What a beast of a game, its addictive gameplay and variety of builds hooked me in and never let up. I never was a fan of the Roguelike concept as I vastly prefer the traditional game structure but this game's boon system adds this unpredictable flavor that makes every run feel fresh and exciting as you never know when you gonna get THAT busted build and such. Story is perfectly curated for a rogue system with some superb voice acting but that comes with some restrictions since story didn't really move forward in any significant way until my first clear 21 attempts in and up until that point dialogue was usually like "oh you got killed by this X thing ?, perhaps you should do Y next time" or some character yapping about random shit and when it finally decided to move forward, it just wanted to give you a reason as to why you should try to escape over and over again. Game's overall carried by the super solid gameplay and stellar voice acting. Even if you don't like Rogue games, you should give this a try at least.

if you think this game “plays weird” and don’t get the hype i beg you to play 5 other NES platformers then come back, relax, and feel the lushness of the first true strand type game.

super mario bros is not the primordially simple jumping game it is often introduced as. platformers had ages to mature in the hypercompetitive arena of the arcade throughout the 70’s and early 80’s. aside from its understatedly elegant aesthetic, the ambition in SMB is in the elevation of movement from merely a mode of traversal to a gymnastic, expressive activity.

megaman, simon belmont, and ryu hayabusa are all transparently simple state machines— the amount of possible actions they can take is finite and countable. super mario bros did not invent momentum in platforming, nor was it the first to leverage the additional complications that a more involved system of movement entails. the friction between the player avatar and the ground. the acceleration from a dead stop to a full run. the short moment after taking your finger off the jump button before the character truly starts to fall. all the little intricacies and details compound to make mario a much more expressive vessel for a player to inhabit. what sets SMB apart is that the movement is honed to the extent it becomes even more natural than the comparatively simple systems of the above games.

mario’s body doesn’t literally move like the human form does, but negotiating the balance of a jump in mid-air, trying to establish steady footing on unhelpful terrain, and wheelin and dealing with newton’s first law in general are central to the human experience. in super mario bros, nintendo squarely refocuses the platformer from a cabaret of obstacles to a celebration of acrobatic motivity

and so, it became the bedrock upon which their castle was built