Post for: #Super Mario ^{(5 Posts)}

I thought it might be fun to talk a bit more about games that I'm playing as I'm playing them. After all, I think I play more games than I realize, and it seems my memory is such that if I played something a week ago, it might as well have been ten years, I'll just forget. Also, sometimes I'll look back and think that it would have been nice to talk about things as I was playing them, and see what I was thinking then. If you go back far enough in this blog, back when it was hosted on a different service, you can see that I put up a blog post on the day of the Wii launch. But I thought I would be cheeky and not talk at all about my thoughts on the Wii, or Wii Sports, or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. No, instead I wrote up a post on Sneak King, the Burger King stealth title for Xbox 360, which launched on the very day of the Wii release. That was fun and all, but maybe I should have talked about how awesome Wii Sports was! Or heck, talked about the launch, since I was working at GameStop at the time!

I'm always on the lookout for an interesting new rom hack of a Super Mario title. Some of them give you new levels with some graphical changes and it makes it feel like you found some DLC for a classic game, while others make big changes like new powerups and abilities that make it seem like this could almost pass for a sequel that just never got released. Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash! is another category, in which so much as been changed that it's not even a sequel to Mario 1, it's an entirely different game!

Welcome to the second Nintendo Power review. Looking through issue one was a lot of fun, but to be honest I've looked through that issue a ton of times. I'm kind of looking forward to the next few issued because I'm a lot less familiar with them. It's September/October 1988, the NES is the hottest thing around, so let's see what the pages of Nintendo Power had to tell us. Read along on Archive.org.

Here we are, issue number one, and it starts off SUPER strong with the iconic cover art! Mario looks fantastic, but let's take a moment to appreciate the impressive clay rendition of Wart. They really nailed it! In another decade most game magazines would just be using official artwork for covers, and it always seems so bland to me. I love when artists in these old magazines were allowed to go weird and wild. And as we'll see inside, boy did they ever!

I meant to write this post up exactly a month ago, when I went to the movie spoken of in the title. But maybe this is good too, as I've now had time to think about the movie a little bit more since first seeing it.