Bringing Back “Nintendo Hard”
Kudos or curses to Phil for introducing “Asshole Mario” to COUp yesterday. It’s always fun to see that there are gamers out there that still have a love of classic games, but are also passionate enough to design new levels for it. And challenging ones at that!
With the clever use of environmental layout and resources, one could easily bring us back to the era of “Nintendo Hard”. Sadly, these days game design seems more geared toward the cinematic aspect of immersion into a virtual world than creating a test of one’s dexterity and puzzle-solving skills. I don’t think that many games–even in the SNES generation–would encourage the kind of outside-the-box thinking, such as sacrificing Yoshi’s life as a tool in order to get across a broad lava pit.
For these videos, watching the player replay the same areas over and over and over again can get a little annoying, though there were times when the audience of COUp would cheer him on. What would make it much better would have been to add the audio track of the player himself, much like this series of Mario vids.
Myself, I don’t think I’d make it past (or maybe even to) Level 4. Every time I’d hit a hidden coin box, I’d turn into Sawyer from Lost. And if my buddy had made them for me to try out, I’d be constantly punching him in the kidneys.
