If you are actually talking about Mario Bros., i.e. the game that’s only about kicking turtles, crabs and flies coming out of pipes, yeah, I’d say that one was hardly a new thing.

Super Mario Bros. though? Hard disagree. Back then, that’s a scrolling platformer with controllable jumps, inertia that let you do sliding tricks, and relatively complex physics (acceleration, positional damage, shells, …)

Also very good readability with mechanics that were easy to learn on the spot.

Look at what most platformers played like around that time, and even what basic design errors a lot of them kept doing long after that. SMB was lightning in a bottle.

Social media never was press.

remember not to do this to the creature merchants as well

Wait. The scamp and the merchant mudcrab? How does that work? They can’t even equip stuff, can they?

Though to be honest almost any rimworld trader will happily buy several tons of 5% crap that will deteriorate into nothingness in the next 5 minutes.

My favourite part about the elders scrolls shopkeepers was in Morrowind, where anyone you could barter with would immediately equip whatever silly hat you just sold them.

In Elder Scrolls or Rimworld for example, you’d be limited by how much money the trader has.

Or you could trade with something of equivalent value. And before you know it you’re encumbered again, now with a set of oak furniture to sell to someone else.

high-tech gimp mask

Okay, I wasn’t sure how to describe this… This is perfect.

Not really. I am just a bit younger, growing up between the 80s and 90s. I still play old games, only those that aged well though, but sometimes decades after their prime. I play new games a lot too. And games from any time in between, as long as they do something right.

And there are many, many games around which you can bond just as well as you could back then. Not even talking specifically about multiplayer games (which I don’t play very much at all) I’ve always been a fan of “co-piloting” games, just sharing the experience of playing, spectating, commenting around a game.

Some games are fantastic for this. Some games are rich enough that you can share your experience and discover other people do stuff completely differently. This sort of always existed (for example, what’s the right way to complete Legend of Zelda?), and this is still true even for somewhat simple games, but possibilities have only increased in range. I am pretty sure nobody plays a game like Rimworld or Tears of the Kingdom the same.

Dude. Mario Kart sells consoles, not the other way around. You’re delusional.

Don’t know about Superman, but we have those figures, and it’s a bit disappointing.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/3/

Someone has a three moon wolf shirt design to sell.

I have the Switch 2. MK world is nice I guess, but it’s nowhere near what 8 was. It feels like they were so proud of their connected gimmick they decided they would create nothing for this episode.

8 cups, almost all of them redone old tracks. The “highways” connecting them feel very similar except a couple areas (and those include, again, bits of old Mario Kart tracks). I mean, the way they redid these old tracks is cool, but base MK8 also did that very well with its 4 retro cups, and had 4 main cups full of awesome new tracks. And that’s before DLC/Deluxe added 4 extra cups. Not counting the pass for the Tour tracks, those were subpar.

There’s a lot of music… But apart from that game’s theme, all of it is remixes from Mario games. The karts also are almost only rides from previous episodes.

The free roaming mode is frankly not that great. I had loads of fun messing around in Forza Horizons games, but here it’s just a bit boring. Challenges must be activated and interrupt your driving, they’re mostly so easy you can mess up and still clear them, and though they do track records, they don’t do anything to make you want to improve them. Also you don’t meet other players. For fuck’s sake, the last actual Mario game had you meet and play seamlessly along random people!

MK World is like 90% fueled by nostalgia. This is not what I expect from a new Mario Kart game.

Chiropractics is brain waste in itself.

Yes please. If it’s not kitsch, weird and/or flashy as hell, it’s not true ESC. There was a year when it was like almost everyone had agreed to sent their most boring crap, it was terrible.

You know, despite not really believing LLM “intelligence” works anywhere like real intelligence, I kind of thought maybe being good at recognizing patterns was a way to emulate it to a point…

But that study seems to prove they’re still not even good at that. At first I was wondering how hard the puzzles must have been, and then there’s a bit about LLM finishing 100 move towers of Hanoï (on which they were trained) and failing 4 move river crossings. Logically, those problems are very similar… Also, failing to apply a step-by-step solution they were given.

Kinda ironic for someone with that last name.

Céline Dion did one. Not for Canada, though.

If they qualify for one or two more Eurovisions, they can use that as a proof of European-ness I’d say.

Weird. It certainly could be better, but the Switch wasn’t that hard to fix I’d say. I mean, if it was, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I have quite a few dead electronic devices lying around that I probably broke more than they were originally.

On my switch I changed a SD card drive and the fan, and that required unmounting quite a bit of it. I was very slow at it, but it’s more annoying than hard. Mostly solder-less with just a lot of screws and pins locked in with small levers.

Also I opened lots of joycons, and while it’s not hard, yeah fuck those flimsy pieces of shit. Of course I changed sticks a lot (with other shitty sticks, Hall effect joycon sticks weren’t a thing yet) and changed a couple rails, those tend to fail too.

IMO the SN/SF30 series is great if you want compact and still good for actual gameplay.

Though you have to be able to grip it the old Super NES way, from the sides, held by fingers and with thumbs resting diagonally on the buttons. I discovered some people didn’t like it but they were mostly holding it weird. Like cradling it uncomfortably in their palms with thumbs coming from the bottom…

Just updated my SN30 pro, and it works! Great.