Call me old-fashioned, but I wasn't really all that excited for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 when it came out. I'm not a huge fan of first person shooter games with a few exceptions (one of them being Goldeneye for N64). I did give into the hype and I played it, and it confirmed my malaise towards it. More power to those who love it and engage in epic multi-player battles online, but it's just not my cup of coffee. However, I do consider myself a gamer, although more a casual one these days. My days of hardcore gaming died when the N64 fell into obscurity, and really, the salad days of that hermitry were when the NES was the big system out.So it's not really all that surprising when I say that the older franchises are the ones that pique my interest. Zelda is my favorite franchise of all-time. Metroid, Mortal Kombat, Madden NFL, Final Fantasy and Sonic the Hedgehog all are titles I look for when they're announced as new. The original King of the 8-Bit Characters and Nintendo's mascot franchise is what has been taking up most of my gaming time nowadays though. Yep, a little Italian plumber named Mario, after nearly 30 years, still gets more attention from me than the most hyped shooters that seem to saturate the market.
From the time when he was climbing scaffolding to try and save his girlfriend from a giant ape in a game where he wasn't even in the title to the myriad number of games he's anchoring for Nintendo today, Mario's journey to the top has been pretty special for both his parent company and the gamers who've played as him over the years. Nearly every game he's been associated with as a lead character has been awesome, the exception being the boring and overly difficult Super Mario Sunshine for Gamecube.
The best part about most Mario games is that they have replay value, something a lot of current games don't have. Obviously, the older Mario games have this. The allure of the NES, outside of the obvious nostalgia, is that with no or limited continues and limited or no in-game hints (i.e., the game doesn't hold your hand when you're trying to defeat it). The games are still a challenge to beat to this day. It really doesn't matter how many times I've beaten the original Super Mario Bros.; each time I fire it up on my Wii Virtual Console, it's a challenge. I can't say the same for some other games. Still, even the later games in the series, even with the save points and the hints, there's still a degree of difficulty that makes the challenge unique even if you're coming back for a second or third time to play through. Additionally, the later Mario games have so much content in them, so much stuff to play through, that beating the game and beating the game are two different animals. Take for example Super Mario Galaxy. You can beat the main quest of the game by accumulating 60 stars and taking out Bowser, saving Peach and the Universe in the process. That's great, but there are 120 possible stars to collect. That opens up the gameplay even more, and on top of that, after you collect all 120 stars, you unlock Luigi and can play through the entire game again with the green-suited brother of Mario. That's what I call getting more bang for your buck.
Nintendo gets blasted for not getting with the times, still producing "kiddie" games and not getting the third-party support that the other systems do. Those criticisms may be founded to other gamers, but to me, I don't really care. Nintendo first-party titles for the most part have the intuitive gameplay and the degree of difficulty (i.e. not hand-holding easy but not skull-numbingly difficult) that I look for in games. Even what many people thought was a throwaway title, Luigi's Mansion, was engaging and kept me busy for hours on end.
So here's to the fat Italian plumber in the red hat. For gamers like me, he's an icon, one of the steadiest rocks in video game history. Plus, it gave us this:
Yeah, that's the stuff.
