Month: May 2011

1985 in closing

Well, to be honest, the Nintendo’s release titles do not, for the most part, stand the test of time. Hell, to be honest, we only played some of them because they were the only video games available for the system, and we sure as hell couldn’t go back to the ATARI 2600 after seeing graphics that consisted of multiple pixels in different colors.

The Nintendo Entertainment System was probably the most important achievement of 1985! Forget Reagan meeting Gorbachev and all that other Cold-war-era BS! The Nintendo was where it’s at!

Going onward from here, we have a lot more games to cover each year, and I intend to give full reviews only to those that deserve it. For most of them (those rated less than 4 and not awful or significant enough to warrant further exposition), I’ll just give a couple sentences and a screencap. For some of them, it’s far, far more than they deserve.

Super Mario Bros.

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platform

I skipped this in my alphabetical listing because, frankly, I wanted to finish 1985 with a game that did not suck. Super Mario Bros. spawned the most successful video game franchise in history. You noticed I didn’t say, “probably” or “one of” anywhere in that sentence, and it isn’t because I am biased (though I probably am): Mario is, empirically speaking, the greatest video game franchise of all to this day. Though its impressive 40 million units sold is due, in no small part, to it being bundled with the console, many of the sequels continue to be worldwide best-sellers to this day. To this day. When I say “to this day” I mean “it still moves preposterous numbers of units when sold without any changes on virtual console.”

I could go on gushing about this. I could wax eloquent about Mario’s origins, his first appearance, or any of that crap that people talk about when Mario is presented in a blog. In fact, I think I will.

 

At some point I'll also review the game.
At some point I’ll also review the game.

Continue reading “Super Mario Bros.”