SMB2 (Lost Levels) has a very unfriendly opening, interesting contrast. The geometry feels (intentionally) tight and awkward which clashes against the 'going fast' appeal of SMB1. Maneuvers are good, but not when they're slow(?). SMB2 has the same dissonance as 2D Sonic--I can't go fast!!!
3-2 kind of sucks, just flat plane with a bunch of enemies
X-4 mazes
3-1 stresses the risk of shell bounces and introduces hammer bros
5-1 introduces bullet bills
5-3 bullet bills with unseen source -- like bowser fire
7-2 just the other water level with more bloopers?
Game is built to prioritize fun and smoothness--stomp mechanics, overcoming the arcade.
"...Mario was said to be the picture of our Saviour." - Ulysses, p. 113, 1997 Picador edition.
starman expiry
this video is accidentally kind of thematic
Old 2D Mario is a driving game, new 2D Mario is a skateboarding game.
"The whole world in that visage"
{== First run: normal player, tentative. ==}
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays! Here's an indie gem you probably haven't heard of: Super Mario Brothers is a 1985 video game developed by Nintendo R&D4. It can be difficult to find the exact site of revolutions in art; we can say that music recording is a big milestone, then overdubbing, but you can't really go back to a single album where the switch flipped between nascent technology and complete dominance; people still play shows and do live-style recordings. But in games it's obviously Super Mario Brothers, in the west its release settled the whole question of video games: we're going to keep making these, and they will be played on a box in your house.
A good chunk of Super Mario Brothers has entered our cultural memory; the game's opening level is the de-facto standard for platformer tutorials, and if you've ever played a shady platformer from the Google Play store, it probably plagiarized 1-1, if not the entire game. Even if you haven't, pretty granular pieces of design like these block structures and the "progressive overload" tutorial pattern, where an element is introduced and then complicated over the course of a few screens, are ubiquitous and always evoke the original SMB. There's not a ton of unique content in the first Mario game, in fact several levels are just copies of other ones with extra enemies, but these tutorialization patterns appear over and over.
This sort of design keeps players from being overwhelmed by new stuff, but on the scale of a single level the game has a definite arc in difficulty. {--By the time you reach 4-1 you'll be familiar with all of the elements, but the moving platforms are still arranged as a progression, with breaks in between for some more conventional platforming and turtle-stomping.--} A major change in the side-scrolling platformer, compared to the earlier Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong, is that you can make a level full of these discrete challenges but the player can move smoothly between them, they are woven together and allowed to be more than the sum of their parts: Suddenly, Mario is going on a journey through worlds, and the only limit on our pace of play is a generous timer.
Miyamoto didn't invent moving to the right--we have Defender to thank for that--but leading up to Super Mario Brothers scrolling games moved from shmups, where you essentially move a box at a set speed in 2D, to scrolling car games that integrated jumping, to something like Kung-Fu Master which tries some deeper movement stuff but ends up awkward. Mario nailed character movement; in Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers you can practically see the character change state as you move around--it's very discrete, jumps are short and lack air control. In Mario Brothers you have to be moving to jump left or right, and there's a conflict between the tight space of the level and our need for momentum. There's nothing wrong with this, Donkey Kong is a good game, but it's closer to Castlevania than Super Mario.
Mario Brothers, which predates SMB by two years, still has an interest in the physics of movement. The slide-to-a-stop state is an important innovation. I don't like how rigid the early Mario games are, but when Nintendo has updated the movement of these games they are kind of trivialized; in a way I do prefer the Gameboy Advance version of Mario Brothers, but they loosened the movement when they translated it to GBA. It's fun, but the rigidity of the arcade version clicks nicely with that humble, single-screen game concept. If you have a character that feels like Super Mario, he belongs in a Super Mario game, not this arcade thing. Mario wants to run.
Pac-Land is a closer predecessor to SMB1, but the tight timer makes it difficult to have fun with the movement, and Pac-Man can instantly accelerate to full-speed, which removes a lot of the complexity we'll see in SMB. All of the momentum appears when you try stop or change direction, which usually turns movement into a flat execution challenge, whereas Mario is built to let you adapt to threats. Pac-Land does give you some air control, but the game's level design doesn't ask you to do much more than jump at the right time. Pac-Land and Super Mario Brothers are superficially similar, but you can tell that one is an arcade game and the other heralded the home console future.
So while Super Mario Brothers is a progression on older Mario games, the will to scroll the screen demands a lot more speed and adaptability than a one-screen game would want or need. Any time I try to describe the movement in this game, I get distracted and play through a world or two, so we can start with irresistible. Mario's top speed is high enough to make obstacles exciting, but low enough that anyone can make an unbroken run through a level with a bit of practice. SMB1 is my go-to for innately fun character movement, and it's enjoyable to simply run right and scroll the screen; Mario's legs move cartoonishly fast and the background graphics are varied enough to create a sense of speed and progress {== Interesting discussion on how they managed this in [1]. ==}.
The movement, minus any external challenge, is a toy, and if Miyamoto is owed any special credit over the other people who worked on the game, its because he prioritizes making this toy fun to play with, and uses that as a springboard to making the game. To that end we get the first moments of Super Mario Brothers, where this goomba demands that you learn about jumping. Air control is the key to Mario's movement, it must be incredibly finicky to design a system that rides the line between commitment and adjustability, but I think they did it. In the most extreme case you can stop a jump right around its apex by holding back, but you'll usually want small adjustments just to stick each landing. The margin on jumps can be fairly small in later levels, so it's often too late to recover by the time you realize a jump is bad. This provides some stakes and gives us a challenge to overcome, even though we get a lot of control. Absent these pits and precise geometry, jumping would be strictly better than running.
Your speed is also preserved when you land, so landing on a one-block column forces you to decide between trying to get the next jump out immediately or slowing way down. In a word, the movement is smooth. There's an instant of friction when you start moving, to remind you that you shouldn't stop, and it's intensely satisfying to string entire levels together at full speed. That's not really what SMB speedruns are at this point, but I have to imagine that was probably the impetus for them.
I've seen a lot of people say that SMB1's physics are outdated, but one of the best things about the game is that you do have to get acquainted with the movement: it's a platformer, after all, the game is about moving around. Snappy, intuitive movement is the rule in later Mario games, but that approach has its limits: as the 2D series has progressed it's become more and more reliant on gimmicks and level design, while the first game is both very simple and very replayable. I can't say the later games are bad, but once you've seen Mario Wonder's bag of tricks it's hard to justify playing it again.
If you go into SMB1 expecting to play it once and get the full experience, you're going to miss out on a lot of the fun. The game's sense of speed isn't just served up on a silver platter. Mario's level design can seem a bit crude and awkward, especially later on, but it's telling you how to approach the game. Pipes are essentially big vertical walls which you can slowly jump up to or elegantly skip across, like a 33rd-degree plumber. {~~ SMB1 commands a concept that a lot of games fail to, and I think opportunity cost is a good-enough phrase for it. ~> this is a bad avenue for this discussion. ~~}
Failing your line and bonking on a wall doesn't kill you, but it brings Mario to a stop. {== If you fall below running speed while in the air, Mario is pegged below running speed until he lands! ==} Accelerating from a stop puts a delay between the player and their desired speed, which is slightly frustrating and incentivizes playing well. Beyond the obvious failure state of death, the game quietly pushes you toward playing quickly as your knowledge improves. The closest parallel would be a driving sim, where executing poorly loses you speed and position, but doesn't necessarily crash the car. In SMB, there are gradations of speed loss but I always experience it as a binary--I don't mind sacrificing a bit of speed to get a clean landing, but hitting a wall feels like a failure.
I think this constant, low-stakes challenge of maintaining speed makes the game's mundane moments and levels fun. Running freely is coded as a reward, and that keeps the time spent in between challenges engaging. Add to that the reward of scrolling the screen--our indicator of progress--and you have a consistently satisfying game regardless of any other content. Again, more than the sum of its parts.
With that said, you don't always want to go fast. Each world's fourth level is a castle; these have low ceilings and are dense with fire ropes. There are lots of other spots that I prefer to navigate a bit more slowly too. The game is fairly open-ended, so if you want to go for a nice walk through the Mushroom Kingdom you absolutely can. In these moments, where you need to navigate vertically or move below running speed for whatever reason, the game's friction becomes an engaging challenge instead of a limit. Mario passes through a whole bunch of different speeds as he accelerates and decelerates, and each of these slightly changes his jumping and air behaviour. As you master the game, the system allows for some incredibly graceful and impressive-looking movements. SMB is not a precision platformer, but managing your momentum is always a concern, so playing well is an expression of skill, and I feel like I've earned it whenever I pull off some weird looking jump like this {== X-4 fire flower backwards jump ==}. SMB1 is built to play as smoothly as possible, you'll notice the slippery collision on this block, and Mario's entire hitbox can stomp enemies as long as he's moving downward. The game contains zero bullshit deaths, which is kind of impressive by today's standards, and revolutionary at a time when home games were still copying the arcades.
The joy of movement brings me to one of the game's many glitches, fast acceleration. You accelerate more quickly if Mario is facing away from your movement direction, but I mostly do it because I think it looks cool. These changes in direction also help visualize how many tiny adjustments I make while playing this game. Despite being very simple by modern standards SMB1 is always mechanically engaging. The game's skill ceiling has been destroyed by a host of unintended mechanics like clips and wall jumps, which break it wide open in a speedrunning context, but famously resulted in the minus-world glitch, where you can enter a warp-pipe with a broken destination and play a level made from some random code. There's a great article by Nathan Altice on Gamasutra--RIP--discussing the bulletproof engine behaviour that makes minus-one an actually playable level [1].
We've lost a lot as games grow more complicated, and SMB1's unintended behaviour is an offshoot of its fantastic, hardware-limited design. You'll notice it doesn't instantly crash any time you break the rules. Glitches or exploits like the minus world, or even clipping through walls, really add longevity to games--the dupe glitches in Dark and Demon's Souls help replayability, as do the stairs in Anor Londo. Competitive games with long lifespans are carried by unintended behaviour--I'm thinking of Melee, but my beloved AoE2 has its share as well.
So, what are we running and jumping into? Mario sets itself apart from previous platformers with its frequent secrets, around 1 or 2 per level for the whole run. These are another incentive to replay the game, and since SMB1 is pretty hard the hidden coins, power-ups, and extra lives can come in handy. And they give score, if you care about one of the only mechanics Mario inherited from the arcades. You can get your high score on the title screen! No initials though.
Secrets are not an obvious inclusion for a platformer, but before games were 100 hours long secrets were essential for replayability. Looking for and finding new, hidden tools in the world can make a level you've played many times feel fresh, and they beg the question of other secrets waiting to be found. Before glitches were popularly understood, people thought the minus world was an intentionally hidden level, partially because SMB1 has so many secrets. So the secrets served the exact same function they do in, for example, a Souls game: they convinced people this world was bigger than it actually is.
Mario's enemies each test some combination of timing, reflexes, and jumping ability. The goomba is a simple jumping challenge, and they are quickly relegated to a meat shield role, forcing you to account for the small bounce after you stomp the goomba. I think this is why they usually come in pairs. Koopas are similar, but retreat into their kickable shells that can bounce off obstacles and damage you. The flying variation takes two hits, but when you knock their wings off they begin moving in your direction, meaning you have to use some air control to land on them a second time or try to clear them by a few blocks.
Piranha plants complete the classic trifecta, and they take on a few roles. Sometimes, the challenge will be timing jumps to avoid them, but you can often jump clear over them too. If Mario is touching their home pipe the plants won't come out, although waiting for them to hide is so slow I think it counts as another soft-failure.
Underwater there are fish and bloopers, who have some rudimentary AI. Variety is welcome but I think the underwater movement is a bit slow in comparison to the grounded levels. {~~ Water does have a unique challenge, since moving vertically also forces you forward ~> Water does have a unique challenge, with stilted vertical movement and its general floatiness, but they didn't find a way to make platforming interesting so the underwater segments just feel like swimming past a bunch of stuff ~~}. The short water section in 8-4 is probably my favourite, I think using these mechanics to avoid static threats is less frustrating than the blooper's randomness.
My knowledge of enemy names is running out but these spiked turtles are un-stompable and thrown onto the playfield by Lakitu, which makes for a few memorable levels. Black-shelled turtles are immune to the fire flower, and fire ropes and fire balls are both timing challenges that harmonize with Bowser's fire breath. The latter 3 exclusively show up in castles, again pushing you to take your time.
Further into the game there are cannons that fire Bullet Bills at random intervals, they turn a whole row of the screen into a danger zone, which escalates as you approach the cannon. Finally there are the dreaded hammer bros., equipped with a highly random lag switch in the form of their hammers. They are usually avoidable until 8-3, where you have to face them directly. I have no idea what the intended strategy is, sometimes you can jump over them, and standing one block away is pretty safe but running underneath feels more like a gut check than a skill check. Thankfully, they are hard-countered by a fire flower.
That covers basically every challenge you could throw at a player with these mechanics, and it's an impressive roster for an NES game. The game's power-ups are mostly self explanatory: the mushroom makes you bigger, which can be an interesting tradeoff in 1-2, for example, where big Mario has to either time a crouch slide or slowly break blocks to progress, and small Mario can run right through. The main use for the mushroom is giving you a mistake budget, although it doubles the size of your hitbox, so there's another tradeoff.
The impetus for this video was a small, incidental detail I noticed in the star power-up, which makes you invincible for a while. I had never given any thought to when it expired, and just gave myself a very safe margin to avoid damage. There are actually three staggered warnings for the starman running out: the strobing colours slow down, then the song ends, then the invincibility runs out after a bar or so of the regular music. Pretty great!
For a game that had to invent a bunch of level design conventions and fit 32 courses on an NES cartridge, Super Mario Brothers is shockingly good. You can't scroll the screen backwards in SMB1, and that forces the game into being a series of linear segments. Since running is fun I think that's a good restriction, even the immaculate Mario 3 has the occasional maze level that just wastes a bunch of your time. The technical limits--you'll notice the screen never scrolls vertically--create a tight focus on interesting single screens that are sequenced as an escalating challenge. 3-3 is a perfect example of this, introducing various kinds of moving platforms, combining them in a couple different ways, then it's over. Short and sweet. 5-2 is similar, showing you a hammer brother, teaching you to kill one with a block, then presenting two of them.
With some exceptions, the levels are built to make a clean run possible, but never trivial. Underground levels and castles usually take some slower maneuvering. Really the only thing I can take issue with is the repeating maze designs in some of the castles. They behave a bit like secrets, insofar as you have to notice the level is repeating, but secrets give you something good when you find them. These repeating segments just bar progress, and the only challenge is memorizing or writing down the paths you've already taken. They're kind of a nothing feature, they just eat some time until you memorize the route. Nintendo loves cannibalizing its own ideas, good and bad, and these mazes appear in many 2D Mario games.
Other standouts are the fish bridge (2-3?), which I believe is guaranteed safe if you never stop running, the Lakitu levels which are really fun to execute on, and the final two. Once you learn how to move, SMB1 has a very gentle difficulty curve until world 7 or 8, depending on who you ask. 8-3 is full of hammer brothers, and has a special background as you approach the final castle. 8-4 is another maze, but I managed to absorb the route through speedruns so it's all good. Adding a water section and separating rooms with pipes makes this castle feel quite large, while the other castles are just straight lines. It's the climax of the game, after all.
I can confirm Super Mario Brothers is as good as ever. Obviously this topic was kind of a comfort pick, but I always love to give games I enjoy a closer look, even if literally everyone else has done the same thing.
"Sometimes, I wish my heart got blast furnace" - A year in review video I watched in a dream.
I don't really know what I'm looking for when I look back at these old games. A couple Christmas's ago I played SMB1 once a day for the entire month of December. The game is more than a decade older than I am and my only exposure to it as a kid was getting stuck around 1-4 on the Wii Virtual Console and giving up. There's no nostalgia here, but that more elemental form of game design, shaped by processing and memory limits and the creativity those bred is supremely appealing to me. By necessity, great old games focused on doing a few things perfectly.
We're spoiled for games like that right now. I'm not the biggest fan of UFO 50's catalog, but it is fifty games for anyone who wants a more focused experience, and if there's ever been an objective Game of the Year, it has to be UFO 50. Balatro also breeds creativity from a pretty limited set of cards. I used to think you needed full-random roguelikes or Binding of Isaac's endless synergies to make this sort of game fun--I was wrong. But I can't stop thinking about the AAA lineage, and I guess the Game Awards put into perspective how fucked the larger games industry is.
At the end of my Diablo 4 video, I said I was done playing AAA games, and I meant it, but I went ahead and played a couple more anyway. The Silent Hill 2 remake was really indicative of how poisoned the culture around games is; from the idiotic backlash about the character designs to the almost-unanimous praise the game received for being a nightmare golem of AAA trends hastily covered with the skin of an influential video game. Playing the remake, fully expecting a masterpiece, would have been one of the most depressing experiences I've ever had with a game if not for the friend I played it with.
It's like they plugged Unreal Engine into a stock ticker and let market forces direct the thing: It has a recognizable name, because originality is a risk. It's way too long, because games have to be long because games are $90. It plays like the Resident Evil remakes, because those made money. It has awful, thoughtless, sub-God of War melee combat because that's part of the package now. I have to wonder if anyone who thinks the real Silent Hill games are irredeemably clunky played them for more than five minutes, because jumping into Silent Hill 3 after beating SH2 remake, I deeply appreciated how responsive the character rig was, and how the simpler graphics make room for details like bloody footprints--it's almost like fiction is better when it focuses on significant details instead of cramming in as many details as possible. Why don't they ever eat or go to the bathroom in this movie? This is unrealistic!
Then the Game Awards rolled around, and watching all of these aging video game celebrities and regular celebrities pick their way across the stage to integrate the new product and then rush through an award nobody in attendance cared about really felt apocalyptic, even more than their past shows. And all this amid a plague of layoffs. E3 was constantly falling apart at the seams, and that hinted at the humanity of everyone involved. Frequent mistakes and baffling choices always made the event memorable and fun, regardless of the games on display. The Game Awards are total: highly scripted and controlled, and like SH2 remake they're indicative of how risk-averse and uninteresting the games industry has become as it turns into a Serious Business.
Just look at their game of the year, a celebration of Sony's marketing department that gleefully picks through the scat of one of the best studios of all time--a studio Sony killed and restructured into Asobi, who are cursed to forever make games about how cool the PlayStation controller is. I'm sure Astro Bot is a good video game if you ignore all context, but I don't think I could stomach it. And I don't have a PS5, why would anyone get a PS5.
Once upon a time, Super Mario Brothers was the future, because it was the most fun you could buy. In unfurling levels into scrolling worlds, it may have toppled a domino that led to the Silent Hill 2 remake. It's hard to take lessons from such a simple game, especially one as iconic as Super Mario Brothers, but I guess what I enjoy about it is how thoughtful all of its choices were. In reinventing the 2D platformer, there were no conventions to lazily copy, so it ends up being a game from a particular place and time, a game that created the myth of Miyamoto. Almost 40 years on, AAA is a katamari ball of these conventions, just included in games because they're around, and never in a coherent way. And if you want a competent video game, you have to somehow ignore that all the coins are sponsored by Raytheon.
I wish people would be a little more restrained with the word "slop," because it's going to burn itself out too quickly. I used to prefer slurry because it has septic connotations, but slop lacks any hidden moral judgements: it's just slop, and this has been a year of slop, probably the start of a sloppen age. AI has continued its march to replace every entry-level designer and artist job in the world, and it's quickly been shuffled into every tech product to no one's benefit. AI chat summaries so you don't have to read the chat, AI video summaries so you don't have to watch the video you wanted to watch. In a very literal way, AI produces slop: it decimates its training data and spits it back out in various combinations.
What really scares me about AI, and this didn't fit in the other video, is that people with the skills to actually write good code or synthesize research might become scarce as students get through school on AI-generated work and enter an AI-driven workplace. It's the flip-side of replacing thousands of workers with an enterprise ChatGPT subscription: everything gets sloppier, while the designers lose the eye to see it, the programmers lose the ability to make it performant, the scientist loses the ability to formulate questions. On top of that, if my formative experiences as a computer enthusiast were just discussing Python with a customer service bot, I would get into hiking or something.
Time and time again, it feels like the end of everything. I'm not quite self-centered enough to really believe it's over, but I don't think there's any popular sense that things will slowly improve over time, at least not on their own. Maybe that's a good thing in the long term, but World War 3 is not out of the question either, considering the logic of genocide is playing itself out in Palestine and already overflowing to their neighbours. It's bleak.
And I don't have the answers. Here and now, it's Christmas. Hopefully you're with people you love and not on the computer too much. {--I'm going to watch some Age of Empires and decorate my living room after I finish this voiceover.--} If you're alone, then please treat yourself well.
I hope you're looking forward to more videos in the new year--I am trying not to spend so much time in my own head, and I'd rather release an imperfect video than abandon a bunch of them. That's where I've been, and even if the review never comes out, please try Void Stranger, I guarantee you have never seen anything like it. I have three scripts in pretty good shape right now, and one of them is a political thing with some twists and turns, so big things coming. See you in 2025! The video's over! Thanks for watching, as always.