Don’t have much to say on the game cuz it’s Mario and everyone knows Mario (besides how I swear this game delays your jump input in an awkward way when you’re building momentum + Hammer bro hammers have questionable hitboxes). Two and a half stars may seem like a poor rating for such an influential game that set the groundwork for the industry, but hear me out: 2.5/5 is actually 5/10 which is the perfect, middle of the road rating for a game like this, especially coming from someone who sucks at platformers like me. I was playing this on and off, but look at how long it took me to beat this lmao.

SMB stays one of the best game rating standards, cuz it’s easy for me to imagine games that I enjoy more than Mario ranging from decent to godly (3-5 stars), and games that I don’t enjoy as much going from meh to horseshit (0.5-2 stars). Perfect 👍

Imagine you’re a ph.d student. You take some previously set foundations and form a thesis on it, and you’re a believer. You believe it so hard, in fact, that you start getting ahead of yourself and detailing all the different applications your theory can have. You’re making it bigger, and bigger, and bigger… until you suddenly realize half way through that the theory is bullshit. Panic starts to set in; you already have months of effort put into all the ancillary shit cuz you got ahead of yourself, and the deadline’s approaching. What do you do? You double down on those things by making the world even larger and some of the designs cooler (emphasis on “some”) in the hopes that you didn’t work off of a bad idea. Unfortunately, none of those things promised salvaging what was becoming a shit game.

What happens at the end of this story? You toss the project to your much more competent older brother and have him try to make it work in 5 weeks time. The end result is Devil May Cry 2. Not the worst game I’ve ever played, but a poor product of misconceived priorities

Review of the campaign only

I got fond memories of this one

The alternate 1950s timeline where a parasitic alien invades the world is cool. There’s also a nice variety of weapons that all sound nice when fired, and a neat health system where your life-bar is partitioned into four quartiles that can regenerate individually, but never as a whole, creating a neat blend of having a methodical approach to going ape shit

The problem? The campaign is very imbalanced. There’s a lot of different chimeran species, but aside from the smaller bug-like variants, they’re presented in a form of escalation; each one takes more firepower to kill than the last. This comes from a campaign where the baseline soldier variant already demands more than usual for an introductory foe, taking upwards of 20 shots from a carbine which holds 150 bullets. This is tolerable in open spaces with friendly soldiers on your side, but tedious in narrow corridors being traversed solo

Do I still like it? Sure, I had fun. It’s got problems though