Ok shhh I'm playing this on the Vita port and it slaps, not sure what commentary I could possibly add to such a legendary title. I will say that it's taken me some years to finally really get round to it, due to my frustrations with the momentum which is a bit slippery still (my preferred platformer being Rayman 2), but after watching a retrospective essay espousing the benefits of Mario's movement variety I gave it another chance. I do still find it's aged a smidge in terms of that slippery movement, but the running momentum is extremely satisfying in combination with jumping/somersaulting etc. I'll also add that it is one of those surreal titles where I feel some nostalgia for it, despite my sole experience with it as a child was watching someone else play the DS version for 5 seconds in primary school, and one time I bought NSMB for the DS but the cartridge had been swapped out for this (I... should've kept this lol) and had it for all of a day and didn't get past Whomp's fortress. Transferred nostalgia? Change nostalgia? Who knows, but the liminal y2k aesthetic blogs are onto something here.