PixlBit

Some of the visual elements in the levels were also meant to evoke a play. For instance, the platforms that seemed to be suspended by strings or bolted to the backdrop. Also, the way the levels all ended was supposed to be an "exit stage left" (which it would be from the perspective of Mario as an actor on stage.) 

Nintendo does that a lot, actually. Look at the intro to Super Mario All-Stars or some of Nintend's online presentations. Those seem to be probably deliberate callbacks to Warner Bros cartoons that showed mortal enemies like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd as colleagues and actors when off-camera("What's Up, Doc?") Mario was designed as an "actor" like Bugs or Mickey that could be plugged into any situation he was needed for. 

This section covered my two favorite PS2 games: Dragon Quest VIII and Final Fantasy XII. DQVIII was a shock in how big of a leap it was from its PS1 predecessor. I took the day off from work for FFXII's launch. 

There were a lot of Galaxian clones on pre-NES consoles and computers. Some of fhem were close enough to be sued over, but there was one I liked on TRS-80 called Galaxy Invasion. That one had the twist that the boss "flagship" enemies would occasionally fire unavoidable lasers if you didn't destroy them in time. There were no official Galaga ports until the NES, so I think Galaxian actuallly did better on the home market since Galaga had to compete against Super Mario Bros. It's obviously a different story now: Galaga is one of the most evergreen arcade games out there and is in almost every collection Namco puts out, alongside Pac-Man and Dig-Dug. Galaxian occasionally gets put in colllections for historical context, but really shows its age while Galaga is a legit timeless classic.

I always thought of early 80s shooters as falling into one of three categories: Space Invaders clones, Galaxian clones, and Centipede clones. 

Fighting games are among the few games thaf I do get into in terms of online play. A lot of it is the character designs. I'm a fan of the Guilty Gear series, and ASW has really been doing well for itself over the past few years with DBFZ. That game was a definite improvement over the old Budokai games.

Cities Skylines is what SimCity 5 should have been. The king is dead, long live the king.

Fun fact which Cary probably already knows: By now a lot of us know that SMB 2 started out as Doki Doki Panic in Japan. What a lot of people don't know is that Doki Doki Panic started out as... a Super Mario game. 

I'd have probably iiked this game if I could have played it. I mostly got what my family would get me. But my uncle set me up with a huge collection of pirated games for the Atari 130XE.

I tried Jade Empire during my brief stint as a 360 owner, but I have never been able to get into Bioware games at all. My typical experience is to play through the intro, lose interest, and move onto something else. When I want a western RPG, Bethesda (pre Fallout 76, anyway) and CD Projekt usually fit the bill a lot better. I remember Shiness from a few years back. Looks a little like Tail Concert or Solatorobo.

I have RPG Maker MV, but I haven't been able to get the motivation to really build something on it. But I've played with a lot of game-making software and level editors. A lot of early computer games featured level editors. Definitely interested in Game Builder Garage.

This is one of the GOATs. My favorite 2-D Mario game. It squeezed out every bit of performance the NES could muster. It looked better than quite a few 16-bit games. I liked the compact nature of the levels and the ability to store power-ups and was disappointed that SMW dropped that. I actually felt that Super Mario World, while still a fine game, was a step down from SMB 3 in some important ways. Technically, the NES shouldn't have been able to handle it, because the NES didn't natively have the capability to handle multiple direction scrolling - heck, the smooth scrolling of the original was still mostly a Nintendo trade secret thaf was beyond the capabilities of almost every other game company at the time. Nintendo had to make new programming tools to accommodate diagonal scrolling. 

I actually first played it in 1989, sometime before it released, at a McDonald's competition. At that time McDonald's was giving out Mario toys in happy meals. I also saw it in one of those PlayChoice-10 arcade machines Nintendo made at the time, again in 1989 before the game was officially released.

I read somewhere that Nintendo's premise for SMB 3 was that the worlds were the sets of a play, hence the opening with the rising curtain and some of the visual elements.