As a way to clear the boards of my second week-long absence in a month, I'm running a sort of Crazy Eddie sale on Mario-related links. EVERYTHING MUST GO! YOU'LL NEVER SEE PRICES SO LOW ON VIDEO GAME STORIES EVER AGAIN! I'M SO CRAZY I'M GETTING PLASTIC SURGERY AND FLEEING THE COUNTRY!
11/28: Metacritic's Mario Kart 7 page: No surprise here: they haven't tinkered with the winning formula.
11/27: I could watch Mario's stop-motion adventures all day. Too bad I can only watch them for a minute and twenty-seven seconds.
11/26: Follow a meme long enough, an eventually it will get to Super Mario. Fully 35% of the Internet is devoted to what back in 1995 was three guys making up Chewbacca-Ate-My-Balls jokes. The newest one (already so stale it's bricklike) is the pepper-psray cop, cropped out nonchalantly dosing the eyes of peaceful protesters, and put into ever more ridiculous (and usually innocent) surroundings. Two of those innocent eyes belong to Mario.
11/25: 2011: the year of "TIL." TIL stand for Today I Learned, a shorthand for treating ancient news like latebreaking scoops, because it's news to you! If your TIL is something that hasn't been previously shared on the Internet, which is a game of Googlewhacking nowadays, then you win, and gain attention. A good example is this Mario tidbit: the cover to SMB2 is art reused from the original Japanese SMB. If you're waiting for the "news" portion of this tidbit, there isn't any: it's just some recycled art. Nowhere near as scandalous as the original SMB's cover, which shows Mario falling to his death.
11/24: Everyone who bought a 3DS early has two more reasons to get that mistake rubbed in their faces. Nintendo is launching Zelda and Mario bundle packs for $200 each, whihc is quite kind of them because -- thought experiment -- imagine a person who wants a 3DS but does NOT want to play Mario or Zelda. That person probably exists, but is rarer than the legendary Zapdos.
11/23: Most big Nintendo games launch within a few weeks of each other around the world. Australia is usually one of the last countries to get their slice of the it's-a me pie. So to gain a few weeks on selling, some have turned to the "gray market," where they buy in bulk from a country where the item is already on sale, and thus get to street it a bit early. Take a guess what happens next. Note: if your guess involves Nintendo placing a stick firmly up its butt, you win!
11/22: Is this a thing now? Taking a you-gotta-be-kidding-me touchdown run and scoring it to the Super Mario invincibility music? Don't get me wrong, I like it, but it kind of diminishes the achievement of breaking free of 11 enormous muscular men who can run a 4.5 forty.
11/21: Metacritic's Mario and Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games page: There were two Robin Hood movies that came out awhile back: one had a big budget, Kevin Costner's quasiaccent, and the other had the bad guy from Sleeping With the Enemy, and a pre-wowsa Uma Thurman. This Mario and Sonic game is that Patrick Bergen version: forgotten, rather justly swept under the rug because there are not only better Mario and Sonic games out, there are better Mario and Sonic games out this week.
11/20: Metacritic's Super Mario 3D Land page: There's a fairness to collective ratings: assuming each is from a critic of equal weight, you total them up and divide by the asymptote, holding the coefficient to probablize the matrix algorithm, and at the end you've shown that you were not paying attention in math class. Or statistics. But you don't have to: this is an A game, both by importance and by rating. (Luckily, it's not AO.)
