SPUDD 64’S TOP TEN FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME: 1
Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!
- Kyle
SPOILER ALERT
This is it! This is the last one! And I write this without a shred of doubt or sarcasm…EarthBound is absolutely my favorite videogame EVER. And I think it’s probably the best videogame ever made. Seriously.
Why? Alright, check this out. My youngest brother gave me his Super Nintendo after he moved on to bigger better systems. I accepted it mostly out of curiosity, but this turned out to be a pivotal moment in my understanding of videogames. By the time I decided to finally hook the thing up to a TV and start playing some games, I had already played through Final Fantasy VII and some “Castlevania” games so I was no novice. Plus I had enough RPG experience to know that was the kind of game I really enjoyed.
Digging through that dusty box of SNES cartridges I came across EarthBound, a game I have never heard of. At all. The box art looked a little bit stupid too, with some big bulbously smooth golden guy. I figured it would be some kind of crazy platformer like Vectorman or Earthworm Jim so I figured I’d give it a try before pitching it. Yes, I just wrote “Pitching it.” I was going to throw away most of the games I had no interest in playing.
Within seconds of starting EarthBound I knew something was up. First off, it didn’t start like a typical platform. There was a lot of walking around, a lot of speech bubbles, and some weird stuff about a meteor falling. Even weirder, when I walked up to the meteor, a bee…yes, a BEE…started talking to me. Or something.
“In the future all is devastation?” What? And I was some dopey little kid in pajamas! And here this…bee…is telling me all about some horror from the future named Giygas that must be stopped here, in the past, or the future will be, well, devastated.
I kept playing and pretty soon I was wandering around my small little hometown of Onett. And coming from a small Midwestern town myself, it was really easy to identify with this kid Ness. It’s like I was playing the kid I grew up as.
Eventually I started meeting other friends. Jeff Andonuts. Prince Poo. Paula. I could name them, and they kind of formed into a party and…wait. This thing was an RPG? It’s like my head suddenly exploded. I couldn’t decide if EarthBound was stupidly awesome, hilariously fucked up, or both. So I kept going because I had to find out. And I wandered around on pink clouds…
…and inside a completely bizarre human-shaped tower named, appropriately enough, Dungeon Man…
…in addition to more strangeness than I could possibly describe here. By this time, I was hopelessly addicted to the game. Remember, my only other RPG experience had been playing Final Fantasy VII, a game full of magic and swords and robots and lasers and material and summons and larger than life fantasy cut-scenes. That, I thought, was what an RPG was. Not this thing. Not a 10 year old kid with a baseball bat and his friends. But, and I kid you not, I simply couldn’t stop playing.
I mean, seriously, how could you walk away from an RPG with enemies like the cookie-stealing Spiteful Crow…
…or the New Age Retro Hippie…
…or enemies that wanted to drown you in their own puke…
…or the miniboss of all minibosses, Master Belch himself, who greets your party’s arrival with a nice long huge burp…
Believe me, the above is not even the smallest portion of the incredible weirdness that goes on in EarthBound. There is also the land of Magicant, the realm inside your mind, where you can take your time, walk around and encounter the mental images of all the people you’ve seen so far in the game. All while you’re in your pajamas.
And of course, before you and your good friends finally travel even farther back in time to the final battle, the horrifying knockdown, drag-out struggle against Giygas, you learn that organic matter can’t survive the trip through time and space so your spirits must be housed in robot body duplicates. WTF?
And man is that last battle appropriately bizarre and horrific. After seemingly endless wandering through intestinal passages, you come across a colossal pile of bio-technological tubes and tentacles with a giant eyeball in the middle. The eye opens to reveal…your own head. Again, WTF? Then your rival, an annoying kid from your hometown named Pokey, descends in a spider-mech suit and is suddenly called Heavily Armed Pokey. After a long and weird battle, Pokey tires of the game and unleashes Giygas on you. Giygas, who has attacks whose form “you cannot grasp.” Do we need another WTF here?
Now, all of the above would be more than enough reason to celebrate a game as deliciously skewed as EarthBound. But what seals the deal here is the end, and the way the game plays out. Already, several times throughout the game, when the chips were down and you were close to giving up, the game would pause and some text would appear saying something like “You can do it! All you have to do is believe in yourself!” And man, as hokey as that sounds, that shit was awesome. Just awesome. Here’s the game talking to you! And there was no irony in it. None at all. It was as pure as a Saturday morning cartoon or a little league baseball game. Try hard! You can do it! You’re the hero!
And here, at the end of all things, up against an enemy you can barely survive, an enemy whose attacks “You cannot grasp,” the thing to do is pray. Not in a religious was, but in way that involves reaching out, asking everyone you’ve met in the game (and believe me, there were A LOT of characters) to help. So you do. You pray. Nine times.
And somehow, because you believed in yourself, because you tried hard, because you didn’t give up, and because your friends believed in you…you defeat Giygas. And you save the universe. Your robot bodies are spent and nearly destroyed. But it’s over. The war is over.
And like all the best stories and movies, the story doesn’t end there. You can wander around and explore the rest of the world and visit all the people you’ve met, to see what happened to them after the final battle.
You can spend hours doing this. But eventually, all things must come to an end, and you head back home, back to your little house in your little home town, and you go to sleep just the same way you were sleeping when the game began and the meteor fell.
But that pounding begins again! And your neighbor Picky brings over a letter from Pokey daring you to find him if you can!
Maybe there was nothing revolutionary, or drastically different even about EarthBound. But to this day, almost 20 years after playing my very first videogames, I have never had as much fun, been as emotionally invested, or cared so much about the characters in a game. Maybe the developers did the right thing by changing the focus of the RPG from doomed princes and tragic princesses to kids who played baseball and did good in science class. An awful lot of us were kids just like that, and an awful lot of us thought puke jokes were funny, thought hippies were weird and scary, and wished there were talking bees from the future. And who wouldn’t want to have a robot body, even if it was just for a little while. So EarthBound really succeeds because it puts you in the game, far more than even the most realistic first person shooter. EarthBound is the only game I can say that I feel like I didn’t just play it, I lived it. And for that reason, it will always be number one to me.
- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)
SPUDD 64’S TOP TEN FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME: 2
Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!
- Kyle
I should warn you now that there are HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD.
It’s difficult for me to write about Ico. I’ve been thinking about this piece for quite some time now but no enlightenment has come. Maybe it’s best just to share a personal perspective and leave it at that. After all, a game like Ico is best if it’s actually experienced rather than described by someone else. I realize that conflicts with my spoiler warning since I will be giving away much of what happens, but in the end, reading this is up to you.
I remember very clearly the first time I learned about Ico. I was working at a large Barnes & Noble bookstore at the time and we had a big newsstand. I didn’t buy many magazines since I was able to read just about anything on my break for free, but there was an issue of, I think, IGN or EGM or whichever magazine regularly included PlayStation demo discs. Most of the time, these covers were as lurid as they come, with some grotesque CGI image of a laser bazooka wielding soldier blasting away at some alien menace or some scantily clad woman in a martial arts throwdown. This time though the cover was a very simple black silhouette of a horned boy against a silver background. Under the silhouette’s feet were the words “Ico. The best game you’ve never heard of.” It was polybagged because of the demo disc, so I couldn’t read it for free on my break and I had to buy it. I remember reading the article on Ico late at night after work and being absolutely fascinated. Completely entranced by the premise of the game. A game with no health bar, no menu screen, no titles, no items, no display, with very little music, and no clues. If any of you are old enough to remember, some of those concepts were what made the very first Legend of Zelda game on the NES such a colossal hit.
Reading further, I was deeply impressed by the developer Fumito Ueda’s aesthetic for the game. I remember a passage where he described how they chose to depict the sky in Ico. He said something like “When you look at the sky outside your window in the middle of the day, it is rarely completely blue. If anything it is often simply very bright, with elements of white and grey blending with the lightest blue.” He went on to criticize how so many games that were striving for complete realism would always depict the sky as a pure blue which, on a television screen, often makes it look very dark and very fake. And the skies in Ico definitely look like the high summer skies of a hot August afternoon.
So many of the visual elements that are commonplace in games today had their beginnings in Ico such as bloom lighting and minimal design. Ico is probably the first and one of the only videogames that I think can truly be considered a piece of art.
I was so entranced by the article that I spite of the lateness of the hour, I played the demo immediately. I had high expectations but the demo exceeded them all. The game took place in a castle of almost inconceivable vastness in a world of absolutely staggering beauty. The vistas were so powerfully and beautifully rendered that at times I found myself with sweating palms and a gaping mouth, staring, terrified and awestruck by something like a yawning gulf of air beneath my feet or a sheer escarpment of castle wall that loomed for what seemed like miles above my head.
I was thrilled when the game finally arrived on store shelves, although the American cover…
…is absolutely dreadful compared with the beauty of the Japanese cover…
…which is based on the painting “The Nostalgia Of The Infinite” by Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. That painting, and much of de Chirico’s work, resonates very clearly with Ico.
If the demo was a powerful experience, the game itself was almost overwhelming in its quiet beauty. After a prologue where you see a small, sad guard of armed men on horseback taking a small horned boy into the colossal castle and imprisoning him, for reasons never to be known, inside of a giant stone sarcophagus, the game begins. A strange tremor shakes the castle and the sarcophagus, one of what looks like hundreds lined up in rows along the walls, topples ever so slowly and breaks open releasing the boy. Immediately, in the span of just a few minutes of visual imagery and without even a word of narration, you are completely immersed into a strange but very fully realized world. Where is this castle? Why are you here? Why does the boy have horns but the men do not? How often are horned boys taken into the castle? And, after looking at the hundreds of sarcophagi, are they all full of the skeletons of horned boys? So many of these questions are never answered, only hinted at, which gives the game its majesty, power and emotional impact.
Most gamers are very accustomed to pressing some buttons immediately upon the start of any game to call up a menu, get used to the commands, learn how to heal and switch weapons and so on. I confess, I did that right at the start of Ico. There was nothing. Other than learning how to jump, that was it. It took a long time for that to sink in, and the feelings of uncertainty and nakedness were both frightening and exhilarating. Immediately, playing Ico proving to be a completely different gaming experience visually, mentally and emotionally.
Given no clues as to what to do or where to head, it is easy to begin simply exploring the incredibly vast spaces inside the castle.
And the castle is indeed vast. One of the things I remember from that article was Ueda explaining that often in videogames, the player would see some incredible structure or vista far off in the background but would never end up actually moving through that area. He said he made a point of not doing that with Ico and that throughout the game players would still see these incredible parts of the castle but they would eventually and with time get there and see them close-up. I remembered those words very clearly as I moved through the game and saw this…
…and this…
…and this…
…and sure enough, I set my foot on every one of those locations.
Very soon, after a dizzying climb up a spiral stair, you discover a pale, beautiful girl in a cage. It is the work of a moment to free her, and here the story of Ico begins. You see, you are unable to pass through many of the areas of the castle alone, but this girl, Yorda, has some kind of strange affinity with the castle and is able to open paths that the horned boy can not. Although she speaks, her words are given in symbols that are never translated and in this wordlessness Ico becomes almost universal. Each area of the castle is a small piece of a larger puzzle, and you must solve them all while taking care of Yorda, helping her across chasms, pulling her up ledges beside you, holding her hand when you rest, and most importantly, saving her from the terrifying, inky black smoke monsters that seem to dog your footsteps at every turn.
Through it all, a bond grows.
You begin to care very deeply for Yorda, and somehow, slowly, inexorably, almost subconsciously, it becomes clear that the two of you are trying to escape the prison of the castle. However, it’s not just to escape. It’s to escape together.
- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)
SPUDD 64’S TOP TEN FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME: 3
Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!
- Kyle
A true classic in every since of the word!
So much has been written about the many “Zelda” games that there is really not a lot more that can be said about the mechanics, the innovation, the design, and so on. So I won’t. Instead, let me tell you a story.
As I mentioned, I played a lot of videogames from the 1980s on, although there were quite a few breaks. Mostly, I played these games on my younger brothers’ systems (they had an NES and later an SNES as well as a TurboGrafx) and in college a few of my roommates has an SNES. So while I was able to sample almost every game that came out, I was never able to spend a lot of time with any of them because I didn’t own the console. Beating Super Mario Bros. 2 (the first videogame I ever beat) was a bit of a fluke because I spent so much time in my younger brothers’ bedroom playing that game that I pissed both of them off for weeks.
That all changed when I got out of college. By this time, both of my younger brothers were adults and had moved on to PlayStations and Nintendo 64s. After a visit home one weekend, my youngest brother Zach hauled this dusty box out from under his bed and said “Here. You were always playing this thing. You can have it.” And inside was that first generation SNES complete with controllers and a crapload of games. Quite a few of the cartridges were no longer functional, but two notable games were. Earthbound (much more on that one soon) and The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past.
I had PLAYED some of the very first Zelda game, but never nearly enough to complete it. Honestly, at that time, much of the charm was lost on me so I never regretted not being able to finish. But now, as an adult in his late 20s, there was something really appealing about those simple adventures of Link. So I hauled the SNES home and after a quick trip to Radio Shack to buy the necessary equipment to connect the SNES to my TV (it really was that old) I sat down and gave it my undivided attention.
For hours.
Which turned into weeks.
And I even bought one of those small, black and white, badly typeset game guides to help me when I got stuck. Because when I was playing this, we didn’t have a home computer. Or the internet. Hardly anyone did!
But that didn’t mean jack! I LOVED this game! I played just to play! Days would go by where I didn’t even bother with the plot, I just wandered around talking to people in the game!
I can’t explain it, but there was something so charming, so engrossing, so incredibly FUN about this game that I never wanted it to end. So you can probably guess what happened next, right? After weeks of playing this thing, I had exhausted just about everything I could do. It was time to finally see how it ended. And then…the Dark World! The adventure was only half over! I think I woke up my wife and my roommate screaming with glee when I discovered that incredibly cool Dark Hyrule, and how it looked just like the evil twin of Light Hyrule.
And man, let me tell you about those Dark Hyrule trees. It is ridiculous, and honestly a little embarrassing, to admit how much Nintendo videogames have affected my own art and drawing style. And these Dark Hyrule trees, as well as the Great Deku Tree of later Zelda games, has been showing up in my art and my comics, in one way or another, for over a decade. I guess I just love the world of Zelda that much.
Since then, I have played every Zelda game Nintendo has put out. The Ocarina Of Time, Majora’s Mask, The Wind Waker, The Four Swords Adventure, The Phantom Hourglass and The Twilight Princess. I think I missed those two “Oracle” games somewhere, but I played all the rest. And I love ‘em. I love ‘em all. I don’t have a bad word to say about any of them. But still, to this day, my absolute favorite and the crowning jewel in the Zelda crown is, to me, A Link To The Past. Nothin’ better.
- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)
Spudd 64’s Top Ten Favorite Video Games of All Time: 5
Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!
- Kyle
Metroid, the original NES game, has the distinction of being the very first videogame I ever purchased with my own money. In 1986, I saved paper route money for weeks to buy it, and was absolutely thrilled with the game once I got that ridiculously large cartridge out of the box and into my brother’s NES. I’m sure most of you remember this…
At the time, Metroid was dazzling. The plot, the graphics, the diversity of weapons, the game mechanics including the morph ball and the ice beam, the length, the challenge…all of these were just so far ahead of their time in the mid-80s. Things we take for granted in videogames today, such as secret or hidden areas accessible only through unexpected or even counter-intuitive uses of weapons and in-game tools, were introduced in Metroid, I think for the first time. Indeed, Metroid was the game that introduced gamers world-wide to the concept of the miniboss with Kraid and Ridley.
And the graphics? Well, in 1986, this looked pretty damn stunning…
Nearly 16 years later, I was still a Nintendo fanatic and enjoying the heck out of my GameCube. Metroid was a distant although still pleasant memory, so I was extremely doubtful when I read that Nintendo would be creating an entirely new, fully 3-D, first person shooter for the GameCube called…Metroid Prime. Honestly, I just didn’t see how it would be possible to make a compelling game in 3-D from a first person point of view that was true to the original feel and spirit of Metroid. Seriously, how were they going to handle the morph ball? I mean, Metroid was a 2-D side scrolling classic, and many of the attempts to update these side scrollers with snazzy new game mechanics and graphics had failed miserably. Anyone remember Castlevania 64? Right, I thought so.
So I waited. I didn’t buy Metroid Prime when it came out and I waited for reviews. Lots of reviews. Lots and lots of reviews. And when those reviews starting coming out, they were universally glowingly positive. Apparently, even the morph ball mechanic worked like a charm. So, since I had a real job and not a paper route this time, I went out and bought the game.
And, damn. Just…damn. Metroid Prime ruled.
Where to even start? I guess the music is as good a place as any since it is one of the very first things I noticed. The soundtrack to the game is simply incredible. Gorgeous washes of ambient electronic sound, occasional hints of melody, and tons of atmosphere. With very few exceptions, there was no attempt with the soundtrack to create songs, or even themes. Instead, all of the “music” was pure aural sculpture, as essential to the feel of the game as the graphics and the game mechanics. I have the entire soundtrack, so if you’d like it drop a comment in and I’ll find a way to get it to you.
The graphics, as expected, were nothing short of perfect. After a brief introductory sequence aboard an orbiting space station and a battle with a gigantic alien creature, the player is treated to a thrilling scene of Samus narrowly escaping both the exploding station and a monstrous mechanical Ridley in her familiar orange ship. The action resumes with Samus touching down for the first time on the surface of Tallon, and the whole scene is as good as, if not better than, any cinematic blockbuster movie.
There is the thrill of seeing Samus’ ship rendered so realistically we believe it really flies. And of course, along with the music (the “Tallon Overworld” theme is one of my favorites in the entire soundtrack) there is that feeling, so powerful in the “Metroid” games, of being in a place that is utterly alien and totally unknown. The flora and fauna of Tallon are so well-designed, so realistically depicted, that the experience is less like a game and more like watching a Discover Channel special on the life forms of extrasolar planets.
All of this, however, would be meaningless without rock-solid game play. And Metroid Prime offers that in spades. Samus arises from her ship…
…and the exploration begins. The aspect of the game that I, and many other gamers, was most worried about was the change in point of view from a 2-D side scroller to a 3-D first person shooter. In addition to that, I was extremely concerned that the control scheme would be so complex that it would interfere with my enjoyment of the game. Nothing could have been farther off the mark. Nintendo, a company with a long history of simple yet incredibly powerful and intuitive innovations, designed a control scheme that utilized every button on the GameCube controller in ways that were simple to grasp, easy to implement, and a breeze to internalize. Within seconds I had the feel of the game and found it incredibly easy to run, jump, turn, aim, shoot, and more.
Even the first person point of view turned out to be a tremendous addition. By putting the player quite literally inside the armored suit, the player in essence becomes Samus. This is hardly a new concept since it has been used so often in so many other first person shooters, but this point of view combined with the almost overpowering sense of solitude and presence of the unknown in Metroid Prime make for an incredible gaming experience. The player truly feels as if they are thousands of light years from home, completely alone on an utterly alien and deeply hostile planet with no one and nothing to rely on other than their own wits and reflexes.
The addition of the visor system was, in typical Nintendo fashion, a cunning way of simplifying what could have been a baffling control interface. A series of displays on the left and right of the “screen” mirror was Samus, or the player, sees from inside the suit. Simple toggles of the control stick or other buttons easily and quickly cycle the player through different weapons and eventually different visors which adds another fascinating dimension to the game and to the universe of “Metroid.” For example, since Samus is running around Tallon in an incredibly advanced computerized suit of armor, it is natural that when the armor takes a certain kind of hit from electrical enemies or high energy enemies, the digital display inside the visor degrades…
A subtle detail to be sure, but one which greatly enhances the feeling of danger so inherent to the adventure. Later, Samus gets several upgrades to the suit which allow the player to see in different ways, including infrared. Certain enemies can only be detected and dispatched this way…
Finally, in the crowning touch, Nintendo handled the inclusion of all those old and familiar Samus gadgets like the morph ball and the grapple beam amazingly well. After gaining the morph ball upgrade, switching into morph ball mode is handled by an incredibly smooth camera transition from the first person point of view to an over-the-shoulder, or over-the-ball, third person point of view so the player can actually see and control where Samus is rolling. This explanation may read a little jarringly, but the in-game execution is flawless. The grapple beam is equally simple and visually unique enough to make it quite different from Samus’ weapons and a hell of a lot of fun to use.
I won’t go into much detail about the plot, but the Space Pirates and the Chozo are included in ways that really do a lot to flesh out the story of the “Metroid” universe in fascinating ways. There are, of course, lots of bosses, many of whom are colossally huge and, in true “Metroid” fashion, almost nightmarishly difficult to defeat. And of course the threads are laid for the inclusion of Phazon and the events that lead into the equally fantastic sequels Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
In short, Metroid Prime took every worry I had about the game, the design, the game play, the mechanics, the graphics, the sound, and the plot and blew them away. Nintendo has done a lot of really wonderful things over the years, but to me, Metroid Prime will always stand as a highlight in a history full of stellar achievements. Samus has never looked better.
- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)
Spudd 64’s Top Ten Favorite Video Games of All Time: 8
Talented artist and incredible friend, Spudd 64 will be counting down his top ten favorite video games in the next ten weeks. Enjoy!
- Kyle
“Thank you Mario, but our Princess is in another castle!”
I think I just got a little bit frustrated with that line. In any case, I never did actually finish Super Mario Bros. I played it. A lot. Who didn’t, really? I mean, nearly every kid growing up in the 80s had a Nintendo and a copy of Super Mario Bros. But something about castle after castle after castle…and still no Princess. Well, I gave up somewhere around World 6 or 7.
But along came Super Mario Bros. 2 and things felt a little…no, actually, a LOT different.
First, what was up with that box cover? Sure, there was Mario, but why was he holding some kind of gleaming turnip? Even the title screen looked a little funny…
What was with all those people? Toad and Luigi and the Princess and more turnips and…those sure didn’t look like Goombas and Koopas. So, in the cartridge went (remember those gigantic old cartridges?) and the game began.
Sure enough, nothing, and I mean nothing, in this game resembled anything I had seen in any other Mario game. The music was different. The landscape looked different. Where were the cute little smiley faces that were plastered all over every cloud, hill, mountain and tree in the first Super Mario Bros.? I wasn’t sure if I would even like this game. And then, creeping forward from the right edge of the screen, I saw it. Only I didn’t know what “it” was. Some kind of squat little robed lump inching forward wearing a creepy hockey mask. Only later did I come to know and love these things as the Shy Guys that they were.
Fortunately they were about as easy to deal with as the Goombas, and later I had great fun playing as Toad, picking them up, and throwing them all over the place. Soon the Shy Guys were joined by Snifits…
…and I was now completely immersed in this new Mario world that I eventually learned was called Subcon. There were so many things about this new game that, to me, seemed to position it head and shoulders above previous Mario outings. The ability to pluck, something Toad excelled at. The chance for the player to run through the game as either Mario, Luigi, Toad or the Princess, each of whom had slightly different abilities. This level of strategizing was something very new to me, and probably relatively new to the world of 8-bit platform jumpers as well. And who could forget those bizarre little beakers of red liquid that you could (somehow) pluck out of the ground, throw down, and make a magical doorway to a parallel dimension appear…
Refreshingly, Super Mario Bros. 2 offered a lot more interesting bosses as well. Instead of the same tedious jumping and dodging against Bowser, players were treated to duels with Birdo, Mouser, Tryclyde, Clawglip, Fryguy, and, in a move rare for a Mario Bros. game, a single game ending duel with the biggest boss of them all, King Wart…
Finally, after battling your way through desert worlds, river worlds, electric worlds, worlds inside jars, and more…after beating King Wart (who hates vegetables!) deep in his lair, the player finally frees the mysterious Subcon fairies who carry King Wart’s corpse (!) off the screen to a presumably grisly end. And here, my friends, is where the game really tugs at my heartstrings. After it is all said and done, instead of a simple credit sequence at the end we learn…it was all a dream!
The entire adventure, whether you played as Mario, Luigi, the Princess, Toad, or a combination of them all, was all a dream Mario had while sleeping peacefully in bed. I especially love the peaceful, almost lullaby-like music playing while Mario, colored in deep blue tones to show the depths of night, snores peacefully in his bed. And after the cast of the game has been introduced, Mario wakes up very briefly, looks around for a moment, and drifts back to sleep while the rest of the credits roll. Wonderful! I mean, every gamer is aware of the nature of entering and interacting with what more or less amounts to a dream world since the world of the videogame does not, in physical reality, exist. But at the end of Super Mario Bros. 2 the realization that it was all a dream within a dream just blew me away. It seems quaint now, but for the 80s, this was deep stuff in terms of games.
It was only after finishing this game that I read more about it and figured out that Subcon was indeed a shortening of the word subconscious. And it was many many years later that I learned why this game seemed so damn weird, so unlike any Mario Bros. game, and remains my favorite Mario Bros. game of all time. Once upon a time, it was a Japanese game named Doki Doki Panic…
…and Nintendo simply pasted a few different sprites over the characters and shipped it out as Super Mario Bros. 2. That story is well worth reading, and you can probably find decent articles about it on either Wikipedia or the delightful Super Mario Wiki. Check ‘em out.
Alright, one last confession. I saved this for the end so it wouldn’t be too embarrassing. Probably the biggest reason that Super Mario Bros. 2 has such a special place in my heart is that it was the very first videogame that I ever beat. The only game I had completed, on my own, all the way to the credits. And I was almost 20 years when it finally happened. Still, I remember the thrill of sitting in my room very late at night, putting down the controller after throwing that final vegetable at King Wart, and watching the rest of the story unfold. I had done it. Me! I had finally been able to get to the end of a story after starting and abandoning so many others. It was just an awesome experience, and this is the game that really turned me into a video game lover for life. Now if I could only stop having nightmares about Birdo…
- Spudd 64