I really don't like Nintendo. I owned a DS and 3DS and loved both, but I've always felt Nintendo are a coldly and overtly anti-consumer company whose every synaptic routing is centered around, "How do we get these f*ckers to make us even richer?" That's not to say their competitors are any better, but they at least have the decency to make a pretence of it. Nintendo have never done so, and my interactions with them in customer support have always come off as hideous, verging on deliberately unhelpful.
It's not just in their corporate speak, but in their 'products' as well. A lot of people wet their pants over Nintendo Directs like Reggie just told them their dad was finally coming back home, and I don't get it. They're simply selling you a game they sold you 20 years ago for twice the price. Yes, Nintendo make a lot of good games, but not good enough to soypog over, and the worshipful reverence they inspire makes me sick to my stomach.
But since I was stuck in a storm today and couldn't play real grown-up, macho-man, hair-on-your-chest games like Genshin Impact, I decided to give Super Mario Run a try. I've been playing with my phone a bit more, because I'm usually too tired and depressed these days to plug in my gaming laptop, and because my doomscroll device is already in my hands I figured it would be a good way to stave off my demons for a bit. I downloaded a bunch of cute games that started feeling less cute the moment they were installed, none more so than Super Mario Run. I started getting Vietnam war flashbacks of that godawful Mario Kart phone game they made once, but I pushed on, especially because I was interested to find how substantive Nintendo's move into the mobile phone market was. It has to be something really big for Nintendo to forgo console exclusivity, right? This is a company that would rather burn every last functioning SNES on Earth than let you play Zelda: A Link To The Past without paying $80 per year, all for the privilege of playing through their proprietary emulator which is seven times sh*ttier than the lowest-rated homebrew you can find on Emulator Zone. So for them to actually put Mario on a phone, they must have done something incredible.
They have. This is one of those absolute sh*t 'free-to-try' demo games that asks you for a fee to unlock the rest of it, because they don't want to list it as a premium game on the app store. It's also extremely condescending and annoying for the short time you can have with it.
I really don't understand why Mario is held in such high regard when it's so insipid most of the time. Maybe I'm just too old or not gay enough but there seems to be little reason for people to lose their minds over this. 'Whimsy,' I guess. God these games are overrated. My last experience with Mario was Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Journey on the 3DS, and it was all right. The mainline games are even worse, of which my last one was Super Mario 3D Land, and it was thoroughly mediocre yet I bought it like the dumb f*cking idiot I am because people were saying it was the greatest human invention since fire and the wheel. The Mario movie sucked too, and whenever I complained about it Nintendo's legion would cover their ears and scream, "IT'S FOR KIDS!!!" as if that excuses something for being sh*t. Why does being for children give a product permission to be bad? Chicken Run is for kids and it's a kickass movie. You let your kids watch sh*t like the Mario movie and grow up stupid and then complain that 'Gen Alpha is cooked.' You put the iPads in their hands, you neglected them to the point that Skibidi Toilet was their sole source of comfort, you are to blame.
But anyway, Super Mario Run is a demo for a sh*t game that you try when you've become so braindead that nothing really matters anymore, and it's a dangerous place to be. You can link your Nintendo account to the game, which is how I discovered that I'd forgotten what birthdate I'd put on my Nintendo account when I made it in 2013, back when I pretended I was older than I really was online so I could sign up for stuff (if you don't remember that you used to need to be 18, not 13, your youth is showing).
By now you've probably guessed it's much more fun to talk about what Super Mario Run represents than the game itself. Don't waste your time on this, there are better games, even for your phone. Ones with less input lag, ones that don't deceive you about being free, and ones that aren't made by a company that hates their fans. I guess the one positive thing I have to say about Super Mario Run is that the graphical style is really nice, as 3D Mario always is. For all their flaws, Nintendo do have a mastery over making these soft, marshmallow-like 3D objects that cohere together perfectly in their world of brightly coloured sh*t. But I'm not giving Super Mario Run points for that. I play games for entertainment, not to congratulate a company for being technically good in one department. If you're not already inside its thrall, playing a Mario game is such a disillusioning and disheartening experience. This was just my reminder.
What a sh*t company. All their stuff feels like 'products.' And as long as its fanbase is willing to pay for a bad experience, as Pokemon: Scarlet & Violet proved, it won't change.
