The Gospel According To Rhys - Colwyn Bay North Wales Web blog About Sport, Wrestling, PHP, SEO, Social Media & Networking

Last night, my Internet clicked off suddenly. I wasn’t best pleased, I was doing “Post Website Redesign Promotion/Catching up”, and really could not be dealing with the hassle of no Internet. Thank you very much Tesco.net. Rather than do something productive to help alleviate the stress of no Internet and shout at a poor excuse of a technician down the phone, I booted up my SNES emulator, and played the game I downloaded a few nights ago, Super Mario All Stars.

Specifically, Super Mario Brothers 3.

This game was the holy grail of my childhood, the game that was worth 3 games to swap, and I used to go to my mates houses who had Nintendo’s and watch them play, I was that in love with it. Eventually, I got a NES quite late on in the product’s lifespan, and I always rated Super Mario Brothers 3 the best of the games, the sheer brilliance of the level design (Fire Mario melted Ice in Ice Land, making fire flowers useful, rather than pointless compared to a Flying Mario), along with the unique power ups (it was brave on Nintendo to only give the kuribo boot one level) made this probably one of my top 10 games of all time. Recently, Edge disagreed, preferring the SNES incarnation, Super Mario World.

Now, I could write about three gigabytes of excuses why I disagree with Edge’s picks (and why BBC felt the need to cover the story), but the general jist of it is located on my comment on this post on Infendo. Long story short, video games are subjective, and what right does Edge say to rate one game above the other. I was also pissed off that games such as Street Fighter II, Civilization and Super Mario Brothers 3 were not in the top 10. I wanted to prove them wrong.

Unfortunately, loading up Super Mario Brothers 3 and playing it for a good few hours made me realise one thing – Edge were right. What separates the SNES game from it’s NES predecessor is the level size and difficulty. Far too many times in my game I took to the skies and skipped entire levels. The sheer size of the levels in Super Mario World make this an impossible task. One hour gone, 0 deaths, 99 lives and already on World 7. Without using any of the warp zones.

It’s still a good game, don’t get me wrong, it’s just too easy, even for modern gamers. Admittedly I have played it a fair few times but even so it just comes across as challenging as falling off a tightrope.

Apologies for the rant, but I don’t blame Nintendo for making a game for kids, I blame Tesco.net for forcing me to play it.

In other news, you may have remembered a post a few days ago about the Top Three Things I’ve Yet To Achieve As A Blogger (even though it’s now two thanks to The Gospel According To Rhys Appreciation Society facebook group). That post was written for “The Three Group Writing Project”, and as a way to choose a winner, I have to list the posts that I liked. I’ll be honest, I was very selective in the ones that I read, purely because a few of them the titles inspired me as much as graph paper inspires me. Nevertheless, I’ve picked a few that I enjoyed. Here they are.

• Three Puzzles To puzzle you
• Three Ways To Track Your Comments
• Top 3 Tips To Pick Up Girls Using Blogs

Right, tonight I’m off to a poker night, so I’ll tell you all about it on Thursday probably. If I am not in jail or something. Tomorrow’s entry is good. It’s Christmassy, and features a video from Youtube. What more can you want in July?