The most annoying world in Super Mario Bros. 3 is hands-down world three. Plumbers apparently are terrible swimmers, and navigating underwater is only marginally less frustrating than killing off all four ninja turtles in two minutes. The designers felt a frog suit would be a nice bone to toss at gamers, but it’s barely an improvement underwater, and a nightmare when back on land.
presented by nibbishment
Super Mario Brothers 2 introduced a lot of cool, quirky gameplay aspects to the series, but one of my personal favorites was the idea the jumping onto an enemy’s back might not immediately kill said enemy. The idea of riding on an enemy over an otherwise deadly obstacle opened the game’s level design up to all sorts of interesting possibilities. My favorite of which is today’s moment.
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| All aboard! |
Write a story about a group of characters working towards the same goal, while one of them, obviously, is not on the same page. Word Limit: 1500
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“I hate that fish. He just gulps you and you’re dead. Fucking bullshit.”
– Some eloquent YouTube Commenter
You get messily devoured a couple of times the first time you encounter him. After all, he’s one of the very few enemies that can kill Mario no matter how powered up he is. He feeds on your complacency. He doesn’t care that you have a raccoon tail or a fire flower (well, technically, he might care a bit about that). You’re just swimming along, and suddenly – GULP – you’re back to the world map. You’re just bait to him.
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| Exhibit A: Mario about to be reduced to chum |
Presented by nibbishment
We open our countdown with an unexpected moment.
Throughout Super Mario Brother 2, you’ve digging up turnips, carrots, and parsnips. With the exception of the odd potion bottle, these are things you might expect to be planted within the soil. You fling these tubers at enemies to knock them out. Everything is working as God intended it.
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| Pictured: Something you might expect to find sprouting from the soil. |
I’ve decided to team up with Nibbishment to do a series of posts about various video games we’ve both enjoyed way too much. There are so many sites out there that review games as a whole, but we’ll be eschewing that and just picking out our favorite moments. The ones that gives us goosebumps or made us shout “Radical!” because we were hip 80’s kids. We’ll split the workload here, but we’ll be cross-posting.
Our first list will run down the three SMB games released for the NES. Delightfully, we discovered we shared very similar feel-good moments so there was little argument. Hopefully, you’ll feel just a bit of the adrenaline we did while recounting the best moments these games had to offer.
This week we had to write a story about two characters meeting for the final time, whether they know it or not. Word Limit: 400
I’m back from my honeymoon, so it’s time to catch ya’ll up on how things are going in Survivor. I wrote two stories while on the plane and did no editing, so please forgive me. This week we had to write about someone who takes elements of their old job and puts it into their new job.
Continue reading Survivor XV, Challenge 12: Old Job, New Job
This week we got to choose to write a story where all the characters fail at everything they do, or all the characters succeed at everything they do. I took the latter. Word Limit: 700
Publisher: Infocom
Developer: Infocom
Year: 1981
Platform: Everything
The second installment in this landmark text series is a definite improvement over the original, though still has some maddening features that would never be tolerated today.
Death By Troggles 
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