in no other game can you write about the "bloody battles" of The Civil War while Mario's smiling head happily floats above

full of unusual, non-Mario-like quirks and weirdly short/easy but a neat tiny little adventure

imagine the timeline where this game released in Japan as another Mario 1 with stages even harder than Lost Levels and The West got a reskinned version of a Goemon game or something

super mario maker (1986)

basically a playable newgrounds sprite animation

surprised by how many levels completely passed over me with nothing interesting going on in them. there's a good handful of fun stages but an almost equal amount where it feels like you just hold right and occasionally press jump when an enemy appears atop the completely flat ground. hard to critique though because every speck of this game feels perfectly as it should be, likely due to its immense legacy. a good time to return to every so often.

another prime example of pre-SMB NES games with a lot of heart and ideas that can't manage to grip me in the slightest

the sound of Mario's footsteps are as slippery and disgusting as he feels to control

I don't think I can say this game is perfect anymore after giving it another go because 100%ing most of the levels is a travesty and I kept feeling that Yoshi was a little too slippery BUT it still remains a near-complete encapsulation of everything I want out of video games: overflowing with love, phenomenal presentation in every department, high skill ceiling yet still fun to mess around in, got me smiling at every moment thinking about it. it's the realness

goopy ghost scanner goes chomp chomp chomp chomp

excessive back-and-forth between characters and occasionally confusing in the order you need to select actions, but a cute little story of childhood wonder in a countryside village

everyone has uno dipshit it came free with your fucking super famicom

Mario throws absolute shade towards Wario's puzzles which is wild considering how much of a strickler Mario feels with his time limit and sad sound effect when you break a wrong tile whereas Wario's just here to chill out with a hard-as-nails puzzle that you can accidentally mark a piece you didn't mean to as much as you like. chalk another one up for Mario being the worst character in his own universe

easiest pick for game I thought I would be decent at but am actually unfathomably horrendous at

very similar to Devil Dice. goofy-looking in the same way Star Fox is and maybe fun for a little