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Yzz

Yzz

Shy Girl
Pronouns
She/Her
Sunshine has really high highs. The electric ray battle is the best boss battle in a 3D platformer, because it actually makes you think in 3 dimensions and your actions build upon each other.
 
Skittzo

Skittzo

Bob-omb
Founder
Pronouns
He/Him
Derachi said:
What’s up fam!!!! I’m here. It’s Monday morning and I’m here and I’m ready for this week to happen to me
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Gonna be a rough Monday for me, hopefully not a rough week. My 3 year old was up crying all night with a sore throat and runny nose. Got a COVID test, hopefully good news coming within a few hours.
 
Ramune

Ramune

Piranha Plant
Pronouns
he/they
9-Volt said:
I bet KH cloud games will shadow drop alongside Sora DLC. Let's see how many people will care.
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Do we have prices for them? KH3 is under a tenner on PS4 now and the complete Story So Far collection or whatever it's called regularly goes on sale. I have to assume most people interested in the series are already platforms where it's been available and is now dirt cheap.
 
wonaph

wonaph

Rattata
Pronouns
he
Fajgar said:
I'm sad that I have almost no time to play Dread before sunday.
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I know... I was only able to get through the first boss in my first week with game... and probably have to wait until Sunday to continue... I kinda like having it to looking forward to and not ending so quickly... but I really just want to keep going 😥
 
Fajgar

Fajgar

Rattata
wonaph said:
I know... I was only able to get through the first boss in my first week with game... and probably have to wait until Sunday to continue... I kinda like having it to looking forward to and not ending so quickly... but I really just want to keep going 😥
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Hopefully the wait will make us enjoy the game even more when we can sit down and play it.
We are in this together 😊
 
Intoxicate

Intoxicate

The best is yet to come...
Sunshine was love on second sight. Didn't get into it on the GameCube, it was too strange with the larger Hub world and the long intro (Mario goes on vacation, get imprissioned etc. I expected to jump right into action like in 64). Now with the 3D All Stars re-release I gave it another try and despite some frustrating parts, it has really great ones too. Loved it, and it was my personal most positive surprise from the 3 games (but I expected 64 and Galaxy to be great, so that couldn't be topped).
 
Derachi

Derachi

Fresh Eater
Founder
Pronouns
he/him
Cleaning Up a Big Mess
A Pseudo-Defence of Super Mario Sunshine by a Fomer Hater

By FamiBoards user “Derachi”

One of my most vivid childhood memories was explaining the concept of the newly released WarioWare Inc. to my dad in the gravel parking lot of a densely populated reception hall in a sparsely populated town in June of 2003. My uncle, my mom’s youngest sibling, had just gotten married to a woman I had barely met. She had a son around my age who I knew I was going to have to become friends with. At the time I didn’t know what to think. As an adult I know exactly what to think: she’s one of the nicest, kindest people I’ve ever met, and her son is very much like her in this exact way. This wedding reception was a lot, so my dad and I stepped outside of the venue to take a brief walk. This is where I extolled the mere concept of the micro game compilation I would, in just a few weeks, receive as a gift for getting good grades on my year-end report card. The game would go on to become one of my favourites of all time.

My dad, later that weekend, would tell me that my new cousin was probably just as confused as I was and probably doubly scared, so it’d be good of us to maybe try to get me and him to hang out, and get to know each other. This is where I learned how we were going to do just that: He also had a GameCube, and he had a stack of games. One of which was one I had yet to play: Super Mario Sunshine.

There was a time not too long after this I was spending a weekend at my grandparents’ place, just down the road from my uncle’s house. My cousin was, for whatever reason, not around. I believe he might have been away on some hockey playing-related weekend trip. I was afforded the opportunity that weekend to borrow a game of his, and I of course borrowed the Mario game I had yet to play. I started and finished that game in that weekend. At the time: I liked it a fair bit!

Time and exposure to the internet was not kind to this fond memory. For years I was told it was a bad game. Unfinished. The frame rate was bad. For over 15 years I was told it was the black sheep of the Mario franchise and, through opinion osmosis I became one of the flock: I became a Sunshine Hater. I was told that Sunshine was bad so much I started to believe it.

In 2019 I moved halfway across the country with two friends to start new chapters in our careers. In this new part of the country, I met a girl. In very early 2020, I started dating this girl. We both loved video games so a lot our earliest conversations were about video games. She admitted to me to loving Super Mario Sunshine. She didn’t say the game was perfect but she loved it all the same. Sunshine Haterism flowed through my veins. Internally I scoffed. “She likes Sunshine? The BAD Mario?”

In September of 2020, this girl and I moved into a townhouse together. We, at the time, only had one TV, so it went into the bedroom instead of the living room because we had a bed but not a couch at that time.

I had a couch before moving but it sucked. If people online are desperate to hate something, don’t hate Super Mario Sunshine, hate my old couch!

Super Mario 3D All-Stars was released later that month. The game plan was simple: she and I would play all three games, passing off the controller between Deaths and Stars/Shines. This way we’d both get to experience all three games. My impressions of the package going in were that of a garbage sandwich: two good things wrapped around literal trash.

Super Mario 64 immediately proved to me that my garbage sandwich impression was simply not nuanced enough to express my exact thoughts on this elusive bundle. Super Mario 64 was not possible, in 2020, to simply describe as “good” or “bad.” It was a relic. It was good in the way that a toy found at an archeological dig site is good. It was good in the way that historians would look at and say “wow, people in the past would spend hours a day playing with this.” I’m not saying it was too old to enjoy, but I AM saying it was too old to love. A spinning top from 1000 BC and a modern day Beyblade are ostensibly the same toy. But I would rather spin a Beyblade than a three thousand year-old top ten times out of ten. Much like how a thirty century-old top was the centrifugal Rosetta Stone that eventually brought us Beyblades, Super Mario 64 was the three-dimensional computer-world Rosetta Stone that brought us a lot of three-dimensional computer-worlds that we continue to enjoy today. Super Mario 64 is good! But also, Super Mario 64 is old. It has the feeling of an old reliable pick-up truck. I’m glad it exists. I would rather a newer truck.

Super Mario Sunshine is hilarious. The game starts with Mario, Peach and an aged Mushroom fellow riding in an absolutely ridiculous pink-interiored aircraft with only three horizontally lined up, evenly spaced seats, watching a nonsensical video explaining the vacation they have already decided they were going to take. Mario, our hero, expresses a nearly sexual response at the video’s mention of seafood that puts him into a delirious trance. Then he goes to JAIL. The hilarity of Super Mario Sunshine’s bizarre narrative are besides the point, however. No matter how much I enjoy its bombacity, it is purely a vehicle to get Mario to this tropical island and jumping around with a water cannon strapped to his back.

Where Super Mario 64 is an old reliable pick-up truck, Super Mario Sunshine is a Miami Vice-looking speedboat piloted by a man in a Hawaiian shirt who has only consumed uncut cocaine for the past week and he is trying to pitch to you his idea for a science fiction tv show. It’s fast, it’s slippery, it’s not all there. Sometimes it’s broken! Sometimes it’s so unbroken that you can’t help but feel like the person who made this deserves a Nobel Prize. It’s not just inconsistent, it’s WILDLY inconsistent. Mario’s water pack helps the player deal with hard-to-judge 3D distancing. Sometimes the game sees fit to take that water pack away. Mario moves incredibly fast and he’s incredibly agile. With little practice, the kinetic bliss of two dimensional Mario games has translated to 3D better than 64 could have ever accomplished, in a way that can only be described as an glorious accomplishment. Then there’s a level where there’s a giant pachinko board floating in absolutely nothing with zero explanation and Mario is the ball and the moment you think you know how the pachinko mechanics work, the game goes out of it’s way to prove you don’t and never did and never will. The music is wild and incredible. The voice acting is wild and bad. There’s one sound-bite where a Toad asks “what’s this icky paint-like goop” and I don’t know if any English-speaking human was involved in the writing, translation, recording, or implementation of that line other than the one human who said it into a microphone a single time without hesitation and received a too-small paycheque for it. I think about that line a lot. Sometimes level goals are as simple as “collect the red coins.” Sometimes you have to spray a single bird with water for it to shit out a Shine.

Super Mario Sunshine was Super Mario Odyssey before Nintendo decided they don’t need to ship games before they’re ready.

Sunshine doesn’t care what you think about it. It is what it is. It tries a lot. It accomplishes some. What it accomplishes and what it doesn’t renders the game, more than anything, interesting. It gives us an example of what a Nintendo game looks like when it ships early. Do you like it? Do you love it? Do you hate it? It doesn’t matter. It has its morals and values and pachinko level. You need to go to it. It is not going to come to you. It wants you to pick it up from the airport and help it move a couch. What are you rewarded with if you meet it halfway? One of the most interesting Mario games of all time. Is it good? Yes! It is incredible? In a non-qualitative way, absolutely.

I went into Sunshine expecting a bad game and what I got was a game that wasn’t afraid to be itself, but a game that stopped short of being it’s complete self because they had to ship it before it was done. But even then, it tries a lot, and succeeds at more than people give it credit for.

I’ll conclude my Sunshine defence-framing assessment of Super Mario 3D All-Stars by saying Super Mario Galaxy 1 was disappointing. If Super Mario 64 was an old reliable pick up truck and Super Mario Sunshine was a speedboat piloted by someone who is more cocaine than man, Super Mario Galaxy is a water slide for babies. I refuse to elaborate on this statement.

To conclude this rambly essay: Super Mario Sunshine is better than people give it credit for. It’s weird, it’s bad in spots, it’s good in way more spots. It’s easily the most satisfying Mario has ever controlled in 3D space before Odyssey. The setting of the game feels shockingly well realized. You should play it.
 
NabiscoFelt

NabiscoFelt

Chaos Plumber
Pronouns
he/him
Sunshine is a pretty good video game, with moments of absolute greatness sprinkled in

My ranking of the 3D Marios though is basically strictly chronological. 64 < Sunshine < Galaxy = Galaxy 2 < Odyssey (haven't played 3D World or Land)
 
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