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NFUN posted...

it's not a channel it's an instrument. the real question is how did you find that?

I typed "delay lama mario" into Google!

NFUN posted...

also it has videos with millions of views what are you talking about?

The channel I found only had ones with thousands of views at most.

Leonhart4 posted...

Yes, 3 is still better than World because it has better individual level design that focused on actual platforming instead of hiding secrets.

But unfortunately Nintendo agrees with you and that's why Mario games now have flagpoles as a collectible.

You can have both!

Kaizo Mario World: I am not a fan of super hard fan romhacks. I don't really get the appeal, other than for twitch streaming purposes. It doesn't exactly offend me, and I have more respect for it for being one of the first (if not the first?), but I see things like Pokemon Emerald Kaizo, and I just don't get why people want to kill themselves playing it. But then again, I have played mods for BG2 to increase the difficulty, so I guess I'm just being a giant hypocrite here.
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Baby Park
Mary O
Brooklyn
Dennis Hopper
Anya Taylor-Joy
Angry Sun
I'm a Chuckster
Do the Mario
Fireworks (End of Level)
Super Mario Bros Super Show
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
7 Grand Dad
Toaster
Super Mario Bros. 2
Backwards Long Jump
Chuckya: I don't know if there's anything in all of Mario that I am more neutral toward than Chuckyas. Was this nominated because they can chuck you into an abyss, and that's kind of annoying? Whatever. I'll say this, they look better in 64 DS than 64. Their eyes were way too big on the N64.
Reznor
Final Fantasy Characters (Mario Hoops 3-on-3)
Mouser

- Frog Suit Tier
Great Giana Sisters: Yep, textbook plagiarism. I like how they even kept the siblings element, which is like the least important part. They even keep the "all just a dream" element from SMB2! Alright, let's just check out this gameplay... Wow, you can't even make the screen slow down for a second when you stomp a goomba? Is it really too much to ask that you don't have the exact same block sprites for Giana to smash? This music is way worse than SMB1's, too. But the game honestly doesn't look THAT bad, I've seen way worse.
Wall Kicks Will Work (Star)
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Toad (Character)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Dong Dong Never Die
Mario Bros.
Pauline
Stanley the Bugman
Chill (Dr. Mario Theme)
Torpedo Ted
Monkey! (Dennis Hopper): I actually went to a place called Monkey Island recently, and got to feed a bunch of monkeys. It was pretty neat.
Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix
L is Real 2401
WarioWare
King Boo
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray)
Gooper Blooper
Mama Luigi
Lakilester
Steak (Boss Fight)
NBA Street V3
Coins (Mario Kart)
Luigi Mario
Mario Paint
Fortune Street
Yoshi's Safari
Move Faster, Pokey!
Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition
Racist Mario
Jump Rope Challenge (SMO)
Wario's Woods: How do you people even know about these crappy early 90s puzzle games starring secondary Mario characters? Like, honestly.
Fat Yoshi
Mike Tyson: Oh, because Mario is the ref in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out? Okay. Well, Mike Tyson is kind of a bad person, isn't he? I remember he bit off a guy's ear to get himself disqualified from a match rather than lose it properly. I don't doubt that he was an amazing boxer in his prime, but I don't know what else he's done, let me look it up. Oh, he was convicted of rape, how delightful. Wow, he's younger than I thought. Look, I told you that I don't know anything about sports! To me, he's just the ear guy.
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart)
Mario Golf: I've never liked golf. Ever. My dad's cousin is super into golf, he lives and breathes golf, he traveled to Scotland to golf on the first courses ever. He's also the most boring man in the world. Oh, Mario Golf? I'm sure it's better than regular golf. I played Mario Golf exactly once, at Josh's house in 1999, and I didn't understand the controls and got bored and just played Pokemon. You can tell me that the later Mario Golfs are better, or that eleven-year-olds are idiots and I should give it another try, but I distinctly remember thinking this was less fun than Pokemon, so why should I play it instead of Pokemon?
Personalized Mario 64 Cartridge Theory
LUEshi
Boswer's Clown Car
Casio Hellburst
Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels
Wario's Mario Party 1 and 2 Voice
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Yoshi's Cookie: Stop nominating shitty Yoshi puzzle games no one cares about, dammit. This ranks above the Yoshi game solely because it at least has a real name.
Bowser is Pissed (Theme)
Yoshi (Game)
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39)
Mario is Missing

- Poison Mushroom Tier
I Am A Teacher: Super Mario no Sweater
Mario Kart Tour
Mario Teaches Typing
Super Mario Bros. Special: How do you even know about these things? This is so obscure that even the Wiki doesn't know exactly when it was released. Oh wait, I think I've heard of this, this is the one that's so poorly made that it doesn't have screen-scrolling, and is just a series of single screens? Man, I'm afraid of getting banned for making a joke about this being the wrong kind of special. God, I'm watching it in action now, and the music is so off-key that it's hurting my ears, even I can tell this is completely wrong. And it doesn't even have end-of-level fireworks! He just hit a block in 1-1's ceiling to make a fire flower pop out, but I don't think you can even reach it because of the lack of screen scrolling, god this is atrocious. But like, again, I have seen much worse than this. It does seem playable, even if everything is wrong. Does... does the original SMB1 have lava that's just one sprite that never moves? I can't remember, I feel like it flowed, right? Someone tell me. Holy crap, after hitting the axe to beat Bowser, the screen just immediately flashes to Toad talking to Mario, it doesn't even show Mario walking off-screen, how embarrassing. Inexplicably, while watching this video, I got an advertisement for War Thunder, a game I've never played, in Japanese. WAH SUNDA.
Super Mario Land
Bowser's Big Blast
Watch for Rolling Rocks (0.5x A Presses)
Luigi Meeting Himself
Mario Screaming (Video)
Tatanga
Super Hornio Brothers
Toadette
Hand Injuries (Mario Party)
Pink Gold Peach
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Robirdo
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics)
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Petey Piranha
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Subspace Dubbed Over
Mario Pissing
Blue Shells just Before the Finish Line
Birdo

- Veto
Wario Land 4: I have only played one Wario Land game, which was the first one, briefly, at a Best Buy demo.

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme)
Link (Mario Kart)
Dr. Goomba Tower
Italians
Chris Pratt
Triple Jump
Super Mario Bros. Movie
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.
Isle Delfino
Beep Block Skyway
Vivian
Bowser
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Shy Guy
Valentina
Lack of Mario vs Sonic (Character Battles): Honestly, I'm not opposed to this. Setting up Link vs Cloud is one thing, setting up Mario vs Crono is one thing... Setting up Mario vs Sonic? I don't know. It would feel like a compulsion, like we just need to get it out of the way. And why? Why honestly bother? You know perfectly well that Mario would just SFF Sonic into oblivion. rSFF is barely a real thing. It's POSSIBLY changed the course of a significant match exactly once ever, in 2005, when Mario was doing worse than Samus indirectly for three years, then absolutely destroyed her when they met. You can argue Tifa beating Sephiroth in 2018, maybe. Neither of those matches are clearcut, inarguable cases. Like, yes, Mario vs Sonic, the classic rivalry, we all know about it. And if the character contests were held in like 1994, it would be a serious discussion. But even back in 2002, Mario had already clearly won their rivalry. It was already long since over, I'm sorry, and throwing them against each other in a contest would just result in a massacre, and everyone knows it. So yes, I actually support this possible? decision.
Smash 64 Commercial
Pirahna Plant (Smash Bros)
Mysterious (Mario Paint)
Peach's Castle: It's a very fairytale-looking castle. I won't lie, it's a little narcissistic of Peach to decorate the front with a stained glass window of herself, but I guess she's a princess, she's allowed to do things like that. Why this castle exists in a green field by itself, far away from the subjects I presume she rules over, is a mystery. Perhaps Peach's role is purely ceremonial, and the Toads wanted to keep her away from the main Toad city so she can't meddle in their politics. I guess that's contradicted by Mario RPG, where the castle is clearly in the main Toad city, but you can probably argue that those are different continuities. We know at least that Paper Mario is definitely a different continuity. God, what's that one German castle that inspired every fairytale castle ever? You see real castles from the medieval ages, and they are not as cool as these kinds.
Mini-Yoshi (TTYD)
Koopa Bros
Hurly Gloves: A great idea conceptually. Mario and Bowser working together... barely. Bowser still getting out some of his anger by chucking Mario at some unlucky enemy. What I don't understand, and what I've never understood, is why Mario's place in the battle is taken by a tiny Mario doll while he's picked up by Bowser. The doll doesn't do anything, and when Bowser's turn is over, Mario returns to his normal place, and the doll disappears. It can't be a software thing, like "there needs to be something in Mario's place," because you could just have it be an invisible sprite. I don't understand this at all. And the fact that Bowser throws the doll if Mario is unconscious, it would be funnier if he still just threw Mario.
Tubular
Koji Kondo
Staff Roll (Mario Kart 64)
Autumn Mountain Battle Theme: I am told by someone who shall remain nameless that Origami King is okay. I can believe that's true. Anyway, this is a much better Japan theme than the Sammer Guy one. It's perfectly good, I like it well enough. Not the best Mario battle music of all time, though.
Fawful
Axem Rangers
Mario Lemieux
Mario/Sonic Rivalry: This was a fun source of debates in the playground, but I'll level with you: even at Sonic's height, he was far below Mario. His games are just worse. The best Sonic platformer is worse than Super Mario Sunshine. His mechanics don't translate to 3D at all, and they barely function in 2D. I don't need to repeat a million youtubers' correct assessment that Sonic games incentivize you to take things slowly to avoid hitting enemies, but tell you to go fast. Sonic is superior to Mario only in one way, which is memes, because he's so much lamer. Every modern Sonic game involves Sonic traveling to the dimension where his other dimensional duplicate doesn't speak so you can relive the good old days, but the good old days are still worse than SMW! This was never a rivalry, anymore than Arnold Schwarzenegger vs Sylvester Stallone was. One of them is clearly superior to the other, and that's simply that.
Swapping Cartridges
Tanooki Suit
Delay Lama: This is stupid. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 1.6K views for its most popular video, huh? How did you even find out about this thing?
Super Mario Bros Plumbing Commercial
Warp Whistle
Shigeru Miyamoto
Super Mario Land 2

- Super Mushroom Tier
How Many Super Mario Games Are There? (Video)
Metal Mario
Luigi's Up-Taunt
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Super Mario Strikers (2005)
Shellcreeper
Stealing Stars with Boo: Diabolic. Anyone who does this is evil. I do it, of course. It's one of the most effective ways to turn around a game. I'm almost a little surprised that they still use Boos for this. Like, you could easily use Nabbit or something, but no, they've used Boos since the 90s, and they use Boos today.
Bowser Meets Bowser
Sammer's Kingdom (Theme)
Hide and Seek mods
Bowser Theme (Super Mario World 2)
Mario Quiz Cards
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme)
Mario Tennis: Power Tour: I have an important story about this game. One time, I was playing it in the playground during recess. My friends James and Thomas were sitting at the table with me, talking. James was like "did you hear that Jennifer broke up with David," and before Thomas could respond, I yelled "What?! That's bullshit!" because something happened in the game that annoyed me. Then they laughed. Wait a second, who the hell are these characters? Clay? Ace? Mason? Chad? Why are there so many no-name human characters? And why does one look exactly like Chun-Li?
Bah (NSMB Music)
March 10th: Mario Day. Do any other big IPs have a day besides Star Wars? This would have more meaning if Nintendo did something like release games on this day, but it's still a fun little thing.
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Mario + Rabbids
Slider (Theme)
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Wreck-It Ralph
Wiggler: To me, Wigglers are one of the two definitive "let's show off the console's new powerful technology" enemies. Wigglers are more complicated than any enemy on the NES, with multiple parts to them, the head having different properties from the body, and two different modes (normal and angry). The other definitive enemy like this is that one stretchy arm guy from Resident Evil: Code Veronica, post its name if you know it because I don't, where his gimmick is that he can stretch his arm to travel up to and down from a balcony, and you were supposed to be like "oh my god, the Dreamcast is the most advanced console ever," but actually were like "wow, that is the least scary thing of all time." Anyway, leave it to Nintendo to make a caterpillar enemy where it never turns into a butterfly as a mechanic. Like, I can so easily imagine that you have to, I don't know, jump on its head, and it goes into a cocoon, and then you throw fire at it, and it emerges into a butterfly and gives you a bonus item or something.
Mushroomy Kingdom
Giga Bowser
Chargin' Chuck
Rainbow Road (Fat Bearded Guy Song)
Jim Carrey as Wario in SMB2
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)
Super Mario World
Cape Feather
Admiral Bobbery
New Donk City: I don't really understand what motivated the decision to make this a realistic version of NYC. Like, in terms of the graphics, at least. The Mexico and Japan levels are still very cartoony! And there had never been realistically-proportioned humans in Mario before, it's actually kind of bizarre to see them standing right next to Mario like nothing is going on. And I've been to NYC; less than 100% of the citizens wear business suits like it's 1950, I'll tell you that. But the level nails it. It's like a perfect level. In concept, it's great: you're just in a city. There aren't goombas to stomp, there aren't paratroopas to dodge, it's just a normal-ass city full of normal-ass people doing their jobs. And there are still platforming challenges! It even feels alive in a way the other kingdoms don't, with Pauline's song, turning into a 2D billboard challenge... It just does everything right. Can't compliment it enough, except that the rest of the game mostly doesn't match it.
Super Mario RPG: Perfect in every way. The only thing I can suggest would be implementing Paper Mario's mechanic of getting a free attack on an enemy if you jump on them to start the battle, but honestly, who cares? As far as I'm concerned, this game is immune to criticism. I'll tell you this, too. When I was a kid, I remember fighting the random enemy "Glum Reaper." I thought that was a cool name, so I tried to use it as a screen name on Battle.net. Taken. I tried to use it on GameFAQs. Taken. I've tried to use it on like twenty things over the years, and it's always taken, this unimportant forgotten enemy from an SNES game.
Super Mario Odyssey

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything
Super Mario Bros. 3: It has unfortunately come to my attention that several people in this topic consider SMB3 > SMW. These people are bad and should be shunned. Don't get me wrong, SMB3 is really good, and it absolutely raised the standard for both the Mario series and the platforming genre as a whole. But do I think it's as good as SMW? Absolutely not. Part of that is down to SMW having the advantage of being on a more powerful system, and it's entirely possible that if it had been forced to be made on the NES, I would have it lower than SMB3... but that's not relevant, really, because I played both of them for the first time as part of SMAS on the SNES anyway. I'll tell you this, though: SMB3 does have probably the best visual style of the entire series. Not the actual graphics, I mean the stageplay aspect. What inspired this, I can't possibly guess, and according to the Wiki, Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that this is just a stageplay put on by Mario instead of a real adventure. Not only does this game give us sort of an overworld, it finally gives us, like, characters beyond the core heroes and villains. We now have the kings you rescue. There's Turban Guy, Crown Guy, Short Crown Guy, Naked Turban Guy, Old Guy, Thick Mustache Gray Hair Guy, and of course, Hideous Mime Guy. It adds a ton of enemies, moving parts to stages like the airships that were completely impossible to imagine in prior games, is this the game that added dry bones?, the Koopalings, which I'll give a pass to because this was their first appearance and they were obviously intended to be Bowser's children, and introduces flying and swimming power-ups. Like, yes, to be clear, this game completely mogs SMB1. It absolutely takes everything to the next level, and is equal to or better than it in every single way, and I can't praise it enough... but is it better than SMW, which has almost all of those things, and Yoshi, more power-ups, secret exits, a consistent overworld, and ghost mansions? Like, c'mon, the only thing SMB3 actually mogs it on are the stageplay stuff, which, yes, it is a super clever use of background as a storytelling resource, and maybe the airship levels.
Kuribo's Shoe
Bowser (RPG Versions)
Fire Flower
Super Paper Mario
Mario Tennis (N64)
1-1 Theme
Yoshi
Super Mario 64 DS
Minus World
Stretchy Mario Face (Mario 64)
Culex
Count Bleck
Bowsette
There Will Be Brawl
Mario, the Idea vs Mario, the Man: I don't know why, but "you can't just say "perchance" really gets me. I thought this was older than two years, though. I appreciate how the professor (I know this is a fake essay) understands that Mario crushes turtles to save the princess. But the best part of this is the crossed-out "I believe" at the start of the second paragraph. That's actually a perfectly accurate correction that a real professor would make. There are several giveaways that this is fake, not the least of which is the date (Feb 18 is way too early to be "midterm I"), but that one cross-out nails it. As someone who's corrected more than one essay in my time, I really do enjoy the stupidity of this. I have seen people start talking about one thing and go into an insane tangent about money and privilege (another thing to be more accurate: dumbass students don't know how to spell privilege, they spell it like "privalege" or something). You think I haven't seen papers with "cool as fuck" in them? I absolutely have. Oh wait, Elon Musk shared this post on Twitter? Ugh, that actually makes me think a little less of it.
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Charles Martinet
Hammer Bros.
Brawl in the Family
Rawk Hawk: Everyone loves a good arrogant villain who learns his lesson and becomes a good guy. This is why people liked Groose, too. I appreciate how the Wiki analyzes his wrestling style to tell me that it's most similar to lucha libre, which a Paper Mario player might actually not know. I just realized, Rawk Hawk is only the first of two bosses in RPG sequels I've played who loses a fight and then emails you about it. I can say with certainty that Rawk Hawk > Kai Leng, though. And you know what, Rawk Hawk isn't a reference to Hulk Hogan. He never calls you brother even once. Hulk Hogan references are the only wrestling references that even I get (though I've learned enough now that maybe I'd recognize an Undertaker one), and I appreciate that Rawk Hawk is a more generic wrestling heel. I said this before, but Rawk Hawk absolutely should have joined you as a companion, he'd be better than Madame Flurrie and Mini-Yoshi!
Glitzville
Pirahna Plants on Parade (Level)
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat
Mario vs Chrono Rivalry

Sea

MZero posted...

Well he is dead

Not a good enough explanation, since Maechen is like a thousand years old and still just looks like a regular old guy.

Whoops!

Mario + Rabbids
Slider (Theme)
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Wreck-It Ralph
Mushroomy Kingdom
Giga Bowser: It's a fine design for Bowser's ultimate form or whatever. I like how the Smash Wiki represents him with the Smash emblem and then goes on a tangent about how he debuted in Smash, therefore he doesn't get the Mushroom emblem. Like, what do you want me to say? It's just Bowser, but bigger and scarier. It's a serviceable design for a boss, but it's not like there's complex lore behind it.
Chargin' Chuck
Rainbow Road (Fat Bearded Guy Song)
Jim Carrey as Wario in SMB2
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Baby Park: God, kill me. Seven laps of almost pure chaos. This of all stages is the one where you are most damned by a blue shell, where anything happening to you at all will result in losing three or four places at least. And something will happen, because the stage is so short that everyone always has an item. Green shells will bounce at impossible angles and hit you, a red shell will hit you one second after you're warned with a beep, lightning and bullet bills and mega mushrooms... I honestly don't hate Baby Park, but if I have any desire to win whatsoever, I will never choose this stage.
Mary O
Brooklyn
Dennis Hopper
Anya Taylor-Joy
Angry Sun
I'm a Chuckster
Do the Mario
Fireworks (End of Level): A great little way to say "you did it." But when I think of Mario 'things,' this is like nowhere near the top of the list.
Super Mario Bros Super Show
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
7 Grand Dad: So, this is an obscure early romhack to turn a Flintstones game into a Mario game, until some Twitcher streamer made it popular. I've never heard of it before! I like how the only change is to replace Fred Flintstone's head with Mario's head, even the body is the same. They don't even replace the caveman club with a hammer. Even the 1-up icon is still Fred Flintstone. I mean, I guess there is a connection between Fred Flintstone and Mario, in that they both have dinosaur pals, but it's very odd that this exists at all. The game looks playable, honestly. I'm watching a playthrough of it now, and it looks completely okay as far as crappy early 90s platformers go. I've seen way worse than this. I don't understand why it's called 7 Grand Dad, though.
Toaster
Super Mario Bros. 2
Backwards Long Jump
Reznor: In my RPG group, some jokers of which are hiding in this very topic, like ten years ago, someone put their token on the internet as Trent Reznor, so we always called his character Trent Reznor instead of his real name. One session, I'd been up for two days and was horribly tired and barely functioning. I noticed in the game that Trent Reznor was in a tent, and everyone started making Tent Reznor jokes. Then I said "You know who Tent Reznor's brother is? Tarp Reznor." They still give me shit over that.
Final Fantasy Characters (Mario Hoops 3-on-3)
Mouser

- Frog Suit Tier
Wall Kicks Will Work (Star)
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Toad (Character): I assume you mean THE Toad, as opposed to the Toad species. I'm convinced that he only exists as a character, and we're cursed with Blue Toad and Yellow Toad today, just because of SMB2 needing someone to replace the son character in Doki Doki Literature Club. Everyone knows the father became Mario, the mother became Luigi, the daughter became Peach, and then what do you do? What do you do if the only other Mario characters that exist up to that point are Stanley, Pauline, Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr? Like, I can imagine a version of SMB2 where they don't think of using Toad, and just make up a character, like Peach's father or something, and that just becomes canon. We could have an entire Mario series with a Mushroom King, who'd of course be a comical short guy, but we dodged that because the first game needed a guy to say "your princess is in another castle." Oh, did you want me to talk about Toad himself? No. He's the most nothing character, even moreso than Stanley or Toadette, because at least they have "has a job" and "is a girl."
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Dong Dong Never Die
Mario Bros.
Pauline
Stanley the Bugman
Chill (Dr. Mario Theme)
Torpedo Ted
Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix
L is Real 2401
WarioWare
King Boo: Is King Boo the most frequently appearing non-Bowser final boss in the series? I don't know. Look man, I have no idea what you expected here. King Boo is just a big ghost. He's who you call when you need a ghost boss. As a rival for Luigi, he's fine. He's a big spooky ghost to challenge the cowardly hero's fears with. He's gonna phase through a wall and float slowly at you, that's fine. Like, if you were analyzing Luigi as a real character, it makes complete sense that the culmination of his journey of self-actualization is to face down the embodiment of spookiness and overcome it, and it makes complete sense that the embodiment of spookiness is a ghost. But boy oh boy, he's even less of a character than non-RPG Bowser. He's the most nothing character, he doesn't even have a name. Even Toad technically has a name. And his partner in Double Dash is Petey goddamned Pirahna.
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray)
Gooper Blooper
Mama Luigi
Lakilester
Steak (Boss Fight)
NBA Street V3
Coins (Mario Kart)
Luigi Mario
Mario Paint
Fortune Street
Yoshi's Safari
Move Faster, Pokey!
Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition
Racist Mario
Jump Rope Challenge (SMO)
Fat Yoshi
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart)
Personalized Mario 64 Cartridge Theory
LUEshi
Boswer's Clown Car
Casio Hellburst
Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels
Wario's Mario Party 1 and 2 Voice
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Bowser is Pissed (Theme)
Yoshi (Game)
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39)
Mario is Missing

- Poison Mushroom Tier
I Am A Teacher: Super Mario no Sweater
Mario Kart Tour
Mario Teaches Typing
Super Mario Land
Bowser's Big Blast
Watch for Rolling Rocks (0.5x A Presses)
Luigi Meeting Himself
Mario Screaming (Video)
Tatanga
Super Hornio Brothers
Toadette
Hand Injuries (Mario Party)
Pink Gold Peach
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Robirdo: 'Its name is a portmanteau of "robot" and "Birdo", as well as a possible pun on "Roberto".' Who writes these things into Wikis? Like, who has the time to do this? I don't know. It's not as gross as Birdo, so it has that going for it. The fact that its mouth can close is to its great credit and benefit. I've never played Super Mario Advance, but looking it up, this looks like a really easy boss fight. God, who would look at Birdo and think "I can remake her as a robot!" I guess no one, since this is just a nightmare Mario is having.
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics)
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Petey Piranha
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Subspace Dubbed Over
Mario Pissing
Blue Shells just Before the Finish Line
Birdo

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)
Super Mario World
Cape Feather
Admiral Bobbery
Super Mario Odyssey

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything
Kuribo's Shoe
Bowser (RPG Versions): I don't think I need to say much, so I will. RPG Bowser is like if you take regular Bowser, and then turn him into an actual character. He's lightning in a bottle, he's an earthquake in a can. Normally, Bowser is a big monster who laughs a lot and wants to marry Peach. But in the RPGs, he's allowed to show us that he's a big monster who laughs a lot and wants to marry Peach... and is insecure that people don't fear him enough, or doesn't want to be associated with Mario, or can't figure out why Peach isn't into him, or is flabbergasted that Luigi defeated him (not really, but he thought so at the time). It's kind of amazing that this carried over from Mario RPG into the Paper Mario games, too, this one aspect of the games remained unchanged: that Bowser would be an actual character who sort of has depth to him. He's at his absolute best in Mario RPG and TYYD, of course, but everyone is, because Mario RPG was written by Square, and TYYD was written after PM did the hard work of setting up the premise. I wonder what a real Bowser character in another RPG today would be like, like if they had to write in his stupid son and the Koopalings. Oh, I should specify that I'm referring only to Mario RPG and Paper Mario Bowser. I only played one M&L game, and that was so long ago that I don't remember anything except Luigi having lightning powers, so I have no idea what Bowser is like in them. I assume not as good.
Fire Flower
Super Paper Mario
Mario Tennis (N64)
1-1 Theme
Yoshi
Super Mario 64 DS
Minus World
Stretchy Mario Face (Mario 64)
Culex
Count Bleck
Bowsette
There Will Be Brawl
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Charles Martinet
Hammer Bros.
Brawl in the Family: One of the definitive late 2000s webcomics, though it went on for a really long time. I find that a lot of its jokes don't exactly land, but it did contribute in a major way to the Mario series. Specifically, this is what I think redeemed Waluigi in a lot of peoples' eyes. Like, if you play Mario games, he really doesn't say WA that often, or at all really. He speaks like other human characters do. I don't know what prompted the comic to make WA his catchphrase, but it was definitely the right call. And whoever wrote it really went all-out. There are multiple youtube videos starring Waluigi singing with complete art accompanying them, like this was a real labor of love.
Glitzville
Pirahna Plants on Parade (Level)
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat
Mario vs Chrono Rivalry

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme)
Link (Mario Kart): If you're going to have a Nintendo crossover on Mario Kart, it was always going to be Link. You can argue Pikachu, MAYBE, but Link is the obvious choice. I appreciate that he has a bunch of little animations with his sword, and the Hyrule stage replacing coins with rupees is a great little piece of detail. I love how you can hit the three little thingies as you drive to open up a "secret" way to skip part of the stage and finish faster, that's a very Zelda concept in contextualized for a racing game. I don't know how good the attention to detail is with Villager and Isabelle, though, because I've never played an Animal Crossing game. Actually... Is Link the first normally-proportioned human in a Mario game? This does predate Odyssey. Someone tell me if I'm right about this.
Dr. Goomba Tower
Italians
Chris Pratt
Triple Jump
Super Mario Bros. Movie
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.
Isle Delfino
Beep Block Skyway
Vivian
Bowser
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Shy Guy
Valentina
Smash 64 Commercial
Pirahna Plant (Smash Bros)
Mysterious (Mario Paint)
Mini-Yoshi (TTYD)
Koopa Bros
Tubular
Koji Kondo: Is this the music guy? Ah yes, the Nobuo of Mario. Well, I can't fault his skill at making goofy Mario music. I do like his Zelda stuff better, though. But if you're going to ask me for specifics, sorry. I am very much not a music guy. You'll notice he's above Miyamoto, though, that WAS intentional.
Staff Roll (Mario Kart 64)
Fawful
Axem Rangers
Mario Lemieux
Swapping Cartridges
Tanooki Suit
Super Mario Bros Plumbing Commercial
Warp Whistle
Shigeru Miyamoto: Like everyone, I've got mixed feelings on this guy. He created some of the best video games ever, and improved on a lot of the ones he didn't create... but he also ruined a lot of games by being too conservative, or by wanting to try ideas that were clearly terrible. There's no doubt that he's done more good than bad, but you do have to wonder what Nintendo would be like today if he'd retired in like 2006... By the way, he was absolutely correct to shut down Wapeach immediately. That design is terrible, and it would have completely changed the dynamic of Wario and Waluigi.
Super Mario Land 2: This was the defining Gameboy game for me before Pokemon. It's not great. It's way better than SML1, it's nowhere near as janky and bad, and it has a lot of weird, kind of cool ideas (the Rabbit power-up, the space level), and it even has an overworld. An overworld for a Gameboy game from 1992. It's got cute little things in it, too, like the giant turtle who swallows you to transport you. The jump in quality from SML1 to SML2 is really high, but that doesn't mean the game really compares to the console Marios. Mario is not a series that's sort of defined by its console vs handheld games in the way Zelda is, where you could depend on Zelda to have a big epic adventure on the console and then one or two lesser adventures on the Gameboy each generation. Mario just got these two games for the Gameboy, then nothing until SM64DS, and then the New series later on. I don't really know why Nintendo sort of slept on handheld Marios for fifteen years, but it did.

- Super Mushroom Tier
How Many Super Mario Games Are There? (Video)
Metal Mario: Oh God, did you mean the power-up, or the boss in Smash and variant in sports spinoffs? Well, whatever. As a power-up, it's great... for its time. It's the kind of thing that would not have worked in 2D. You need to feel that power, that slow build-up of energy and strength tha enemies can't stand against, and you need it to make you immune to environmental hazards. It's like Metal Gear, you know? The idea of a stealth game was always good, but in 2D, it was never, ever going to be as good as in 3D. This, to me, along with the wing cap are the ultimate examples of Mario power-ups that take advantage of new technology. The nearest recent example I can think of is the hat in Odyssey that lets you control enemies, which was probably doable on the Wii or Wii U, but the Switch really let them try all kinds of crazy gimmicks with it. Oh, and as a Smash boss, whatever, he's fine.
Luigi's Up-Taunt
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Super Mario Strikers (2005)
Shellcreeper
Bowser Meets Bowser
Sammer's Kingdom (Theme)
Hide and Seek mods
Bowser Theme (Super Mario World 2)
Mario Quiz Cards
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme)
Bah (NSMB Music)
Super Mario Galaxy 2: It's like... I'm sorry, SMG and SMG2 are fine, they're good, but outside of Rosalina's spaceship, it's REALLY hard to remember any location in either game. It's hard to remember any setpiece. It's hard to remember anything that happened at all, except for "WELCOME NEW GALAXY." It's like I retained nothing besides the general feeling of being satisfied after playing them, and having no desire to replay them. Although that's kind of a lie, because I did beat SMG1 a second time with Luigi.

Yu Gi Oh TCG

Chargin' Chuck: Is football even popular in Japan? Like, every other Mario enemy is either just a monster, like a Goomba, or a monster with what is clearly a weapon, like a Hammer Bro. Chargin' Chucks are I guess supposed to be koopas (at least according to the Wiki) wearing football gear, but is this supposed to be football gear, or is it supposed to be armor that just looks like real world football gear? On the one hand, we know that the Mario world has real world sports, but on the other hand, football is by far the most popular sport Mario's never had a game for, and I checked the Wiki for every single sports game and Mario Party minigame, and couldn't find a single football reference outside of Chargin' Chuck, so I'm going to say it's very plausible that in the Mario universe, this is just regular battle armor. You can say that they attack in SMW by throwing baseballs and kicking footballs, but that doesn't really prove anything. I won't budge on this unless someone can produce an image of someone playing a benign game of football in a Mario game.
Rainbow Road (Fat Bearded Guy Song)
Jim Carrey as Wario in SMB2
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Mary O
Brooklyn: I've never been to Brooklyn, but I have been to NYC. It's like the only other city in the country that matters besides Los Angeles. Sorry, folks! If you live in Chicago or Houston or something, I'm directly insulting you. YOU, personally. It does feel very different from LA, much more packed in and lively in a way that LA's gigantic sprawl definitely isn't.
Dennis Hopper
Anya Taylor-Joy
Angry Sun
I'm a Chuckster
Do the Mario
Super Mario Bros Super Show
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
Toaster
Super Mario Bros. 2
Backwards Long Jump
Final Fantasy Characters (Mario Hoops 3-on-3): Someone nominated this in the Final Fantasy topic, too. I don't know what I think of making White Mage a girl, I'm of the opinion that their original intention with the job in FF1 was that it was a man, but so be it, it's fine, and I know that the later remakes clearly make it a girl. Ninja, Cactuar, Moogle, and Black Mage? White Mage, Black, and Moogle, sure, Cactuar, maybe, but Ninja? That is not an iconic Final Fantasy character. That slot should have been either the Fighter (name's Dune) or like Cloud. I realize Square probably doesn't want Cloud playing stupid cartoony basketball against Diddy Kong, though, but still not a freaking Ninja, no one particularly associates that job with Final Fantasy.
Mouser

- Frog Suit Tier
Wall Kicks Will Work (Star)
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Dong Dong Never Die
Mario Bros.
Pauline
Stanley the Bugman
Chill (Dr. Mario Theme)
Torpedo Ted
Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix: I didn't even know this game exists. I haven't played DDR since like 2006, if even then. What the hell even happened to music games? They really fell off the map. I'm kind of shocked that there's a licensed Mario game from 2005, I didn't realize Nintendo allowed that sort of thing back then. Anyway, I don't like DDR, but I also am not offended by it, so who cares? I have friends who insist I'm tonedeaf, so maybe music games just aren't for me.
Mario vs Sonic at the Olympic Games
L is Real 2401
WarioWare
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray)
Gooper Blooper
Mama Luigi: I assume you mean the episode? Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to find this episode? It took me almost five seconds... Did Mario always have brown hair in this cartoon, and Luigi black? God, it's so strange to see Luigi acting like just a guy instead of cowardly. Look, I'm not into YTP, I'm not the guy to analyze these things. As an episode, it's crap, like the rest of the series.
Lakilester
Steak (Boss Fight)
NBA Street V3
Coins (Mario Kart)
Luigi Mario
Mario Paint
Fortune Street
Yoshi's Safari
Move Faster, Pokey!: I had to look this up. Look, maybe this was the height of internet humor sixteen years ago, but I am thoroughly unimpressed. I found someone making an extended song out of the soundclip, and yeah, it's kind of funny that he's frustrated by the unfair level, but like, I need a little more in 2024, I'm sorry.
Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition
Racist Mario
Jump Rope Challenge (SMO)
Fat Yoshi
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart)
Personalized Mario 64 Cartridge Theory
LUEshi
Boswer's Clown Car: I've never really liked this thing. It's a little TOO stupid, even for Mario. It's fine for Bowser Jr, but Bowser himself is already big and threatening, he doesn't need this stupid thing to be a problem for Mario. All it adds is a way for Bowser to escape after Mario defeats him, and like, I can't possibly imagine anything that matters less than logical lore in Mario games.
Casio Hellburst
Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels
Wario's Mario Party 1 and 2 Voice
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Bowser is Pissed (Theme): I do not like this, sorry.
Yoshi (Game): ... So, this is some kind of crappy block matching puzzle game. They couldn't even come up with a real title for it. Barf. At least they knew to include a multiplayer mode, so I guess they get some points just for that.
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39)
Mario is Missing

- Poison Mushroom Tier
I Am A Teacher: Super Mario no Sweater
Mario Kart Tour
Mario Teaches Typing
Super Mario Land: I had this game as a kid. I never beat it. Even as a five-year-old, I could tell it was janky and not up to the same quality as the other games, and sort of just not worth playing. When I wanted a Gameboy game, I played SML2 and Tetris until 1998, and then exclusively Pokemon after 1998. Pokemon, Pokemon Pinball, and the Pokemon TCG video game. I was the biggest Pokemon fan as a kid, I'm sure we all were. But like c'mon, this game has nothing to make it stand out aside from having slightly weirder-looking enemies.
Bowser's Big Blast
Watch for Rolling Rocks (0.5x A Presses)
Luigi Meeting Himself
Mario Screaming (Video)
Tatanga: This is sort of the worst Mario final boss, conceptually. Bowser and Wart are big animal monsters, then you have ghost things and robots, and Tatanga is... an alien. Just a random alien. I mean, sure, he's better than Bowser in a bathtub, but not by that much. At least Bowser in a bathtub is weird, even if it's bad. It's not even a creative alien design, or even a standard alien design. He's just a purple goblin in a flying Jetsons thing with a bubble windshield. "Tatanga became Wario's henchman to get revenge on Mario for ruining his scheme to marry Daisy." Bro, you're from space, and you're pining after DAISY?
Super Hornio Brothers
Toadette
Hand Injuries (Mario Party)
Pink Gold Peach
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics)
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Petey Piranha
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Subspace Dubbed Over: This is so aggressively obnoxious and unfunny that I think it retroactively erased the last three times I laughed at anything.
Mario Pissing
Blue Shells just Before the Finish Line
Birdo

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme)
Dr. Goomba Tower
Italians
Chris Pratt
Triple Jump
Super Mario Bros. Movie: It's not art, but it did everything it needed to do. It doesn't fail at anything, even if its only particularly good quality is Jack Black as Bowser. Yeah, you can probably complain that Luigi is barely part of a movie with the word "brothers" in it, and yeah, Peach and Mario have completely different personalities, but I'm gonna let you in on a secret: video game Peach sucks. Even when the characters get to speak, and Bowser kills it and is hilarious, Peach still sucks. And the ending does feel definitive, even if the power-up is sort of unearned in a storytelling way? Because this movie thoroughly entertained a bunch of kids while I was still a teacher, as opposed to the 90s movie which I am certain would not have, I will give it a pretty good rating. I didn't see Wish, the other big animated release of that year, but I bet it's better than it.
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.
Isle Delfino: The PS2/GCN era of gaming has a ton of tropical-themed games, I assume because technology had finally reached the point where you could have decent-looking water. Isle Delfino is okay. I kind of like it for being the only Mario game to stay on-theme the entire time. Like, it's just a tropical vacation place. There's no cold mountain zone, there's no lava zone, there's no food zone. Someone actually put effort into making sure all of the levels are places you'd plausibly find on a tropical island: a city, a small village, an amusement park, a hotel, several beaches and bays... It is by far the most effort put into any game to make the setting actually make sense. It is a little strange that these people who presumably rely on a tourism economy have a justice system that's so unfriendly to outsiders, and an airport that only has one runway, but I'll accept it. Like, you might be thinking I dislike Isle Delfino just because I say things like SMS is kind of bad, but I've never complained about the setting itself. All it's missing it like a cruise ship level. Along with the Metro Kingdom, I think people tend to like the 'real city' locations that don't have standard enemies more than Nintendo realizes. And yeah, I also think that Isle Delfino should have been in Odyssey! It was a perfect opportunity that they missed.
Beep Block Skyway
Vivian
Bowser: THE video game villain. If you want to see how to do Bowser wrong, look at King K. Rool. Yeah, I said it. King K. Rool is garbage. Bowser is obviously at his best in the RPGs, where he gets to talk and be silly and slightly insecure, but even when he's in the main games and is silent, he's still good. The only bad Bowser appearance to me is in SMS, and that's widely agreed to be the lamest (though not necessarily worst) mainline Mario game in general, so his crappy final boss fight sort of slides by. Oh, did you want me to analyze Bowser like I did Ganondorf in the Zelda topic? The thing is, Ganondorf has a little more to him as a character, right? Bowser is just a king who wants to fuck Peach. Setting aside the question of species, the best you can really say about Bowser as a complex character (outside of the RPGs) is that he was born to rule and thus probably grew up super entitled, and can't understand or accept that Peach is into short Italian plumbers. I don't pretend to understand her tastes, but I'm not judging them, either. Sometimes he kidnaps someone else, like those fairies in 3D World, but it's always just as a way to gain some kind of power, whereas kidnapping Peach is done for its own sake. I don't even know why he wants Peach, he clearly already hooked up with a lady koopa at least once. I guess this element of Bowser's character, kidnapping Peach, has dialed back over time as Peach became a little more active, but he still captured her in Odyssey, so what do I know. Look, I like Bowser and everything, but if we're taking Bowser as a whole instead of Bowser in the RPGs, he's going moderately high, instead of very high. Worse than Ganondorf, better than King K. Rool and King Dedede.
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Shy Guy
Valentina
Smash 64 Commercial
Pirahna Plant (Smash Bros)
Mysterious (Mario Paint)
Mini-Yoshi (TTYD)
Koopa Bros
Tubular
Staff Roll (Mario Kart 64): Solid. Not the best, but solid. It feels definitive, like the game is over, which is somewhat inappropriate, since Mario Kart is meant to be replayed a thousand times, but okay. You know what this feels like, this feels like the triumphant music you'd hear in a JRPG where you can't lose the fight because you've gotten some kind of enlightenment power that makes you unbeatable.
Fawful
Axem Rangers
Mario Lemieux
Swapping Cartridges
Tanooki Suit
Super Mario Bros Plumbing Commercial: I like the part where the redhead is confused about what she's reading and is a bad actress, and I like the use of the classic drawings of them at the end, and the font. Wow, Mario and Luigi only serve Brooklyn and Queens, huh. I didn't know that. I guess I have a question... This commercial looks like a TV commercial, but do kids... even watch TV commercials anymore? I have to believe most advertising is done on youtube or netflix or something, right? This type of commercial just seems so archaic. And you could argue that that's the point, that Mario is from the 80s, but the lady clearly has a modern-ass smartphone. She also looks more realistically-proportioned than Peach? Very strange. That movie is generally okay. Nothing about it is great, but it never completely blows, either.
Warp Whistle

- Super Mushroom Tier
How Many Super Mario Games Are There? (Video)
Luigi's Up-Taunt
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Super Mario Strikers (2005)
Shellcreeper
Bowser Meets Bowser
Sammer's Kingdom (Theme): I don't know the name of the instrument that's at the start of every "Japanese" theme in every video game ever. The wooden pipe sounding like it's hitting something, you surely know exactly what I mean. That and the guy going OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO are the universally understood sounds of Japan. I watched a British guy playing Civilization on YouTube once, and he said "ah, trumpets, very American," and I was like wtf, do other countries associate us with trumpets? Anyway, this is not as Japanese-y as I expected, and it's not very "100 duels"-y either, so... I dunno. It's fine.
Hide and Seek mods
Bowser Theme (Super Mario World 2)
Mario Quiz Cards
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme)
Bah (NSMB Music)
Mario + Rabbids
Slider (Theme): This isn't the theme I thought it was. The beginning was what I expected, then it went in some other direction. Is this... the Flintstones theme? Is this a fake theme you posted to confuse me? Yeah, you jerk, I googled the actual song and it was what I thought it was, you had me going for a second.
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Wreck-It Ralph
Mushroomy Kingdom

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)
Super Mario World
Cape Feather
Admiral Bobbery
Super Mario Odyssey

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything
Kuribo's Shoe
Fire Flower: In a way, this is THE Mario power-up. I know you're thinking it's the mushroom, but the mushroom just makes Mario look normal. This is what gives him an actual superpower. This is the first actual magical thingy that gives Mario fantastic powers that make the game drastically easier. All other powers-up in Mario, and maybe even in general, extend from this thing. I couldn't find any explanation about what inspired the fire flower, so I'm going to just assume that Shigeru Miyamoto had been studying Amazonian tribal shamans and got the idea from that. And changing the characters' costumes is a great idea, not just to indicate to the player that you have a power-up, but also just to look cool. Alright, let's rank the fire flower costumes... No, they all look basically the same, never mind. Wow, Mario Kart Tour has way more characters than I expeted. Kimono Peach? Hakama Mario? Penguin Toadette? Detective Baby Rosalina? This is like... the dumbest trash. Hey. When I was a kid, I thought Mario was shooting fireballs out of his armpits. Like, I realized that didn't make a lot of sense, but the sprite for the fireball clearly starts in his armpit and not at his hand.
Super Paper Mario
Mario Tennis (N64): God, I played the absolute shit out of this game, and the later Tennis games. Sue me, I've never liked Mario Golf, and Party is only fun occasionally, or to watch. It's this and Kart for me. Like, seriously, Mario Tennis and Kart are like just fun embodied, I can't praise them enough. But I bet what para is waiting for is to see if I'll know that this is the game that introduced everyone's favorite character ever: Waluigi. I'll tell you this, I was once playing Mario Tennis in the living room when I was like thirteen, and my sister and her friends walked in. One of them said "Are you playing Mario?" and I said, "No, Waluigi." And that's why I have always been famous for being the absolute best at talking to girls.
1-1 Theme
Yoshi: I have learned recently that multiple people are not fans of Yoshi, considering him to just be "an extra hit" in SMW. You know who you are. Yoshi is the best. I'm still kind of unclear on if there's a THE Yoshi, the way there's a THE Toad, but Yoshi adds a lot of depth to the series in terms of gameplay. He's the first time in a video game I can recall using a mount? But obviously he also eats things, sort of flies, throws eggs, and in SMW, the different colors of Yoshis have different extra powers (with Blue Yoshis being the master race). Like, when Yoshi is utilized well, he adds a completely new dimension to what's going on... when he's utilized well. But a lot of the time, he either doesn't appear, or he's an NPC, or he's just poorly implemented (hello SMS). Like, the way I view Yoshi is as a way to temporarily add more controls. Essentially as the ultimate power-up. And the idea of many different colors of Yoshis gives the species a little more visual flair. Like, what do you want me to tell you, Yoshi is great and you suck if you don't like him. That said, I never use Yoshi in any of the spinoffs, he's never what I want to see in gameply terms.
Super Mario 64 DS
Minus World
Stretchy Mario Face (Mario 64): Listen, I realize that the term "soul" is overused a lot these days, but...
Culex: Fun fact, this was my introduction to Final Fantasy. Years later, I played FF4, expecting to find this guy, and was disappointed that I didn't. Such an odd decision, to make a FF reference that's not really a reference to anything specific. You could have easily plucked out any of hundreds of bosses or enemies from the first four games. But the idea of Culex, this mystical powerful being from one dimension, being like "hm I wonder what 3D is like, I'll fight Mario on the SNES," is obviously hilarious in retrospect, but still actually a good idea. Was this... was this Mario's first crossover with a non-Nintendo video game series? I'm looking up Culex in the remax, and yeah, his new 3D model looks faithful, although I guess he changes his shtick to turn himself into 3D to test the dimension? Fine. I played Mario RPG a million times as a kid, and beat Culex every single one... but I still never got anywhere close to 100 super jumps in a row.
Count Bleck
Bowsette
There Will Be Brawl: I remember bringing this up to my friend when it was new, and he was just like "Its only joke is just acting like Smash is serious." And that's not really true. It actually does tell a coherent, sort of interesting story, even if some of the jokes/atmosphere settings are a little over the top (I vividly remember the 'Luigi fucking a sock' part from the first episode). Recontextualizing Smash as some kind of serious murder mystery set in a shithole modern city is a good idea, and SOME of the character interpretations are good. The best ones are Captain Falcon and Pit reimagined as gay club owners, and the use of Ness, Lucas, and G&W is perfect. But some of the character uses are a little pathetic, like Samus as a stripper or Waluigi as a mentally disabled person, or they're just edge for the sake of edge. Like, Kirby as basically just being Hannibal Lecter, I don't know about that. But, ugh, what's good in this series is REALLY good. Link and Zelda, Olimar, and some of the writing. It does have some lows, but it's mostly highs, so I've got to give it credit where it's due. That said, they made the correct decision in never continuing this.
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Charles Martinet
Hammer Bros.
Glitzville
Pirahna Plants on Parade (Level)
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat
Mario vs Chrono Rivalry

Hbthebattle posted...

They DID do that though. Lake Kingdom is Greece, Snow Kingdom is Russia, Wooded is Germany, Seaside is France, Cap is England, and Luncheon is Italy. It's just the smaller levels that aren't based on anywhere.

If that's the case, these are very weak elements. There is nothing in Seaside that jumps out to me as France, for instance.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Mario Tennis

The original, or the series?

- Frog Suit Tier
Wall Kicks Will Work (Star)
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Dong Dong Never Die
Mario Bros.
Pauline
Stanley the Bugman
Chill (Dr. Mario Theme)
Torpedo Ted
Mario vs Sonic at the Olympic Games
L is Real 2401
WarioWare
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray)
Gooper Blooper: Who keeps nominating SMS bosses? I'm going to find you and destroy you. He's just a boss who shows up and you fight him. Pull off his tentacles, pull out the cork in his mouth, etc. There's a lot of pulling involved in his battles. I love how verbose the Wiki is about this character. "Gooper Blooper is a larger than average Blooper who never displays much in the way of intelligence and, like most Bloopers, can only speak in indiscernible "bloops". He appears to be loyal to the Koopa Troop, most especially his Bloopers, and will attack anyone who poses a threat to Bowser's plans or attacks his Bloopers, showing that he is also ruthless. He has even attacked ships and sports events on occasion. He also aims to destroy Mario, likely due to his interference in the Koopa Troop's plans and that he tore off one of Gooper Blooper's tentacles upon their first meeting." All of that text to say that he's just a squid. Has Mario ever fought a humanoid enemy in any of his mainline games? Not counting Bowser and his family. I don't think he has, it's always some kind of goofy monster. Even Link occasionally fights another human.
Lakilester
Steak (Boss Fight)
NBA Street V3
Coins (Mario Kart)
Luigi Mario: I'm just going to rate the movie version of Luigi here, who is... well, he's Luigi. Why the hell does Google's cast list for this movie list Luigi before Mario? Anyway, John Leguizamo, I just realized he looks a little like Johnny Depp. Check it out, I'm not wrong. Not young Johnny Depp, modern Johnny Depp, they look similar. Look, this character isn't elevating the film, but he's not even the bottom twenty problems with it, so I'm not going to get too much on his case.
Mario Paint
Fortune Street: What the hell, this is a S-E x Mario crossover party game? How have I never heard of this? Oh, look, all of the characters are DQ instead of FF, that's why. I don't understand DQ's popularity at all. The first one, sure, back when it was groundbreaking. But every subsequent game is just the most generic JRPG you can imagine, and they're still insanely popular in Japan. Modern FF may suck, but at least it's not literally the same thing every time. Oh gross, this is just Monopoly? Jesus, just make a Mario Party clone, that's what people want. If I want to play Monopoly, there are a billion variations for me to play, I don't need a Mario x Dragon Quest crossover version.
Yoshi's Safari
Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition: I found an explanation of this and watched a little in actino. I'm not really a homhack afficiando, but this seems not fun at all.
Racist Mario
Jump Rope Challenge (SMO)
Fat Yoshi
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart)
Personalized Mario 64 Cartridge Theory: I had to look this up. This is just completely stupid and not even worth addressing. Even as a kid, I don't think I would have believed this.
LUEshi
Casio Hellburst
Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels
Wario's Mario Party 1 and 2 Voice: Honestly, I have nothing really to say about this, it sounds like a bad impression of Wario, that's fine, except that Wario clearly yells "oh my God" in one of them. Am I crazy? Is that in a real Nintendo product?
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39)
Mario is Missing: I knew about this game as a kid, but I was never able to find a rom of it, so I've still never played it. God, a point-and-click for Mario, what a completely wrong genre for h--is THIS where that creepy image of Luigi is from? Goddamn, that's his expression in every single screenshot. Wow, this Wiki page listing all of the errors in the game's geographical knowledge is insane. Yeah, gonna level with you: I've never played this, but I get the feeling it's trash.

- Poison Mushroom Tier
I Am A Teacher: Super Mario no Sweater: I had to look this up. Is this the most obscure Mario merch ever? God, I've said this before, but Nintendo is obviously very defensive of its properties now, can you imagine if they still rented out their characters for these kinds of ugly monstrosities?
Mario Kart Tour
Mario Teaches Typing
Bowser's Big Blast
Watch for Rolling Rocks (0.5x A Presses)
Luigi Meeting Himself
Mario Screaming (Video): Most things on the internet are bad or forgettable. I will forget about this ten seconds after placing it in the tier list. I do like the autotuning to make it sound really awful, though.
Super Hornio Brothers
Toadette
Hand Injuries (Mario Party): God, some of these minigames. Let me tell you about Star Fox Adventures. I played that game as a kid for a few hours, got to the point where you had to do some challenge against a dinosaur that was lifting something, but it was really pressing a button super fast. I just straight-up couldn't do it. To this day, I've never played past that part. This is also why I hate Ocelot's torture sequence in MGS1. It's a good sequence, but I hate playing through it.
Pink Gold Peach
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics)
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Petey Piranha
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Mario Pissing
Blue Shells just Before the Finish Line
Birdo

- Veto
ProtonJon: Is this some mid-level LPer? Get out of here with this. The only LP I watch is Game Grumps.

- Super Mushroom Tier
How Many Super Mario Games Are There? (Video): Stop posting 45 minute videosssssss but I actually did watch it, and there was some mildly interesting information in it. Here is the Official Anagram "Mainline" Mario Game List, excluding remakes and such, no one is allowed to dispute its authority: SMB, SMB2, SMB:LL, SMB3, SML, SML2, SMW, SM64, SMS, NSMB, SMG, SMG2, NSMBW, SM3DL, NSMB2, NSMBU, SM3DW, SMO, and SMBW, with New Super Luigi U being borderline, but all other games starring Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, and Wario being clearcut as not counting. I'm glad this question has finally been put to rest.
Luigi's Up-Taunt: Your link didn't work for me, so I found a youtube video of every character doing his up-taunt. I'm actually kind of surprised that so many have scared faces to do it with. Pichu pulling off its head is hilarious. Oh man, Chrom is in this game. Remember Chrom? I wonder why it doesn't work for ROB. Or did you mean his up-taunt in general? Because it's a very solid taunt. Luigi is probably the character who's changed the most since Smash 64, and mostly to his benefit. Or maybe not? Let's check the Smash tier list. He was dead last in Smash 64, and in Smash Ultimate, he's 39 out of 82. Looks like the highest he's ever been is B tier. Poor light, floaty, slow Luigi. Better than Mario in Melee and Brawl, worse than Mario in woah wait a second, how the hell is Mario #22 in Ultimate, but Dr. Mario is #78? They're like the exact same thing!
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Super Mario Strikers (2005)
Shellcreeper
Bowser Meets Bowser: It is obviously funny that Nintendo of America's new president is named Bowser. It was right of them to poke fun at the idea. I didn't even realize Bowser was a real name. Too bad there's no one named Koopa for them to make that joke in Japan with. But like, although the fact that this guy's name is Doug Bowser, this is the most not a joke joke ever. It's just him telling game Bowser that he's not the new president, and telling him to leave. I feel there was a lot of missed opportunity here, like with Mario busting down his door to save Peach, only to realize there's been a mistake, and then cutting to Peach wondering why Mario is taking so long to rescue her.
Hide and Seek mods
Bowser Theme (Super Mario World 2)
Mario Quiz Cards
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme)
Bah (NSMB Music)
Mario + Rabbids: Do you like X-Com? ... I actually don't, I'm very bad at it, which I'm slightly ashamed of, because I do like tons of games adjacent to it. I think what makes these games stand out to me isn't the rabbids themselves (I have never liked rabbids) or any of the gameplay, it's that it managed the impossible task of making completely believable Mario-style guns for the heroes to use. Like, imagine Mario with a realistic gun. Doesn't work, right? These games came up with several different guns that completely fit into the Mario aesthetic. But boy oh boy, I don't really like the rabbids, and I suspect no one does, because the game just forces you to always include a rabbid on your team. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I'd like the game more if instead of rabbids, it just had Rosalina, Daisy, Toad, and uh... God, I need two more human characters... Wario and Baby Mario, I guess. I'm sorry, does anyone like Rayman? He's like the most forgettable major 90s platformer protagonist. Him and Earthworm Jim. I'll say this for Sonic, his games usually are better than Rayman and Earthworm Jim.
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Wreck-It Ralph
Mushroomy Kingdom
Rainbow Road (Fat Bearded Guy Song)
Jim Carrey as Wario in SMB2
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Mary O: Completely fine tutorial person. It was either this, or making it like Daisy or something. Can you imagine writing a ton of in-character tutorial dialogue for Daisy, or Kamek, or something like that? Mary O is a good pun name, at least. She deserves to show up in a Smash Mario Maker level.
Dennis Hopper
Anya Taylor-Joy
Angry Sun: So, is it really the sun, or just some entity that looks like the sun? I really want to believe that even in the Mario universe, the sun can't be destroyed by a koopa shell. And this just raises way more questions once you factor Mario Galaxy into the equation. I know a lot of people really like the angry sun as an enemy, but like... it could equally just be a bird. It's just a sun with an angry face. I sort of like the SMM2 version of it better, because at least it has a weird, ugly Aztec theme going on.
I'm a Chuckster
Do the Mario
Super Mario Bros Super Show: I watched this like four times as a kid. I don't even know what channel it was on. I remember literally only one thing from it, which was when my mom walked in. Mario was playing poker with someone, and every time Mario won, it played the coin collecting sound, and she laughed at that.
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
Toaster
Super Mario Bros. 2: See, I think the key difference between Mario and Zelda is that Zelda focuses on problem solving. There are puzzles, you have a set group of tools to solve those puzzles, you get more tools as you go along, and some of the puzzles are actually enemies who will try to stab you to death, but some of your tools let YOU stab THEM first. The challenge of Mario is not puzzles, it's just your prowess at platforming. How good are you at making precise jumps, or dodging things? There's rarely a lot of intense thought put into a Mario game on the part of the player, it's purely about your ability to time things. Mario doesn't really get new tools as he goes along, either. He just has his skills of running and jumping, and instead just gets temporary power-ups used to let him access new challenges reliant on timing. Unlike Zelda, it's always usually clear what is expected of you, and the question is just if you can do it. Which is why this game is so weird. The platforming segments are completely different because of the weightlessness of everything, there are way more mazes and puzzles and bosses that require a second to figure them out, there aren't really power-ups, and many of the challenges are about finding ways into or out of things while being chased. And we all know why this game is the odd one out, so I won't go into it. I will just ask, is this the only successful use of "it was all a dream" in video games? I can't think of anyone else trying it, even LA implies that at least something to what happened was real. It's crazy how much this game impacted the series. It gave us character selections, the idea of everyone having different advantages, playable Peach and Toad, Luigi's high jumping, Peach's floating, Mario being the well-rounded guy, it gave us shy guys and bob-ombs and Birdo, it established that there's a THE Toad... It's honestly more consequential to the series than probably any other game besides SMB1. Too bad it's not actually that good to play!
Backwards Long Jump
Mouser

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme)
Dr. Goomba Tower
Italians: I dunno, man. They gave us spaghetti, lasagna, and the Latin alphabet, but they also gave us fascism and Jersey Shore. This is a mixed bag. But Italian food is the most neutrally acceptable food for sure, it's in everyone's top five, so they at least gave us restaurants that can always act as a neutral ground, so I'd say that mostly redeems them.
Chris Pratt
Triple Jump
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.
Beep Block Skyway
Vivian
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Shy Guy: It's very strange to me that shy guys still exist, because the role they fill (humanoidish enemies who walk back and forth) is already filled by koopa troopas. It's like a galoomba situation, where every few games, they'll show up again and you'll be like "oh yeah those guys," shy guys show up all the damn time... in the spinoffs and Yoshi series. In the mainline games, though, it's just SMB2. Like, despite the fact that you think of shy guys as one of the definitive Mario enemies, as far as the real games are concerned, they showed up literally one time in 1988. They just have such a strong spinoff presence that they have the veneer of being as important as koopas or boos. Like, seriously, I'm looking at the Wiki, and they're in every single Yoshi game, RPG, Mario Party, Mario Golf, Baseball and Soccer, half of the Mario Karts and Tennises, and in every Smash except the first one. I honestly did not realize until just now that shy guys are basically the Daisy of Mario enemies, they seriously have zero presence in any of Mario's actual adventures whatsoever.
Valentina
Smash 64 Commercial
Pirahna Plant (Smash Bros)
Mysterious (Mario Paint): See, THIS is perfect space music. Pay attention, Mario Galaxy music, this is how you do it.
Mini-Yoshi (TTYD)
Koopa Bros: At first, I was going to rank Koopa Troopas, then I realized this was a specific group. I... I played Paper Mario like a million times as a kid, as I've already mentioned, and I don't remember these guy at all. But the idea of parodying the TMNT with Koopas is solid. It's kind of a shame they don't take it all the way, with giving all of them different weapons and naming them after some kind of historical theme. But yeah, this is one of those things that just sets Paper Mario apart from the mainline games. It's allowed to make weird references that require way more explanation. The mainline Mario games rarely have things that reference stuff outside of the Mario series, right? I'm not forgetting anything obvious? All I can think of is FLUDD being vaguely like the ghostpacks in Ghostbusters.
Tubular: I didn't have access to the internet consistently in the mid 90s, and I didn't have a strategy guide or the instruction manual. So imagine my surprise when I figured out how many hidden levels there are in SMW. I was absolutely not good enough at the game to beat the special levels, among which was this one... except then I realized I could cheese a lot of them with the Blue Yoshi. I know this level has some infamy as one of the craziest and most challenging, but honestly, whatever. It's fun. I'm sure I could beat it today if I wanted to. I'm glad they tried weird ideas even back then, but like... this isn't the definitive Mario level to me or anything, it's just a mildly fun and interesting one.
Fawful
Axem Rangers: I remember finding these as a kid and being like "was that a goddamned Power Rangers joke?" And the answer is sort of no, because it's just parodying sentai in general. But as a kid, I didn't know what that was, so I interpreted them as just being a riff on the Power Rangers. They are... fine. Completely fine. I feel like this might have been the first time in any game where I encountered a team of enemies who each have their own team-based abilities, like you have to take out Axem Pink early to stop her from healing the others, etc. It's kind of interesting that Mario has never encountered like an Anti-Mario in any of his games, you know? Where you'd have a boss fight against another platformer guy you have to chase and jump onto. The closest thing is Bowser Jr in SMS.
Mario Lemieux
Swapping Cartridges
Tanooki Suit: THIS is the other flying power-up I forgot. As a kid, I remember being very confused by this and the relation between raccoons and flying. Is this... is this the most overtly Japanese thing in Mario? Like, I know that there are samurai shy guys in one of the Paper Marios, and in Odyssey you go to a Japanese-themed level and fight samurai monsters, but in terms of recurring elements in the Mario series. Mario I would say is very apolitical and anational. Like, obviously Zelda takes place in a European fantasy world, but then every so often, there's a ninja clan, or some kind of weird demon mask, or Ganondorf pulls out a katana. That kind of thing is much rarer in Mario, and altogether absent in other Nintendo properties besides Pokemon. How often does Peach put on a kimono, or someone throw one of those paper lanterns into the air? I wonder... are we just conditioned to Japanese cultural items through osmosis, and that's why we always accept it? Or is Japan just cooler than most countries, and they know it? Like, I can't recall the last time I played a video game and went to an India-inspired level. This reminds me of those goddamn awful Harry Potter prequels, where they leave Britain, and it's like, a significant part of the appeal of Harry Potter is how aggressively British it is. Yes, the magic stuff is important, but the British cultural elements lend a lot to the series. I don't care about seeing 1930s wizards in Germany because I don't care about German culture in relation to Harry Potter. Germany can make its own cultural things. I go to a Harry Potter movie, I want to see ugly anglos saying snog and having ridiculous last names. Similarly, anyone who says they want Persona 6 to take place outside of Japan, you're crazy. The aggressively Japanese cultural elements of Persona are half of the appeal. I don't want to see Persona in the United States, I don't want to see it anywhere except Japan. The only non-Japanese elements I want to see in Persona are Thor so I can equip him to be immune to physical damage, and Alice because Japan is obsessed with Alice in Wonderland for some reason. I bring this up because this is very much not the case for Mario, where even if they excised that Japan level in Odyssey or the tanooki suit, the games would still feel the same. And its presence in Odyssey doesn't stand out that much because you also go to Mexico and US-themed levels anyway.
Warp Whistle: I was in my thirties before I realized this was a reference to Zelda 1. I remember as a kid, I never used these or warp pipes, because I wanted to actually play the game. But they are a great concept, and I assume are key to Mario speedruns in the modern era. To compare them to the Zelda item, it's a little interesting, because I think of Zelda as putting more effort into the diegetic elements than Mario, but neither of them make any attempt to explain why this thing summons a whirlwind that takes you somewhere else. Anyway, the poor warp whistle has been completely outmoded in later games, where Mario has access to a spaceship or a giant flying hat.

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)
Super Mario World: The definitive 2D platformer. All others need not apply. This is the height of the genre, at least in two dimensions, and I cannot possibly imagine anyone disputing that. I remember as a teenager, people on B8 would say SMB3 is better, but there's no way that opinion still holds today, right? SMW is just perfect in every way.
Cape Feather
Admiral Bobbery: He's perfect. Every other military-esque thing in Mario is either some kind of spear-wielding toad or a goofy airship, and then this guy just walks in with his captain's hat and ship wheel on his back and acts like a 19th century sailor for no reason. What military did he even serve in to become an admiral? Then he tops it off by having the best backstory, in that he has a backstory worth anything. The idea of this guy's lover dying of illness while he's out at sea is so strange, too, it's so un-Mario. No one dies in Mario. Even when Bowser is turned into a skeleton, he's still not dead. But Scarlette the bob-omb did, I guess. This guy just lends so much more credibility to Mario's team. Everyone else is either a dumb teenager, a con artist, or Flurrie (ugh). This is the only person who joins Mario in the game who plausibly looks like he can handle himself in a fight, and then on top of that, he's probably also the best companion in the game as well.
Super Mario Odyssey: SOME of its levels are imaginative and fun, like the Sand Kingdom, Luncheon Kingdom, Bowser's Kingdom, and Metro Kingdom, and most are alright. Moon Kingdom and Wood Kingdom can suck my balls, though. I feel like a bit of an opportunity was missed, honestly. This is a game where the premise is that Mario needs to travel all around the world, so they should've leaned into the different countries element. We have a Mexico-inspired kingdom, a NYC-inspired one, and a Japan-inspired one. Just throw caution to the wind and dump the Lake Kingdom and Snow Kingdom and whatever, and make every level a real world country stand-in. The last level can stay as the moon, because that obviously ratchets up the tension and craziness. Ah well, despite that, the game itself plays perfectly, and the gimmick of controlling enemies with the hat is perfect, and the final battle against Bowser is perfect, so I can't complain that much. It was also a wise decision to not make it required to get all of the power moons.

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything
Kuribo's Shoe
Super Paper Mario
1-1 Theme
Super Mario 64 DS: I know a lot of people complain that this game ruins the balance of the original, and sure, even as a teenager, I immediately knew that Luigi was way better than all of the others and completely breaks the game. But like, I don't care about balance in a goddamn single-player platforming video game, get out of here. I know the game plays a little differently from the original, and it doesn't quite 'feel' right, but again, I don't care. I'm fine with putting this at exactly the same level as the original.
Minus World
Count Bleck
Bowsette
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Charles Martinet
Hammer Bros.
Glitzville
Pirahna Plants on Parade (Level): I have complete respect for SMBW for doing something a little different. Like, it could have easily just been another NSMB situation, where it's just the most standard, soulless Mario fare possible, and they actually did try to add weird new stuff to the equation. Does it all work? Maybe not. But this is like the second level in the game, right? It's telling you right away that this jaunt into Marioland is going to be a little different than normal. I noticed in 1-1, it starts off similar to SMB 1-1, but then immediately changes into something new and different. I am glad they got away from just redoing 1-1 forever, unlike a CERTAIN blue hedgehog and his grass stage I could mention. And yeah, the idea of Pirahna plants doing a parade with Mario and singing along, and if you kill them they stop singing, is genius.
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat
Mario vs Chrono Rivalry

human, or are we dancer?

WarThaNemesis2 posted...

Luigi Mario

Do you just mean Luigi, whom I already ranked, or the live-action version of Luigi?

Paratroopa1 posted...

No, not even close. It's a famous video. There's more technically complex stuff out there than this (most of it is also pannenkoek).

I just saw this, even though I already ranked Vivian somehow. How does this video have as many views as it does, when it's so dense and specialized?

- Frog Suit Tier
Wall Kicks Will Work (Star)
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Dong Dong Never Die
Mario Bros.
Pauline
Stanley the Bugman
Chill (Dr. Mario Theme): Not a fan. Some of the sounds are really grating. The theme itself seems passable, though. This was never going to be one of the classic Mario songs.
Torpedo Ted
Mario vs Sonic at the Olympic Games
L is Real 2401
WarioWare
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray)
Lakilester
Steak (Boss Fight)
NBA Street V3
Coins (Mario Kart): According to the Mario Kart Wiki (separate from the Mario Wiki), coins in Mario Kart were an idea contributed by Miyamoto. Of course. I'm aware that these slightly increase your speed, but I've never noticed the difference while playing, and I've played a lot of Mario Kart. I've also never been excited to get them from an item box. There's no instance where I want a coin instead of a red shell, literally zero.
Mario Paint
Yoshi's Safari
Racist Mario
Jump Rope Challenge (SMO): I don't remember this at all. I looked it up, and it looks difficult. I'll tell you this, I never got the best item in Mario RPG that requires you to super jump 100 times on an enemy's head, the best I could ever do was like 20~ jumps. This looks annoying, but nowhere near as bad as the pachinko thing.
Fat Yoshi
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart)
LUEshi
Casio Hellburst
Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels: It's just SMB1, but harder. I don't know, it is better than Donkey Kong Jr, so I'm obligated to put it above that game, but that just makes me regret putting DK Jr so high. There's nothing memorable or interesting about this game at all, other than the fact that Nintendo so didn't want to bring it to America that it reskinned Doki Doki Panic and instead gave us a game that added a ton to the Mario lore, sort of by accident.
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39)

- Poison Mushroom Tier
Mario Kart Tour
Mario Teaches Typing
Bowser's Big Blast: It's literally luck. There is literally no skill involved at any point. You might as well just spin a wheel to choose the winner. If you were allowed to choose the order you go in, that would involve at least a minor amount of skill at statistics, since whomever goes first has the lowest chance of losing, in exchange for potentially going last in the next round. But you can't. It's the Chutes and Ladders of Mario Party minigames. But although it is completely devoid of any skill, it's not as annoying and bad as some of the worst minigames. You at least aren't going to destroy your finger by pressing a button ten-thousand times in a second or something.
Watch for Rolling Rocks (0.5x A Presses)
Luigi Meeting Himself
Super Hornio Brothers
Toadette
Pink Gold Peach
Paper Mario: Sticker Star: This was the end of Paper Mario, and everyone kind of knew it going in. I remember that no one was excited for this game. It was immediately obvious that it had ditched everything that made Paper Mario good other than the paper gimmick. But what no one expected was for them to replace the experience progression system with just having to keep stickers around. If you don't know, you battle by using limited-use stickers. Each time you defeat an enemy with one, you lose it, and have to find a new one somewhere. There's no level up system, which means there is literally no incentive to ever fight non-bosses. All it does it waste time and resources. And the bosses are all defeated by a single sticker they're weak to, so there's no actual strategy involved. It's shocking that this is a real product, it's so awful.
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics)
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Petey Piranha
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Mario Pissing
Blue Shells just Before the Finish Line: We all know this feeling. It's brutally unfair to be in first place the entire time, then get hit by three blue shells, a red shell, and a lightning bolt during the last quarter of the third lap, and go from first to ninth. It's the most frustrating thing, but I also can't justify turning off blue shells. If someone gets to first place and manages to get two items to defend themselves with, and blue shells don't exist, then they're going to win. The only other ways to stop them is lightning (affects everyone), a triple red shell (rare for the second and third place racers), or items like the mega mushroom or bullet bill (very rare for anyone close enough to first to realistically hit the leader). I kind of wish the games could be balanced better, but at the same time, I know that would make it impossible for less-skilled people to participate, and being a real competitive game is not the point... but that doesn't change how annoying it is to lose because of something completely outside of your control. To quote Captain Picard, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose."
Birdo

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: Played this a lot as a kid. I still don't know why Smash classifies Yoshi and Wario as different series from Mario, though. I know you can say the same about DK, but I feel like DK has more of an identity outside of Mario than they do. Anyway, yeah, good game, but it gave us the babies, so it came at a cost. I learned about this game from my friend Josh. Josh's parents bought him way more games than mine did, so I had to go over to his house a lot to play them. The problem was, Josh was a really bad sport and would turn off my gameboy or the N64 if he started losing, which was frequent, because I was way better than him, even though he had more time to practice. But I can't complain! Josh introduced me to Smash, Pokemon, Yoshi's Island, Star Fox, Starcraft, and Mystical Ninja Goemon, so my gaming tastes do owe a lot to him.
Valentina
Smash 64 Commercial
Pirahna Plant (Smash Bros)
Mini-Yoshi (TTYD): I know people like this character, and I agree that the idea of a Yoshi that's born in front of you, and your actions slightly affect what color he'll be, is a cool idea. But I just wanted another enemy race person to join you. There're a million games where you can play as or ride on Yoshi, but only two games where you can fight alongside a Goomba. I do like that because he's born while you're calling yourself Gonzalez, he keeps doing that for the entire game. But hey, at least he does everything you expect and want out of a Yoshi. He eats enemies, he throws eggs, and he floats for a little while. I sort of wish more games kept the SMW 'different colored Yoshis have different abilities' gimmick. Anyway, let's do this: Black > White > Pink > Blue > Red > Green > Orange.
Fawful
Mario Lemieux: Really, this is the best real-world Mario you could come up with? A 58-year-old Canadian former hockey player? Well, I'm looking at him, and he appears to be very excellent hockey player, so good for him, I guess. 21 years of professional hockey is nothing to sneeze at. "His numerous ailments included spinal disc herniation, Hodgkin's lymphoma, chronic tendinitis of a hip-flexor muscle, and chronic back pain so severe that other people had to tie his skates." Ouch, how common are such injuries and ailments in hockey? Obviously, I know about the brain problems football players suffer from.
Swapping Cartridges: Such a cool concept. It's amazing that this kind of stuff occasionally actually works. As a kid, I wondered how people even discovered these things in the first place.

- Super Mushroom Tier
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Super Mario Strikers (2005)
Shellcreeper
Hide and Seek mods
Bowser Theme (Super Mario World 2)
Mario Quiz Cards: Okay, so I was going to go through all of these and find the most embarrassing ones, but there are literally thousands, so I gave up early on. Here's a compilation if you're interested: https://lostmediawiki.com/Mario_Quiz_Cards_(partially_lost_educational_flashcard_designs_based_on_game_franchise;_1995-1997) . That said, of course it's hilarious to see Luigi as a Confederate soldier or a Russian cosmonaut or running away from vaccines. And it's hilarious that Mario and Peach boycott Bowser for refusing to let Rosa Park onto his bus, but a certain younger brother is absent from the boycott. The era of Nintendo renting out its properties to insane trash is long since over, and sadly will never return, which denies us more ill-conceived things like the Mario flash cards. God, can you imagine if there was official "Luigi the Confederate soldier" art made today? I'll defend Luigi on the reading a book about WWII and Hitler, though, nothing indicates that that's specifically a Nazi book, it could easily just be a regular history book about Nazis.
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme)
Bah (NSMB Music)
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Wreck-It Ralph: I only saw the first movie, and it's fine. It's pretty good. I think it's sort of interesting that in pop culture, video games are always portrayed as being stuck in the 80s forever. I don't know the last game I played with lives and points. Surely there are way more kids today who play Fortnite than who ever played Donkey Kong 2, and video games in media are still portrayed as beep boop platformers. Anyway, the story of a guy wanting to be more than he was meant to be, and then teaming up with Sarah Silverman is as old as time. But, like, to be clear, all of the real video game stuff in this movie is there for like one minute, and has no effect on the plot. Yeah, it's funny to see Bowser for five seconds, but it could have as easily been a random fake Bowser stand-in. Imagine if instead of Wreck-It Ralph, they'd used a real character from a forgotten 80s game, like, I don't know, Tapper, where the guy gets bored and has the same adventure Ralph does. Then again, I guess that's what they did with the Chip and Dale movie recently, and everyone complained about it, so maybe this was the right choice after all. Anyway, I never saw the second movie. I read the original idea for it was the arcade getting a cabinet for Wreck-It Ralph 2, and Ralph having to team up with his future self and not really liking him, which is cleverer than what they actually did, which as far as I can tell is fifteen minutes of Disney Princesses. And I know that the movie ends with Sarah Silverman saying goodbye as she goes onto a new adventure without Ralph, breaking them up... which is also the ending of Frozen 2. I don't know, I'm just saying this is a little weird and sounds bad.
Mushroomy Kingdom
Rainbow Road (Fat Bearded Guy Song)
Jim Carrey as Wario in SMB2: I can see it. As a kid, I loved Jim Carrey. He's definitely lost the veneer he once had, though. Would he be the best Wario possible? Maybe not, but I'm sure he'd be at least a pretty solid one. What I'm wondering is how much his Wario would be similar to the real Wario. Like, obviously his Eggman is very different from the real Eggman, so although he can definitely pull off being a cartoonish wackjob, I imagine his version wouldn't quite line up with the video game's.
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Dennis Hopper
Anya Taylor-Joy
I'm a Chuckster
Do the Mario: Uploaded 17 years ago, god... Anyway, was this real? Was this really at the end of every episode of the cartoon? Because it's REALLY absurd. That's not even what "the Mario" should be. "The Mario" should be like jumping with one fist raised above your head, and the other held parallel to your waist. God, you just could not make something like this anymore without irony. Yeah, 1989, even back then this is pushing it. I think my favorite part about this is that the Wiki has translations of the lyrics into German and Italian, but no other languages.
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
Toaster
Backwards Long Jump
Mouser

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)
Cape Feather: As a kid, this was pretty much the only item I wanted. I loved flying around in SMW, finding the secret stuff in the clouds, looking for secret exits. The speed of it was very fun, as was trying to control your movements by crazily pressing backward and trying not to collide into things or fly too far. I understand why we rarely get flying items in Mario, but what I don't understand is why there are so many. You have the feather, the leaf, the winged cap, the P-balloon, the bee mushroom, and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Like, there are clearly so many restrictions on what Mario characters can and can't do, but there appear to be no such restrictions on the power-ups they use.

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything
Kuribo's Shoe
Super Paper Mario
1-1 Theme
Minus World: This is my second favorite video game glitch, after Missingno. What makes them so good is that they're unintentional, still playable elements in their games, which lends a weird, creepy factor. Looking it up the Wiki, it tells me that the world is actually World 36-1, but the came can't display 36, so it just looks like -1, which is kind of disappointing. The idea of a secret accidental reverse world in the game is really compelling. I'm almost slightly surprised that Missingno and the Minus World never got any kind of shoutout by Nintendo in later games. It would be really easy to add a pokemon or level inspired by them. It has to be an intentional decision not to do so, right?
Count Bleck
Bowsette
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Charles Martinet: I know very little about this insane weirdo. Just google him, and he looks completely insane. He does look like the kind of man who could devote thirty years of his life to saying "wahoo" in four different voices. And man, he is really good at those four voices. He's great as Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi, and I read him explain once the logic he used in how to voice each. He didn't just make up random voices, he actually put thought into their personalities and used it to inform his acting, like making Waluigi try to mask his insecurities by acting like he's hot shit. But "Mario ambassador," what does that even mean? He surely got removed by Nintendo for some reason. I just want to know if it's a better or worse reason than Kojima replacing Hayter, the guy everyone loved, with Keifer Sutherland for no reason at all.
Hammer Bros.
Glitzville: Why does a wrestling level take place in a medieval Chinese building? Who cares! See, this is why Paper Mario is so good. Instead of having grass level, fire level, ice level, it has things like an archeology level, or a pro wrestling level. Everyone loves Rawk Hawk of course, he should've been the party member instead of Mini-Yoshi. The idea that the cartoony Mario world, which is full of just nonsense, can have something as seedy as a rigged wrestling tournament, and Mario needs to rise through the ranks for whatever reason, is great. It's at odds with the normal Mario atmosphere in a way that enhances the game instead of detracts from it, and in a way that can't really be done in the normal platforming games. The Paper Mario games (the three that matter, anyway) really do a fantastic job of utilizing the resources and genre they have access to in creative ways.
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat
Mario vs Chrono Rivalry: I was hoping no one would nominate this, I really didn't want to deal with it. Six matches this went on, SIX. Mario wins four, but one of his losses involves LFF. Crono wins two, but two of his matches involve weird rulings by CJayC. I don't hate this rivalry, and I agree that it's sort of more interesting than Link vs Cloud, since there is no discussion possible anymore about who the strongest character is in these contests... but Crono also fell off hard, while Mario did not. I think GameFAQs is probably the only site on the internet where this would even be a rivalry at all. I'll say this, though. Even though two of Mario's victories are dubious, neither is anywhere near as bad as Link vs Draven. That one to me is the most questionable decision in the entire history of the contests, because at least Mario and Crono were never going to actually win the contest itself. I'll also say this, I've contributed pictures for about a dozen matches, and only one ever got accepted, which is this: https://i.imgur.com/V3AnYz4.png. I was bummed when these got rejected: https://imgur.com/a/DM4JNZc

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme)
Dr. Goomba Tower
Chris Pratt
Triple Jump: Everyone loves the triple jump. It's a great idea, too. Gives Mario more height in exchange for needing more room to maneuver, and lets slightly more skilled players (but not crazy skilled ones) do more impressive things. Almost anything that increases Mario's ability to do platforming at the cost of requiring more skill is good to me, as long as it's not some kind of super aggravating glitchy thing.
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.
Beep Block Skyway
Vivian: Yeah, I know what you're doing, you saw how I ranked Birdo and wanted to nominate the other LGBT-adjacent character. So be it. I'll say this: when I played TTYD as a teenager, I never questioned that Vivian was a girl, because they obviously removed all of the gender stuff from the game. Never even occurred to me to ask. And as a character, Vivian was great. Useful in battle, reasonably compelling as a character when she falls out with her sisters, all of that works really, really well. Not the best companion, that title of course goes to Admiral Bobbery, but still good. According to the Wiki, Vivian is "inconsistently" either a transwoman or a male crossdresser, and in the Japanese version, her sisters insult her with male insults. I believe it. Like, to be clear, Vivian is no Birdo. Regardless of the pronoun issue (which is confusing even in Japanese), Vivian does not look or act anywhere near as gross as Birdo does, and so won't place anywhere near that low. And you know what? I completely respect wanting to identify as a girl, then dressing as a cute goth witch. Goth has to be the single fashion style with the greatest divide in how good it looks depending on your gender. Go ahead and identify as female, then take advantage of the fact that girls are socially more able to wear silly clothes than boys, that's fine. It's probably true that if you remove her trans/crossdressing element, her character changes for the worse and loses some of its complexity. Like, the bullying she undergoes from her sisters takes on a whole different meaning if it's because of trans stuff. The thing is, obviously this game is from 2004, and there's no way any of that was being thought about by the writers. I'm sure that to them, "Vivian being a boy" (I don't mean that offensively) was just a way to include some more jokes, and now it's become more complicated, the exact same way as Bridget from Guilty Gear, where they clearly made the character to be a boy as a weird sex fetish thing in the early 2000s, and now pretend that it was always their intention that s/he be a respectful portrayal of transwomen. I'm actually curious how this will be handled in the remake. I don't think they'll just completely cut Vivian's gender issues again, but at the same time, I can't imagine they'd include trans insults in a Mario game, so I don't know where they're going with this. God, this was longer than I anticipated. This makes me not want to do one of these topics about Persona, because I know someone would nominate that one scene with Naoto.
Hell Valley Sky Trees

- Poison Mushroom Tier
Mario Kart Tour
Mario Teaches Typing
Watch for Rolling Rocks (0.5x A Presses): For you, para, I watched this entire video, even though I'm sure you just chose the most technically complicated Mario video you could find. The half-A press stuff I found to be extremely uninteresting, but the part about Scuttlebug homes updating as they hit you was mildly neat. The gate ceiling stuff is boring, though the idea of building up speed for 12 hours if funny. The PU stuff is boring. Slope sinking speed? Die. I don't know how this has 4.9 million views.
Luigi Meeting Himself
Super Hornio Brothers
Toadette: In a way, Toadette is Toad's Wario. The Watoad, if you will. She is a character defined exclusively by her relation to and how she altered an existing character into a new one. But where Wario actually has a distinct personality and is a very different person from Mario, Toadette is still Toad, but now a girl. Is that thing about Toads not having gender canon? Because that just raises even more questions. It's like, at least Toadsworth has a moderately interesting design and uses a color that's not generally used in Mario's color scheme. Toadette is literally just female Toad. I think the best usage of her was in the Mario Parties where she sells you the star, because at least they recognized that no one on Earth wants to play as freaking Toadette. I mean, her femaleness is defined solely by her pigtails and pink color scheme. She doesn't even have eyelashes or lipstick, the main ways you establish a cartoon character is a girl!
Pink Gold Peach
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics)
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Petey Piranha: Does anyone actually like Petey Pirahna? I know everyone tolerates him, but does anyone actually like him? He's gross, he's ugly, he's stupid, and his only contribution to the series is just to be a big boss for you to beat up. According to the Wiki, he's the leader of the Pirahna Plants, and I'll level with you, I didn't realize they even had the capacity to appoint a leader. They don't even really feel like Bowser's minions. They're just evil plants who try to bite you when you pass over their pipes. That's all they have going for them. What are even his duties as their leader? Is he the one responsible for allying with Bowser, the guy who always loses? I don't know, man, I disliked this thing in 2002, and I don't think I've ever played as him in any of the spinoff games. I remember him being a boss in Smash, where you have to choose between saving Peach or Zelda. That's probably the best usage of him ever.
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Mario Pissing: "7 years ago." That was 2017. God, I'm old. How does this have over a million views? This is aggressively not funny. Although, I'll admit that I generally dislike urine humor anyway.
Birdo

- Veto
The Wizard: I've never seen it! All I know is that the kid loves the power glove because it's so bad.

- Super Mushroom Tier
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Super Mario Strikers (2005): Is this the craziest and riskiest thing Mario has done with its aesthetics ever? The only thing I can think of that compares is Paper Mario, but even that somehow seems less radical. The hard lines, the intense expressions, the... everything, really. It's all still recognizably Mario, but there's a crazitude to it that the series otherwise never has. I don't understand why a soccer spinoff of all things became the experiment, because it's not as if Nintendo ever does this with its other spinoffs. Nerd that I was in high school, I remember in 2006 making a fan moveset for Waluigi in Smash that involved his Up-B being based on the 'swimming in air' animation he does in this game. And it really goes to show how much aesthetics matter, because no one remembers or talks about this game for absolutely anything except how they moderately changed the look of the characters. They took precisely one risk, and it's way more memorable than, say, Mario Kart Double Dash, which was surely a million times more popular, yet hardly anyone talks about it anymore.
Shellcreeper
Hide and Seek mods
Bowser Theme (Super Mario World 2): Completely fine.
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme)
Bah (NSMB Music): I had to look this up. I mean, it's fine. It sounds very Mario-y. I definitely get why they used it. Is this really exclusive to NSMB? I feel like it's way older than that.
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Mushroomy Kingdom: The idea of 1-1 being abandoned after years and falling to ruin is--wait a second, when Brawl come out? 2008? When did MGS4 come out? Also 2008? I was going to accuse one of stealing the other's idea, but I guess not. Anyway, this is a fantastic concept for a stage, and if you're going to do deep lore shenanigans with Mario of all things, this is how you should do it. It's almost too clever for Brawl, given some of the terrible ideas in that game. I like how the Smash Wiki has an entire section about tournament legality for every stage, as if fan tournaments have any bearing on the games themselves.
Rainbow Road (Fat Bearded Guy Song)
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Dennis Hopper: I always wonder what actors who were in real movies think when they're in genre trash. I remember watching Dracula Untold or whatever that movie's name is, and Charles Dance plays a spooky vampire who looks directly at the camera, and wondering what he's thinking in each moment he's on-screen. Hopper is a completely fine actor, but no one on Earth could have saved his role. He plays--"President" Koopa? God, you can't even get the title of royalty right. It's like the Final Fantasy movie where one of the major characters is "Dr. Sid." That the live action Mario movie exists for real is completely insane. At least he made out better than Raul Julia, poor guy.
Anya Taylor-Joy
I'm a Chuckster
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
Toaster
Backwards Long Jump
Mouser: Oh yeah, these things. See, this is what I was talking about with paratroopas. Mouser isn't a koopa with sunglasses or whatever, he's just a mouse who throws bombs at you. If this game wasn't just a reskin of an unrelated game, then Mouser would surely be a big Goomba who spits bombs at you or something like that. That said, Mouser is still just a big mouse who throws bombs and has sunglasses, so he's not going to place very highly. It's strange how the only enemies in that game who stuck around are shy guys of all things. I want to talk more about shy guys now, but since this is limited exclusively to Mouser, I don't know. It's not a very interesting design.

- Frog Suit Tier
Wall Kicks Will Work (Star): Okay, I watched someone getting this star. It is... completely unremarkable? It's kind of neat to go around the back of the stage to a place you otherwise basically never go, it kind of makes things feel secret for a second. A level where you have to use wall kicks to ascend is good, it utilizes an option that many seven year-olds aren't going to be good at, but... I don't know, of all stars, why nominate this one? I don't understand.
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Dong Dong Never Die: So, this is just a fan game Street Fighter parody that includes Mario, but gameplay-wise, he's just Akuma? Yeah, okay.
Mario Bros.
Pauline: Possibly the most nothing Mario character of them all, and that's saying something. All she's got is that she was in the first game, and she sings the song in Odyssey. It's almost a little weird how rarely she's used, too. The Mario spinoffs always are looking for more characters to throw into things, and Pauline almost never shows up. Most of her appearances are in games where Donkey Kong also appears. I guess she was in Mario Tennis Aces, a game I've never played, and the gacha Mario Kart game. Oh, she's in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as DLC? I didn't realize. It's like, it's almost kind of interesting that they had so little for Pauline to do, that they made her the mayor of a city. They could've easily said that she was the princess of whatever land, the way they did Daisy, but they instead modeled a fake New York City and made her the mayor for some reason. It's so at odds with the rest of the Mario universe. I guess I could talk about how Pauline establishes a precedent of damsels in distress that video games followed for decades, but I know no one really cares. She's just... the least interesting and memorable human Mario character. A complex asterisk. "Did you know that Peach isn't the girl in Donkey Kong?" That's Pauline's legacy as a character.
Stanley the Bugman
Torpedo Ted
Mario vs Sonic at the Olympic Games
L is Real 2401: Possibly the stupidest video game rumor to get as big as it did. It's too bad the internet ruined video game playground gossip. There'll never be another "Mew is under the truck" ever again, I feel like we lost a bit of the mystery of games now. The text on the statue doesn't even look like "L is real 2401." The Wiki says it says "Eternal Star," but it doesn't even look like that. It just looks like garbled-up super compressed JPEG text.
WarioWare
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray)
Lakilester
Steak (Boss Fight): I haven't even played Color Splash, but I knew from legend that the boss fights are just real world items modeled into the game, and guessed correctly that this would be one. How lame and bad. "People enjoyed the first three Paper Marios, it must be just because of the paper aesthetic. Remove all other aspects besides that, and replace them with their non-union Mexican equivalents." Looking it up, I see most of the boss fights are actually the Koopalings, gross. See, I wouldn't mind if there was ONE distractingly real-world boss fight with a normal object. If you're fighting all kinds of wacky Mario enemies like a gold Bob-omb or whatever, and then just a watch appears and you have to wail on it while it just sits there being a watch. That could be funny. But that's not what happened. Instead, you have to prepare the steak to be cooked while it attacks you. God, does anyone like the latter two Paper Mario games?
NBA Street V3
Mario Paint
Yoshi's Safari
Racist Mario
Fat Yoshi
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart)
LUEshi
Casio Hellburst
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39)

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme): Unlike the other themes people have nominated, this one actually does feel water-y. I actually do get the impression of this being some kind of swimming level just based on the sounds, and for that alone, it scores some points. But it's also just a nice little tune. Not very energetic, it feels very "take your time-y," but some stages are like that. Overall, great.
Dr. Goomba Tower
Chris Pratt
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.: THE video game, by which all others are judged. If you say the word "video game" to people who don't play video games, they think of this, Pac-Man, or Tetris. Maybe Mario Kart or Pokemon, if they're a little younger. Even my mom has played SMB1. Even my DAD, who doesn't know any video game except Galaga, has played SMB1. You can go onto youtube and type in "tribal person plays SMB1 for the first time" and see tribal guys being only moderately surprised, because even THEY knew about this game before seeing it for the first time in their lives. This game has ascended past being just THE video game and entered like our collective unconsciousness. And it's easy to see why it changed everything, of course. It's just better than every game before it. The only possible contender is Tetris, don't talk to me about Duck Hunt or Excitebike or whatever other crap. Dig Dug? Q-Bert? Elevator Action? Pac-Man? Get out of here. The absolute only pre-1984 game that operates on SMB's level is Tetris. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Pokemon, in that it's a game that just completely outmodes everything that comes before it. There isn't a single pre-1998 GB game worth mentioning in the same sentence as Pokemon, again with the exception of Tetris, and I'm sorry, Link's Awakening lovers, but it's true. I'm not going to pretend that SMB is the best game ever, it's not even the best Mario game on the NES, but it absolutely trounces anything that came before it to an embarrassing degree. Oh, I need to talk about the game itself? ... It's pretty good, by modern standards. Still fun. Can you imagine if Mario had taken the same route as Sonic, and doubled-down on deep lore and complex characterization? If Wario was some black-suited edgelord, and every game was about going to an alternate dimension where Mario doesn't talk, because they realized they made a mistake in the late 90s with Sonic Adventure, but don't want to retcon most of the series' history?
Beep Block Skyway
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Valentina: As a kid, I remember stumbling onto a "level 3 challenge" guide on GameFAQs for Mario RPG. I decided to try it, and I got to the fight with Valentina and Dodo before giving up. It is completely insane that this is technically a real Mario character. Unquestionably, she's the most sexualized any Mario character has ever been. It's not just her huge boobs and tiny waist, or the way she waves both around in her standing animation, it's the fact that her dress exposes her entire legs, it's the Betty Boop animations... The only that makes her look Mario-y is that instead of hair, she has a bird on her head. This is how you do an evil femme fatale in a Mario context, this is how you design her to emphasize her femaleness in a way that's still cartoony and silly. The design logic behind her is clearly so much stronger than Birdo or the Koopalings, even if she doesn't fit into the mainline games.
Smash 64 Commercial
Pirahna Plant (Smash Bros): The ultimate Smash shitpost. No one wanted this. Sakurai gave us the hero we deserved, and the hero we needed. It's so stupid in every way, like a parody of characters people actually asked for and wanted. And what really makes it work is how it's not really even a character. It's the only Smash character who's just a random enemy minion. It's different from having a Waddle Dee or a Moblin character only in that Piranha Plants are more famous, and a plant running around is more hilarious. It's even better than choosing a random pokemon, like Furret, because at least someone out there loves Furret, and Furret is a creature. The Pirahna Plant is just a plant.
Fawful: I have no idea how his dialogue reads in Japan, but translating him to speak in Engrish was a great idea. It's not hard to see why this character struck a chord with fans in a way that no one else in SSS did. He looks weird, his dialogue is fun to read, and he actually serves a useful purpose in the story of the game. He completely mogs all of the other 'non-main villain' bosses in the series. Like, imagine if instead of Fawful, the villains were just the Koopalings again. I don't know why the Mario RPGs are the one place where the series is allowed to try weird stuff, but I'll take it. And unlike Paper Mario, no one ever stepped in to completely ruin them, which is also nice.

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything: Probably the best Mario meme. It parodies how much luck is involved in Mario Party minigames, it parodies tryhards, it parodies crappy AI, and it involves zero effort or skill at all. Luigi was the correct choice for this, too. "Yoshi wins by doing nothing" isn't nearly as funny. This has to do with Luigi always being #2, so for him to be #1 not by his amazing skill or anything, but instead simply due to others' incompetence, is automatically funny.
Kuribo's Shoe
Super Paper Mario: God, remember when Paper Mario was good? Remember when this came out, and everyone said it was the worst one? Now people look back on this game as the good old days, like when RE6 came out and suddenly everyone loved RE5. Yeah, the first two are better, and yeah, I don't know if turning this into a half-platformer instead of full RPG was a good idea, and yeah, it does kind of look and feel cheaper than the first two... but you get to play as the core four on a wacky adventure, and the humor is still there, so who cares? I remember playing this and being kind of shocked that Luigi is the final boss, simply because it meant that you couldn't play as him during the fight. And yeah, you know, I'm on board with the fan theory that the fourth game should have had Mario as the final boss, since the first three are Bowser, Peach, and Luigi. Like yes, the actual game is not as good as TYD, but all of the elements that make TYD so good are still here, just not quite as perfectly-executed. Like really, the Mario RPGs are so amazing partly because they're allowed to do weird stuff and shine a light on how little anything in this series makes sense, like having a completely nonsensical silly world played semi-straight in a JRPG context, and SPM still nails that part, so even if it's the weakest of the good three, it's still a really solid entry into the Mario canon.
1-1 Theme
Count Bleck: See, why can't Paper Mario have characters like this anymore? By that, I mean fun and interesting characters. He's just a weird shadow man who's a high-class nobleman and also a magician I guess, why not. This is how you do a one-game antagonist; he comes in, establishes that he'll be the villain instead of Bowser, has a bunch of fun scenes, and then exits so the real villain can take over. He even manages to have a short romantic subplot with his secretary. Like, it's amazing how simplistic his design is, and the design for all of his minions, just basic shapes slapped together and given some gradients, but it really works in a way that, say, a giant realistic fan does not. He reminds me a little of Vaati, another character who shows up for only one game (at least in his human form, the one that matters), but also manages to be super memorable and beloved. In a way, Count Bleck is lucky. He's one of the few characters who leaves on a high note, and never completely embarrasses himself in some later crappy game. Like, honestly, if you want to include another character in Mario Kart, use this guy instead of Baby Rosalina.
Bowsette
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Hammer Bros.
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat

- Poison Mushroom Tier
Mario Kart Tour: I didn't even know this exists. Weird Nintendo phone games I've never heard of, this happened a lot in the other topics, too. Oh gross, it has lootboxes and gacha mechanics? I hope you like low tier.
Tekken Tag Tournament Mario Costumes: ... You know, I know I said that I love crossover stuff, but I guess the unstated assumption I was making was that the crossover stuff would actually look good. Like, the Soul Calibur Star Wars stuff I ranked super low in that topic. Maybe instead of giving each Mario character's outfit to 5+ characters, they should have just focused on making one character look good for each. I don't think a single Tekken character looks good dressed as these Mario characters. Lei as Toad and Lili as Peach are probably the best ones, but... I'm going to go ahead and say this is not very good, actually. Paul wearing the Mario hat on top of his super tall hair is funny, though. I would not pay for these to be in my game. I would actually pay for them to be removed.
Mario Teaches Typing
Luigi Meeting Himself: How lazy can you be? At least change it to being another character than Luigi, or at least make it Nega-Luigi or something. I appreciate that they at least wrote alternate dialogue, which is almost more effort than I expected. "Tell Rosalina I found this one!" Luigi, I see what you're doing there, back off, she's mine.
Super Hornio Brothers: There were two porn parodies of the live-action film? And Nintendo bought the rights to the films to block their distribution? The first one has been scrubbed and no known copies exist, while the second was rediscovered in 2009? "A computer virus informs the brothers that King Pooper (Buck Adams), based on Bowser (also known as King Koopa), has kidnapped Princess Perlina (Chelsea Lynx), based on Princess Peach. King Pooper intends on forcefully having Perlina help him travel to Earth with a tub full of semen energized by a special generator." The Peach parody saves the Luigi parody, but leaves the Mario one to die to the Bowser one? King Pooper needs to procreate to create more offspring, so he... just hires a prostitute? Is that even evil of him? I watched part of this on youtube. I'm going to be honest, I've never watched a porn parody of any kind before, and I was expecting something simple, like "Hornio and Screwigi learn they must have sex with Princess Puss before King Boobser can," and then just twenty minutes of fucking. The actual plot of this movie is way more elaborate than I expected, and actually makes more sense than the real 90s movie. Doesn't make it good, though.
Pink Gold Peach
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS
Big Bertha x Mario (Mario Comics): It took me a minute to track this down. I just realized, I haven't seen anyone use the ol' "ugly villainous woman attracted to the hero" trope in a while, is that a dead trope now? I mean, I'm willing to ignore the fact that she's a fish (not even a fish-woman, just a fish) who's into human men, that's fine. What I'm not willing to ignore, and I guess what I never knew until just now, is that the 90s Mario movie has a character named after her who is very much not a fish.
Wendy O. Koopa
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Birdo

- Veto
Wall Kicks Will Work: I have no idea what you meant by this. I googled it and got completely unremarkable Mario 64 guide videos. Give me a specific video to watch, I guess is what I mean.

- Frog Suit Tier
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Mario Bros.
Stanley the Bugman: Is this guy canon? Does he still exist in the Mario universe? Because he's the only Mario human who's not associated with Mario in some way, right? The Wiki says he shows up in the WarioWare games, I guess that counts. Last appearance that wasn't a rerelease or a sticker in Smash is in 2009, ouch. Even Daisy does better than that. Man, even I haven't played Donkey Kong 3. I think the most memorable thing about this character is that he's probably the inspiration for Felix Fix-It in Wreck-It Ralph? I never saw the second movie, I heard it was terrible.
Torpedo Ted
Mario vs Sonic at the Olympic Games: It's so bizarre that this was the game, this of all things, that finally gave us the Mario vs Sonic rivalry crossover kids had wanted for sixteen years. No one on Earth wanted a sports game. Everyone wanted some kind of platformer or something. And like I said, I'm not a minigame lover. The only thing about this I remember liking at all was that they acknowledged Sonic's inability to swim by giving him an inner tube whenever he's in the water, but like, that is not enough to save this for me. Let's see, who are the playable characters... All the Mario standards, all the Sonic standards... Blaze and Vector? I'm gonna level with you, I have not played a Sonic game since S&K, I don't know anything about modern Sonic lore or who these characters are. God, it also has Mii support. I never liked Miis.
WarioWare
Grandpa Mario (Serving Tray): You should've nominated the serving tray itself, it's so ugly and everything is off-model. But just focusing on this one picture of this one guy, Grandpa Mario here looks like he was some kind of sea captain. This is my fanfiction of this obscure noncharacter from the 1980s.
Lakilester
NBA Street V3
Mario Paint
Yoshi's Safari: I have a serious question. What genres of video game has Mario not been involved with? Because this is a lightgun FPS of all things, which is about as antithetical to Mario as I can think of. I make fun of Miyamoto a lot for shutting down interesting ideas, but the flipside of that is that Mario has way fewer completely garbage games than Sonic, who will whore himself out to ANYTHING. Wait a second, Iggy Koopa is the one who designs robots to fight Mario? Iggy Koopa? He's a mechanic? ... Okay.
Racist Mario: For a second, I thought this was Arin Hanson's work. Remember when he wasn't just a LPer? The idea of Mario being angry at non-Nintendo characters being in his game and getting violent is potentially funny, but they are way too talky in this. There should be like 1/3rd of the dialogue, and some of the deaths just aren't funny (especially Donkey Kong's). This video is relying way too hard on being disgusting and violent for humor, and most of the jokes just don't land. Kratos showing up isn't funny at all.
Fat Yoshi
Thunder Cloud (Mario Kart): I completely forgot this thing existed at all. The speed boost is nice, but what does that have to do with lightning? Why does it make you immune to rough terrain? Completely bizarre concept for an item, I'm sure they just wanted to have an item with both benefits and drawbacks. This is rarely something I ever wanted to see when playing.
LUEshi
Casio Hellburst: Yeah, look, I know I said I like when fans make cool things out of properties they like, but like... I sort of assumed that it would at least be in the spirit of the thing they liked. This is JRPG boss music, not bing bang wahoo Mario music. I went ahead and watched some of this game in action, and I can see that it's obviously doing a thing with a different tone than regular Mario stuff, but I don't know. It reminds me of the Phoenix Wright fan cases where the characters curse. It's just completely at odds with what the game actually is.
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)
Special Mariko Broken (Sket Dance Chapter 91/Episode 39): Boy oh boy, are you on the wrong track if you're nominating F-list anime for me to rate. I've never even heard of Sket Dance. I don't have a Crunchyroll account, so the only way I was able to watch this was as an undubbed non-youtube upload in Japanese on a guy's Facebook account. I don't speak Japanese, so I am forced to make up my own plot based on what I see. Okay, the anime stars Dudebro, Blonde, and Text-to-Voice Man. They're on some kind of gameshow with some extras, which they lose, and then a gross pedophile persuades them to play a knockoff Mario cartridge by Wontendo. Dudebro and Blonde yell a lot for reasons I don't understand, so I'll assume they have mental disabilities. Wow, these graphics are pretty good for an NES. The game briefly turns into a Dragon Quest parody, then the TV grows a hideous brown tentacle that flies into the controller, then there's a VN, then they play the game of Life, which is possibly the most boring boardgame on Earth. The end.

I'll level with you guys, you have not been nominating the things I expected.

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series): This is definitely the best Mario spinoff series, and also technically the most popular Nintendo series without a fighter in Smash. Who would you even include? Waluigi in a kart? Anyway, it's incredible that the most popular game in the racing genre is just Mario in a car. No one has been able to make a racing game even half as popular as Mario Kart, and that's for reasons that extend beyond the Mario branding. The games are just good. They're always fun, they're always semi-balanced, they're always easy for less-skilled players to understand. Mario Kart is just a really good series, and that's really all there is to say. Definitely far superior to Mario Party as a silly dumb party game.

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Kuribo's Shoe
1-1 Theme
Bowsette
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas: Up, down, up, down. Sometimes they jump, sometimes they hover. Everyone loves paratroopas. Such an odd decision to make them koopas, too. There's nothing that links turtles to flying, they're completely disconnected ideas. This could have easily just been some kind of evil bird serving Bowser, he already has turtles, fish, mushrooms, beetles, plants, and whatever Lakitus are, so why not birds as well? But someone said "let's put wings on an anthropomorphic turtle," and then they just did, the absolute madmen.
Hammer Bros.: I hated these things as a kid, I could not get the timing down to get past them at all. And again, such an odd concept. No one associates hammers with throwing. If they were throwing axes, that'd be one thing. Everything in Mario is so cartoony in a way that I don't think any other game series can quite match. That's why the realistic humans in Mario Odyssey were so offputting. They work really well as the strongest generic enemy in the early games, but that's about all they are. It's sort of interesting to compare the Mario enemies to Zelda enemies. You would expect that the slightly more serious and realistic Zelda series would have more complex enemies, but it really doesn't. They both mostly just have goofy monsters for the hero to fight, and if we're being honest? The Mario ones at least have an explanation for why they're fighting you, in that they work for Bowser.
Dr. Goomba Tower
Chris Pratt
SupperMarioBroth
Beep Block Skyway
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Smash 64 Commercial

- Super Mushroom Tier
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64)
Sheelcreeper: I hope you weren't expecting much here. It's just the prototype Koopa Troopa. They're grosser than regular Koopas, though, and more real-world turtle-like. I was going to speculate that they were inspired by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and that's what made turtles big at the time, but to my surprise, TMNT released the year after Mario Bros, so I guess it was just a weird coincidence that two different companies on opposite sides of the world made fiction about turtles in the sewers of New York.
Hide and Seek mods
Puzzle Plank Galaxy (Theme): This would be a great theme for a redneck stage. Let me just check what this stage looks like-oh.
Starman
Donkey Kong (1981)
Rainbow Road (Bearded Fat Guy Song): This is fifteen years old? Goddamn. Goddamn. 4.8 million views on an account with 7.76K subscribers, huh. Anyway, this is good and everything, but I have a much higher standard for intentionally bad internet music. I was going to link the Clock Song there from DHMIS, but I couldn't figure out how, so oh well.
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme)
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers
Trials of Death
Anya Taylor-Joy
I'm a Chuckster: So, are chucksters a job on Delfino Island, or just a hobby? It's too bad that Delfino Island never returned outside of Mario Kart stages. It could have easily been a random stage you visit in Odyssey or something. I guess no one really cares about SMS. Even I don't. It just feels like the most obligatory Mario game. Like, we have a new console, guess we need to have a new Mario game on it. What happens? I dunno, Mario goes on vacation and talks to a water gun. The most important thing about that game is actually the introduction of Bowser Jr, the worst major Mario character.
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack
Toaster
Backwards Long Jump: Look man, I don't care about speedrunning tactics at all unless they're super weird and interesting. This is just like wavedashing in Melee. I never cared enough to learn how it works, and I never will, and I'm not particularly bothered by the fact this means I'll never reach the highest levels of play.

Raka_Putra posted...

I think you missed my nomination, unless you don't feel like looking it up (which is fair).

Mr_Crispy posted...

you missed Yoshi's Safari.

Whoops.

- Frog Suit Tier
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X)
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Mario Bros.: You thought I was going to screw up and rank SMB1, but you've got another thing coming. I never liked this game as a kid, but I was also really bad at it. It's strange how much this game added to the Mario lore. Luigi, turtles, traveling through pipes, coins, fireballs, POW blocks... I guess that's actually it. This is also the only game where traveling through pipes actually makes sense, since you're in a sewer. I enjoy how every few games, Mario makes the weakest, lamest attempt to remind you that he's a plumber, by fixing a pipe or something in the opening of the game. Strange how the turtles come back in all later games, but the crabs and flies are just left in the wastebin of history.
Torpedo Ted
WarioWare
Lakilester
NBA Street V3
Mario Paint: You know, Mario has a reputation for whoring himself out to any game idea ever, but after about 1998, he really stopped doing that. Even though he's in like twelve games per year, they're always at least okay. There're no more Mario Paints or Mario's Time Machines shitting things up. And don't tell me that Mario Paint was your childhood favorite game or whatever, I know you're lying. I admit that it has more functionality than you'd expect, and the mouse controller is neat, but even in the 90s, you could do all of this with just MS Paint.
Fat Yoshi
LUEshi: Our modern memes completely destroy these ancient memes. It's like, even if you took Isaac Newton, the breadth and depth of what he knows compared to an average modern scientist is much weaker simply because we've had so much more time to improve our science... I mean, memes. I also just noticed only now that it's Mario and not Luigi.
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)

- Poison Mushroom Tier
Mario Teaches Typing
Pink Gold Peach
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS
Wendy O. Koopa: I know what you're doing, war. You're trying to get the last place on my list. You're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than Wendy O. Koopa. It's true that she's gross and I hate her, but she's nowhere near as gross as Birdo. Yes, both of them are like disgusting parodies of femininity. Wendy's got these gross puffy pink oval lips that are the same color as her high heels (imagine wearing shoes the exact same color as your lipstick), but that's nowhere near as disgusting as Birdo's mouth. The thing about Wendy is, if you're going to make a villain who parodies femininity, you need to go full-blast. You need her to be like a sexy sorceress or something who briefly tries to seduce the main character, then gets offended when he's not interested, and turns into a crazy witch who throws fireballs at you. Or you need to be like Grunty from Banjo-Kazooie, where she's hideous and has no motive except to be pretty again. Wendy has none of that, she's just there and gross, but not as gross as Birdo, so she's way more forgettable. Like, it was obviously wise to not make Wendy a sexy witch when she's just one of Bowser's random minions who gets instantly defeated in a level you don't even remember, and obviously if you're not going to give her any special attention, then she can only really have one personality trait, and her trait is that she's a girl. Really, that just brings us back to the Koopalings in general, who are all complete nothings. Like, don't even bother nominating any of the other Koopalings, because they're all just getting immediately shunted into the low, but not lowest, tiers.
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch

- Blue Shell Tier
Birdo

- Veto
Mario Pinball Land: Never played it! The only video game pinball game I've played is Pokemon Pinball. I played the shit out of that game as a kid.

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Kuribo's Shoe
1-1 Theme
Bowsette: I like how people took something as lame and stupid as Toadette turning into a copy of Peach named Peachette, when both Toadette and Peach are already girls and don't need the suffix, and turning it into a bizarre gender bender meme. This got big enough that Bowsette even has her own Wikipedia article. And that original comic! Almost perfectly done. The loneliness on Mario's and Bowser's faces, Peach's disgust while playing tennis, Luigi's surprise-but-not-disgust. I would say the only flaw is that Bowsette should really have red hair to match Bowser's, but whatever. Just the idea of Peach realizing that Mario's replaced her by turning their nemesis into her clone, and being completely appalled, is hilarious. This got so big that the original artist for Bowsette was given a trophy by Pixiv for inspiring so much fan art. Like, Bowsette was obviously a meme with a very limited shelf life, so I'm not sad that she's gone, but she was the best Mario meme in years when she came out.
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content: I hope you don't mind if I just do all of them at once, instead of just Peach. Again, it's insane that this is real. Nintendo is so protective of its properties, and yet it allowed Bayonetta to cosplay as Peach, Daisy, Link, Samus, and Star Fox. And yes, compared to Bayonetta's normal costumes, these are puritan-tier, but just the fact that they let the goth sex witch run around dressed in a sexy Halloween Peach costume in a real video game is bizarre. I wonder why they chose these particular characters, though. Like, there must be a reason they chose Link instead of Zelda. And looking at the Bayonetta Wiki to reacquaint myself with these, god, I forgot how much less hot Jeanne is than Bayonetta. I still need to play the third game, it's like more than a year old now. I am a big supporter of silly game crossover stuff like this, I put Link in SCII as the best Zelda thing in my ranking topic, and I am 100% supportive of more stuff like this.
Thwomp
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat

- Hammer Suit Tier
Dr. Goomba Tower: It's a shitpost. I completely respect this. You think I'm going to complain about the lack of originality or whatever, but I 100% respect Dr. Mario World for making most of its characters into jokes. You think I'm going to complain about Dr. Baby Rosalina? Absolutely not. I have nothing but respect for Diddy Kong for finishing eight years of college and medical school as a teenage chimpanzee. Dr. Fire Rosalina? God, I love it. My only regret is that it has Dr. Peach instead of Dr. Nurse Peach. I would have given this enough bonus points to reach a higher tier if they'd done that.
Chris Pratt
SupperMarioBroth
Beep Block Skyway: Do people dislike this level? This is one of the few levels I specifically remember, because my sister came in while I was playing, she decided to play with me, and was way, way worse than me, and died like a million times. The literal only game she's better at than me is Ms. Pac-Man. Anyway, I don't know. The background and design of the blocks is lazy, but as far as a platforming challenge goes, this is completely fair and reasonable.
Hell Valley Sky Trees
Smash 64 Commercial

- Super Mushroom Tier
Staff Roll Theme (Mario 64): Perfectly serviceable end credits music. Fills you with, I don't know, the feeling that you're done. There's no more! Think about all those great memories, like when you jumped into the wrong portrait and fell down, or when you got the red coin a chain chomp was guarding, or I don't know, I haven't played Mario 64 since the DS one, and that was in like 2003 or something.
Hide and Seek mods
Starman: I remember when I was like 5, I read the manual for SMB1. I distinctly remember reading the section about power-ups, and it mentions the "invulnerability star." I didn't know what invulnerability meant, but I did know "invisibility," and I thought it was just a typo, so for like six months, I kept saying "invisibility star" because I thought the reason enemies couldn't damage you was that they couldn't see you. And the thing is, even when I was 5, I knew this was wrong, because if you're avoiding enemies, then you wouldn't also kill them on contact, but obviously the enemies all die when you touch them. I can't explain the logic I was operating under, it made no sense at all. Anyway, I was always annoyed to get these as rewards in Toad Houses in SMB3 as a kid, because obviously the power-ups that stay active are much more useful than a few seconds of invincibility at the start of a level, which is usually the safest part anyway. These were only useful for killing overworld bosses.
Donkey Kong (1981)
Gust Garden Galaxy (Theme): This is definitely *the* Mario Galaxy theme. It's not bad, and it's very adventure-y, but... there's nothing about it that feels space-y to me. Rosalina's Observatory has a space theme. This absolutely does not. Look, I'm a simple man, if I'm exploring the cosmos, I want to hear space music.
Tonkachi Mario
Talking Flowers: I don't really think they add anything, and their design is just gross in a way I can't really define, but is definitely related to Birdo's mouth. I don't hate them, though. As a way to add more dialogue into the Mario universe in a way that diegetic and non-obtrusive, they work really well. I like that some of them are kind of sassy and insult your skills.
Trials of Death
Anya Taylor-Joy
Kublai Khan
Tetris Attack: Wait, is this just Panel de Pon, but they replaced the fairy characters with Mario characters? Hilarious. I've never played this game, though, and I probably never will. It's strange how this was just a thing Nintendo did in the 90s, take a game from Japan and insert unrelated Mario stuff into it so it would sell better in the US. You couldn't really do that anymore, huh? I remember trying to explain that's what happened in SMB2 to my teacher in like 8th grade, telling him about "Dookie Dookie Panic," and him laughing and telling me that "dookie" has another meaning.
Toaster: Of all the appliances in my kitchen, this is probably the second-least used, barely beating out the coffee maker. I don't even drink coffee, but my parents gave it to me for free when they replaced theirs with a better one.
Klepto: What a lazy name. Odyssey came out in 2017? God, I'm so old. Anyway, this is the most nothing character. It's just a vulture who carries a star, and you have to hit him so he stops and you can collect it. It could have as easily been a paratroopa.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

I think I'm just not into these homogenized, cover based Tactics games. I couldn't get into Mario and Rabbids either and this appears to be the same game.

What couldn't it have been an FFT/Tactics Ogre style? :/

At least I'll have Unicorn Overlord next month.

The difference in quality between Strikers and Tactica is insane.

Tactica is awful, dont waste your time. I say this as someone who did waste his time and beat it.

Oh jeez, I even watched that video hours ago, okay.

MoogleKupo141 posted...

Toasters

I googled this, and I don't know what it is. Can you provide a link to be clearer?

- Super Mushroom Tier
Hide and Seek mods
Donkey Kong (1981)
Tonkachi Mario
Trials of Death: I didn't realize the video was made by the guy who made the level. Okay, listen. I generally dislike kaizo games. I generally dislike romhacks where the sole purpose is to be balls-bustingly hard. But I can respect the idea of making the HARDEST level. Not merely a hard one, but the actual #1 hardest one, and spending 2500 hours trying to beat it, taking so long that the Mario Maker servers are taken offline and no one else will ever be able to play it. It's a level of single-minded insanity that I don't want to be near, but I can I sort of respect it. The level itself looks like complete garbage nonsense, though. I hate playing that kind of stuff. And I skipped the part of the video that was just youtubers I don't know overreacting to him beating it. Who watches reaction videos?
Anya Taylor-Joy
Kublai Khan

- Frog Suit Tier
Lou Albano
Practice Makes Perfect (Legacy X): I won't lie to you, I don't like or know much about rap. When I was a teacher, kids asked me to name five rappers off the top of my head. All I could come up with was Kanye West, Eminem, Coolio, P-Diddy, and Will Smith. I can't think of any type of music that has less to do wtih Mario than rap. As far as rap goes, though, this is okay.
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy
Torpedo Ted
WarioWare: Here's the thing. I don't really like minigames. I like them occasionally, and I like the really, really good ones, like blitzball and Septuple Scare, or whatever the FF8 card game is called, I'm not looking it up. But they need to be REALLY good. That's why I'm not really a Mario Party guy, either. So a game that is nothing except super short minigames, none of which are like super polished? I dunno. At least it gives Wario something to do, I guess. Wario is more philosophically interesting than he is interesting as an actual character.
Lakilester
NBA Street V3
Fat Yoshi: Was this in the original game? I had to look it up. Feed a baby yoshi 30 yoshie cookies to make him fat, and he'll give you items. I mean, okay? I feel completely ambivalent about this.
Donkey Kong Jr. (1982): No one on Earth feels strongly about this game, and that's fine. It's notable for two things: the deep lore of the Donkey Kong series, about whether DK Jr. is the modern Donkey Kong or whether he's a separate character, and being Mario's only appearance as a villain. Again, imagine Nintendo today gallavantly using its properties like this, doing weird things like making the hero of one game the villain of the next. It would never happen. But yeah, anyway, no one on Earth cares about DK Jr, and no one ever will. He's also really ugly as a character. The game IS more functional than Mario Teaches Typing, though.

- Poison Mushroom Tier
Mario Teaches Typing
Pink Gold Peach: I remember when this came out. It's sort of the ultimate example of lazily adding fake characters to video games, even moreso than Mortal Kombat's palette swap ninjas, because at least those required someone to write backstories for them. At least Baby Rosalina required someone to model her. I'm pretty sure that if I had the Mario Kart model for regular Peach, that I could make Pink Gold Peach. And the fact that she's Pink Gold Peach, and not even just Gold Peach, somehow makes her even lamer. But like Waluigi, Pink Gold Peach is enhanced by her lameness and the laziness she embodies. I have to believe that someone said "we need a second heavyweight human female for girls to play as besides Rosalina," and when they realized the only human woman left was Pauline, they just pooped this out instead. I guess this is better than just inventing a new human character for spinoffs. God, they really lucked out with Daisy already existing.
Pachinko Game (SMS)
Yakuman DS: Alright, let's see what this is... Mahjong? Motherfucker, do you think I care about mahjong in the slightest? I can't think of anything I care less about. Let's at least see the Mario characters' official skill at mahjong. Goomba has a 1 star, Luigi has a 3 star, Toadette is killing it at 4 stars... I don't know if I buy Bowser Jr at 4 stars, he's always seemed like an imbecile. Toadsworth at five stars makes complete sense, though, he's like the only character who would plausibly have the time and inclination to get good at board games.
Hotel Mario Cutscenes
Mario Galaxy 2 Glitch: It took me a while to realize the glitch. If you go into this pipe, and then back through it, there will be a big black void where there wasn't one before? I... don't care at all. It's just some weird oversight. They were going to include something there, they removed it, but they didn't fully remove all traces of it. Fine. Unless it's usable for some speedrunning thing?

- Blue Shell Tier
Birdo: I don't know if I want to get into the gender issue with Birdo, I guess I have to because it's the only thing this character is remembered for. I mean, let's not even address how this creature is not a bird at all. It is clearly some kind of reptile. Trying to read the gender tab of Birdo's wiki is insane because of how it tries to address the official sentences that say "he" while still using "she." I don't know, I'll be honest with you, even independent of any gender stuff, this character is gross. Even as a kid, I did not like Birdo. The spinoffs tried to pair her (I'm just going to use female pronouns) up with Yoshi because they're both humanoid reptile things, and like... I felt bad for him? You know what Birdo reminds me of, it's Q-Bert. It's the giant snout hole. And I hate Q-Bert! Q-Bert is gross. Whatever animals in real life have mouths like this, I don't want to be near them. Like, I'm sorry, but the original concept of this character was clearly to be a parody/insult toward trans people by being a gross monster man who wants to be a cute girl, and has just stuck around on the Mario series like a polyp. Would anyone be sad if this character just stopped showing up forever? Would the series be diminished in any way if I went back in time and replaced Birdo's boss fights in SMB2 with just, I don't know, a really big goomba or something? Is this a character trans people try to reclaim the way I know some do certain characters in Danganronpa or Persona? Because I want nothing to do with Birdo at all, it's definitely my least favorite 'main' Mario character. Unless someone finds something worse, which, I don't know, maybe you can.

- Veto
Donkey Kong (1994): Never played it!

WazzupGenius00 posted...

not even the first Nintendo game where a hero rescues a kidnapped woman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07ONM3UNZeo

Goddammit, I knew about Sheriff, too.

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina: I've cooled a lot on Rosalina, I liked her more when she first came out. What makes her unique is that she's the only Mario character who actually has a backstory. No one else does. The most you get is that Mario and Luigi were babies once maybe I dunno. Go to the Mario Wiki right now and find any other mainline series character whose Background tab is even one-tenth as long as hers. Rosalina, and Rosalina alone, has an entire backstory with lore attached to it. And yes, it obviously gets completely contradicted in later games by the introduction of Baby Rosalina (unless you believe in the idea that the baby characters aren't really connected to the adult characters, or that they're regressed versions of themselves rather than being from the past, etc), but the fact that this character got past Miyamoto is crazy. He's well-known for shutting down any attempts to do anything different with the Mario brand, and somehow, someone slid Goth Space Peach right past him. God bless the soul who did that. And poor Daisy! Before Wonder, she hadn't been in a real game since 1989, and Rosalina just shows up and takes her place as 'Girl 2,' despite Daisy putting in the hours in all of the spinoffs. But Rosalina has something Peach doesn't: cool magic tricks. She floats! She has a wand! A star follows her around! Her voice has a cool reverb effect! It's not a mystery why Rosalina is way more popular and beloved than Daisy, and probably more popular than Wario, I would guess. She's everything I want in a woman: blonde, 8 feet tall, magic, and owns a spaceship. If you're a woman who has all of those attributes, call me.
Kuribo's Shoe
1-1 Theme: This has the most memorable first two seconds of any video game song, and then after that, obviously it's still super memorable... But you compare this to the LoZ main theme, and it's not comparable. The Zelda one completely annihilates this in terms of quality. The Zelda one feels epic and compelling and draws you toward a classical fantasy adventure even though it's a shitty NES chiptune, and the 1-1 theme is just kind of silly fun. It's not even especially wacky or cartoonish, it's just, here's a bright, colorful video game. I'm not saying it's bad or anything, it's still like the most important piece of video game music ever made, but... is it really the best? Is it even the best Mario theme? I doubt it. And you compare this to the Pokemon RB opening theme, and it's completely destroyed. DK Country beats it, too. I dunno. It's better than the main themes for Kirby, Metroid, F-Zero, Kid Icarus, and Star Fox. And yet, for all I just ragged on it, it's still going into my second highest Mario tier, so take from that what you will. When I think of Mario, I do not think of a series that's really defined by its music in the way that, say, MGS or FF are. It has music, and the music enhances the games, but I'm not like "goddamn that 1-1 theme unf."
Luigi
Thwomp: I love thwomps. They're like a perfect video game enemy. You understand the rules they operate by instantly, they always follow those rules, and their movements can be predicted and used to solve puzzles by standing on them and getting up to places you can't normally reach. They're an A-tier enemy, but not an S-tier one.
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat: One of the classic minigames. Perfect concept and execution. Not my favorite MP minigame, but probably in my top ten.

- Hammer Suit Tier
Chris Pratt
SupperMarioBroth
Hell Valley Sky Trees: I'll be honest, I kind of love stupid stuff like this. Completely unexplained nonsense thrown in to make the game more mysterious. My favorite example of this is the bag in the dumpster in RE4. Did the dumpster bag show back up in the remake? I can't remember. I've played RE4 like ten times, but RE4R only once. It's not even bad, it just could not possibly match the original in terms of influence and importance.
Smash 64 Commercial: I know there's a whole 'thing' about nostalgic adults thinking their childhoods were better than modern kids', but I'll say this: the best 90s commercials absolutely trounce the best modern ones. You can't have a completely uncynical stupid commercial anymore. You could not play the Mr. Bucket commercial today without it becoming a Tiktok meme in one second.

Bitto posted...

Luigis Mansion, Smash Melee, and Superstar Saga all released pretty close to each other and all really differentiated Luigi. I think thats what caused it to stick. Some props should go to Paper Mario too with Luigis secret diary.

Well, what I'm thinking about specifically is in SSS where Mario has fireballs and Luigi has electricity powers, and I'm wondering about the alternate universe where Luigi got differentiated by keeping that as his theme.

lol

Does it have a post-credits scene?

- Frog Suit Tier
Lou Albano: This was the voice of the Mario cartoon? ... Honestly, he looks exactly like I expected.
Blindfolded Mario Maker Guy: This is the level of content creation we've sunk to. Everything reasonable has already been done, so now we're down to insane nonsense like this. I appreciate the guy's focus and ideas, I guess, but... I dunno, I can take or leave this. I did like the part where he runs into plants while in Link mode.
Torpedo Ted: This is stupid, but stay with me here: I like Bullet Bills more because they're more serious. They aren't smiling, and they have angry eyebrows. They know their job, they have their job, and they aren't screwing around. Torpedo Ted is smiling like an idiot.
Lakilester: I'm gonna level with you. I played Paper Mario like twenty times as a kid. I loved that game. I hid a bad report card from my parents so they wouldn't punish me by taking away the game. I do not remember this character at all. If you'd just shown me a picture of him, I would've believed this was someone's OC but for the too-true-to-the-90s quality of the image being hard for randos on Deviantart or whatever to replicate.
NBA Street V3: Oh god, is it racist if I make a joke about white men not being able to jump? I was going to say that they made no attempt to make the Mario characters fit the game's real world aesthetic, but that's not quite right. I'm looking at images of the game now, and although it's true that the Mario characters have their normal wonky Mario proportions and vibrant colors, I don't know... there's definitely something that's been altered about these models. These are not just straight ports of the SMS models, someone definitely altered them in some fashion, but it doesn't make them fit into the real world any more than they usually would. Completely bizarre.

- Poison Mushroom Tier
Mario Teaches Typing: My school had this on a computer, I don't even remember whether it was the computer room or library computer, and even as a dumbass first grader or whatever I was, I could tell it was garbage.
Pachinko Game (SMS): I wonder if Japanese game developers realize that no one likes pachinko outside of Japan. Like, my understanding of this game is that it only exists because it's the closest you can get to being a random slot machine that legally qualifies as a game, and thus evades Japan's anti-gambling laws. Is that correct? I don't remember if I even beat this level. I beat Super Mario Sunshine, but I got the minimum number of shines to do it. If you needed this game to finish, then I beat it, otherwise I probably didn't. I remember it being aggressively unfun and stupid.
Hotel Mario Cutscenes: These are actually a significant step up from the CD-I Zelda games' cutscenes in terms of competence. They are nowhere near as ugly or stupid-looking. But seriously, can you imagine Nintendo being as flippant about its brand today? Absolutely every detail of every major Nintendo IP is now so polished and defined that new ideas are rare. What's the last time a third party got to touch Mario? The Mario vs Rabbids game? "You know what they say: all toasters toast toast!" I love how stupid and pointless Peach is in these cutscenes. It's like the perfect embodiment of how stupid and vapid Peach is as a character. She doesn't even get an ending cutscene where she's like "lol thanks for saving me." Honestly, I'd seen all of the Zelda CD-I cutscenes before because they're so awful and hideous that every frame is hilarious. These were mostly new to me, and I'm sure it's because they're just not as ugly and terrible and funny.

- Veto
Mario's Game Gallery: Unfamiliar with this one, sorry!
Blue Shell Incident: I'm not watching a 30 minute SFM shitpost video, get out of here.
Bowser's Fury: Didn't play it! I did play Super Mario 3D World, though.

Researching:
Trials of Death: I found a video to learn about the lore of this level, but it's 40 minutes long, so I'll rank this later.