Super Mario Message Board

Seeing poor Mario like this, as an angry anti-hero, going against other famous video game protagonists, is a really weird concept. Sebastian von Buchwald, an artist on DeviantART created a pretty big gallery around this idea, featuring some rather unconventional fights.Read more...

Flappy Bird is a game in which players tap the screen to make the titular Nintendo sprite conversion navigate a series of familiar pipe obstacles. It's sloppy, frustratingly difficult and covered with in-game ads. It's also the most popular free app download on iTunes. What gives? Read more...

2013 is slowly coming to an end, which means video game characters can finally enjoy their holiday feast... even if it's tiny and made of plastic. Bonus points for finding the Portal Turret in the photo. Oh and why isn't poor Luigi sitting on a throne? It was his year after all.Read more...

Cat Mario, meet Mario cat. Redditor Collinferal had a friend with a bored cat. With $140 in materials and his carpentry skills, he made her a magnificent Mario-themed toy that will keep said cat occupied for minutes. Read more...

I've played Super Mario 64 before. Maybe you have too—but you've probably never played it as a horrific corrupted hellscape, like it appears in this glitch run of the game by vinesauce.Read more...

Fresh Prince + Super Mario 3D World = This song by BotanicSage. An unlikely mix, but it works!Read more...

'Gritty' isn't a word I normally associate with Mario, but you know what? Polaris makes it work here.Read more...

After scrolling through the first level of his video game-themed interactive resume, I was fully prepared to offer Mr. Robby Leonardi any job I might have had lying about. Then I got to level two. Read more...

Since 2006, over a dozen artists from a Mario forum collaborated on a number of eBoy-esque isometric Mario worlds, like the one you see above—and the results are pretty fantastic.Read more...

I really dig fan-made mashups and animations where there's a little easter egg or a hidden reference to catch every second—like the Statue of Liberty holding a golden NES Zelda cartridge in YouTuber James Farr's retro mashup animation above.Read more...

I never thought I'd find a rock opera based on Super Mario Brothers exciting. It turns out I was wrong. Read more...

In this, the year of Luigi: here's this kind of bizarre, kind of funny fake 'documentary' by Nintendo about finding a parkour pro version of Luigi.Read more...

Digital artist Fernando Reza added seven new really cool posters to his series, in which Super Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom meet World War II-style propaganda. The series is also available in his store.Read more...

I'm not sure Chicago commuters were ready for those huge, hypnotizing eyes when Luigi greeted them on the city's L train, rebranded as the "Luigi" yesterday to celebrate the character's 30th year. He spent the day seeing the city, enjoying its deep-dish pizza, and riding its famous elevated rail line.Read more...

Created by the people at creative agency 8-Bit Gogo, this is what they call a "next-gen" take on Super Mario. In other words, it's a darker, grittier version of the plumber's surreal world. The video is fun to watch, and this is an interesting look at something that Nintendo will never, ever make. (For the best results, skip to the end and look at the final product, then back up and watch the designers do their thing.)Read more...

How do you transform poor Lucas from Mother 3 into something completely horrifying? Tighten his body and swap his face with Wario's. The unspeakable result would be a hysterical Smash Bros. character, that's for sure.Read more...

Three years ago, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto told me that he had the work of Surrealist painter Rene Magritte floating around his head when he was crafting the few first Super Mario games. It makes sense when you think about it. There’s a certain mind/eye trickery in the Mario games that definitely has its roots in the Surrealist movement. So, making Mario game versions of famous Magritte canvases? Utter genius. Read more...

Mario is a man we've become well accustomed to, we've followed his escapades for decades now. But despite bringing us new experiences he seems to harp on the past an awful lot.Read more...

Mighty Morphin Mecha Mario, assemble! If the world ever needs a giant, Koopa-fighting Super Mario, this one straight from Gmod would do the job easily. Especially with that giant drilling tool (hopefully) attached to his left arm.Read more...

Even Bowser and Bullet Bill are peaceful in Pablo Pintachan's digital drawings of Mario, Link and Luigi. Well, Link looks a bit nutty and I'm not sure he's up for to exploring Hyrule, but at least he's calm. Dayshot is an image-based feature that runs every morning, showcasing some of the prettiest, funniest game-related screenshots and art that we can find. Send us suggestions if you've got them.

Today, according to Nintendo, is Luigi's 30th birthday. The company says Mario Bros.—which introduced Mario's taller sibling—was released July 14, 1983—a day before the Famicom console launched in Japan. Strangely enough, I have a vivid memory of this game's debut. My family was on vacation in August 1983, going up the Eastern Seaboard. I actually had Mom dig out the old B. Kliban calendars that hung in the kitchen—Mom planned our vacations—to verify this today. (Christ, I hope she never gets subpoenaed.) Anyway, we were in New York, my first visit to the city, on Aug. 7, and my brother and I saw a Mario Bros. cabinet in an arcade near the Battery, as we waited for a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. More than just introducing Luigi, this title is the genesis of some of the founding pillars of the Mario canon. It's the birth of the koopa, the series' ubiquitous, disposable turtle enemies. It broke away from Donkey Kong as the series' unifying antagonist. It's the basis for Mario and Luigi's identity as plumbers. Remember that "Jumpman" was a carpenter at a construction site in 1981's Donkey Kong and had no apparent occupation (big game hunter?) in 1982's Donkey Kong Jr., though he did acquire his first name in the second game. Donkey Kong 3 had yet to release and when it did later that year, the human character was called "Stanley." My brother and I begged Mom and Dad for two quarters to play whatever this Donkey Kong-without-Donkey Kong sequel was. This was one of the first games to feature a tutorial for each stage. Older arcade titles required you to read the rules off the glass or cabinet art. We still didn't know what the hell we were doing. "Stop hitting the POW!" my brother yelled at me, "It's not doing any good!" Did we see the Statue of Liberty that day? The calendar says yes. I couldn't swear to it. I don't have any other memory of my first visit to New York, 30 years ago this summer, other than that I played Mario Bros. there. And my older brother was Luigi. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

The daily Smash Bros. screenshots on Nintendo's site can easily compete with anything the internet at large has to offer. Take, for example, the one uploaded today. We'll probably never know what's going on in the pic between Mario and the Wii Trainer. They are not fighting, that's for sure.

A few too many mushroom pickups and Mario Kart transforms into a seriously strange and gorgeous 1930-style grand prix, courtesy of artist José Emorca Flores, Mario re-imagineer extraordinaire. But where's Waluigi? With all this insanity going on, he would probably look nice guy in a fuel-efficient family car. Flores' prints are up for sale here, while his entire "The Kingdom of Krash" installation will be on display tonight through June 30 at iam8bit in Los Angeles. Mario Kart by ~jose Emorca Flores~ [society6] To contact the author of this post, write to gergovas@kotaku.com

The iconic carnivorous piranha plants from the Super Mario games can be frustrating, but sure no one will approach the garden where this giant, six-foot-tall, fire-breathing replica will stand. You can watch the entire creation process at hackaday. Home made 6 foot tall, fire breathing piranha plant from Super Mario Brothers [YouTube] To contact the author of this post, write to gergovas@kotaku.com

Super Mario World, which is a game about a plumber riding a dinosaur, is filled with rules that make absolutely no sense. For example, if you—and by “you” I mean the character you inhabit, Mario the plumber—jump on something dangerous, it will kill you, unless you are big, or wearing a costume, or riding a dinosaur. Some other rules: teething piranha plants will not pop out if you’re standing next to their pipes. Caterpillars will turn red and become invincible if you jump on them. Ghosts will stop moving when you’re facing in their direction. To understand Super Mario World is to understand these rules. Once you figure out the game’s internal logic, you can pick it apart and break it. It’s like a giant goofy puzzle, as much about conceptualizing as it is about executing. The rules in Super Mario World make no sense. And they also make perfect sense. Back in the late 80s, pleased with the inordinate amount of success they’d found on the NES (née Nintendo), legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto and his crew decided it was time to create a new moneymaker. Enter the Super Nintendo, a glorious grey toaster with stylish purple buttons and 16 bits, which for the time was a whole lot of bits. (Today, of course, we have many more bits, to the point where we’ve stopped keeping track, and talking about bits in 2013 is thoroughly uncool.) Accompanying this Super Nintendo was Super Mario World, a pretty new game that yanked the already-iconic plumber from his familiar Mushroom Kingdom to a country called Dinosaur Land, where adorable reptiles rule everything and the terrain is made out of desserts. By all accounts, Super Mario World is an excellent game—the best Mario, many argue. The greatest game of all time, some might say. I am not here to argue that point. You are aware that Super Mario World is a good game. Here, look, it gets a YES: My question is: what makes this fun? Why is this game regularly ranked among the classics? Why, as I play through Super Mario World for what must be the 50th time by now, this time on the Wii U’s Virtual Console, am I still enjoying myself? I think I've figured it out. And we could talk and talk about the art, and the music, and the sound effects, which may very well be the most important part of Super Mario World, because the clink of a coin or the whir of a jump are just as integral to the game as anything else, but really, it’s all about the rules. Super Mario World is a masterpiece because of them. The first thing you see, after loading up your platform of choice and starting a new game of Super Mario World, is a plump little Mario, in all of his 16-bit glory, flanked by bushes and colorful fruits. There are big giant hills in the background. And there’s a message: "Welcome! This is Dinosaur Land. In this strange land we find that Princess Toadstool is missing again! Looks like Bowser is at it again!" The text is justified for some reason, so there are giant gaps between many of the words. You’ll probably skim over this and hit the A button, more than once if you’re impatient, and eventually find yourself on Yoshi’s Island, where you’ll see the world map for the first time. Wow! Now THAT is a world map. Immediately you can tell that this game is going to be interesting, and immediately you're fascinated not just by what you see but what you don't see, which is one of those things that has characterized Mario games over the years: the idea that there's always something else out there. As you start to run and jump through each level (represented by those dots on the map), you start learning the rules, sometimes from little instruction boxes that pop up and toss you clunky hints like “This gate marks the middle of the area!” but usually from clever environmental clues. You see a red shell next to a row of enemies, so you throw it at them to see what happens, and bam, you see that killing nine enemies in a row will get you an extra life. Rule learned. That sort of elegant level design—the type of lesson that makes you feel smarter because you figured out the answer yourself—is missing in many of today’s over-tutorialized games, which may be one of the big reasons Super Mario World is so highly revered. There are tutorial boxes in the game, yes, but they are optional, and easy to skip. You have to figure out yourself that jumping on chainsaws will kill you, unless you use the spin move, which somehow makes you temporarily invulnerable to most enemies. You have to learn on your own that the only way to get to the top secret power-up treasure trove is to fly to the top of the ghost house. In an interview with the New Yorker a few years ago, Shigeru Miyamoto had some choice words about game design, comparing a video game to a detective novel. Games, the Super Mario World producer explained, are all about escalation. “To what extent are you going to hide the secrets?” he said. “In order for a mystery or a joke to work, we have to provide the necessary amount of information. Not too much, not too little, but the perfect balance, so that in the end people can feel, How come I didn’t realize that? The difficulty with video games, unlike movies or novels, where the authors themselves can lead the audience to the end, is that in games it’s the players who have to find their own road to the end.” Miyamoto has always been a mystery virtuoso, a master of progression and level design. He's always understood that a game's rules are only as good as its lessons. I imagine that watching him use a level editor would be some kind of spectacle, like Mozart at a piano or Hemingway at a bar. But, yes. Back to Yoshi’s Island. Your first choice in the game is whether to go left or right. If you go right, you meet Yoshi, and you start getting to know Mario’s new green partner, who is beloved because he’s overpowered. He can eat almost anything, spit fireballs, stomp baddies, grow wings, pound the ground to cause a mini-earthquake, and provide you with a last-minute vertical boost if you jump off him at the right moment, even if it means you have to sacrifice him along the way. You monster. (Maybe the dinosaurs actually went extinct because we were always dropping them off cliffs.) If you go left, you’ll have to jump on dragons, dodge giant bullets, and stomp your way up a hill, where eventually you learn that there are four hidden palaces in the world that contain giant colored switches, and if you find them all, you can fill in all of the colored outlines throughout the world and turn them into helpful blocks. By the time you reach the first castle of the first world, you’ve learned quite a few of the game’s rules. You understand that a P-switch will turn blocks into coins, so it’s easy to figure out that you can get that trapped Fire Flower by hitting the switch and making it fall to you, which feels more rewarding than, say, jumping up and getting a Fire Flower because it's right in front of you. That first castle, by the way, is not messing around. The first half is filled with dangerous lava pits; the second half puts you in an auto-moving room with big brown pillars that plummet from the ceiling every few seconds in an attempt to crush your skull. And just when you think you might be safe, when the screen has stopped scrolling and you're at the boss's big red door, you can't wait too long, or another pillar will smash your face. Then you beat the boss, by knocking him off a tilting platform in what may be the coolest boss idea in any Mario game ever, and you blow up his castle. This is where the real game begins. See, when you get to the next section/level/world/whatever, Donut Plains, you can finally pick up the Cape Feather, which is a new power-up that allows Mario to cosplay as Super Man. The cape functions a lot like the Raccoon Suit in Super Mario Bros. 3, in that you can use it to fly, but there's one pivotal difference: in Super Mario World, you can stay in the air. With a bit of deft maneuvering, you can glide indefinitely through the skies, essentially cheating your way through almost every level in the game. Presumably this is why we have yet to see the cape in any other main Mario game. Flying above every level, while fun as a weird sort of guilty pleasure, is not the ideal way to play a video game, and if you do this a lot you'll just feel kind of awful, like you just ate an entire bag of Lays: it was fun while it lasted, but now you kind of regret it. Still, one of Mario's grandest traditions is that you can always find ways to skip past sections of the game. Warp pipes, warp whistles, that sort of thing. In Super Mario World there is the cape, and there is the Star World, which you can use to break all of the rules and actually beat the game in only 11 levels, if you do everything just right, although what would be the point? Longtime Mario fans, when revisiting Super Mario World for the first time in years, may find that everything feels more... slippery. Newer Mario games aren’t quite as bouncy, and they make it much more difficult for you to die, mostly because you can cling to walls. Super Mario World is much more punishing. (And fans have found ways to make it even tougher: almost every SMW ROM hack is just an excuse to make you navigate random mazes of muncher plants.) This is a difficult game, yes, especially compared to its successors, and what's particularly interesting about its difficulty is that there's very little reward for getting things done. There are no achievements here. No trophies. (Curse the thought.) Your reward for accomplishing something is always a green mushroom, also known as an extra life, also known as a 1-up. Always! Earn 100 coins? 1-up. Get three matching tiles in the goalpost mini-game? 1-up. Hit the right blocks in that other mini-game? 1-up. Eat two pink fruits? Spawn a cloud that starts flinging coins at you. Collect them all and you get... a 1-up. Collect five dragon coins? 1-up. Strange, right? Must have been a holdover from the arcade era, where getting an extra life essentially meant getting more money. But in your comfortable living room, when losing all of your lives just means having to replay a couple of stages, why are these 1-ups so prevalent? I took this idea to Kotaku boss Stephen Totilo, and he proposed that maybe the rewards don’t matter, because what really matters is the act of doing these things in the first place. Fair point. There are two different types of video games: the ones where you do things for a greater purpose, and the ones where you do things because you like doing them. You trudge through quick-time events in Heavy Rain, for example, because you want to see the story, while you play Tetris because it’s fun to play Tetris. Super Mario World falls into the latter category, and much has been written about the simple satisfaction of the Mario jump, or that iconic jingle that plays when you collect 100 coins. Indeed, the game feels great to play, because the acts of jumping and climbing and dinosaur-riding are fun and satisfying and smooth and glide-y. There are few things quite like frantically hitting the left and right directional buttons while Mario is mid-air, trying to get him to land in juuuust the right place. But what's really satisfying, I think, is the intersection of those individual acts and the rules that drive this game. See, as you progress through Super Mario World and figure out how everything works, you will experience revelatory moments: when you land on a new platform and see a wire, for example, you’ll instinctively know to duck from the incoming razor blade, because you learned earlier in the game that when there’s a wire, there’s probably a razor blade en route. Every new section of the game throws more rules at you. The dolphins on Butter Bridge only jump in one direction, and you have to quickly hop through the herd to get to where you want. Little fireballs in the Forest of Illusion jump to the left or right, leaving dangerous tails of fire separated by Mario-sized gaps, and the older ones will start to disappear after a few seconds. The big rhinos on Chocolate Island take two stomps to die; the small ones die in one hit, but they breathe fire. And there's nothing quite as rewarding as mastering these rules—realizing that, for example, jumping on nine koopas without hitting the ground will get you an extra life, and climbing on a chain fence still counts as being in the air, so you'd might as well try to see how many nasty lizards you can stomp before you've gotta hop off. Then, there's a section of the game called Special World, accessible after you've found all of the secrets—or cheated your way through all of the secrets—in the Star Road. The Special World is not meant for beginners, nor is it meant for cheaters. You need to have played through the rest of the game in order to understand it. Every single level in the Special World blends rules and ideas from all throughout the game. You'll see obstacles presented in new ways, or enemy combinations that you've never seen before. But the rules are still all the same. Super Mario World never breaks them. The logic is always consistent. It might make no sense that piranha plants are scared to come out when you're standing next to them, but they're always scared to come out when you're standing next to them, so it makes perfect sense. And that's why Super Mario World is brilliant, really. It's not just about how good it feels to make Mario leap off the ground: it's about challenging yourself to learn the rules surrounding what Mario can do when he's off the ground. That's when you really get it. Every single enemy, every single obstacle, every single aspect of Super Mario World has a personality. That's what makes it special.

Yes, this Mario figure on this lamp (found on Etsy) is the key to making a gamer-friendly lighting fixture. But the thing that makes it awesome to me is that rugged-looking pipework. The no-nonsense iron reminds that being Mario is rough work. Sure, you start in the sewers and wind up in the colorful Mushroom Kingdom but it’s still pipes, pipes all the time. It’s nice that this piece brightens up his day. Via Neatorama

What do you think about when you think about poetry? Does a 1950s beatnik stereotype come into your head? Do you think of a smoky café where open-mike slams happen every Saturday night? Are memories of Pole Position summoned when you think of free verse? Depending on your tastes, it sometimes might feel like poetry and video games are about as far from each other as two forms of expression can be. But they don’t have to be. Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year proves that. Bogost’s game makes a point of moving poetry’s occasional inscrutability and emotional imagery into video games. But Our Princess Is In Another Castle—a new collection from author B.J. Best— returns the favor. The book walks readers through a life refracted through pixels. It’s a life journey where dating, heartbreak and parenthood find kinship with the monsters, hunger and striving of classic games like Dig Dug, Pac-Man and Sinistar. On Another Castle’s pages, a Joust poem imagines the lives of the ostriches. “Doom” portrays a traitorous mind blasting away chunks of remembrance to depict the ruthlessness of fading memory “Maniac Mansion” imagines the horror game locale as a place of love and family, but with swatches of its gothic mood left intact. Some of Best’s poems imagine the interior lives of characters like Pac-Man or Mario. Others sketch out the existences of the people, playing them like the NES-owning grandfather in “Kid Icarus.” ASTEROIDS That August we watched the Perseids on the lake. I tried to impress you with the constellations I knew: a teapot, a bumblebee, Zeus with a lightning bolt, a jug of wine. I was making them up. • You oohed when one whooshed large and low. I knew they were all space junk, God jizz, whore iron, star snot. I knew how much burning hurt. Now you tell me a story. Tell me again how much you love me. I had the chance to ask Best, an assistant professor of English at Carroll University, few questions over e-mail. Our conversation follows: Kotaku: You draw mostly from older games. Do you feel like new games don't inspire as much poetry? Or were you drawing on memory? Best: The old adage is “Write what you know,” and I grew up in the ‘80s, so the book looks primarily at classic games, since that’s what I grew up with. I definitely think it’s possible to write poems about newer games, but it was harder for me. One reason is that it simply takes longer to play a modern game—you could probably beat Super Mario Bros. in the time it takes to complete the tutorial level of a modern game. But I also liked ‘80s games simply because they were so weird. One of my favorites in that way is Mr. Do!: you’re a clown collecting cherries who can shoot an energy ball at the dinosaurs that are chasing you. It’s easy to pick out the compelling details from a game like that, and leave the rest aside. The other problem with modern games in terms of using them for my own work is that so much of the narrative is already given to you; it can be hard to wrest the game away from its original associations and turn it into something new. Q*BERT Cartoon characters needn’t fear ledges. It’s beautiful here in the desert: mesas built up like pyramids, rattlesnakes coiled in cool, a pinyon jay cackling in the pines. All day, our hero has been chasing or chased, as the script requires, overshoots the lip of a cliff, and soon he is skittering on air. He floats long enough to hold up a sign with a funnypage swear—a riot of asterisks and exclamation points—and then comes the descending whistle, the splat. Below, he gets up and shakes the dust from his hair, but otherwise no claw, paw, or bone out of place. Step right up, folks, into this carnival of life: a cacophony of colors, flashing lights, a juggler with a cascade of rubber balls, spinning things. Step right up to the edge, peer over, contemplate the vastness below and the silver ribbon of a river tied beneath it. Step right up, pay a quarter, win a prize. You sir, yes, you sir. Mister Muscles. You look like a man who could ring gravity’s bell. Kotaku: How much of the book is autobiographical? Is it pulling from your own experiences or establishing a character? Best: Most of the poems have autobiographical elements, but none are pure autobiography. The poems were driven by my own memories, but games’ details encouraged me to follow them. For me, it’s more important to write a good poem than to faithfully reflect an actual experience of my life. A few poems, like “Mr. Do!” and “Dig Dug,” are almost entirely fictional. Kotaku: Is there much bonding with your students over video games? Have you changed how they might look at the medium? Best: I teach a freshman seminar on video game theory . The students are surprised when we play the games we do, because they were expecting to play things like Call of Duty for three months. I assign a lot of indie games that address different social and cultural issues. Sometimes, the students resist a bit at first, but I think eventually they enjoy realizing that all games can have meaning, or at least convey a message beyond “kill this; don’t get killed by that.” We do talk about games we all have in common, though, so it is fun to explore aspects of those games they haven’t considered—Pac-Man’s obsession with eating, or Mario’s quest to save one type of kingdom from another. Several students have told me that won’t again be able to look at a video game without analyzing it, and that’s when I think I’ve been a successful teacher. If you’re curious about the games Best teaches in class, here’s a sample: Pac-Man (VirtualNES)Ms. Pac-Man (VirtualNES)Tetris (VirtualGBX)The Oregon TrailPassageSuper Mario Bros. (VirtualNES)Civilizations WarsDys4iaPersonal Trip to the MoonWolfenstein 3DLittle WheelKing’s Quest I (download)Bloons Tower Defense 2MinecraftLine RiderDoomZorkSamorostLesbian Spider-Queens of MarsLovedEvery Day the Same DreamJanuary CONGRATULATIONS, ENTER YOUR INITIALS At last, you’ve done it. After years of errors, oodles of maneuvers. You’ve baffled the bullets. Crossed every chasm. Bludgeoned all the bumblers until you became beatified. Congratulations. When you were born, your mother cast upon you three letters like runes. All along, you’ve scrutinized them like a scholar, wondering when they might start spelling something sensible. Something more than a sweatshirt, an old car that needs new brakes, frozen pizza. Maybe even jealous of those who have Ignatius or Makepeace or Magdalena. Now think of all the luminaries likewise initialed! Actresses. Philosophers. Explorers. Kings and queens. And Jesus Holy Christ, who has been atop the leaderboard for centuries. Now you are among them, your initials glorious, forever electric in their pantheon. The prose poems in Another Castle aren’t rhyming couplets but they still manage to evoke hypnotic syncopations as you read them. They feel like they’re able to echo the random specificity of the joyful, painful, sudden of life through the abstract prism of video games. Light goes in, bounces around and comes out changed. The words on the page may not speak to the exact mechanics of, say, Space Invaders or Rampage. But you recognize the feelings that bubble up as you’re reading. But Our Princess Is In Another Castle is published by Rose Metal Press and is available now. Poems reprinted with permission.

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