Super Mario Crossover: Let's Discuss Moreover

If you don't know what Super Mario Crossover is, you should do yourself a favor and try it right now. It only takes a minute to get the gist (although you'll want to take longer). Go ahead, I'll wait.

Back already? If you didn't play the game (and apparently hate fun, happiness, and the finer things in life like Ninja Turtles), let me fill you in: Super Mario Crossover is the latest in a never-ending stream of fan-made crossover games. The catch here is that the most memorable characters on the Nintendo (NES) are playable in Super Mario Bros. 1, and it's pretty good.

Super Mario Crossover is a remarkable tribute to old-school NES gaming. And this tribute is beyond the “hey-nice-job-on-the-pencil-drawing-that-looks-kind-of-like-mario-or-maybe-luigi” level and approaches “oh-wow-that-is-definitely-a-painting-of-mario-and-luigi-murdering-shy-guys” and all of its brilliance.

 Definitely.

What makes this crossover so great is how true to the original games it is. The source material is represented well here. All of the sprites are lovingly ripped from the original NES games, meaning the clouds are still floating, white bushes.

Or are the bushes low, green clouds?

I think the sprite dimensions are even the same. (This results in an incredibly short Link. Before playing the game, I expected to see the taller Link from the side-scrolling Zelda II.) Keeping the 8-bit roots has the effect of making all the characters look strangely at home in the Mushroom Kingdom. (Then again, if a squat plumber doesn't look out of place, who would?)

You got: Princess Toadstool

And with sprites come animations, which are also handled well. The jumping, shooting, and even the unique death animations for each character are kept intact. Unique music tracks and sound effects for each character have also been included. Throw in some controls and mechanics that do a reasonable job of emulating the original games (painfully so in some instances), and you have an impressive package.

The real draw in Super Mario Crossover is experimenting with the characters' abilities. I don't think you've truly experienced the game until you have:

• Shot a lakitu out of the sky
• Captured a mushroom with the boomerang
• Denounced Castlevania's Simon Belmont and his rigid jumps
• Unleashed a charged shot through a line of goombas
• Cleared out a screen of bricks with the spread shot (the most overpowered weapon in the game)
• Seriously, Castlevania had the worst controls
• Drained a coin box with rapid fire
• Long live Dracula

The only way to collect coins.

The problem with having a great foundation for a game is that it's tempting to smother the game with cool ideas. As impressive a task creating this game is, I'm almost more impressed with what Jay Pavlina, the creator of Super Mario Crossover, didn't do with this game.

Everyone who plays the game is going to have some interesting ideas of what could make the experience even better. But instead of adding a bunch of half-baked features, he managed to hit the most important parts, handled the original games well, and kept the overall premise very simple. Adding all of the weapons from the Mega Man series would not even approach penance for spotty hit detection and having characters occasionally fall through the floor.

Jay also adhered to the Rule of Fun. Quoting him from his interview with Popten:

“Well… I did include an ability even though it screws up the game’s balance. And that’s Bill Rizer’s spread gun of course. I tried to balance it as best I could by making the bullets weak, but it’s still by far the strongest weapon in the game and makes everything a breeze. But like I said, my goal was to make the game fun, and who wouldn’t want to mow down enemies with spread? I knew I wanted it, and I knew everyone else would want it, so I put it in anyway.”

Wisdom. Now that I've touched on how games need to keep their concepts simple, let me disregard my own advice and splurge about what I want from the next iteration of Super Mario Crossover.

When I first heard of this game, I expected there to be a sample level from each of the NES games. I was looking forward to Mario jumping on alien spiders from Contra and Samus power bombing Mets from Mega Man.

"Mamma mia! That's-a one big koopa!"

I understand that Super Mario Bros. 1 was ideal because the levels are pretty simple and essentially only require moving from left to right. But if you're able to pick and choose levels from different game series, there's enough variety that it would definitely be possible to offer up levels that all the characters could run through (barring Simon).

The other thing is that rehashing the first Mario game over and over could get old quick. I would like to see the next game take Super Mario World and use everyone's sprites from the Super Nintendo era. (Not surprisingly, all the characters in Super Mario Crossover are characters that survived to the next generation of game consoles.) The graphics would be a little prettier, but the nostalgia would still run thick.

The graphical upgrade goes hand-in-hand with my desire for level variety. Trying to recreate every level of Super Mario World would be suicidal, but taking a level from each represented game would provide some quality over quantity.

Fan-made crossover games can certainly feel very derivative, but Super Mario Crossover has won me over. I wonder if, years from now, people will recreate our more modern games as crossover games. Imagine the Quake Guy fragging some Covenant Elite into glorious gibs. Holding more than two weapons is so overpowered.

Video Games Are Like Logic Puzzles

It blows me away that video games are treated like the second-biggest waste of time ever conceived by man (right above studying Time Cube theory).

The only brain activity required to watch your typical television show is the repressing of your entire left hemisphere's attempts to escape the torture of hackneyed plot formulas by exiting out the back of your skull. This is the socially accepted way to spend your time. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional brain-strangling session myself, but even the dumbest video games require some neurons to fire.

A video game (any kind of game, really) is like a logic puzzle. How's that? Let's start with a simple logic puzzle and break it down.

A farmer needs to cross a river on his small raft. He has with him a fox, a chicken, and a sack of grain. His raft can hold one object besides himself. In the presence of the farmer nothing gets eaten, but if left without the farmer, the fox will eat the chicken, and the chicken will eat the grain. How can the farmer get all three possessions across the river safely?

Not to be confused with the Mario Pit Crossing Puzzle.

Every puzzle has an objective, or goal. In this case, it's getting the farmer's lovable misfit crew across the river (sack of grain is the comic relief).

We also need rules that we apply to reach the goal. The rules here are that the farmer has a lousy raft and that we must ensure that all of the animals starve.

Finally, we have to maintain resources in some manner. (This is less apparent in some puzzles than others.) We could consider the animals as resources, but let's not. I'd like to bring your attention to how many times we cross the river. The River Crossing Puzzle is often presented with the caveat that we must cross the river as few times as possible. Besides, you're not impressing anyone if you solve the puzzle in a couple hundred turns.

Our logic puzzle has a goal, rules, and resources to account for. So does every video game you've ever played. The most obvious examples are video games based on puzzles.

The only winning move is not to play.

Let's consider a more interesting example, like the legendary Super Mario Bros. game. That's right. Legendary.

The goal of Super Mario Bros. is obvious enough; keep moving right to reach the end of each level. Also an acceptable answer: rescue a MacGuffin dressed in pink that will never, ever learn.

But how does a game like Super Mario Bros. deal with rules? Short of using glitches or cheats, you are forced to follow the rules. It's a given. All the stuff that isn't questioned because it's common sense (like gravity, stomping on turtles, and chasing growth-inducing running mushrooms) make up the rules of your typical Mario game.

OK, so where does resource management come into play? It's not like you can save up your golden coins and spend them on anything other than an extra life. I can answer that one too. (Ah yes, the privileges of answering your own questions.)

Platforming games are, by and large, played in real-time. Aside from being governed by the rules of the Mushroom Kingdom, you must manage your time, reflexes, and position. No matter how awesome you are, you can only hit those buttons so fast. And because of your limitations as a human playing a game in real-time, you have to manage those reflexes. Have you ever given yourself just a little extra space to make that running jump? How about waiting for a crushing ceiling to repeat its up-and-down pattern just to ensure you can sneak under it cleanly? That's managing your reflexes right there.

Your response time and real-time actions are even more apparent as resources when we consider the alternative. What if Super Mario Bros. was a turn-based game instead of a real-time game?

Super Mario RPG: An entirely original idea.

With the real-time system, time and your reflexes determined how far you could move. Now, in the turn-based system, movement would be fixed over some amount of turns. Shuffling actions around on a turn-based system should be easy to recognize as resource management. But really, the only difference between this system and the real-time system is how quickly you are making the decisions. The focus will have shifted from reflexes to planning, but the actions themselves are the same (and some resources, like position, would remain unchanged).

In short, all games, even real-time games, have some sort of quantifiable resource to be handled, just like logic puzzles.

Hopefully you can see how a video game is like a logic puzzle. Both force interpreting and applying goals, rules, and resources. When you approach a new game, there is a flurry of mental acrobatics you go through to learn, understand, and play the game. This is decidedly more involved than drooling all over yourself. So what's the problem with video games again?

Admittedly, some games do not provide very interesting rules or goals, which lead to not very interesting challenges. But no one is making the argument that all games are worth your time.

The other problem is when you play a game exhaustively. With a logic puzzle like the classic River Crossing Puzzle, it's interesting when you solve it the first time, but you're not getting much else out of it once you've solved it. The same goes for a video game. When you can play the game without thinking about it... then you're not really thinking about it. Deep.

Play some interesting games. Play some that are really challenging.

I said challenging, not sadistic.

And when a game isn't challenging anymore, learn a new game. I can think of worse things to do.

About

What is the Nifty key? Only the most stylish and smart button on your keyboard. (Unless, of course, you have a Menu key. And to think you wasted all that time right-clicking like a chump.) This handy button replaces the ill-advised “Ctrl + Fn + F19 + Sys rq + Middle click” shortcut, making it possible for humans with less than three hands to easily access the niftiest content.

I maintain this blog to contribute to the online community that I benefit from so often. I read my news online. I get my entertainment online. I do my work online. I irreversibly scar my psyche online. It only makes sense that I put my interests and writing online.

I am what you might call a gaming enthusiast. Playing games is a favorite pastime of mine, but I spend more time reading about, discussing, and creating games than I do actually playing them. I happen to think that gaming can be a productive hobby.

That being said, I use this site to review games, discuss games I'm working on, and blather about where this field is headed. Whoa! A blog about games? We're really changing it up now! The idea is that, unlike most of the gaming content out there, this site isn't (really) bad.

As a developer, being able to search for help is an invaluable service to me. And I wouldn't get that information if people didn't post their solutions. So a sort of side-goal for this blog is to provide solutions to problems that I have come across when working on whatever.

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