totally fine.

We tried to convince her to get the Stusy S, but she wouldn't do that instead.

We really wanted her to get the Steusie S.

I thought Pregnant Sonic would be the best tribute, but she vetoed that.

And then also, there was an immediate veto of just our two faces, too, which is kind of confusing.

It's like, it's not you.

But no, no, it was a very sweet thing that Mary did.

And we were, I would say, speaking for both Nick and I, we were honored to help.

Also, she was, she was fanatical about attention to detail.

Like making sure it was like, she was like, this needs to be pixel perfect.

This aesthetic, like the aesthetic of the hearts needs to match the aesthetic of the letters.

Like, I want to make sure this is from the same game and everything.

So, like,

she was, she was really like making sure this was perfect for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, well, um,

anyway, so I guess I've now entered the, the realm of like, if my wife was killed or disappeared, I would go to Silent Hill.

Just in case she might be there.

Like, I just, like, I get it now.

I'm like, oh, I mean, like, I've always gotten it, but like, now I'm like, you know what?

Maybe this trope isn't that bad.

Yeah.

Because if you like, really, really, like, you can't imagine your life without somebody.

Um, yeah, I go.

I wow, Heather stands with the wife guys.

All right.

It's great.

No, it's so that's like, you know, it was a very sweet thing.

And it was like, I was, I was, I

was so happy to help.

What a gesture.

Yeah.

All right, Nick, what are you playing?

Well, I've been playing a game about a little robot.

Yeah, no shit.

Actually, I've had this

platformer that's on my, it's been on my radar for a while.

And I'm getting, and it just came out.

It came out on November 13th of this year, and I got some time to spend with it.

And I thought it was a good thing to play a little bit

with the main topic that we're talking about this week, because it is obviously, like all modern platformers, it owe some to Super Mario Bros.

3.

It's called BZ.

That's BZZZT.

B-triple Z-T.

BZ.

And Matt, can we play a little bit of this trailer?

Oh, sure.

Nice.

I think this will just give you, for people, for the two of you and for Rochelle here, we'll give a little sense of the aesthetic of this game, which is really, really charming.

And then also for anyone listening, maybe you'll hear a little bit of the soundtrack.

Ooh.

So it's very much just like, you know,

dash, jump, double jump.

And you're just moving around these super quick stages.

And

it's just one of those things where it's one of those things where it's not innovating, but it's doing absolutely everything right.

It's just like a perfect version of this kind of platformer.

It's just this fast platformer where your little toaster-sized robot named ZX, he's cute as shit, it's just oozing with charm.

And it's very Celeste/slash super meatboy slash neon white and kind of a different genre where the levels are super short and you get a super fast reset on death, so you can just keep iterating on this thing.

And there's collectible bolts, you know, in each level that that's that's your item that you're trying to get all of and then target times to hit um to 100 each stage and the target times are very aggressive so it's just like but achievable but it's one of those games where it's meant for speed running and meant for trying to get to the top of the leaderboards or just progressing through normally but that's like an added um

layer to the game.

It's also got some really fun boss fights.

One boss fight it just turns into a straight-up shoot-em-up and just a schmup and it's and it's just so fun and it's just such like a great like you know kind of pastiche of the the best kinds of games of that type.

But I want to shout out the developer.

It's an indie solo dev.

I believe his name

is Karel Matejka, who's from the Czech Republic.

It goes by KO.dll.

Apparently has been working on this for four years.

It's just kind of a labor of love.

But it's just a really, really well-executed platformer.

And I love these sorts of games.

So as I was playing this through, I was just like, this is just pure joy.

I just like, I'm just having so much fun.

Like, I just love, this is exactly what I love about video games is just like, is this sort of, this sort of energy and this sort of progression and this sort of like, you know, trying to compete with myself and trying something again and again until I eventually achieve it.

And, but also just like, just all the aesthetic

just pleasantness to it, like the soundtrack

and the art direction.

and the animation.

It's just a great package.

So BZ BZZZT.

You can get it on Steam right now.

It also apparently runs natively on the Steam deck.

So that's an option for you.

And you should, Matt,

you'd love this.

This is very much for you.

Heather, I'm not sure how calming it would be.

It's a little frenetic, but

I do think you would like it.

Watching that trailer made me feel like,

especially since we played Super Mario 3 this week or month.

I'm like, man, if I'd seen that trailer when I was a child, I would have been like, this looks like the best video game of all time.

Right, 100%.

No, yeah, it's like the ideal of what a video game could possibly be from a 1989 perspective.

It's just like,

this is the perfection of like a 2D platformer.

Yeah.

So again, it's, it's, you know, it's not, it's not,

I don't want to oversell it.

It's not like innovating.

It's not like, oh, this is something that's completely new.

This is, it's not going to hit like a game like Celeste, which I mentioned might.

But it is just like such a, such a, great execution of it.

And it just is made clearly by someone who knows, who likes these sorts of games and knows what makes them work.

Hope people check out Biz.

This game is beautiful.

We love it.

We love a platformer.

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All right, let's talk about our we play you play, Super Mario Bros.

3.

Super Mario Bros.

3 was directed by Shigeru Miyamoto, of course, and Takashi Tezuka.

Tezuka also produced Super Mario Bros.

Wonder.

He stuck with Nintendo like Miyamoto for basically his entire career.

He has this quote, which I figured I'd read to tee this up.

I have never consciously separated casual users and hardcore gamers when I design a game.

For the past 20 years, I have always been trying to make games so that anyone, as many people as possible, can enjoy them.

I cannot help but say that I love my job of making games from the bottom of my heart.

I just love that little bit of earnestness.

I love that.

What a sweetie.

That rocks.

And to know that he has stuck around

for so long rocks because,

I mean, I'm not the first person to make this observation, I'm sure.

There is so much Super Mario Bros.

3 in Wonder.

Like, there's so much

discovery.

Like, that feeling of discovery and that feeling of what's going to happen next is so present.

particularly in Wonder, I feel.

Yeah, and the idea that each level kind of, and this is the thing that's been retained with, you know, know, the 2D Mario's basically from that point on, yeah, from that game on, but like the idea that each level kind of has a theme.

Each level, this is the level where this happens.

Yes.

Or at minimum, it ties in with a larger world that has some sort of,

you know, running theme.

Yes.

So the local, yeah, go on, Heather.

I was going to say, um, I had not seen the Super Mario Bros.

movie until this week.

Oh, yeah.

Which I watched in part of this sort of like holistic Mario experience I was trying to give myself for this podcast.

And

it, it's, I think it is

a recognition of Mario 3's

supremacy in the Mario anthologies that the climax, spoiler alert, the climax of the Super Mario Bros.

movie

is the tanuki suit.

Right.

Like,

it's not

like he

dabbed.

I mean, eventually he gets the fucking invincibility star.

But, like, I would say that the

sort of visual climax of the film is Mario in the tanuki suit saving the Mushroom Kingdom.

And that feels like everyone at Nintendo being like, I don't know if we ever got higher than this.

Like, the tanuki suit may have been the moment in Mario gaming where everything clicked and it felt good and it felt like like true joy because the cape suit in Mario World is essentially the tanuki suit by a different name

and the uh the the hat wings in super mario 64 is essentially the tanuki suit by a different name like it it it was somebody at nintendo being like what if this motherfucker could fly and and everybody being like yes

anyway that

My thoughts are a little disorganized, but I was like, when I saw the movie, I was like, yep, they get it.

They know that Super Mario 3 was the best of all of them.

As the, you know, the

distinguished from the raccoon suit,

which we get from the Leaf early on, the Tanuki suit is just kind of like, you know, this...

much rarer item that you get later in the game and that it's like kind of like a you know a precious power-up that you might want to hoard for certain situations since you have something of an inventory uh but i i i read that that, you know, it was that somebody was Miyamoto himself.

And he basically, with a tanuki suit, he was like, this isn't going to make sense to Western audiences because they don't understand like kind of the folklore associated with this creature.

But I just want to throw it in there anyway.

And it's kind of speaks to like just like, yeah, the inventiveness and the willingness to be like sort of like, we're just going to put shit out there and people will accept it.

and people audiences will be able to understand it you know and audio or or even if they don't understand it they'll be able to appreciate it on its own terms.

Because the idea of like, yeah, this guy is going to get a suit that dresses him up like a tanuki, a creature that's largely unfamiliar to

people in the West.

And then that if you do a certain sort of...

combination of button presses,

if you crouch and press B, I believe, press attack, you turn into a statue that's invincible.

Like, it's so fucking weird and surreal, but then again, so is eating a mushroom and growing to twice your size.

Yeah, I was going to say it's funny that that was even like a consideration that people might not get it because like I could give a fuck.

Like I don't care.

But that's the ultimate thing.

And especially like for like the audience is largely going to be children.

It's like, yeah, kids will just like buy it.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah.

I'm in.

I'm already here.

I love it.

So this game was released in Japan for the Famicom in October of 1988.

Now, the localization scheduling in the pre-internet age was so wild if you look back at it because this game doesn't come to North America until July of 1989 and when it comes out in July it's in arcade cabinets and it's it's in the NES Play Choice one cabinets which were basically like you put a credit in and then you'd have a you'd have like a two-minute play session of a game so like if you wanted to play Super Warrior Bros 3 for

for for you know like 10 months after like 10 months in North America it was only accessible in the arcade version and then it comes to NES finally the home version in February of 1990 So like a year and a half after the initial Japanese release.

The PAL release is even wilder.

Doesn't come out in PAL in European territories until August of 1991.

So basically three years after the Japanese launch and when the Super Nintendo was already released in the United States.

I was a sentient being for

the preamble of Super Mario Bros.

3.

And if you weren't alive at the time or you were not yet conscious,

the atmosphere and the energy, and I was a Sega kid, but like

the knowledge that Mario 3 was coming was the most pervasive childhood meme of these few years.

Like you knew it was going to happen.

And I also want to read from...

From the Wikipedia entry of The Wizard, which was a movie that came out in 1989 that came out before we could play Super Mario Bros.

3.

During 1988, a shortage of ROM chips and the preparation of a version of Super Mario Bros.

2 for the West delayed several of Nintendo's game releases in North America.

One such product was Super Mario Bros.

3.

The delay presented Nintendo with an opportunity to promote the game in a feature film.

So in 1989, Tom Pollock of Universal Studios approached Nintendo of America's marketing department about a video game film inspired by Nintendo video game competitions.

The film was The Wizard, and it followed a

special needs kid

as he traveled across the United States with Fred Savage, who I think played his older brother, to a Nintendo tournament where he would play Super Mario Bros.

3 for the first time.

It was

going to see that movie, which I didn't.

I didn't go to see The Wizard.

I think we rented it at my house, maybe.

The finale of this film, which I've queued up here on YouTube, is just

like two minutes of Super Mario Bros.

3 being shown to an audience.

Yes.

And the kid who's playing the game in the movie does things that you could not conceivably know of.

for a first-time player.

So let's, can we watch a little bit of this?

Yeah, it's basically a theatrical theatrical commercial for the for the game.

And it's, yeah, like you were saying, it's the climax of the film.

So kids are basically, you know, haranguing their parents into buying them tickets so they can see,

you know, again, pre-internet age, we take things for granted the idea that you could see footage for a game before its release.

But here back then, it was only in a movie theater.

I just read about the plot.

Nine-year-old Jimmy Woods suffers from PTSD after his twin sister Jennifer drowned two years earlier.

Prone to randomly wandering away from home, he perpetually carries it around a lunchbox while frequently repeating the word California.

It's, it's, my memory of it is not particularly respectfully handled.

Um, it's it's it's like a it, but it was inspired by both by the who's Tommy, so like the idea of like, okay, this person is the pinball wizard, but he's, you know,

got some disabilities.

And then also, I think it was based on timing, it was partly meant to be like a kid's version of Rainman.

Man.

Super Mario Bros.

To your station!

So there's like a bully kid and our main kid

who are given 10 minutes

to play Super Mario Bros.

3 having never never seen the game before with no access to it in the United States.

Yeah.

At this like proto esports championship and they're playing four points.

The mix of the scoring with the game soundtrack is so bizarre.

It's also dystopian.

100%.

This set that they've created to

highlight Super Mario Bros.

3 looks like something from like

the Running Man.

Like it is

a nightmare, like

two giant screens that open with Terminator 2 style, like metal folds

to reveal Super Mario Bros.

3.

And then a room of...

the room is gray,

like an industrial gray.

And the kids are playing Mario.

And the highlight of this sequence is when the young kid

discovers the warp whistle by crouching

for three to five seconds, whatever it is, in one of the levels, in order to disappear behind the

scenery and get the first warp whistle and go to a different world.

before.

And

you could not have known that that was possible.

Yeah,

I don't know.

It's kind of amazing that it exists.

I mean, it's like, you know, as cynical as you want to be about some of these IP movies that come out these days, like

that was as blatant as it gets back in like 1989.

It was just like,

this is a Nintendo commercial that we're going to release as a feature film.

The bully, at one point, they stop at his house or something.

I haven't watched this film since i was like infinity young uh they

the bully has the power glove yes right yeah and he shows it to our main characters and it's like you'll never understand like the power that this glove has

and then uses it to play a video game and everybody is astonished and it was effective because when you watched it you you knew it was expensive because the bully's rich and you also knew that if there was a possibility of you getting the glove, you would be unlike all of your peers because nobody had the power glove.

I had a friend who had the power glove in elementary school, got it because of the wizard, and we were all like, holy shit, it's the fucking power glove, and then you use it, and it's like, just sucks, it's completely, completely unworkable.

Um, but uh, the yeah, but but so the game itself is being super hype in this context.

I also thought we could play this Super Mario Bros.

3 USA commercial, which I remember from when it was airing back in the day.

And this one also kind of just speaks to just sort of how omnipresent the marketing was for this.

So we get a bunch of kids in multicolored

outfits canning Mario.

The camera is pulling back

to reveal

they are all forming Mario's face with their bodies and it stretches it across Super Mario Bros.

3 from Nintendo.

The continental U.S.

power.

And yeah, that now you're playing with power tag.

That was the scariest thing I've ever seen.

Very cultish.

Yeah.

That commercial, though, also was on a budget and scale that video game commercials weren't during the 80s and not

in the United States.

Like, usually it would just be like a set of like screen grabs and

clips, and it would be like, Rygar is the craziest game you'll ever play.

You gotta get it.

Go get it.

Ask your parents for Rygar.

And that would be it.

Yeah.

But this was like somebody had seen an Apple commercial and was like, no, what we need to do is convey the scope of Mario's presence on planet Earth.

So children should form his face.

And we should zoom out and reveal just

the icon of Mario's face.

There's no footage of the game in that commercial.

Yeah,

I think this all speaks to just like the amount of hype, the amount, like you were saying, the marketing budget here, the amount that they were of money, but also just the amount of money they put in this product in like...

generally, because this had a huge budget, I think was the most expensive video game ever made at the time.

And so to have that going in, you know,

there's a version where that goes very badly, but instead they essentially were like, here's the godfather.

You know, here's this going to be this

totemic game that's going to influence scores of games that follow in its wake.

So I guess let's talk about actually playing this game unless we have any other context we want to get to.

I'm ready to talk.

Oh, I did have one other, one other thing I should, because I watched this documentary.

It's like an hour, 10 minutes by gaming historian,

their YouTube channel, The Story of Super Mario Bros.

3.

And the one detail they had, which is just how insane the workflow was in the 80s, where the level designers did level layouts by hand on graph paper.

So

the idea of like designing this and like, you know, you're not using Mario Maker, obviously, but that the process was that cumbersome.

They were doing it by hand.

They're just drawing out a level and then just giving it to a programmer and it would take a full day to be playable.

So like as far as play testing this thing, it was just like an extremely cumbersome workflow.

They should have just used Mario.

They probably should have used Mario Maker.

What have cleaned things up?

They could have just used the Switch and

make it in Mario Make.

Honestly, use the Wii U.

Yet the stylus is even easier.

They fucked up so bad.

Mario Brothers 3

has been

released on

fucking everything.

Right.

And I think that's also something we should touch on as we're talking about this game, which is it originally releases for the NES.

Then it comes out in Super Mario All-Stars in a re

skinned version for the Super NES.

It comes out on the Game Boy Advance as Super Mario World 4, Super Mario 3 Advance, or something like that.

I forget what the subtitle is exactly.

Super Mario Advance 4, Super Mario Bros.

3.

Yeah.

Very good confusing.

It comes out for

the Wii virtual console.

It comes out for the 3DS virtual console.

It comes out on the Switch on Nintendo Online.

And it also comes out on the NES Mini, which is

that sort of the little guy that you plug into an HDMI input on any modern television.

Which version did you guys play?

Well, okay, so as a kid, I played the NES version.

I had this game on cartridge and played the shit out of it.

For this playthrough,

I just went and played on the Switch, which I had some annoyances with, specifically the Joy-Cons.

It was just like a little tough to control this game.

But when I used a, I switched over to the pro controller and had a much easier time playing it on the big screen.

Yeah, I started playing it on my analog pocket.

And then just for convenience later, I did end up playing through most of it on the Switch.

And the Joy-Cons did make it a little tough, but I just had to retrain my brain to use that bad D-pad.

those those the d-pad sucks there's one maneuver that you have that like you have to do a lot for to progress through the levels which is

running um sliding and then ducking as you're using your momentum as you're ducking yes uh to get under a block but it's it's a really difficult thing to uh to execute not not hard to execute with a normal d-pad but with that like you know this button-based d-pad on the on the switch it's it's uh it's pretty tricky and and honestly painful yeah but which which one did you play, Heather?

Well,

if I hadn't been sick for the majority of the last few weeks, I was planning on playing it on an NES on a PVM.

That wasn't an option for me.

So I was like, well, what physical copy do I have of Super Mario Bros.

3?

And I have the Game Boy Advance version.

There you go.

And the Game Boy Advance also has a great button layout.

So I was like, I'll play it on the Game Boy Advance.

Guys,

they added voices to the Game Boy Advance version of this game.

And it is the worst upgrade in the history of Mario.

Like, when you play,

when you play like

Super Mario All-Stars, it's just like, oh, I guess if you don't like

the authenticity of the NES version and the sound of the NES version and you like this updated 16-bit palette, then this is a fine way to play it.

I don't like the All-Stars remake because it doesn't feel sharp in the same way that the original NES version plays.

But that

All-Stars version compared to the Game Boy Advanced version is like the difference between eating a cheeseburger for dinner or dog food.

I've pulled up the sound clips of the Mario samples from the Game Boy Advanced version, and every fucking time you get a power-up, Charles Martinette goes, Just what I needed!

And it's that's too much.

It makes you not want to get power-ups because, like, the difference between that sort of like almost cloud sound when you get a

leaf in Super Mario 3 that boom,

um, or when you get like a fire flower and it goes,

the difference between that and Martinette screaming at you, just what what I needed, or lucky.

It's so bad.

Can we play just a little bit of it?

Yeah, here we go.

See here.

Let's go.

Here I come.

Here I go.

I'm moving now.

Bravo.

A crystal.

Gotcha.

Lucky.

Yahoo.

And set a dumb.

Woo-hoo.

No problem.

Oh.

This is actually audio for my sex tape.

Here I go.

Oh, God.

So they also have voices for Luigi.

And Princess, if you're playing Super Mario 2,

it is horrible.

It is such a downgrade that I eventually, like you guys, played on the Switch,

which my biggest complaint is the physical placement of the B and A buttons

are

at an angle, and the game is designed for those buttons to be horizontal.

Yes, like that's another issue.

Yeah, so that you can hold down one and tap the other button with the bottom of your thumb.

You gotta plot.

It's the only way you can do that on the Switch.

Yeah, it's it's it's a much more difficult implementation, so much so that I thought about getting the NES controller for the Switch, like the, you know, the one you can buy online, but then I was like, what the fuck am I going to, I don't need this, and so I didn't get it.

I had the, I, I had an import Game Boy Advance, and I got the, um, I got Super Mario Bros.

USA, which is what they called Super Mario Bros.

2 for the Japanese release.

And I do remember the voices from that.

I do remember booting up with Super Mario USA!

And like the novelty of it was like, oh, that's kind of cool.

But like, yeah, I'd forgotten how present they are in the gameplay itself.

That is literally distracting.

Yeah.

This is what I needed.

Just what I needed.

Especially because you also get that.

There's a million power-ups that you'll get in any particular level of Super Mario 3 that you don't actually, like, you get like multiple leaves.

And he's already a raccoon.

And then he...

gets the leaf and it's like, just what I needed.

And it's awful.

It's so fuck.

It sucks.

Can I just say that as far as options options to play this game, and you were talking about the unavailability of Chrono Trigger earlier.

I think the Switch presentation of it is honestly,

especially if you're new to this game and you're like, ah, I was going to mess around with this a little bit.

Just go with the Switch version.

Just go with the Nintendo Switch Online.

You know, open up the NES collection and play Super Mario Bar.

There's three there.

Because

it seems to be, you know,

as far as my memory, it seems to be extremely well emulated.

And yeah, I mean, the quality of life thing, which you can choose to use or not, but if you want to just sort of like

kind of

fudge your way through things, you can, you know,

you can use save states and you can, you know, rewind

as needed if you want to redo things.

But yeah, I think that makes it, it is kind of nice that it's just available in that way and it makes it a lot more approachable for people who are approaching this in modern times.

There's actually two versions of

Super Mario 3 on Nintendo Online on the Switch.

One is the full game, and then the other is one that's like marked special.

I didn't realize at first that there were two versions and booted up the special version, and it's just the final,

it's World 8.

And you start with 35 Marios and a ton of power-ups in your

like base menu.

And I was like, holy shit, I have no memory of playing

this much into the game and having all this shit.

Like having 35 lives in Super Mario 3 is not that big of a deal because they, they are extremely generous with the lives that you can get.

Yeah.

But I was like, fuck, I don't, when did I save this?

I have no memory of this.

So make sure that you play the

the standard version and not the special version.

So what you were just saying about like the availability of one-ups, of extra lives, I think kind of speaks to like how well designed this game is in terms of

it.

It was before

we reached the point where

the discussion was like, hey, what if we don't have lives altogether?

What if we just dispense with that?

What if we just dispense with the idea of game-overs?

What if you just sort of like can try this thing over and over again?

But we hadn't reached that point yet.

We're kind of at

an interim point, but they kind of had the solution of like, well, let's make one-ups an ample supply.

We'll make a game over much less likely than will happen in Super Mario Bros.

1.

And it's packed with things, with all sorts of like mini-games, which give you opportunities to get more lives in addition to what you can get within the levels themselves.

But honestly, like, it's very easy to time getting the star at the end of every level.

So at the end of every level, you exit out of the stage, which also speaks to kind of like the way this is presented, which we'll talk about.

You exit out of the stage into a field of black, kind of behind the scenes, if you will, will,

and then you, or off stage,

and then you jump into a box that's got a sort of a spinning slot machine treatment where you can get a star, a flower, or a mushroom.

It's really easy to get it, like I figured it out as a kid, to hit it in the corner and you get the star every time.

And if you get three stars, you get five up.

You get five extra lives.

And that's just like a part of like finishing these levels.

You do this in a row.

You're just going to accumulate more and more lives to where you're in the 60s or 70s by the time you reach World 8.

And so you're not set up in a situation where you're going to have a game, get a game over and have to repeat a bunch of progress.

I don't know.

It was just like, it just feels like a really thoughtful approach to be like, hey, let's make this thing as we're not, we don't need to nerf the difficulty of the gameplay,

but we will like make the let the player have a bunch of different chances while still adhering to the conventions of the day.

Yeah, and like, so this is my like first time going through this game like with any real seriousness, right?

So like i i i didn't finish it i'll say but i'm at the end of world six and i don't think i would have got there had it not been for you know the modern conveniences available to me on the switch you know being able to have a save state and also like being able to rewind because i'm not i'm not trying to prove something right i'm not like i know i know how to play a mario game but for this exercise i wanted to try to see as much of it as i could and i i i so i did rewind some some deaths that i thought were cheap that i was like i know i can't i'm better than this but for the most part it is like you said they're not they're not stingy with power-ups or lives i i think where i'm at right now i think i have like 50 something lives yeah and it's like i'm never gonna i'm not gonna burn through all those But even if you aren't using the rewind, even if you aren't like, you know, cheesing your way through it, however you want to characterize it, I think it's fine to play that way or do whatever you want.

But I mean, like, even if you're not doing that, you still would accumulate a bunch of lives in just a normal, a normal playthrough.

I, I use the rewind feature when I became so impatient with the game that I would make an unforced error.

Uh, so, like, especially on the auto-scrolling, because I, I, I, I like playing Mario 3 like it's a Sonic game.

Like, I like going as fast as you can through a level.

And the levels are really short, which was also

lovely during a time of recovery because it was like I could play like two or three levels and then save and be done.

I think this was retained through during Wonder, by the way.

It's just, it's like they feel like a little sketch.

Yeah, it was, it was, uh, it was a fantastic, like, like, oh, it's just a treat.

Each of these levels is a treat, but the levels that weren't a treat are the fucking auto-scrolling ones, which I have zero patience for.

And I'll be wedged up against the, you know, right side of the screen, pressing against the wall, trying to make it move faster.

And that would be often when I would like die from like a surprise because you're not supposed to play those levels that way.

And I'm just like, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.

I want to get to the next one where it's not auto-scrolling.

But I think that was also the first time that an auto-scrolling level appears in a Super Mario Brothers.

100%.

No, yeah.

This was they had to add additional chips to the cartridges to have the horsepower to be be able to pull this off.

And so auto-scrolling was like a new feature.

It was a novel feature for the Mario franchise at the time.

A feature for the worst.

And I wish they hadn't implemented it.

It is not the, it is a punishing experience for somebody who wants to run and jump and fly across these levels.

Because, man,

I don't want to stand on a donut block.

Let's rewind a little bit.

There's a ton of new kinds of blocks in this game, and that's a delight.

I love that.

There's

blocks.

Yeah, it used to be that, you know, you, you, you could hit a block and either there'd be coins in it or a power-up or you destroy the block.

But there are so many kinds of fucking blocks in this game.

There's like, you know, frozen blocks with stuff inside of them that if you hit with a fire flower melts the ice and you get the stuff inside, which feels like magic.

Oh, there's...

There's like blocks that are like white shimmering versions of your traditional brick blocks.

You see what just happened?

I'm sorry, I don't want to just talk about what happened in the stream yard, but you put your hands together and hearts came out of them.

Oh, that's the that's just a built-in Macintosh feature now.

Is that true?

Yeah, it's it's built into the eyesight camera

after Sonoma that you can like you can put up a peace sign and I think you'll get balloons.

What the hell?

If you do like uh, if you do like

a double,

I don't know, like double hole.

This is wild.

We're seeing all this on Others camera as she lies in.

I think, yeah, include this on the record.

If you give a thumbs up,

you get a thumbs up.

Yeah, you got a thought bell bowl next to your head with a thumbs up.

This is wild.

This is like Cloud Atlas shit.

But it's all built into Sonoma.

Yeah.

And now, if you do teletherapy, there's a warning on your teletherapy that's like like

the balloons and hearts and lasers are not supposed to be a part of your therapeutic experience.

We cannot disable them on our end, and we are very sorry because it's distressing.

I mean, if you're throwing up the horns when you're talking about something pretty.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, like, if you were to just say, like, you know, this is, this is a horrible example.

Yeah.

but if you were like you know i i watched i watched this this person get shot two times he got shot two times

and then balloons appear

just watched a cascade of balloons float from below heavy frame

So yeah,

I forget what caused the hearts or what gesture I was doing, but oh, there's blocks.

Yes,

There are sort of shimmery white blocks that you can pick up and kick or throw, like as if they're a turtle shell.

Yes.

And also, there was that mechanic that you could pick up a turtle shell.

And then there's an enemy that can pick them up and throw them at you.

Yes.

And when that shit happens, you're like, this game is so good that they've taught me about these blocks for a long time.

And then as soon as an enemy picked it up, I was like, oh, fuck.

You know, like, it's

big world.

Fucking big world, man.

Big world's great.

I love big world.

It is.

Big world's great.

And they, and they, and the game continually asks, like, if this, then what?

It's like, here's the, you know, which is like a sketch comedy approach, but it's the idea of like, we have this premise.

How can we get exploring it further and further and further?

And how can we keep iterating on hiding in it?

Like what you talked about with the

ice blocks.

So there's a, in the, the ice land, which we should talk about because that's World Six because that's where you got to.

But in the Iceland, so there's, there's a stretch where there's uh frozen coins in blocks above uh frozen uh the black piranha plants the ones that are just like stationary on the ground and that was a thing where like you know you want to melt the the coins on top without melting the plants on the bottom but i just remember doing that as a kid and feeling like a genius yeah like i got the coins but the plants didn't get me like like of course that's what the game is trying to get you to do but just to engender that feeling it's just like i i don't know i i it's it's perpetual delights so just everything is everything is so joyous in this like what i was talking about with the same sort of fucking feeling playing through this game again um

And like you mentioned, you were a detractor of the auto-scrolling.

I like the auto-scrolling chiefly because of its association with the airship levels, which to me are such a highlight.

And when you get to World 8 and it's like, oops, all airships, I think that's so rad.

And it was like, again, such a mind-blowing thing to experience.

Now all of a sudden, we've got these different airships.

We got a fucking boat.

We got a tank.

You know, we've got basically no net.

Like this airship is just like all jump, all, you know,

insta-fail jumps I've got to make.

Like, like, it's just, it's just such a great, again, you know, heightening an exploration of this thing that was established.

And I also think just such a great climax for each of the worlds, which I'm all over the place here.

But in terms of things that they added to the Mario Canon and also kind of just established for gaming in general, the idea of these hub worlds for each individual, you know, each of these worlds is divided basically into a different biome that affects the design of each of these individual levels.

And that there's some non-linearity in terms of like, you don't have complete choice, complete freedom of movement, but you can choose which stages to do in which order.

There's some that you can avoid or skip entirely based on items or just based on how you progress through the map.

All that shit was such an incredible novelty in 1988.

I really loved that.

And I loved...

Like, yeah, sometimes I would make my choice depending on whether or not I wanted to deal with the Hammer Bros yet.

Because sometimes the Hammer Bros are there on screen.

You can see them.

You're like, I have to go that way, but there's another path right now.

Like, I'll do them later.

Like, sometimes I'm like, I don't want to see these guys.

Uh-huh.

They bother me.

I don't like the Hammer Bros that much.

I love the Hammer Brothers.

I love just like, and I also, because there's an element of like, you can feel like you can outwit them.

Oh, yeah.

Like, if you get like, oh, I'm just going to, I'm going to fire up an invincibility star and go right in there and kill these guys immediately.

Yeah.

Or, or, you know, you can use the music box to put them to sleep, or you can just avoid them because they move around on the map.

Like, all that shit, I don't know.

It's just, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's another layer to the game

on top of the platforming.

And it also makes the map not just like purely functional, but also like a thing that you're also playing to some degree.

I, you know what, guys, I like, I don't, because I haven't really seen these enemies a lot.

The fucking, the flying, the flying Goombas that drop little Goombas that make it so you can't jump that good.

This game loves babies.

It's

the paragoombas are dropping babies.

The big berthas spitting babies.

The squid, what I can't remember the name is called, the bloopers.

I got little baby bloopers.

There's one of the water stages, just a phalanx of just bloopers with babies and big berthas with babies.

And then there's just like the electrified sea urchins everywhere.

And it's just so many hazards.

It's like a bullet hell Mario stage.

And you're also got the clunky sort of swimming controls, but it's so tense.

And it's,

again, it just feels like a completely unique level within this collection of of unique levels.

I was going to say to that, to that tension,

it's tense, but

back to the,

I think it was the designer, developer whose quote you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.

It's not impossible and it's never unfair.

Like it is, it is like you'll have to be patient in order to learn things.

And sometimes the learning of something will require your life, but it's never like, how could I possibly do this?

And

I

rented, or my parents rented an NES and Super Mario Bros.

3 from a blockbuster when I was a kid.

And I was able to beat the game.

I might not have beaten it the first time we rented it.

Maybe we rented it twice, but it was something that a child could do.

And now, as an adult, I play the levels and I'm like, God, these fucking levels are so good that it is still a challenge for me, but it is not damning.

It is not, uh,

it's not like going up a flight of stairs in Dark Souls and there's just a ball that rolls down and kills you.

And you never, like, you're like, well, how could I have known that that was going to happen?

Or, or like, you know, a game I mentioned earlier, like a Super Meat Boy, where the whole idea is like, this is meant to be punishingly challenging.

Like, it wasn't meant to be

that.

There are some very difficult levels in this game, but it is meant to be, again, approachable for

beginners.

And I also played this game as a kid and i played this out of this game as a kid i mean i had this game um because we had an nes in our home uh i you know i i've i've beaten this at least 10 times um and the way i used to play this though as a kid involved a thing that we haven't talked about yet which is the warp whistles and that was a big part of again just like the the progression like kind of feeling and there were warp pipes in super mario brothers one there were warps in super mario brothers uh two uh slash usa uh slash dokie dokie panic and I believe they were in Lost Levels as well.

So this is a thing that already existed, but the warp whistles is something that's borrowed from The Legend of Zelda, felt like much bigger than that, and it felt like much more of a discovery, especially the way they were hidden.

Yeah, the one where you have to duck behind the scenery, you go behind the scenes of the game, and you run behind the exit of it, and that takes you to a warp whistle.

Or there's another one where you break a block that looks like it's at the corner of the map, but it actually opens up another section of the map in the desert world.

And over there, there's another warp whistle.

Like, the way I used to play this game as a kid is I would collect the three warp whistles on the first level and the second level and then I would the first world and the second world and then I would warp to I would use those to warp to like you know world seven and then world eight or whatever.

And so effectively what I what I was doing was like speedrunning the game.

Wow.

But this was a time before I had anyone had the vocabulary for speedrunning.

But that's how I used to like to play this thing, to just try to get through it as quickly as possible.

And I felt like I was getting one over on the games.

Like, ha ha, I skipped all this stuff.

The way I played it this time, and I have played it like this before, but you know, it's been a long time.

I played every single stage on this playthrough.

I just went through and played absolutely everything.

And I will say there are some stages that aren't, you know, great, but there are some that are absolutely awesome.

And there's also like, just as far as the worlds go, you know.

I think worlds like the pipe maze, which is World 7, is like a little uneven and has some levels that are more puzzles than platformers or that have like, you know, like a trick to them uh that's the same thing actually honestly happens it might just be the back end of the game um in world six the ice land like there's like one there's one stage where there's basically a puzzle to the stage which is you have to that thing you were talking about earlier heather you have to grab a turtle shell and fly with it which is so uncomfortable so cumbersome to do and then the so you have to carry the the turtle shell um it from an underground level above to a level level where you have to use the shell to use it to break a bunch of different blocks.

And I like, I remembered, as I got to this place, I was like, oh, yeah, I remember this part, but it was like, it is really, really annoying.

And I think as they compare it with a game like Wonder or even Super Mario World, which was the game right after this, I think they excised a lot of that sort of like puzzly stuff.

There were still secrets in it, but the whole level wasn't necessarily built around that kind of gimmick.

That,

what you just described

was impossible to me because...

I had to look it up how to solve that level.

I had so much trouble with it.

And also, the button placement, like as we talked about earlier, made that particular puzzle insanely difficult because it just i had to like you said i had to clot i had to like hold uh the one button and then with my other hand press the other button at the same time instead of being able to just do it as one fluid thing it was it was so hard yeah it's that's a pain in the ass and so there are some stages that are kind of duds but overall they they're they they mostly really work and are really fun and there's also that you know there'll be a stage like i forget it might be a world seven stage where basically the whole gimmick of it is that you're just grabbing invincibility stars and just sprinting through it as quickly as possible, wherever that comes in the game.

And like, ones like that are just like, oh, again, this is just pure joy.

This is just fun.

This is just a break for the player.

One of my favorite stages is just that you go through the stage backwards.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Like, like you, like,

you're always going left to right in these games.

And one of the stages, you're just, you're dropped off.

Like, you go through a pipe and then you are at the, what would be end of the stage and you go right to left and that alone i'm like holy fuck guys like of course somebody in some meeting was like why not make the stage go the other way and that was enough for that stage to be like exciting um i like the uh you know i also there would just be surprises that'll that are thrown out you know uh when you get to the this was a thing that i remember blowing my mind as a kid and it's very fun to see again is just like when you get to the desert stage where there's the angry sun staring at you the whole time and at a certain point he flies down and attacks you, and you got to avoid him.

But then also that you can kill him is another thing.

But again, just, you know, it's just, it's such an, it's such inventiveness, and it's such a

it's just such a way to add like a just like a little bit of different flair to each of these stages.

Yeah, I was very surprised by it.

I was pretty surprised by the like just the straight-up difficulty, but like the the it the difficulty never got in the way of how fun it was.

Like then that's that's, I think, the mark of a great Mario game because Wonder has that same sort of feel.

We're like, this is this, there was a level I spoke about a couple weeks ago where you have to jump on these blocks in time.

And it took me like a hundred tries, and I did it.

And not a second, not a single attempt was unfun to do.

This is the Wonder stage jump, jump, jump, yeah.

Yeah, that, that is, like, weirdly one of the hardest stages in the game, and it's like in World Two.

Yeah, it was, it was insane.

But that also speaks to, you know, Wonder, this, this one has a little bit more of a linear difficulty progression, whereas Wonder is kind of like weirdly kind of the same difficulty throughout.

I feel like it never, like, it's all kind of just equally approachable, except for like the special stages, or like each of the worlds will have like one punishingly difficult stage that's fully optional.

But that kind of speaks to like, hey, 30 years removed from the original, what are some ways we can mix up the formula?

Or what are some ways we can make this like even more approachable, but still have some stuff that's in there for, you know, the more expert players?

Yeah,

I feel like I'm talking a lot here.

I had the time of my life with this game.

I was so happy to revisit this.

I just thought it was so fucking fun.

I was also shocked how fun it was.

Yeah.

Like, I expected to get past.

We haven't even fucking talked about the music.

No.

Like, the fucking just the World 1-1

map has some of the best tune in a Super Mario game.

Like, it's just so catchy.

And I think, Nick, you highlighted one that you love from Ice World.

Yeah, so the score by Koji Kondo, I figured we'd play this just because this is, we're actually going to do an upcoming episode where we're going to talk about ice stage music.

And this is one that I would have picked, but I figured we might as well play it here.

Here's just the loop that plays in the Iceland

for World 6.

You know, again, in context, the way you're hearing a lot of these are like, hey, I'm listening, I'm hearing like a 10 to 15 second chunk of this while I'm trying to decide which level to play.

So, like, it has to be like very bite-sized, but I don't know.

I always like this track just for like how minimally it's able to just sort of evoke this sort of like ethereal, mystical, wintry land.

It sounds like ice.

It does sound like ice, Matt.

That's a better way to say it.

It sounds like ice.

It sounds like ice.

It sounds like ice.

Can we play maybe the

World One map one also?

Yeah, we should be, we should, we should play some of the more famous tracks on this one, too.

I love this fucking song so much.

I just put it in the chat.

Booting up the game, Mario, like he is comprised of stars, right?

And they coalesce into his form,

which is what the fuck.

That's awesome.

It's like, here he is.

It's Mario.

And then this fucking tune kicks in, and you're like, oh, man, this game's going to be great.

This also, and we're looking at the map screen here as we're hearing this.

You just also get a sense of just how, or you just, just at a glance, just how dense with detail this is.

Because, yeah, you've got the numbered worlds, but then you've also got like a mushroom house.

You've got, you know, just like a

one that's just like a spade on a card.

You've got a fortress.

You've got a castle with a help bubble coming out of it.

Obviously, you've got the Wandering Hammer Brother.

But then also things like everything has like eyes in this.

Like

all of the plant life has eyes.

Like it all like feels like very alive.

And like the plant, there's like a very simple looping animation of like the hills.

bopping back and forth in time with the music.

And the hills have eyes, but in an ominous way.

Oh, God.

That really scared me.

Matt, no, it's not that kind of hill.

But it is just sort of thing of just like, oh, this map, again, there's a world where that isn't even there.

It's just a completely linear progression.

And if all these levels are in sequence one after the other, like in Super Mario Bros.

1, this is still a great game.

But the addition of the, you know, the mini maps, the addition of the overworld just adds so much to it.

Yeah, I like seeing that.

I like being able to, like, you know, being able to call your shot, pick which level you want to do first or whatever.

didn't, I didn't find any secrets.

I know that there are secrets and stuff, but I didn't, I was focused on, I played through the end of level six or whatever, World Six, but I did every single stage.

I didn't, I couldn't skip anything.

And it wasn't for a lack of trying.

I'm like, I just don't know where the stuff is.

I have no idea.

I think the issue is you don't have like fifth-grade classmates you can ask about.

No,

I got, I could have called some, some, some kids, but

it is like, okay, but the secrets are like, are like very secret.

And it is clever how this this game kind of adds to the replayability by trickling those out in the letters from the princess.

And I'm not sure how much

you're processing those as you go through it, but you get the letter from the princess after

you clear a world.

And that one will have like a little bit of like, you know,

just

a clue about where a warp whistle is or something like that.

Or just explain like an extra bit of functionality you might not know about a power-up or an item.

But yeah, a lot of that stuff I just remember being circulated by oral tradition.

It was just like kids would just tell, just tell other kids, like, you know, like, oh, yeah, if you duck on this block, you know, for five seconds, then you'll fall behind it, you know.

And the big secrets are like, I don't know, I think the big secrets just are the warp whistles, really.

Like, that's the stuff that that's really, and I do think that's the thing.

Then, Super Mario World, like, look, I'll say after having played through this again, I liked it as much or more than I already did, which is a lot.

I still prefer Super Mario World, even though I think Super Mario Bros.

3 is just like the more impactful

and more impressive game, given the hardware that it was on and given that it was innovating all this stuff, whereas Mario World was just iterating it.

But, you know, if you ask me what I'd rather play, I'd rather play World or I'd rather honestly play maybe Wonder just because it's more contemporary.

But this game absolutely holds up, and everything that it was trying, all the big swings it was taking, that it connected with all of them is really just staggering.

It doesn't ever really feel its age either.

Like, it kind of is just like, yeah, it looks, it looks how it looks.

It looks like an NES game, but like it like i don't know if this game came out this year you'd be like this rocks it's it's so good no that's a good i mean that's a good look that that for me portal is always the big one of those portal is like i feel like if portal comes out in 2023 as is it's one of the best games of the year um i i think mario 3 is you know if you again if you add some quality of life things like

obviously clean up the UI and make that a little bit less messy maybe get rid of like points which are completely superfluous, but it was just a thing that was retained because it was a convention of arcade games that became a convention of home games.

Add like some checkpoints, you know, just add like a few things to make it a little bit more approachable.

It would feel like a contemporary game.

Maybe some voices, maybe Mario.

Yeah, maybe it's like what I need.

Let's go.

I want to say that one of the things that this game rewards you for is your experience of what

Nick earlier called the if this is true, then what else is true, like uh, philosophy.

And that is, if you use a warp whistle and you're on the island with the warps, and then you use a warp whistle, that you are rewarded for that choice.

Yes, like it, that small moment is not punished, but instead is like, oh, you want to use both warp whistles right here?

Okay, then this is what's going to happen.

Is I don't, it's, it's fantastic design philosophy that you wouldn't just immediately warp to the exact same place that you are, but rather that you would warp to the end of the game.

It's just wonderful.

It's just so, it's pleasant.

It's such a pleasant game.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's absolutely pleasant.

It's a great, uh, yeah, it's also pleasant and charming.

There's, there's shit in the later levels that hasn't yet appeared in the early levels, like the coin ship,

like a shit, like an airship full of coins where you're like, oh my God, there's more stuff happening, you know?

Well, and also just like the

running match game that appears is just like, oh, it's just a fun little extra thing that, again, is another way to get power-ups and add to your inventory and add to your life count.

I've seen memes of the

ones that's like, where it's like three rows and they're like spinning faces and body parts of

where you have to line them up to make a solid picture of whether it's a star, a plant, or a mushroom.

I've seen a meme that's like, this is when all of our trauma started.

Like, it's basically like, this is when we became stressed, was when we had to play those things.

I was like, I've never experienced that.

And I did, I understand.

Like, that must have been so crazy.

Nick,

you're triggered.

I watched the world record speed run for this game, which is three minutes and six seconds.

But it is awesome because

it uses a glitch, but the glitch is in world 7-1.

But up until that point, it is just mastery, is just pixel-perfect perfection of playing this game

to get the warp whistles to get to 7-1.

Because you can't, like,

there's no way to cheat that.

The only way you can do it is to actually progress.

So, you know, you're just watching this player blaze through the first

few maps and then get the warp whistles and then they get to 7-1 and then they do this crazy glitch where a magic pipe appears and then the whole screen goes to

garbage data and then the ending cinematic plays.

But it was one of those things where it's like, this is a fucking rad speedrun.

That's awesome.

And just like the mix of both breaking the game, but also having to play it really, really well.

I'm going to have to seek that out and watch it.

That sounds amazing.

I just have one thing in my notes that I want to make sure that I say because to me, this is like, this was just a thing that stuck with me as I was playing at this time.

And I'll start it with a question, and we can address the question in a second.

But my question is: is attention to detail,

is that just something that signals quality, or is that what itself makes a game great?

Because for me, the animation of the shell spin when you defeat one of the Koopa Lings, when you take down like Roy Koopa or Morton Koopa Jr.

or Iggy Cooper or whatever, and they all have great names, mostly named after pop stars.

The shell will spin and it will spin horizontally.

It will spin like do a flat spin and then it will turn on its end and spin some more and that will signal that it's been ultimately defeated.

And that spin, that vertical spin looks so fucking great.

And this also wasn't a time where you're like, oh, we can just like rotate this sprite in 3D space.

Like it had to be hand animated.

And so like, like, it's just

such a gorgeous bit of animation that's purely flair.

Like absolutely does not need to be there.

He could do a flat spin and disappear and it would accomplish the same thing.

But

it's so satisfying when he spins on end, flies up, and then the rod of power comes back and you turn the king back from a piranha plant into a guy or whatever.

Yeah.

From a dog into a sultan, whatever the math is.

I like the seal

sort of nosing his crown up and down.

Yes, yeah.

I like that.

But is that like, like, that's the sort of thing where I'm just like, oh, this is such a, this is such incredible attention to detail.

Is this why I like this game so much?

Or I guess it doesn't have to be a binary question.

Or but because they had like the the creative leeway

slash the budget

slash the time slash the you know just the the the talent to be able to execute that is that why is does that just indicate the overall quality of the game?

It's it's so I'm trying to think of games that are extremely detail oriented and unenjoyable.

Um, and I think maybe you're on to something, Nick, because even games that I don't care for myself, like Monster Hunter games, I can watch the animation and detail in Monster Hunter games where it's like you'll watch like a cat cook a dish and you're like, god damn, I want to be in this space.

And

wanting to occupy the space of a video game is so much of what's required for a game to be good.

Because, like, when Cyberpunk 2077 came out in vanilla mode and the game was absolutely fucking broken, you still wanted to occupy the space so that you could look at the world.

And that's the hump that it got you had to get over in order to play through cars falling out of the sky or characters suddenly exploding.

And

this is as if you took all of that attention to detail and also implemented astonishingly tight gameplay mechanics themselves, along with a spirit of wonder and adventure and exploration and discovery.

So that's why it's perfect.

You know, like

every time you find out that Nintendo has like, oh, the sound of a power-up is actually the sound of going down a flag or something like that.

You're like, it's a marvel.

uh of that attention to detail.

So I think moving forward, I'm going to think about games that way.

You've unlocked unlocked something for me, which is like, well, part of why I like Fortnite is that you can't, if you kill a warthog, you can eat its meat, but you could also ride a warthog if you jump on its back.

And neither of those things is necessary to win the game.

Right.

Yeah, it's just purely, it's just purely flair.

Speaking of which, I forgot to mention that it was announced that Eminem is joining Fortnite.

Wait, Rochelle is nodding vigorously.

Oh, I'm buying that immediately.

Which I was like, okay, so what is Fortnite?

Who is it for?

Our producer, apparently.

I don't know anymore, right?

I don't know.

I mean, like,

is it nostalgia?

Are you still a fan?

It's just, yeah, nostalgia and it's just funny.

Right, yeah.

That is a huge part of it.

It's just like, what the fuck is this doing in here?

And that's why I bought Giannis, even though I'm a fan of Giannis.

I was like, this is absurd to have, you know, an NBA MVP playable in this with a, you know, fucking shotgun.

Right, yeah.

If you, if you have LeBron James getting in a shotgun fight with

an anthropomorphic cat.

Right.

Uh, and

Eminem.

Like, that's funny.

Yeah.

I like it when it's essential.

I like it when it's not a character and it's it's a guy.

Yeah.

Like when it's a guy, it's just so funny.

I think that absolutely does add to it.

Yeah.

But sometimes licensing-wise, it has to be like it's like, you know, whatever.

It's Will Smith as Hancock, you know, because that's all they can secure the licensing for.

I feel like this is one of those games that's just impossible to cover because it's like, you know, it's like,

there's just so much to say.

You want to feel like you did it justice.

I watched this

super, I watched this

dude who did a YouTube, this YouTuber who did a review of Super Mario Bros.

3, and then he was just like, I think I did a bad job.

I don't know.

It was just like, it's hard to talk about.

Because when it's something that's so good and so iconic, and it's just like you, that you feel like there's so much left on the table, but I don't know.

Is there anything else that anyone wants to add here?

I was just going to say, like, as my first

playthrough, while it isn't complete, I'm going to go home and finish this off because I just can't believe I like

that that it exists.

It's just a, it's a miracle that it's still good you know what I mean like there are so many good Mario games and obviously we did do a 2d Mario rank uh earlier this month and pointed out that there are some mid ones but the ones that are really great just remain great and that's like so good and so special I love that yeah it's perfect which is weird It's weird that it's perfect.

It's just perfect.

Yeah, I mean,

it's just an incredible fucking video game.

You know, and I guess that there were probably there.

I could see some people who are younger or maybe just have never played this before approaching this game that's, you know, whatever,

coming up on 40 years old and just being like, you know, what the fuck was the big deal here?

I guess what I would add to anyone there is just like, it's...

It's tough to put into,

I hope we're trying to put into context at least what this was like at the time, what this felt like on such comparatively crude hardware at a time when so many of what are now conventions had yet to be invented and a lot of them were invented by this game, what it was like to have this fucking meteorite rocket into the earth and to experience it.

It just really is like a its influence is still felt today.

Things like you know

And just one little thing, like the team behind id Software, the core team there came together, or I don't know if they came together, they were already together, but one of their first big projects was a fan port of Super Mario Bros.

3 to PC.

So it's like, you know, even indirectly there, they do that, then they end up doing that Nintendo does not authorize it, obviously, but it was like kind of an amazing thing that they pulled off.

They make the Commander Keen franchise and ultimately go on to make Doom.

So

yeah, but

it's just a game that I think influenced so many developers and I think influenced the taste of so many people who still play games like Heather and myself.

I'm really glad we got to cover it and that I got to spend some time with it.

It's a home run, as they say.

No notes.

None.

They were supposed to put Yoshi in this game, by the way.

The original idea was Yoshi was going to be in.

Yoshi was going to be in three, and they were like, we just can't pull this off.

And so it's delayed to the next generation.

Didn't realize what we had missed.

We could have had Yoshi.

All right.

Hey, it's time for the U-play of our We Play U-Play.

It's your review crew, the Ryu crew.

All right.

These are from our Discord.

Uh-oh.

This for you, okay.

Uh-uh.

Ken's really falling on hard times.

And these are from our Discord, discord.gg slash get played.

So get in there if you want to leave a future review for the Ryu crew.

This one's from Zach.

Zach writes.

Hi, Zach.

Hi, Zach.

Best game ever made.

Simple as that.

Zach's right.

I think there's a case for it.

Look,

if you're young, and I don't know how much of our listenership is young, but if you're young and

that reaction, maybe you had to Elden Ring, you're just like, you're playing this, like, oh, this is the best game ever made.

Completely reasonable reaction.

A lot of people had the same reaction as Super Mario Bros.

3.

There's

a lot of these are just quick little

bursts of praise.

So I'm just going to read through a couple of these real quick.

Life is an internet super highway, right?

It still rips, but it's surprisingly harder than I thought it would be.

I think definitely the difficulty is worth acknowledging.

Like, it's certainly versus modern games.

I think, again, going back to something I said, I think if this just had checkpoints, that would go a long way, which is just, you know,

if they had what the thing they added in Super Mario World, where you have that, you run through the tape and you can restart your play from there.

Or the ability to save.

Yes, that would go so far.

Yeah.

J Train writes, what other franchise can claim multiple goats?

Hard to think of.

I'm trying to think.

Goat simulator.

Nick.

What?

God damn it.

What?

Nick.

It's a game.

Look.

Oh, Heather's getting worse.

It's hard to think about.

I mean, there are obviously a lot of franchises with a lot of great games in it, but there are, in the way that people talk about great Mario games, there aren't that many franchises that reach that level, I think.

Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

Yeah.

I'm trying to just even think of any for the purposes of this exercise.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe depending on how you want to rate Half-Life.

Yeah.

Half-Life, Half-Life 2.

I don't know.

It's tricky.

Street Fighter?

Sure.

Street Fighter.

Yeah.

In that space, right?

But maybe Nick's right.

Maybe Goat Simulator.

It's Goat Simulator.

It's probably the right answer.

This next one's from Jake Bag of Donuts, and Jake writes, World 4 is the best world.

Don't at me.

World 4 is the big world.

Big World is great.

I love big world.

Yeah, especially, you know, there's a point where you get a,

I forget, it's a block, right?

The block that changes between them being big size and small size

in one of the stages.

Like, that's a fun little core.

Yeah, it is really, it is really cool when you see the big, the big Koopas and the big blocks.

John Badley writes, my absolute favorite Mario game, I love all the one-off weird suits like the Frog and hammer bros Mario.

Mario games need more animal suits.

This is this is again This is the difficulty of talking about this we have not talked about like the frog suit or the hammer brothers suit like which are like you know again it's with this far in this the discussion We haven't gotten to there.

But yeah, it is really cool.

And

I remember getting the frog suit for the first time and being like, holy shit, what the fuck is this?

Ribbit Ribbit.

Yeah, yeah, and having that exactly.

But you can, it has limited utility, but just it's one of those things where its existence is just what's cool about it.

Yeah.

Like, like it really only works is of any use in water levels.

And then also, it's the other thing is like you get hit once and then you just lost this precious item forever.

Like that's it.

Yeah.

I, when I, when I used the tanuki suit, I was so happy to be using it.

And then just knowing how rare it was and then losing it did feel horrible.

Yeah.

This next one's from Rapscallion.

Rap Scallion writes, Super Mario Bros.

3 was the first game I ever played.

All games have been downhill from there, 10 out of 10.

Holy shit.

Oh, man.

Fuck.

That's like Evangelion being your first anime.

That's wild.

That's, yeah,

if I had started with one of the best games ever.

Maybe every game would be a disappointment, but maybe it's good that I started with an adaptation of a Rugrats

video game or something for the PlayStation 1.

And then finally, Ghost Pumpkin writes, this game introduces Boo and Dry Bones, the best couple in all video games.

Boo is the best.

Dry Bones is also the best.

Fuck Mario Odyssey for not having Boo.

Wow.

Boo is great.

You know, it's

like

there's some great new characters and great new enemies that are introduced in this.

Also, just like Mario himself is redesigned.

And basically, the Super Mario Bros.

3 design, and I think you were kind of talking about this earlier with the Super Mario Bros.

movie, Heather, to some degree, is like, it's all informed in Super Mario Bros.

3.

Like, you look at Super Mario Bros.

1 Mario, and it's a completely different, like, he's a blocky little picture.

One of my favorite bits of animation in Super Mario 3 is that just while he's running, his head is turning, so you can see both of his eyes.

Yes.

As you were doing that, balloons came from below your screen.

What a fucking nightmare.

By the way, Mario's nose is famously big.

I read as I was going through, as doing research for this, the reason his nose is so bulbous is it's to indicate to the player which direction they're facing at a glance.

Oh, it's one of those things where you hear about it.

It's like the baby crying being annoying in Yoshi's Island, which we talked about recently.

Of just like the re, there's a reason that's there, that it's there from a design perspective.

They really, they really thought of everything.

Guys, thanks so much for writing in.

Oh, God.

Ken.

The divorce just fucking ruined him.

That's this week's Get Played.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen.

And check out our paywalled show, Get Animated, Matt, where we're watching Captain Laserhawk, you and I.

That's right.

This week, we'll be talking about episodes three and four of Captain Laserhawk, a Blood Dragon remix.

And

we say this a lot on the show when we're talking about it, Nick.

The show has been shocking us.

It's shocking us.

It's been absolutely shocking.

It's shocking.

It's shocking to us.

Heather, have you watched Captain Laserhawk at all?

I have not.

I do care if you'll be shocked.

Yeah, you'll be shocked, I think.

All right.

Well, maybe I'll be shocked.

That's only at patreon.com slash get played.

And

I'm really excited to rejoin you guys on Get Animate.

And I've missed it.

And I got some anime to talk about.

So we need you back on.

Yeah, when you're done with this laser hawk, I'll meet up with you guys.

Because

Nick and I, left to our own devices, we're being, let's just say, we're being really bad.

And Matt doesn't mean that in a cute way.

No, no, no.

It's getting quite good.

The quality of the show is lower.

We have some different.

Let's just say that the Patriot audience is skewing a little differently now.

But Heather, it was great to see you here.

Yeah, good to have you.

I feel like we don't normally get to do this that much, so

I'm going to say this to you.

You got played, Heather.

Yeah, of course I did.

That was a Hitgum podcast.