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GoGoDezmo

GoGoDezmo

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Sunshine is a great game that's brought down to being only a good game because it's marred by a ton of jank and tedium.

I will live on this hill. I'll build a nice little house here, and maybe even start a garden.
 
chocolate_supra

chocolate_supra

is just happy to be here
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Derachi said:
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.
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Okay this was an amazing read to kick the morning off with. Props for the effort.

AceBandage said:
Neat
Famiboards
Trinkets
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I see what you did there and I don't like it

Also, I wanna display the cute glitch cookie but because I didn't earn it I'd feel bad..?
 
Mr_No_U

Mr_No_U

Garbage Galaxy Representative
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Skittzo said:
This one is by far my worst signature joke, but I needed a new one after the previous one was there for like a week.
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Every time I read one of your posts I just assume the spoiler in your sig is part of it, and it makes everything better.
 
Red Monster

Red Monster

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Derachi said:
Patron badge looks like a cookie

The best of which you can get at your nearest Subway location
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The cookies are the one good thing about that place. The raspberry cheesecake ones are godly. But only if they’re chewy. If they overbake them then the cookies are nowhere near as good.
 
Pineapple

Pineapple

*
Guaraná said:
what are your most 3 anticipated Switch games for 2022? (not counting BotW2)

Bayo 3, Splattoon 3 and Triangle Strategy for me.
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Insanely hard question, I think I will go with Triangle Strategy, Bayo 3 and AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative.

There's far too many things I want next year, just about everything I want would have been my most anticipated games if they came out in other years. Next year is looking like another 2019 for me which was fanfuckingtastic.

​

 
Skittzo

Skittzo

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Guaraná said:
what are your most 3 anticipated Switch games for 2022? (not counting BotW2)

Bayo 3, Splattoon 3 and Triangle Strategy for me.
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Right now Bayo 3, Mario + Rabbids 2, and probably Shadowrun trilogy if I'm being honest.

If RE Outrage is actually a thing and on Switch then that is third.
 
Hentz

Hentz

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Guaraná said:
what are your most 3 anticipated Switch games for 2022? (not counting BotW2)

Bayo 3, Splattoon 3 and Triangle Strategy for me.
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Kirby, Splatoon and Bayo

But Zelda is #1. I picked Bayo just because I loved the second game, I’m not that excited for the third one after the first trailer, but I’ll still try it of course
 
Mbolibombo

Mbolibombo

New Forum. New Avatar.
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Eastward crashed on me when after I beat the final boss but before the cut scene. So I have to do it all over again :<

The third time this has happened to me on a Switch game

BotW
Octopath Traveller

And now Eastward.. I have to say.. that's a bit frustrating
 
Mr_No_U

Mr_No_U

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Magic-Man said:
Uh oh, I'm into Animal Crossing again
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giphy.gif
 
TreIII

TreIII

Triceraton
Founder
Guaraná said:
what are your most 3 anticipated Switch games for 2022? (not counting BotW2)

Bayo 3, Splattoon 3 and Triangle Strategy for me.
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If we're going only by exclusives/debut-firsts, and also not including "expansions" like MH Rise Sunburst...

Bayo3, Kirby and RE: Outrage.

Metroid Re-Prime is a close runner up. But considering I just experienced another playthrough of that game a short while ago, I'd probably need quite a bit to sweeten the pot.
 
Brewster123

Brewster123

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The New Horizons news made we want to go back and play an older Animal Crossing (I dislike NH's villager interactions or lack thereof and general focus on town customization), so I recently started up a town on the gamecube AC. Its been fun seeing the differences between the series first outing and its most recent entry. The villager interactions carry a much larger focus in the gamecube game, which makes sense given that it can have 15 villagers in one town, and there are some holidays that got dropped in later games. I also forgot that you could get 3-tier towns (towns with 2 separate sets of cliffs) in the original game.
 
TheQuietone

TheQuietone

The Dread Captain
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I was never out of ACNH. God it rained two days in a row and it's making my flower problem worse. Trying to get it under control before the 5th but between work and Dread I can't focus on the flowers for too long. Least I'm at the final boss and then I can decide on the next game from my backlog.
 
Gengar

Gengar

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I see we talk about food a lot here, and as someone who was been cooking more often recently I thought of a question: what should Link be able to cook in BOTW 2 that wasn't available in BOTW?

Now, I would need to check a list of BOTW recipes to see what is already available, but I would like to see some pesto shrimp pasta and beef stroganoff -- two of my specialties -- in BOTW 2.
 

HockeyBird

Tektite
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I only played AC New Horizons for about 30 hours which was enough time to advance my island into a small ghetto. Since I'm upgrading NSO, I'll get the AC expansion. I might as well try it. Maybe the more game like structure will help rope me in.
 
Pandora

Pandora

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Gengar said:
I see we talk about food a lot here, and as someone who was been cooking more often recently I thought of a question: what should Link be able to cook in BOTW 2 that wasn't available in BOTW?

Now, I would need to check a list of BOTW recipes to see what is already available, but I would like to see some pesto shrimp pasta and beef stroganoff -- two of my specialties -- in BOTW 2.
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I truly dont remember what all was in BOTW recipe wise, but gonna say off the top of my head I wouldnt mind making some quesadillas or a buritto. Or maybe some ravioli. I think Link has it in him to prepare these on his long journey of breathing the wild.
 
Suswave

Suswave

s h i t p o s t ~.+.~ a b y s s
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Pandora said:
I truly dont remember what all was in BOTW recipe wise, but gonna say off the top of my head I wouldnt mind making some quesadillas or a buritto. Or maybe some ravioli. I think Link has it in him to prepare these on his long journey of breathing the wild.
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Ravioli was in the game — that’s the fancy wind jump bird ghost right?
 
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