Slate talks about
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Probably old news to the Nintendo junkies and Wii owners out there, but it got me thinking about what must've been going through Shigeru Miyamoto's head when faced with the task of creating a sequel to his industry's
Citizen Kane.
After lulling you into complacency with the game's superficial similarity to Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto (depressed or not) signals that he intends to torment you. The first row of question-marked boxes you encounter includes that familiar mushroom, Mario's iconic power-up. Except this mushroom is different. It's deadly. As Mario was tossed from the screen, I experienced a combination of shock and puzzlement. That would become a familiar sensation over the next three hours. Again and again, the game uses your familiarity with Super Mario Bros. to subvert the playing experience.
Mental Floss Magazine profiles
Shel Silverstein's career, from
Playboy cartoonist to children's books author to musician.
Silverstein made it pretty impossible to get pigeon-holed into a poetry-and-cartooning rut by simply tossing in a few other careers on top—songwriter, musician, novelist, you name it. In 1959, just a few years before he started to write children’s books, Silverstein began a respectable career in music. How respectable? Well, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, won two Grammy awards, recorded more than a dozen albums, and wrote hundreds of songs that were recorded by artists including Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
2 comments:
I've only played the Lost Levels version off of the Super Mario: All Stars from the SNES. That alone was hard enough. After watching the gameplay from the article's video, I can see why fans would like the challenge. I also have the game that they based the American Super Mario Bros. 2 on, Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic. That's still on the list to beat.
Someone at work actually went through the trouble of buying a pirated SMB2 Famicom cartridge on eBay, digging through stacks of used NES games at a store to find Gyromite cartridges with internal 60-to-72-pin converters, and putting them together to play the "real" game (sans title screen, apparently). A lot of effort, but he has the satisfaction of being able to say he beat it!
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