You really can’t go wrong with some Super Mario action. It’s been clear-as-a-bell true since the poor bastard first dug in his heels and made a giant ape his hammer-bitch. The plucky plumber and his perpetually overshadowed brother Luigi have since stood as the mascots – no, the AMBASSADORS – for Nintendo across the world. When the NES hit our shores in ’85 and we first took a crack at the original Super Mario Brothers, it’s been simpatico.

I can still remember getting my grey box for Christmas in 1990. My supplemental was a starter set of three games: Castlevania III, Contra, and that glorious smiling flying asshole on the cover of Super Mario Brothers 3. I was quickly convinced that SMB3 was the hard-wire shit, and it was.

But I had no idea what was coming. The NES had a big brother, and it had one barn-burner of a Mario game. To quote the late, great Captain Lou Albano: Often imitated, but never duplicated.

Super Mario World hit Western shores (no doubt blasting “Immigrant Song” on a boombox) in the late summer of ’91. I don’t need to sit here and run my trap about this being one of the best games of all time; 20,000,000+ copies sold can’t be wrong. When viewed within its place in time, SMW understandably changed everything, because it was Mario squared. In typical Nintendo R&D fashion, work began as soon as a previous project ended. Shigeru Miyamoto (the man we have to thank for all of this) had come up with the idea of setting a Mario game in a “dinosaur land” back during SMB3’s run, and had even conceptualized Yoshi by then. Though some difficulty was anticipated when it came to tackling a new platform, the team’s trepidation was balanced by the promise of far greater capability – the limits of the NES were a thing of the past, and it was time to make some art.

Yoshi, the original martyr-complex beta-male.

The story of SMW picks up right where the 3^rd NES game left off… or I suppose a little bit afterward. The brothers decide to treat Princess Toadstool to a nice vacation in… you guessed it… fucking Dinosaur Land. Why no, Mario, I don’t expect anything horrible or tragic to happen. Not here on this landmass full of monsters. Needless to say, Her Highness vanishes, and it turns out that 12 pack will have to wait. The boys have a princess to rescue… again. After looking around a little bit, Mario and Luigi find a huge fuckoff dinosaur egg, but thankfully its tenant is friendly. Out pops a goofy, soft-serve little dinosaur named Yoshi, and the first thing he does is complain that some of his kin have also been taken. AND GUESS WHO DID IT?

Turns out, not a single goddamn one of them learned their lesson.

You guessed right.

While the basic concept of SMW is a snug fit with its predecessor,s there’s so much more going on that the comparison must end there. Koopas and Goombas make up a thin sliver of the pie chart when it comes to enemies; you’ll be harangued by dinosaurs, the coolest moles ever, Bullet Bills the size of a goddamn house, lava monsters (my favorite), and huge terrible assholes in ill-fitting football pads. THOSE GUYS. In a shining early example of clever AI and design, Chargin’ Chuck is… well, he’s inventive when it comes to assaulting you at every turn. Mario can spin jump in addition to his normal move set, which is helpful when you need to, oh say, bounce off giant saw blades or body-drill your way through some blocks. Sometimes Yoshi (or one of his color-themed cousins) will show up to give you a hand. Yoshi is pretty useful for two things: eating shit that’s about two hand spans in front of him and taking the fall like a dope when you need some extra air time on a jump. A lot of the same power ups are around, but this time instead of a raccoon suit or any of that shit you just get the sickest cape this side of James Brown’s id. Not only can you get it to behave similarly to the raccoon leaf in SMB3, you can even parachute-glide insane distances with it. Mario and Luigi Die Hard their way through forests, seas, caves, ghost houses (yes, entire houses full of ghosts) and castles to put the hot stop on all of King Koopa’s brats… all the time knowing that Big K is waiting.

SMW has a save function, which is entirely necessary because this game isn’t just some mindless platform jumper. There are some steep challenges, including but not limited to:

• saws everywhere
• entire rooms literally flooded with ghosts who mock the very life in your veins
• an ample amount of secret shit, namely some Star Road levels that get Evel-Kneivel-on-meth intense
• tons of thwomps; is he reproducing, I swear, how do they even have sex
• pissed off triceratops that are apparently named Reznor (BOW DOWN BEFORE THE ONE YOU SERVE)
• I hope you like those jet-black invincible munchy-plants because it turns out they’re like kudzu here
• entire sections of the game world without terra firma, offering you only the aimlessly drifting platforms you’ve come to dread
• the ceiling just falling, not centered on you but you know, fucking everywhere

Obviously the graphics kick the shit out of anything on the NES, with a comparatively rich color depth and other luscious details like parallaxing skies and pleasingly detailed animation. The sound stays neck in neck with the visuals; SMW’s soundtrack is one of those OSTs that I can listen to the “extended” versions of on YouTube and never get tired of. There’s a ton of character in the music, most notably (to me) the underground BGM and the “athletic” music.

Two other aspects of SMW that it should be praised for are its replay value and its overall charm. 8-bit graphics only showed us in so much detail; it turns out that those Italian boys have a lot of character, and so do their friends and foes. The appeal was (and is) universal.

I rate Super Mario World an 8/10. It’s one of the cornerstones of retro gaming, a pivotal point of acceleration for one of the world’s most recognizable and well-loved cultural icons.

Thanks for reading! Stay Retro!

Once again we strap on our work boots, sling our spades over our shoulders, and shamble on over to the Console Graveyard. This time we’ll take a look at a system that never truly knew who it was. One that had the best of intentions, but just never committed itself. In a different time or place, it could have been a true legend. Sadly, its tale ended in slow death, and it came to rest with us here in the digital mausoleums of the Console Graveyard. Allow me to introduce today’s embalmed console corpse…

Typically, Japanese companies have dominated the console market. Names like Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have brought us the platforms we’re so intimately familiar with now, and only in recent years has the American giant Microsoft waded into this battle from the neighboring PC field. The CD-i, however, is a rarity; it was designed by the Dutch company Koninklijke Philips N.V. Founded in 1891, the company began by manufacturing carbon filament lamps and soon moved on to radios and engines. As electronics became the mainstay of the later 20th Century, Philips held its own in that market with a solid line of consumer devices primarily focused on media and home use. The company, along with Sony, helped standardize the format of Compact Discs. They even pioneered an early LaserDisc device, but held it back in fear that their tape device sales would suffer as a result. You know Norelco razors? That’s them; the name is just branding.

Their first factory is now a museum. That’s how long they’ve been around.

Philips had become a respectably successful company during the 20th Century, and it felt comfortable taking a shot at multimedia. They began work on the CD-i in 1984, and it first hit retail shelves in December of 1991. That’s seven (7) years of R&D. The CD-i was intended to be more than a gaming console. It was meant for use in a wide variety of applications, from education to music to the old standby of media playing. This is fitting, as the first model available to the general consumer market looked very much like a VCR with a gamepad plugged into the front.

This was the first of many forms the console would take as they tried and tried (and tried and f**king tried) to re-market it.

The CD-i was also one of the first home media electronics with the capability of accessing networks. By partnering with fellow Dutch firm CDMATICS, Philips was able to connect CD-i players to the Internet (in its early form). This concept went over better in the Netherlands than anywhere else; a native grocery chain even implemented it for home shopping and delivery.

Despite all this innovation, there were enough problems with the ambitious CD-i that it died a slow death worldwide. One major complaint was the price point; initially released in the USA for a retail price of $700, the Philips CD-i wasn’t seen as a toy, nor was it perceived as a casual purchase by any but the wealthiest (or most foolish) consumer. The system also got panned for its lack of true games and those games’ inconsistent quality. You see, Nintendo licensed the production of some Zelda and Mario titles for the CD-i, but refused to develop said games. The results are famous among gamers on today’s Internet, and while it’s funny now, no one was laughing in the 90s when they played Hotel Mario (or one of three separate Zelda games) on their 700 dollar CD-i and saw this kind of crap:

That’s it. Other than some cutscenes that look like they were made in MSPaint, that’s Hotel Mario.

These games were so goofy that later on, the Internet would use them to spawn creations like this (one of my favorites, and there are a lot of these):

Needless to say, dedicated game consoles were outperforming the CD-i, and they were doing it for less money at the retail counter. The CD-i’s controllers also caught major flak, often cited as “confusing” and “unresponsive.” There was a lot of variation in controller types across the different models, and none of them were well-liked.

So our console looks less like a VCR, but now we’ve got… How do I hold that? How do I play games with it? It looks like the Wii chuck, but the Wii can actually do stuff.

Philips even let Sony and Magnavox take shots at revamping the CD-i, to no avail. The combination of an exorbitant price, small selection of titles, and cumbersome controls took the device down. It would continue to pop back up throughout the mid 90s with some new attachment or another, but it remained unpopular as Sega and Nintendo continued to outperform it in gaming markets.

PCWorld, GamePro, and GameTrailers all ranked the Philips CD-i as the fourth worst console of all time. It was in this judgment that the benighted little high-dollar console finally found its consistency. While it had been flagging since 1993, and Philips planned a discontinuation in 1996, the CD-i persisted limply until 1998, when it was finally given a shot in the head and laid to rest. Philips remains a strong contender in the consumer electronics market, but it has never ventured into gaming or multimedia again. While the idea behind the CD-i was ambitious and even admirable, the execution once again fouled the whole deal. Lesson learned: if you’re going to pitch a console for $700, it had better be something world-shattering. It also better have a good game library and a controller that doesn’t look like a soup spoon.

I can’t get over it. Here we see that the tiny buttons are labeled, leaving you to guess wildly at the purpose of the big ones. We also see the word “interactive.” Thanks for the clue, because this doesn’t look like it’s used to interact with anything.

Thank you for joining me again in the Graveyard. There’ll be more to come; we’ve just recently cleared some space for a new set of digital catacombs. I’ll see you then, creeps.

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