Scultped model of the Spirited Away Bathhouse.
This just happened
Having a rough day? Put a bow on a pug and make it all better! (submitted by Jelena!)
The Title
Barfutura
Just in case you ever decide to play D&D.
I do play D&D and my character is a Fey Corgi Barbarian.
oh my god
Okay I want to talk about something important to me about video games and I hope that I don’t come off as sounding like I’m basing too much on nostalgia or writing off the current generation of gaming. Games are wonderful nowadays, and in so many respects, they’re getting better and better. Kid Icarus: Uprising was wonderful. I absolutely adore the two Zelda DS titles. Pokémon just keeps outdoing itself.
Mario platformers (the platformers specifically, the RPGs and the Galaxy titles are all consistently fantastic) are letting me down.
They’re not bad games by any stretch, they’re fun and satisfying to play. Super Mario 3D Land has probably some of the most satisfying and memorable gameplay I’ve ever experience from the franchise. But the games themselves are so soulless these days. The level design is linear and incredibly forgiving. The enemies are all easily dispatched and the bosses can all be beaten within 3 to 15 seconds. Remember (god, I already hate how I’m using that word) in Yoshi’s Island when you spent like, twenty to thirty minutes fighting Navel Pirahna in world three if you hadn’t mastered skipping your eggs over the surface of the water underneath the battle arena? But if you had it on lock you could knock him out and feel like a superhero? Or in world five where, after slogging through ice blocks and snow and ricocheting penguins, you suddenly find yourself at the top of a massive ski hill and Baby Mario even gets a tiny Santa hat when you ski down it?
What about in Super Mario Bros. 3 where there’s one world where you have to scale a massive spiralling tower to get to the second half of the world high up in the clouds, and you can even see the tiny dots that is the land portion of it from a break in the clouds in the world map?
Or take Super Mario World. You can’t even see the final world until you dive into the haunted ghost ship (which the instruction manual tells you is a battleship from Super Mario Bros. 3) and dodge ghosts to find the switch that raises a giant Bowser head from the depths of the ocean. How fucking cool was that?
I just… feel like those experiences are few and far between in the new platformer titles. The new games are fun and accessible but there’s nothing particularly immersive about them. Even the final boss fight in 3D Land, while still relatively memorable, feels tiresome after Bowser resurrects himself for… what is it, the third time? It felt like a Square Enix title at that point. That’s not necessarily meant as an insult, it’s just not what I play Mario for I guess.
Look, here’s the thing. Writing off current games due to nostalgia is stupid. It’s so stupid. It’s exhausting. I groan when people do it. “A LINK TO THE PAST WAS THE LAST GOOD ZELDA GA-” no, shut your god damn mouth. But the new Mario platformers are built around nostalgia. That’s most of their appeal! Hey, the Bowser battles are just like the ones in Super Mario Bros.! Remember that? Hey look it’s Yoshi! Neat! The 3D Land theme is similar to the level theme from Super Mario Bros. 3! Aren’t you having fun?
And… there’s nothing inherently wrong with that practice. I have a blast playing the games, but if I were to recall a level I’ve played in any of the three, soon to be four New Super Mario Bros. titles, I couldn’t even tell you which one it was from. And the only reason I don’t include 3D Land in that blanket statement is because the perspective makes the levels slightly less homogenous.
I just think it’d be neat if they crafted their own experiences instead of just getting you to recall one you had ten or fifteen or twenty years ago.
I agree with you about the level designs, they bring nothing new to the table (incidentally, Yoshi’s Island has always been my favourite game because it’s so wacky). My brother and I were a bit, ‘oh, is that all?’ at the boss fight in SMB Wii. But I wouldn’t completely write off the SMB Wii game - only because the multiplayer mode is excellent. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there hasn’t been an ‘old’ SMB game to date that allows two players to play within the same level?
I wouldn’t play the new SMB Wii on my own, but with others it’s a riot. We throw each other around and into holes/enemies on purpose, cooperate to get hard to reach items, and when you accidentally jump into each other it looks like the characters are doing a celebratory chest bump :p
But yeah, Super Mario World (1 and 2) really does have the most memorable level and map designs; there was this one level where you couldn’t progress to the next level unless you skipped the trick exit and found the real one. My brother and I were so happy we’d completed this level, and it went back to the map screen to reveal the next portion of the map… only to loop back to the same level! I was sad when we finished that game, I would have liked there to be a few more levels per world.
Hey guys, I’d be really grateful if you could vote for my tee on Qwertee!
Right over here —> http://www.qwertee.com/product/fight-that-plaque/
can we please talk about the homestuck references in adventure time
the bucket knight
document 413
and this might just be a coincidence but I’m gonna guess that it’s not
Oh my god. There is no fucking way this is a coincidence.
The writers at the adventure time studios love homestuck, or at least some of them do
There’s jade on the board
also this blue muscular lumpthing with his towel
omf
;__;
(Source: pyrop)
rebloggin’ for Sam
YES
meowth is so cute GOD
