Back in my day, videogames came on cartridges. They were sturdy bricks designed to be thrown in dufflebags for sleepovers. The internet barely existed and it certainly didn’t touch our videogames. There was no such thing as downloadable content, expansion packs, or bug patches, so the game on the cartridge was the entire game, take it or leave it. The finality of the experience created a greater bond between the player and the game than today. If you don’t like how Chun-Li dresses or think Dhalsim is too powerful in Street Fighter IV on your XBox 360, don’t worry, there’s a downloadable update coming soon to give you new costumes and difficulty tweaks. Is Bionic Commando on the NES too hard for you? Well too bad, man up and learn to play the game right, pansy-boy.
This increased sense of urgency created an intimacy and a loyalty. Gamers grew attached to the characters and universes of these “classic” games more than they do now. No matter how Master Chief from Halo and Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet may try, they’ll never have the curious fan-devotion of the old-school icons like Mega Man, Sonic, or Mario. Countless grade-school playground conversations and sketchbooks were filled with questions about what would happen if these legends were to meet, to impact on each others’ unique universes. The Super Smash Bros games have allowed us to let many of the bigger icons engage in fisticuffs, but one clever indie browser game has finally allowed us to put a number of the greats in the shoes of possibly the greatest.
Jay Pavlina’s Super Mario Crossover takes the entirety of the classic Super Mario Bros and allows you to play through it as a variety of classic 8-bit Nintendo-era characters, transposing their movesets and skills into the original Mushroom Kingdom. If you choose Mario, you’re playing the original game we’ve all known and loved for over two decades with absolutely no alterations – all the power-ups, enemies and secret locations are the same as before. The real fun comes from replacing Mario with one of the other 8-bit heroes: The Legend of Zelda‘s Link can swing his sword to attack above or below him, with a boomerang for slightly longer-range attacks; Metroid‘s Samus Aran can use her morph ball to squeeze through tight spaces and her upgraded wave beam is far more reliable than Mario’s fireballs ever were; Castlevania‘s Simon Belmont has a double-jump that his contemporaries lack, and his daggars make for a powerful distance weapon; Conta‘s Bill Rizer is a badass and Mega Man… well… he’s flippin’ Mega Man, what more do you want? All that added power does serve to illustrate Mario’s secret power, though: running. None of the other characters ever needed to run in their games, just walk and fight, so rushing through perilous areas and getting to the flag before time runs out is more challenging without Mario’s supernatural ability to run faster than any overweight Italian unionized-plumber has any right to.
Super Mario Crossover is apparently only the demo of the much larger project Jay Pavlina’s been working on. While there is concern that the game in its current state may receive a cease-and-desist order from the owners of the intellectual property it’s based upon, Jay seems unconcerned, stating that it would be easy to replace the copywritten materials with his own original parodies. Until that final concept, or any other fresh projects come along, take the time to play through Super Mario Crossover now. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself remembering things that never actually happened while playing.
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