#supermariocrossover

I did not grow up fully enveloped in the gaming community, most of my early gaming years were spent with at most one or two games, Spyro and PutPut were the faces I most knew. It wasn’t until late in the life of the Xbox that I finally had my own console and not until the Xbox 360 that I finally fully dove into the world of video games. As such I never had much of an experience with the more classic examples of game history, I have never really played a Mega Man game, I hadn’t experienced super Mario brothers until long after Halo 3, and I have never heard of characters like “Simon Belmont” or “Bill Rizer” and yet they all seem so familiar. As I play through the game Super Mario Crossover I am struck most by how familiar it all feels to me. The music and map I do recognize from the super Mario game but as I am cycled through different characters, as I change their skins and weapons and the enemies they face, it all feels very familiar. Perhaps it is how everything here follows the caricature visual style, so they all seem to inhabit the same graphical world. Perhaps because their games all followed the 2D side scroller perspective, o their controls and movements all match the world around them, in fact as I play them I see how they are all so similar for all these reasons and how they can be so different. I start off with Mario a character I am very familiar with I jump and stop in ways I recognize until I fall of a cliff, suddenly I respawn as an entirely new character named Ryu. I have no clue who this character is or how he works, I quickly learn he can’t stomp in the same fashion as Mario and as I miss judge a jump and see that I will soon fall to my death on top of a koopa, I look away, but the usual death music doesn’t play, when I turn back to the screen Ryu is holding onto a cliff edge immediately above the threat, this site so reflective of how I felt causes me to laugh.

Although all these characters have such a similar feel to them even though they seem to match the world of the super Mario brothers, they don’t quite fit. Their moves do allow them to move through the world but its never the same game, and for someone who never experienced the originals there is no way for me to figure out each character without long periods of trial and error. The world feels too much like super Mario brothers in the look and sound and the way the enemies behave, and though some of this is up to me to change around and play with many characters feel so out of place in the way the map is designed. My weirdest experience of the first level is when I was given a character who could double jump and nothing else, I found myself moving in ways that the enemies and the map just couldn’t deal with as I could out jump any threat, but never really beat them. I wanted this character in a more vertical world with less enemies but with enemies who moved around much more, it just didn’t feel right in the super Mario world.