I guess I could had worded that better but what i meant that yes, you can see on surface that's the idea the creators wanted to convey (children's playbook), but it sort of comes out strange and detached as final effect? instead of children's playbook, it comes out like this... strange detached, non-joyed/playful WAREHOUSE dimension. welcome to the semi-john fahey dimension... where the curtains, casino feels and excited honky-tonk bar-esthetics of mario 2 has become the de-facto reality than just a springboard into the world.
also mario 3 starting in total fucking silence while showing the same enacted "play" of mario game... seems hella important. and this is one of the most famous videogames in the world...
Like if the children's playbook theme worked as intended, it would had been a pr boring result... Think of Paper Mario, Braid, modern painted-look indiegames... how it SHOULD had been done: super colourful, carefully laid out and designed cutesy/naivistic graphs to please the player, with all pieces in intact. The meanings of everything are crystal clear: you are playing a children's tale, now you are supposed to do this and that. no secrets, no unexplainable artifacts or oddities or fully realized world. luckily not even yoshi's island completely fall in line with this demand, instead becoming a harrowing mother-baby survivalist simulator...perhaps a survival of hiroshima bombings made the game, no doubt...
Actually this got somewhat realized already in Super Mario World, and you know how it turned out. I like that game also a whole lot, but it definitely got a whole lot more videogamey and casual from that point onwards. nevertheless, respects to Mitzgy... I bet the players loved the kind of blurred, fuzzy, smothered out feel of the game. how can Hell, Lava, Death, And Gothic Pianos feel this fuzzy and lovable?? yet that's how it is... even scary Bowser is riding a happy looking clown machine, while thunder strikes and wind blows in the background... it's akin to gandalf epicly fighting for his life against balrog while lava is spitting in the background, except it's done through an instagram filter and it's more of a charles chaplin slapstick comedy-fight, idk. gandalf sweeps demon off his feet with a pink toy hammer... ok im just making shit up lol.
SMW definitely seemed more Earthbound in suggesting a more logical overal narrative exploration-wise (for example, the total world map and that the levels are more tied into the logic of the overal world), where you are exploring the world map at leisure, revisiting places, beating up American Superbowl Jockeys... Mario the USA Road Trip simulator? Pictures of Mario smiling idiotically at Yoshis beach resort (though I guess the real Tourist / Road Trip Simulator was Mario RPG. who WOULDN'T want to take a selfie with the Cool Yoshi?? he even meets new friends on the way than his old circle of friends, further emphasizing the effect.)
mario 1 is jumping on Woodstock Mushrooms and running past shrubberies that look like clouds above and destroying bricks (? perhaps a throwaway to Migsy's fond construction worker days, maybe he really loves the texture and feel of bricks. remember mgs3 strange but alluring fondness of brick/stone walls and that Sexy Brick Camopaint you could literally only use in about one map??? i don't know what this is But It Sure Feels Great).
it's NATURAL. mario 2 the sprite hack (it's still canon ragnar!!! canon!!!! dont bring logic to arguments) expands this further, with weird catamites/heroes and might and magic 2/little big adventure obsessions on sandy dunes or actually the phase-zones/desertation zones between plains and sand...still natural... (ps i'm not talking much about mario 2 here, because it's actually my favourite of the series).
then comes the mario 3's kinda hollowed-coloured worlds, with somehow less focus on nature and more on the artifice? it's hard to explain. the game somehow feels distant in effect, like a mario's youth coming to an end. it's strange. you are somehow running through the world as an observer rather than somebody who is in it (further emphasized with the strange option in 2 player mode to get into old-school Commodore-era arcade challenge mode with other player)... with the obscured, strange, nocturnal / gothic / erik satie castles with their suspended rhythmically odd start-stop themes. (notice how you never somehow get to see WHAT is in the windows of the castles - who made it, is somebody actually staring at you, why is the levels constructed as they are, why there are even big secrets in these lethal maps etc).
not to mention the underscored thematism and "challengism" of the levels. if the mario 1 and 2 were Alex Kidd, then mario 3 is to them a Sonic game - a game whose purpose is more to be played kinetically as a Sonic game than explore the game world (and thus your existence) within it, and somehow induce detachment and existential ponder in the process.
How much of Sonic really was a game, and more of an EXPECTATION of a game? You jump, you spring forward in great speed(this seems important) but you also have clunky traditional level design that purposefully obscure the joy of speed driving (this also anti-intuitively seems important, which creates a pretty interesting tension and mystery. you just accept these oddities as a kid, even though you feel it's strange...).
the whole world of exploration and the strange amiga-esque world laid in the BACKGROUND and not into exploration. Sonic 2 minigame was more sonic than the sonic 1's minigame (which i will talk shortly in unrelated segment lol). occasionally you end up to a boss robotnik and... the whole game feels like CEREMOUS and pavlovian, almost hinting of a bigger world of logic and reason and truths underneath the hurdle of the voyeristic tourist bus-trip level window-peek into the world, where There Ain't No Getting Offa This Train.
maybe the truth to the world is really not hidden in Star Zone/Star Palace or whatever, but in sonic 1 minigame???? i love that shit. i talk about it some other time actually but i love it, in context and without.
also one of the most thrilling things as a kid was to discover mario stickers or little toys where i lived, because the toy and game world were so, so similar in childlikeness yet so far away in logic, that it felt like an acheological achievement having SOME kind of documentary of your crazy jesus-level gaming? or something like that. I was crazy into videogames and especially mario as a kid, and i knew my vidcons, so to see it proudly stand in limelight on an equal footing with the other pop world... "i was there! yup that's me. that's me in the ww1 trenches / ghetto life. those trenches man". nobody understands what you've been through... it must be different these days, with mario becoming a pop-defacto and mario merchandize found in walmarts etc
Last Edit: December 15, 2016, 07:07:08 am by bonzi_buddy
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