Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 120: Super Mario Sunshine

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

Taking a break from our string of glowing Mario retrospectives, we have a not-so-glowing look at vintage Mario. Yeah, 2002 is vintage now. Henry Gilbert and Sam Claiborn join us to discuss what's great about Super Mario Sunshine... but mostly what's not.

This week in Retronauts, welcome to Isle D'Athena. Hi, everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of Retronauts. I continue to be Jeremy Parrish. There's no escaping me. And this week, we're going to be talking about yet another Mario game. This one, for a couple of reasons. One, it's 15 years old this summer or this autumn, depending on which region you live in. And two, its first proper follow-up in 15 years is coming out soon in the form of Super Mario Odyssey.

This is Super Mario Sunshine. And this may be a divine. divisive and controversial episode, I don't know. We'll find out. Get your one-star reviews ready. Well, this should be your favorite game ever. So we'll get to that. Should it? It should be.

Okay. We know Jeremy hates the sunshine. So I, my opinions have been dictated by a third party. Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll see. So who are you telling me how I should feel? Hey, everybody. My name is Samuel Claiborne.

I'm managing editor at IGN.com and a long-time Retronauts fan. It's good to be back. Welcome back. Also here on the mics, we have. Mama Peach, Henry Gilbert. Hello. Oh, no. It's Mama Peach.

I mean, that's what Bowser Jr. calls Princess Peach in the game. And he calls you that, too? Yeah, we're close, me and Bassett. Hi, I'm Bob Mackie, and I have dangerous opinions on this game. Uh-oh. Dangerous. I'll be arrested after this podcast is over. Wow.

By the iTunes police. Yeah, wait to see where this goes. All right. So, yeah, Super Mario Sunshine. This is the Mario game you don't really hear a lot about, or you haven't really heard a lot about, except all of a sudden everyone had the same idea and me and suddenly said let's revisit Super Mario Sunshine

and so there's been a lot of kind of rediscovery and discussion of this game. And I feel like somehow Bob and I have come down on a different side of the coin than everyone else. I could be mistaken but I don't know I get the impression that people

really love this game and my feelings are mixed. It is a mixed bag No. That's right. The game's journal is cliche. I finally got to use it. It's a mixed bag. I've been saving it for years. It has tight controls. It's a mixed bag of good and not so good. The land of contrast. Yeah.

In conclusion, Ialdafino's land of contrast. Robust multiplayer. So, really? I missed that part. Mead and potatoes. We are going to talk about this game and come to some conclusions or not. But I am positive that you are going to, at some point, point, slam your fist down, and turn off this episode in anger and possibly pin a very negative review on iTunes for us.

So please look forward to it. Super Mario Sunshine. That's the best kind of returauts. The controversial type? Yeah. Is it now? Yeah. Finally, we can give a Mario game the treatment we usually say for Sonic.

Yeah. All right. Let's roast it. No, I, okay, I'm being a little, I'm exaggerating a bit here. I am too. I don't hate Mario Sunshine, but I definitely feel like of all the Mario games, like the core Mario games, starting with Super Mario. No, Super Mario. Are you talking about 3D or?

Yeah, well, it's weird, right? Well, no, like, this is part of a series that's very short. Well, okay, when I, no, what I, what I meant by proper follow-up is that Mario Odyssey will be the first sort of sandboxy kind of open, level design take on Mario. Yeah. Well, the developers say that, you know, 64, sunshine and Odyssey are those three. This is by their own determination. But I feel like of

all the core Mario games, the platformers, starting with Super Mario Brothers, this is the one that needed a little more time in the oven. There's some really cool stuff here, and I like some of the ideas they had, but it also feels very much like a product of its time. And I mean that in a few

you different ways. Like in terms of kind of how 3D platformers work and camera controls work and things like that, it's still, it's pretty rough by contemporary standards. But also, if you set the stage and look back to the dim and distant year of 2002, Nintendo was, they'd kind of lost their way. They were really struggling to find who they were. And, you know, the GameCube era was a pretty dark time for Nintendo. If they, if they weren't for Pokemon, I on Game Boy Advance, I don't know where they would be right now. I blame 9-11. I don't think I do.

It did launch on 9-11 in Japan. Yeah, it did. That's what I was going for. There's a lot of parallels to the Wii U era. Yeah, similar time. But with Wii U, they at least had 3DS and, you know, kind of their excursions into mobile even to lighten the load. The GBA was a hit. It was, but I feel like 3DS has been a bigger hit than GBA.

I could be mistaken, but I... But the GameCube, it was... kind of attempted a me-to. It was the most me-toist of their things because like super N.E.S. and Genesis were kind of similar 16-bit machines, but they were making it without

even thinking of the Genesis. Then when N64, they wanted a leapfrog, CD technology, and have even double the bits as a PlayStation. But then with the GameCube, they're like, well, have it be as good as a PlayStation, PlayStation 2, except with smaller disks. Like, it's just

more powerful than PS2. And I had a handle on it. It was actually... That's true. A handle that could only fit a child's hand. By the time I got a GameCube, I couldn't slip my hand through that thing. And for Control reports, that's important. True, true.

That's true. But this was a time of transition and change for the console industry in general. And, you know, if you want to look at PC gaming, there was a lot of change happening there, too. But look at 2002. That year, Sega had bowed out of the console race. They had abandoned Dreamcast and said, okay, we give up. It's not going... This is a dead business for us.

And they went third party. So you started seeing Sega games on Nintendo systems. It was weird. Sonic Adventure on a GameCube was very confusing. Microsoft had just entered the console market after kind of dipping their toe in with things like, you know, the MSX platform standard. They helped to find that. And, you know, they provided Windows CE for Dreamcast. But the Xbox arrived at the end of 2001, almost exactly at the same time as GameCube in America, in fact, like a week apart.

And so suddenly they'd kind of taken Sega's place. Meanwhile, PlayStation 2 had launched at the end of 2000 and immediately became just like this towering hit that stomped everything in its path. So Nintendo was kind of trying to find their way along with everyone else. But they were definitely the oldest, at this point, you know, most established company in the console race because Sega had literally entered the console market the same day as Nintendo in Japan in 1983. Now, nearly 20 years later, Sega bowed out. Nintendo was left alone, but it had new competitors, a hungry new rival, a massive American corporation with the money to just sink into the business and lose hand over fist for years and not even feel it. So this was a huge threat to them.

And they really, you know, they hadn't had great success with N64. Like some games had been revolutionary and sold extremely well. But as a whole, the platform did really well in the U.S. It was a decent second place to PlayStation. In Japan, it just never went anywhere. It was stuff like, you know, gold-nigh and stuff like that. That wasn't the end. That was 1997.

That was a year after the system launched. Before an off-prone of time. I don't think those games sold that well. I mean, compared to Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, like the N-64's heyday was at the beginning, and then people just sort of tapered off. And there were some great games at the end of the N-64's life, but they just didn't move as quickly as they needed to. It also makes me think

the weird place GameCube was in because at least N64 lost all those third parties but they leaned hard on Rare to fill up their library and then they made a there was some executive level decision of like we don't want Rare anymore

we don't need this, we don't want all their games on the GameCube so they for the first year Someone played Star Fox Adventures and said the hell with these people take this Goolies game and shove it onto an Xbox.

Grab your own goolies. Get out of here. You were saying anyway. No, so that was another just transition point they were in, that they were not going to have rare games to really support them on the GameCube. So it was going to be a whole new era for them in that way, too, compared to N64. And there was also the legacy of these games that defined 3D gaming

that Nintendo created in the late 90s. Like Super Mario 64, it wasn't the first 3D platformer, but it was the first one worth playing. Ocarina of Time was not the first 3D action-adventure game, but it was a damn site better than anything that had come before. But how do you follow up those games? It's kind of a sophomore jinx type thing. It is.

I think they pulled it off with Wind Waker. There are some problems with that game, but it's very good, and they took it sort of a unique direction and that did something that was different than O'Rean of Time and worked. And they tried, I think, to do that with Mario Sunshine, but strayed a little too far.

I feel like Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine have a lot in common in that they both feel unfinished, though, in very significant ways. Yes, and I can explain for all of you animated heads out here. I want to blame the whole water thing on the smash success of One Piece in Japan at the time. I feel like they had water on the brain at this time. That sounds like a medical problem, actually. Yes, yes. But I do think it had a lot to do with that. I never hear those games compared to each other as, like, co-developed games because Mario Sunshine was like one and a half years of development, which is sort of short.

That's crazy. Just a little blip. And I'm sure Wind Waker was much longer than that. We'd actually just talked about Yoshi's Island in this room, and that was a five-year, technically three-year development cycle, yeah, compared to a 3D game. Yeah. Well, and I connect to the two as well, Sunshine and Wind Waker, because they were revealed together. The sunshine reveal gets overlooked in the memories of it because at the late, I think it was like the last week of 2001 or at least late,

2001, there was the reveal event in Japan where they showed the first thing of Wind waker or what would become Wind waker. And that's where the negative feelings to tune links started coming out. And I remember seeing like the filmed off the screen type thing, probably on IGN. But right before that is Mario with a flood backpack in the Delphino Plaza wiping sweat off of his head. And that scene made me feel weird, too, of like, what's going on with Mario? Mario at least looks the same as I remember, unlike Link. But why is he so, is this a game about Mario sweating? What's this game about?

Wasn't Sunshine at Space World that year? And then I couldn't say. I remember it as a trailer reveal. Yeah, I remember it as a trailer reveal, but not as a playable thing. And Shosh and Kai would have been like, that's like November or something. Oh, is it that late? Yeah. At Space World, they had video that IGN reported on and had, like, one snapshot.

And that video is finally on YouTube, and you can watch it. Oh, cool. And Shigarmi Moto walks out and just says, please don't film this. Please don't film this. This is not for, you know, purposes to be online or whatever. And somebody did. It wasn't, I didn't ever published that video, but there was that one screenshot of Mario Running Down an alley.

Okay. It was the first thing that public saw. And then I watched that video recently, and it's what, it's, when you say that, that Sunshine seems unfinished, like, this is the unfinished version that they didn't add much to it, but the textures are just gone. They had the, you know, Delphina Island as a concept, and they show very little else. But it definitely looks like Mario 64. Interesting.

And I think there was a layer added to the GameCube's final, like, some of those levels are gorgeous and they're really pretty, and they feel polished, and the other ones just don't at all. I feel like Nintendo, you mean, you can kind of see. Like, there was this sense of what do we do now with the GameCube? I mean, the system launched with the Mario game, but it was Luigi's Mansion, which is a very good game, but it's not really, like, the anchor of a new console. It's not the killer app. Yeah.

Well, it's not even that. It's just, like, a very limited, very focused kind of game. And people were used to Mario games that were, like, huge sprawling adventures, and Luigi's Mansion wasn't that. And it's a great spin-off. It's really full of creative ideas, but it is very one-note. I mean, you are always Luigi shining a light and sucking up ghosts. And Mario Sunshine is basically just the reverse of that. You've got a backpack, but instead of sucking up things, you're blasting out water.

This was a ghost water. This is Nintendo making a lot of decisions that would anger people, making a lot of atypical decisions. So, yeah, they launch with a Mario game, but it's not a Mario game. It's a Luigi game that's a parody of Resident Evil. The Mario game that they launched, Mario has a gun. sorts. The Zelda game that they launch is a cartoon with a new visual style. The Metro game they launch is a first-person shooter

in a way. So they're making decisions that people did not want at the time that would they react to negatively. The Donkey Kong Country game will be played by Ambongos. Oh, right. That's too. I mean, there's some really cool stuff that happened in the GameCube era, but it was definitely Nintendo, like I said,

it kind of feels like a reaction to what they had done in the N64 era. They didn't want to do the same thing, but they still needed to build on what they had accomplished. And some of those efforts were more successful than others. Smash Brothers Melee is one of the few that's like, it's just more of what the last one did. It is just a refining of the first game. Well, I mean, one of their most successful games of that generation was Animal Crossing,

which was literally just a GameCube game that they tweaked and expanded and put on GameCube. It's very N64 looking and it's great. They did a good job with it. I don't read a lot about. I wrote a bunch of interviews recently about this game, to prepare for this, among other things. And at the time, they talk a lot about the gun, the water being used as a gun. But I rarely hear the developers talk about how much the jet pack actually added this kind of level of platforming.

That is an evolution of Mario, right? Because you can hang in the air. You can get to higher places. And there's an explanation for it all. And there's this level of acrobatics that it adds, which I think is the one progressive thing about it. It takes Mario 64 and a lot of other things are the same, and that is one little progression. You know, it's interesting. We just, like Bob said, recorded an episode on Yoshi's Island, which is the first Mario game to give you the hover ability, yeah, the flutter jump.

And you kind of get that with a jetpack, but this is also the first 3D Mario game with Yoshi in it. That he gets the actual flutter jump. Yeah, so there's like this little bit of kind of confusion happening. It's like they're sort of doubling up on things, and yeah, I really feel like this is a game. that would have benefited from another year of development where they could just say, like, let's take out the things that don't work, let's change this around, let's refine this. But I guess they just couldn't afford to do that because they were really kind of pressed for games at that point.

I think they were also just heavily on the timetable of like, I think they felt some level of guilt of not having a professional responsibility. They have a launch Mario game and by not having that, instead they said we can't be more than a year after launch. Like, we have to have a Mario game within a year after launch. And so it's, I think it was in America, August, launched. So it was only nine months after the, or 10 months after the GameCube launch. And that would continue like Galaxy was a year after the Wii launch.

3D World was a year after the, yes, new Super Mario Brothers, blah, blah, blah. But 3D World was a year after the Wii U launch. 3D land probably would have been a year. after launch, but they were so desperate for 3Ds Mario games. Like, this has to be November. Like, we get in Brownie Brown, get in everybody you can. We got to finish 3D land for November. But the thing is, I feel like a lot of those games that we just talked about,

you know, New Super Mario Brothers, Mario Galaxy, Mario 3D Land, like those are all games that kind of came out of Super Mario Sunshine and that I think they looked at this and said, maybe, you know, just continuing to keep going, continuing to build on the Mario 64 concept, that's not necessarily going to, you know, get us anywhere. I think we can make maybe great games in this style, but what if we explored other approaches to Mario? And so you get like the classic 2D platformer, you get the more like constrained, isometric style, you get the bite-sized packages of Mario Galaxy. And every game kind of takes on its own flavor, and it stops feeling so much like

it's Mario 64, but more complicated. Because more complicated is not Nintendo's style. That's not what they do best. But that's what the controller actually was, which is kind of funny about that system, like going from 1964, adding two analog sticks, adding like four more buttons on each side.

And then it's like that is exactly what Sunshine is too. It's like so many Mario games are adapted to the hardware. Nintendo openly talks about that. And that's why, you know, the Wii had Galaxy, and that couldn't have been on anything else. They always mentioned that. Man, this is such a GameCube controller of Mario. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, the level of your ability to shoot Flood, it's like, well, this has an – these have an analog shoulder buttons, so then there have to be different levels of intensity to what Flood shoots. And you have the X button in the corner, so that should be the change of ways you use Flood, yeah. And Twins sticks for camera, which is super confusing in a Mario game. Yep, especially in this game. Yeah. one is a little bit more resistant and a nub-like and it's hard to

control. Well, it's not even that. It's that the mapping on the controller is the right stick is backward from the way games work now. Yeah. We've accepted a different standard. Right. Like back then it was kind of like the B-A jump button at the beginning of the 8-bit era, like which does what?

And people did it both ways and everyone decided like A is jump because Mario did that. But Mario did the camera stick thing here backward from the way most people I think naturally do like use it. You know, I had the same problem with Final Fantasy 12, the

original version. The sticks worked in the opposite direction that I wanted them to. And now, you know, I think people realize, let's let people customize, you know, which direction the axis works. The camera is backwards and also the look mode is backwards when you're standing in place and aiming.

Can you change that one? No, you can't change anything. We'll talk about the modality of Mario Sunshine's controls because that's a big part of the problem. But Yeah, it just has these little frustrations, some of which I think would have been refined with more development time, but some of which I think are just products of the time because things hadn't been standardized. And, you know, if the Mario Sunshine camera control setup had become standard, like if everyone had followed that, I'm sure everyone would have learned to adapt. But that's not how it went. And so now it's this weird kind of awkward outlier.

And it's kind of frustrating. Do you know. So I want to start by, well, not start, but continue by, yeah, let's get rolling now. I would like to go back and just kind of look at the evolution of the Mario series, beginning with Donkey Kong. Like each game in the Mario series introduced something new or added some sort of really compelling element that made you say like, oh, yeah, I need to play this game. This is like a big evolution. This is a step forward. With Donkey Kong, the idea was platforming.

Like, that didn't really exist before that. Certainly not in a fun, enjoyable, intuitive way. And Mario or Donkey Kong created that. Mario Brothers added a competitive element to the platforming. So, Super Mario Brothers took that platforming and expanded it. It made it a scrolling world. It filled it with secrets and gave you a reason to replay, you know, not just for mastery, but to find the shortcuts, to find the secrets, to find the score. Like, there was a lot to do in Super Mario Brothers.

So it was, you know, taking the platformer and making it huge. Super Mario Brothers 2 in Japan was the same thing but really hard. Super Mario Brothers 2 in America added multiple characters, each with unique skills. and a different way to handle them. The first flutter jump? The first flutter jump, yes. Two different versions of the flutter jump is a matter of fact. Yeah, that's true, actually.

You get the float and the flutter. Yeah, so different ways to play, the freedom to choose which characters you would use for each platform, and also a very exploratory design. Again, kind of building on the hidden secrets of Super Mario Brothers, but even more so, like, where do you use the red potion to enter the subworld? Like, where are you going to find the secrets? Where can you find the mushroom?

How can you, you know, harvest the most coins, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of really great ideas in Mario 2, USA. Super Mario Brothers 3 kind of went back from the exploratory design and created tons of tiny stages with lots of unique ideas, lots of unique power-ups, just a variety of different ways to play these kind of compact little experiences. It was very bite-sized Super Mario World. kind of took that and then pushed back more toward a huge persistent world. Like the changes you made in Mario World stayed permanently.

You opened up the bridge. You threw the switches at the Switch Palace. You revealed things. You opened new paths. You unlocked the Star World. And that became persistent, which no other Mario game had done before that. It was always like pick up and play and start and finish. Whereas this, you know, it added the safe feature and really made it count.

Yoshi's Island was even more methodical. It introduced a different way to play entirely. with aiming eggs and the flutter jump again and the score to chase, you know, hidden objects that were, you know, would unlock things within the world. And then finally, Mario 64 was kind of a combination of all those things but in 3D. So that's a really impressive arc of evolution and game innovation in the span of 15 years. An impressive summary. So succinct.

Thanks. I wrote it down. And then after Mario 64, there weren't any core Mario games for six years. Super Mario Sunshine was the first attempt to revisit the Mario franchise and say, here's what's next. Yeah, after 64, Mario, kind of, the character kind of took a break or vacations, and he's just like, look, I'll play tennis, I'll get, I'll have parties, I'll do golf, but I won't fight with people. I'll fight with people. I'll do all these things. All appear on the GBA a second time.

Yeah. But it seemed like Miyamoto was very resistant to just doing Mario, Super Mario 64-2. I think he didn't want to just give more stuff. And maybe also like rare with the banjo games and all its other ones. Like it was scratching that itch anyway. A Super Mario 64-2, if it couldn't do anything really revolutionary with it, it would have been redundant in the way that Miyamoto hates things of just like, Star Fox can't just be more. Star Fox. Yeah. I also feel like when I, going back to our Mario 64 episode, I think Henry was on that

one too, right? Yeah. I remember reading a quote from Miyamoto or maybe it was Tezica that they regret they had to move to 3D because they lost a lot of their audience. A lot of people couldn't wrap their minds around what was happening in Mario 64. And maybe their reluctance was like, how do we make a more approachable 3D game? And after Sunshine, we see it go back to a 2D game so you can see their anxiety right there. And it's funny that Sunshine is so much more complicated for someone who doesn't play 3D games. Yeah, I mean, they did the opposite of simplifying Mario 64. They made it really

complicated. But I feel that was kind of the thought at this time was like, for games to advance, they have to become more complicated. That was the Majora's Mass Theory, too. Yeah. And Joe Kizui was a much more complex platformer than Mario 64.

Donkey Kong 64 wasn't necessarily but it was sprawling and enormous and just like a huge time sink. Then the next generation was like, no, Everything has to be easy again. Leave people by the nose until we get to games like, Dark Souls, where people said maybe not. But I feel like Sunshine is kind of poised at a knife edge

because it does introduce a ton of tutorial elements. Like, I had forgotten how slow this game is to get off the ground at the beginning. You're just like, shut up. It's like the original five. She like shows up and it shows up and is like jabbering at you. Do you want to hear this again? No. God's sake, no.

Another product of the time, Jeremy, are the cutscenes where I was like, this was like cutscene city and gaming of the time. It's like, well, I guess we have to have these. And these are so bad. They're poorly mixed, too. You can barely hear anybody. It's like, God, yes. There's too much jabbering. Do you guys know games media was obsessed at the time with how they were compressed and how they weren't in real time?

Oh, no. I didn't know. I didn't realize that. There's so much coverage of this, especially on IGN, which is like one of the, you know, sites you can read this stuff on. But there's a, you know, a lot of the review talks about it. A lot of articles are just like, hey, like, you guys aren't getting, you know, rendered cutscenes in this. You're getting pre-rendered. Right.

No. Why were people upset by that so much? I think it's because Metal Gear Solid 2 came out the year prior and it was like, look at what you can do in real time. You can move the camera. Yeah. But it's more like showing off what you could do in real time on that hardware. But like, for what the cutscenes quality level was, like, who cares? They're uglier than the graphics you see in the game.

I mean, especially now when you're seeing them all like in their like whatever. crappy real player video format that just like all. And it's 4x3 which is just not cinematic at all. Yeah, it's gross. Yeah, it's like it's you know 480I and you can play the game in progressive mode. Yeah. 480P but the cutscenes don't change. So they look like even at the time if you had a good TV

like the cutscenes were going to look bad if you played in progressive. They're gross. Those cutscenes just felt like perfunctory. They're just like well people expect us to have these and they can't And they're telling a story that would have just been so much better at just silence of like the way it tells a story, no dialogue is needed to say these are the exact crimes Mario was like was put up for or explaining what the flood is with actual dialogue. Just cartooning like or just like a three panel structure of a Sunday more of a comic strip could have told the story points of this game. Yeah, I mean, supposedly Miyamoto really hates to have lots of narrative in games like this. And I think you can have narrative and make it interesting.

Like, I love the way Galaxy presents everything is sort of a storybook. And it's actually really touching once you unlock the full story and see Rosalina's full story. But this game does not do that good a job with the story. And it's like the premise is Mario goes to a tropical island for vacation and is framed by like a shadowy wraith that looks like him that vandalizes everything. And so Super Mario Sunshine. Which is Dark Sammis. Yeah, basically.

Shadow the Hedgehog. Super Mario Sunshine is basically it turns vacation into custodial work. And it is a game where you are turned into a janitor cleaning up for someone else's crime. It's reversed splatoon.

Mario's always been a janitor, remember. It's always been a flummer. It is community service. That's right. He's a carpentry. It's a carpentry. It's a fun way. I was Yeah, it's a fun way to start a game to be like, welcome to the Funnel Island. You're in jail. We see Mario on trial. It's weird.

It's really weird. To see Mario in a jail cell like sitting on the floor with his legs crossed and talking to his new backpack. It's like, I'm five minutes into this game. What are you giving me here? It's like the final episode of Seinfeld. Yeah, I mean, this, the idea of Mario being framed for crimes seems. to have been a thing on their mind at this time because you also had that

subquest in Paper Mario where he's like framed for murder that's really intense like what's the idea here with Mario suddenly being like having all these crimes pinned on it. Was he framed? He was framed, yes. I can say with conviction. He kills a lot of those brick people in Super Mario.

That penguin wasn't dead. Well, the horsehair people were okay. They're horsehair plants. But yeah, maybe they just like the, I mean it's a funny idea to juxtapose an innocent character like Mario with being behind bars or being on trial, but in action it was just like a bummer and also seeing like the Delphino legal system is really bad that like they don't even let Mario have a real trial, they just like, or a lawyer or a lawyer and Pete says

There are no kangaroos on this island. What's with the kangaroo court? And Peach goes, objection, overruled, you give community service. And yeah, just the cutscenes. It's Peach's voice, I believe, it's the same voice actor says Cortana. Wait, is Peach, is she, does she rule over that island? No, they're visiting Delphino from mushroom. She's a foreign, she has no power there.

Do they have an extradition treaty, though, is what I want to know. Yeah, like, I have so many questions and I shouldn't have them, but these cutscenes raise a lot of questions. Also, I'm glad they didn't make Mario talk. They could have easily said, this is the game where Mario talks. In the Japanese version, really? He does, he's like, baby-de-be-be-de-bib-a-bib-le. He's, like, talking a lot. You can understand what he's saying.

Charles Martinet, or is it a... But he's saying actual words? Yeah, he's like, he's actually jabbering about stuff. But it's really weird. It's not the Mario and Luigi, like, Bama, blah, do you know, it's the actual words. No, he's like actually talking. Wow.

I need to watch this guy. It's something of value, but it's just like, wow, Mario got really chatty. And they cut almost all of that for the U.S. version. Yeah. That's really good. They did that because it's already uncomfortable as it is. It gets even more uncomfortable when you find out that. that the shadow Mario is

Bowser Jr. in disguise and somehow. And he thinks that Peach is his mother, which is the lie that Bowser has told him. And it's just like, this is creepy. And it now makes you, it immediately conjures the thought of like

Bowser and Peach in a sexual relationship. You're like, why are you making me think this Nintendo? And where did Bowser Jr. come from? I mean, there's wedding Peach, Bowser, and Mario Amibo coming out. soon. So this is something Nintendo's kind of hung up on. What Odyssey does is it's cute, though.

It's not cute. They're a nice little costumes. Do you guys, when was the switchover from the Kupa Kids to... This was it. This is it. Yeah, this is Bowser Jr.' I remember I've been very charred by that.

That's another reason people don't like this game. Yeah, fucking Bowser Jr. So the Kupa Kids' final appearance before this game was in Mario Luigi Superstar Saga. They do make appearances in it, but like off-brand, off-bottle appearances,

but they are in the Bowser's castle in that. Yeah, I think like Yoshi's Safari was the last time they showed up, and then it wasn't until Superstar Saga that they had cameos. You fought them all. Is that right? Yeah, and that just felt like Alpha Dream goofing around. It wasn't the Nintendo. But I was so excited to see them.

I was like, I love the Kupa Kids. Yeah, everyone was like, oh, good. The characters that I actually like are here. Hooray. Yeah. But then, meanwhile, I guess Miyamoto and the rest didn't have much affection for the Kupa kids. So they're like, no, we need one kid. Bowser Jr., it also lets them have like a baby version of Bowser to hang out with.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much just baby Bowser from Yoshi's Island, but turned into a separate character and forced upon us forever and ever to time immemorial. There's some inelegant element of his design I hate, and I think it is like he ties a bib around his mouth that has a scary face on it. It just feels like it just doesn't, it doesn't look right. It's like Japanese thief thing where like, you know, when you're when you're a villain or like sneaking around, you tie something over your mouth like the the the little sneaky dude the it just doesn't look good like the the bandit guy in super mario uh new super mario brother's oh the rabbit the rabbit the rabbit navet yeah he does the same thing i mean i get it but it doesn't look good on that character it just yeah well also that character doesn't look good no i don't like it or his voice yeah i don't like

you know that's kind of the opposite of what donkey con junior what happened to donkey con junior right because Donkey Kong had Donkey Kong Jr. And then he got exploded into this whole world of Donkey Kong characters. Where did Junior go? Junior. He became Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong country, yes. Isn't that Donkey Kong? Craigy Kong is Donkey Kong.

Okay. So Junior is Donkey Kong. You get your timeline backward. All right. All right. Yeah. Bowser Jr. still sticks around. Like, he's technically, he now just gets to exist with the Kupilings.

And they're just in the games now, too. They don't talk to each other. But he's still the boss of them pretty much. Like, in the new Super Mario Brothers games, you'll face the cupillings in the world's on the way there. But then your mid-boss and more important will be Bowser Jr. I mean, the one good appearance for Bowser Jr. was in the original New Super Mario Brothers, where you actually kill Bowser and then Bowser Jr. When he turns to a skeleton.

When he turns to his black magic to bring his father back to life. Well, we're talking about, like, the, I guess the family tree here. You murder Bowser and kill him forever. except magic brings him back. That's so dark. What the hell? Obviously, Bowser Jr. is Bowser's son. The Coupa Lings are not Bowser's children outside of the cartoons where the cartoons portrayed them as the Cupa Kids.

I wish I didn't know any of this. I hate myself. They're more like Huey, Dewey and Louie to Uncle Scrooge to Donald. They're not, yeah, well, meanwhile, Bowser Jr. is kind of... Is Uncle Scrooge their great uncle? If Uncle Donald is their uncle and then Scrooge is his uncle. No character could have parents because that implies it's a sexual being. We don't want to think of Donald getting it wet.

Well, again, again, Mama Peach, Dan. And that Peach's reaction to hearing that, like, Mama Peach, like, she should, it's one of those moments that also takes you. It makes, well, it makes you, like, also think Peach is just a dits the entire game. She should just immediately say, like, I never had sex with Bowser. Like, this is crazy. Also, it's biologically impossible. I would recall pushing this. creature through my birth canal.

It's got several spikes on it, yeah. I just assume they're all hatched from eggs anyway in the Kupa tradition. I want this podcast to be nothing but this conversation for the next hour. Oh, God. Let's talk about these eggs marked. I brought several charts with me. I think the, I always assume the Bowser, he creates them like all his minions, which is just through like magic, cupa magic.

It's just that they're hatched or whatever. Okay. I'm putting the composh. You are the host. This is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, a rabbit hole. I do not want to go to that's great. Some sort of hole. About the character of Bowser Jr., he is

Scrappy Do, and like, Scrappy Do sucks. Yeah. Let me at him. Yeah. I mean, Yoshi's Island introduced Pucci, but this is the real Pucci. Yeah. He's a feisty, new character who's like, I'm as cool as anybody. Yeah, let me at him. Like, he's just so

annoying, and it's just, when you see him show up in a more limited capacity in Galaxy, I'm still like, no, go away. I don't to see you. Yeah, he really kills the joy of a Mario game for me. But he's, he's all over the place here, and there's just no escaping him. And this is the one Mario, like, core Mario game I've never finished because...

What? I got toward the end of it. It was just like, I just don't care about this peach kidnapping plot. I hate Bowser Jr., like the roller coaster shootout level. I was just like... Did you have to see all of the islands, at least? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I, I, because some of the later ones are really cool.

No, there's some really great stuff, but like, just the, the end game, I just lost my interest. I, I, I, the final boss is Bowser and his son taking a bath together, so. In a volcano. Yes, in a volcano. Yeah. Volcano hot tub where they've been hanging out with Peach the whole time. And it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Okay. And the story ends with, uh, sort of a surprise of like, oh, flood is maybe dead. This character you've been so close with who like, flood. Pray for him. And Flood, like, I hate the way Flood talks, too, that it's just like a... Yeah, it's a pretty good flood. And that then at the end of the game, Bowser Jr., Bowser has to apologize to Bowser for lying to him about his mother.

And he's like, no, she's not. Oh, okay. The Bowser voice, too, sucks and he's like, oh, what's this? Oh, it's finally, yeah, it's finally the first time I think Bowser has spoken dialogue. And actually, the best Bowser voice, I think his name is Harvey Atkin, John, just died as of this recording. He was the voice on all the Mario cartoons. He had such a great voice.

So no voice can compare to the ones we hear after that. Yeah. And Peach is Cortana. That's right. Yeah. No more Leslie Swan saying one line in a closet. They got an actual voice actor. We're going to be able to be.

So, okay, we've been kind of hard on this game, but there is stuff that I like about it. I think it's really interesting that they basically change the entire vocabulary of Mario controls and build this entire game around this water spewing jetpack that also lets you fly. The fact that it also lets you fly is really cool. Like I said, it does kind of create this confusion because you're also writing Yoshi sometimes. but there's a lot of variety and kind of change to the platforming that happens as a result of this. And when I was replaying it last week to get ready for this podcast, I had to sort of retrain myself to think, oh, right, I can like go places by flying there.

That's, you know, that really opens up the way the game works. And augments your jumps you already know. So, like, if you do a triple jump, you have momentum and height. Right. And then you can kick in the flood and you can go really far. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and the game levels reflect this. There are fewer levels than in Super Mario 64,

but the trade-off is that the levels are like three times the size. Yeah, they say the total game is four times as big as Mario 64. Well, there you go. So my numbers are totally off. By the day, I mean the developer and the producer. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, you have some really huge stages. The first stage you go to, Bianca Hills, is not that huge.

Bianco Hills is not that enormous. And it's actually, it feels in a lot of ways like a reprise of Bobom Battle field from Mario 64, including the level where you're going around a mountain and fighting the boss at the top. But it branches out beyond that. And then you get to the

bay with like the lattice work and everything like that and you know, just tons of other levels. The hotel and things like that. For as much as they overcomplicated the Mario formula with the jetpack, I also feel like that was built in as a way to make a 3D game easier for players

where it's like 3D platforming is tough in any context. We will allow you to correct your jump. If you jump too far, you can hit the button and then hover back a little bit. And Peach, Peach did invent that in the two. Yeah. Did she? Oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought you meant like in the game floor. No, EGAD invented the flood. Right. It's as a tie end of Louie's mansion. Remember, people use Peach as a like a way to kind of learn how to play platformers, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think they do a really good job with, with that. But as, as kind of, we discuss, a little bit before this episode recording session, the level design can be really frustrating

because, you know, there's a lot of verticality, a lot of climbing, like, midway through the game, I remember there was this one part where you're just like on a chain link fence and, like, climbing and climbing and climbing and going up. And if you screw up once, you drop and you don't die, but instead you just have to start over. This game loves... That's the harbor, maybe? Yeah, it's the harbor. That one's really hard. This game loves to punish you with boredom, and that was very much the case of game design where it's just like, no, do it again. And I will say nothing benefits more than playing this game with Dolphin, the emulator, and using save states.

Like, I will manually make a safe state where I feel like there would be one in a modern game. Like a modern game would not make me repeat 15 minutes of climbing and platforming. Yeah, some of these stages, because they're so huge and so convoluted, they take a really long time to play through. Like, this game does really drag in places, especially, you know, if you do screw up. Do you get those flood attachments that kind of remedy those situations? Like, if you're going to explore the harbor early on, it's really awful because you don't have the rocket pack and then you don't have the one that lets you jet across the water. And with those, you can reset and get back to where you're going. Yeah. But, like, you don't know that you should come back there later.

Right. It just doesn't tell you that. Of all the things to explain, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Explain that. And I also really miss the long jump, which is not in this game. The replacement, I feel, is bad and too complicated where it's like they expect you to run, spray, dive, jump, spray, dive, jump,

but just like, it's too hard to do that while moving left and right. Do you guys ever do the side jump into it? That was my replacement for it. I use a side jump where you like flick the stick in one direction, then the opposite direction. Yeah, and he does a side jump, and you get so much momentum from that you really cruise. Of course, none of this helps in the areas where they take away your jetpack. Yeah, and the one thing I hate also on top of the – I'm sorry, this is so negative. But one thing I hate about is the inverted controls where it's like, if you're running, you hit the spray button, you immediately start spraying down because you're still holding – it's like, that is so unintuitive.

So this is a really big problem with the game. And that it's – you know, even if you use an emulator and change the axes on things, it doesn't matter because the game shifts modality on a lot. Like, depending on whether you're in jetpack mode. mode or spray gun mode or if you go into first person mode, like every time you change perspectives, the control situation changes. Like sometimes the right stick is how you aim flood, but then you switch into first person mode and the left stick is how you aim flood. And it's like reversed from how the camera stick works.

It's really frustrating. I think it was just a big mistake on Nintendo's part or the Mario team's part to be like, we can make a game that's kind of a shooter. It's like that's not really your specialty, especially not then. They just needed the Splatoon team to come in. Yeah. Well, I wanted to mention that about Splatoon, that the

mechanic of cleaning ink basically ink off of crap and get to erase stuff instead of putting stuff on there, when I first saw Splatoon at E3 when they revealed it, I got to interview the guys who were leading up the game,

I asked them like, hey, you guys are in Nintendo EAD, is this, did you work on Sunshine? And he said, no, but that the Sunshine team members who saw them working on Splatoon said, we wish we had this technology when we were making sunshine. We couldn't do all these things. So, Deadly Spiltoon has a lot of tricks of the flood, especially like flood, go in water to recharge your thing in, go under the ink to recharge your ink. That's right, yeah.

Well, I wanted to point out that the inverter controls, if you use an emulator, you can't fix it on the camera, but like Jeremy said, the modality changes, so you can't fix it on the control stick that you used to control Mario. But the one thing I hate, and the one thing that interferes with gameplay is, in those awful levels where you have to chase Shadow Mario, you have to stop running.

Otherwise, you will fire immediately into the ground. Just like, why can't I run and then fire out? It just makes me, I hate those levels so much. Yeah, and it feels like a problem that when they would have, in other Mario games, if they saw that in QA, they would have been like, well, we're going to stop. Like, we're not launching it with this. We're going to

figure this out, but they, it's one of those moments where it feels like they just rushed it. But in fairness, like every game at this time had that problem. Metal Gear Solid 2, the chain, like the shifting inconsistent modality. Oh, I agree with you. It was a big problem. Actually, I was thinking of Snake Eater when I was thinking about these controls. Like every button does a thing you don't expect it to. Right.

And every movement does a thing you don't expect to do. You have to like get in groove with the game. It took me like two hours to just understand everything in this game again. Yeah. Yeah, so when I say that Mario Sunshine is a product of its time, this is really what I mean. Like, they really had a lot of good ideas and they wanted to do a lot. But the rules and the ideas and just the mechanics of 3D gaming had quite been refined collectively by the industry. I would say, like, today they've maybe been refined too much and have been stripped down.

But there's got to be a happy medium in between the two. and Mario Sunshine just comes in before things started to get pared down and before developers started to say, let's be consistent, let's really think about how the player approaches this. I feel like the grammar for controls in a 3D world were still anyone's guess. Like, in this game, this button is the menu. In this game, this button is the fire button. At least, at the very least, Mario Sunshine had the smarts to make the R trigger the fire button.

I feel like they were on the right page with that, but not everyone was like Resident Evil 4. But, yeah, it, yeah, and that was a couple of, like, two years later. So, I mean, I guess what makes Mario Sunshine so frustrating is that Nintendo usually doesn't make that problem. Nintendo is usually the company to say, we're not going to do this until we can get it right. I mean, it happens. Then you have, like, voice chat with Splatoon 2. Well, it is, it's an underrated or it's a lesser notice thing when Nintendo, but I think they sometimes are like, we, at the core of our game, we made a bad decision, but we are going to make it as

best we can from this bad decision. Like, Kid Icarus Uprising definitely comes from that school of thinking. Like, they just shouldn't have done what they were doing, but they can't, it's too late. They can't, they'd have to just completely cancel the game. So instead of like, we're going to refine this as best we can, same with Star Fox, the Wii Star Fox, I can't even remember it. Zero. Star Fox Zero.

More like zero to 10. Yeah, it had the same deal of like, well, we, this game has to be you shooting with the Wii U game pad. We can't undo that, so we're just going to refine it as best as possible. And I wonder Flood comes from the same kind of design element that like the core of this game, we want this flood thing in here. We're going to refine it as we can, but we can't change it too much. But no, I think Flood itself is actually pretty cool. I like Flood. It's just some of the way that you interact with Flood and that you interact with

world with flood is just backward and convoluted. Yeah, it's like swimming in any game. It's a good idea, it's a good idea done clumsily, which is the opposite of Star Fox Zero, which is a clumsy idea done to the best of their ability. Yeah, if you look at the stories behind the development of other Mario games, and especially the 3D ones, you hear the, what they do is like, we want to perfect movement first, then we design the game around that movement. I feel like with 18 months, they're just like, this is as good as it's going to get.

We need to start building levels and building things for Mario. to do. So maybe his initial movement, his initial set of verbs, did not take into account what the levels would be, you know, built around those verbs and what he could do. I'm just guessing. But 18 months of development is really the major problem here for this game. Like, everything can

be called back to that. All right. This has been a lot of hate. I need a break from all this negativity. I have a positive thing. Save it for the break. After the break. So, you know, I'm going to be able to be, you know, I'm going to do. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote.

Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just a $400 a month. Plus makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. So, Bob, I've noticed that, you know, living in Berkeley, California, you've become a real radical hippie type. That's true. And I don't have a lot of living space. My kitchen is a hallway with a stove in it, as I say. Yeah. So I've noticed that while I gather a lot of games to, you know, chronicle and photograph, you believe that physical possessions are a burden. Yes. Everything is transitory, Jeremy. It's what Buddha tells us.

So I guess for gaming, you prefer not to own, but rather to rent, to acquire. That sounds like a great proposition. Is there a service that I could take advantage of? Well, Bob, as a matter of fact, there is. There is a service called Gamefly, the best way to buy and rent all your favorite games, but you could just rent if you want. Okay. That's good. And you're saying, okay, so I get a game and I'm done with it, and then it's the mailman's problem, right?

Pretty much. Good. I can stand that guy. You don't have to possess. You don't have to worry about the burden of physical possessions weighing you down. you have more than 9,000 titles to choose from, and I know that you don't have space in your home for 9,000 games. That is very true.

I actually got the landlord to check that out for me, and there's only room for 8,000, and I don't want to break any building codes. Right. So, yeah, Gamefly lets you try your favorite games in movies before you buy. If you ever want to buy them, I don't know if you ever would. And you can keep the games as long as you want, which is great for, you know, the big, meaty RPGs that you tend to enjoy. So do our listeners have some sort of incentive to use this fine service?

you call Gamefly. Why, yes, and as a matter of fact, they're offering Retronauts listeners, a free premium 30-day trial by going to Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. It'll let you check out two games and or movies at a time, and it's only available by going to Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. When it's time to buy a car,

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Garcia is walking into the home of a real monster. I was nervous. I realized what kind of person I was dealing with. It's a goosebumps moment. Download new episodes every Tuesday on the Podcast One app or subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Podcast.com. We're going to be. So, Samuel, you said you were going to say something positive.

So let's start on a happy note. So I think this is the last in the line of Mario Games until potentially Odyssey that do one thing that's really important. And you touched on it earlier. It's the thing that Super Mario Brothers really innovated on. And it's just, it's filled with secrets and it has a big exploration component. And that's totally what evaporated. Like, you know, we're all talking about how maybe this game kind of made them rethink Mario and then went back to New Super Mario Brothers, blah.

And, of course, the 3D World Games, which are okay. New Super Mario games have been pretty good. The first one was a little disappointing, but the console ones have been good. Yeah. Well, I really like the coin-gathering one. Super New Super Mario Bros. too. But I think there's two elements to Mario games. I do too.

I think it's really interesting. innovative and cool. Well, they changed the formula. But I think there's acrobatics in 3D Mario games, and now 2D ones, and then there's exploration. And things really want the acrobatics direction for galaxy, and exploration is just not a huge part of it. Yes, within levels, you find stuff.

But there's no overworld, and that's what this game does right. I love Delphina. I think that island is super cool. I love the secrets. The hub is a lot more interesting than Peach's Castle in Mario 64. I mean, the... At that time, though, Peach's Castle was amazing. It was amazing.

But, you know, once you go back, you're like, oh, it's a ghost town. It's empty. Literally with toad ghosts in it. That's right. And meanwhile, Galaxy has a hub world, but it is just like it's a hangout zone. And it's just, it's not, there's nothing really defined there. And then 3D world just has nothing. It's, it's just, I, but I like, I like that approach, though, of like gameplay tubes more so.

It's just like a couple branching paths that they found for the Mario games. but it is very different from what 64 created, you know, like 3D, 3D world and 3D land are very much like this. You're in three dimensions, but the game, the level design is much closer to new Super Mario Bros. than 64, that's for sure. Yeah, I mean, it's a good midpoint between the style and the new Super Mario Brothers style. And I appreciate that. I think it's, you know, very accessible and approachable, but there's still depth to it. And, you know, you kind of have to play a while to really be challenged. But the second loop of Super Mario 3D land is just, like, punch you in the face hard.

It's crazy hard. And that's really where they kind of like, they kind of get their jollies, I think. Oh, yeah, we've got some challenge here. Yeah. And I agree with Sam. The kind of the discovery of secrets was a different feeling in sunshine than, you know, So, like in 3D world, there was, or 3D land, there's the discovery of secrets of, say, oh, this stage, if I treat it like a classic Zelda stage, I light these four torches. Oh, it opened a secret door.

That's a cool secret. But it wasn't just like, if I go over there, will I find something? Or will there be a coin here or some challenge? Like, it is a different way of discovery that you get in sunshine. And probably, I would think Odyssey is going to have a lot more of that. I hope so. I miss it. And I'm hoping they do something, you know, like give you interesting, worthwhile goals to discover, to justify the exploration.

Because, you know, Mario games have really kind of gotten bogged down with, like, you're getting coins and you're getting one-ups. But after a while, you're like, okay, well, now that I have 200 extra lives stocked up, I don't really feel compelled to explore. But I want to explore because I enjoy the process. But, you know, there's just not that much to get. It's not like, you know, Yoshi's Island, which we talked about recently, where I feel like when you explore Yoshi's Island, you know, and really find all 100% of things in a stage or all 100 points, like, yeah, like there's ample reward for that. It's not just the process, but then, you know, you earn all those secrets and you get bonus stages. And there's not really that here. You find all the blue coins and you hate life a lot.

I remember people hoping, like, on the forums before this game came out. I think this came out first, like, a month early in Japan to America, right? Yeah, actually, it was like, it's so funny. The summer theme game comes out in July and Japan, then the end of August in America. And I remember there was like a special. Farewell, summer. A pre-order bonus. Get a Mario Beach towel in September when you pick up your game.

Thanks a lot. Well, when it came out in Japan, like, there was talk on the forums of, is Luigi playable in this? Yeah, totally. If I get every secret while I get to play as Luigi, which. then would finally be the thing in Galaxy and boy is it a task to get that but at least you get it and it was also a disappointment

to be like there's no Luigi in this like I know we just got Luigi a year before but that would have been a nice secret to unlock Mario gets a new shirt though for all of your work I don't like seeing his forearms I don't like see his tribal tattoo and it's gross oh no that's canonical I forgot he's got a tribal tat you guys are talking about these kind of ultimate unlock secrets

but I really like that you actually do unlock levels, and you don't actually know how much more there is. So some of the coolest ones, like the world where there's the mushrooms on top and mushrooms below, that's my favorite world in this game. And that one is a really late one that I think that's the one you have to go to the top of the Pianta Plaza. There's a big tower in the center of it. You have to get all the way up there, and there's a pipe up there.

It's really, really cool. So there's that. And then there's a, I know nobody likes the Pichinko level, but those are actually bonus levels that you have to get to, like that one, you go under an overhang on a boat and then jump upwards into something. So the reward for exploration is like really cool in-depth, more gameplay. And that's a great reward. Like, that's the best type of reward.

What I felt is, we're complaining again, I'm sorry, what I felt was in elegant about this design. And again, I think it speaks to the short development cycle is that I feel like they probably wanted a more Mario 64 kind of world design where it's just like, you're in this world. Sometimes in Mario 64, you need to select a star to fight that challenge, like Cooper the Quick or whatever. But if you're in a world of Mario 64, conceivably, you can find more than one star.

You can find the star you're not even looking for. In this game, every version of the world is, like, for lack of a better word, instanced. Yeah. And that also affects the blue coins, where it's like some blue coins are only available in these instance versions. It made things seem, again, in elegant and fractured and not, like, cohesive like they were in 64. Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that I really appreciate about the subsequent Mario games, which are more limited, more, as you say, tube-like. One thing that is a result of that is that the camera tends to be more fixed.

And as a result, they can afford to make more challenging platform-type stages, you know, because you don't have to worry about fussing with the camera and which angle is optimal. Like, that's a really big issue in the bonus stages in this game. Like, there's some really cool platforming challenges. They take away flood so you can't, you know, hover around. you can't you don't have that you know that fallback and it's got this cool a cappella theme or version of the super Mario brothers theme and it's like really yeah it just feels like oh this is you know a throwback to classic Mario but unlike in classic

Mario you have to fuss with the camera while you're doing this complex platforming it's kind of like the Bowser levels in Nintendo 64 where you know if you die there's nothing below you right and there's these long platforming segments or either go up or across and in 64 that had some of the same problems where occasionally you're just like I just couldn't see that that was the platform I need to get to and that one it's locked so when you have total control you'll see

what you need to do and you'll miss the jump because your camera angle was like not quite aligned with your analog stick jump. Yeah but at least Mario 64 you had the C buttons so everything kind of ratcheted whereas here it's a lot smoother and so there's more opportunity to fail. Yeah and the geometry

is way more complex too just the things you're running across it's not just like the either like flat or 45 degrees surf. It's just like these weird things that are constantly rotating. The moving ones. Yeah, I hate those.

And like I feel like these are overpraised because I feel like people were kind of compensating for how much they didn't like flood. The people who were critical of this game is like, oh, why didn't they make an entire game out of these a cappella music levels or these flood-free levels? And I'm like, some of these are okay. Some of these are just like,

have you played the one where the guy will throw you? And it's just like, I don't know where he's throwing me. I don't know. He rotates, kind of. And then he always throws you backwards. in one direction, but you have to make sure you approach him and talk to that. I have never figured that one out. Yeah. There are a lot

of challenges. And again, these levels kind of need checkpoints. I mean, at best, they have a kind of artificial checkpoint built in and that there is a one-up mushroom about the halfway point. But a lot of this game and a lot of games of this area where it's like, oh, no, do it again. Even though you can do this and it's really easy

and boring, do it again. And I feel like, again, Dolphin saved my life and made this game much more playable. It's like, okay, halfway point, F1, and I'm going to keep going. It's, by the way, it's called I.L. Delphino is a reference to the codename of the GameCube, the dolphin. And the Piantha people look stupid. Yeah, they're terrible. They're very unappealing.

These Kilroy people. Conversely, Yoshi barfs fruit juice. Yeah. That looks painful. That's weird. We at work, I recently stumbled across a bag that was from Space World 2000, and it was a dolphin. bags, a Nintendo dolphin on it. Inside, there's a foam dolphin.

Whoa. That's a theme, you know, Olamar's ship is the Dolphinus. Oh, you're right, yeah. So they really ran with that. And I think Wave Race Blue Storm, I think there's a dolphin, at least one dolphin stage in there, too. Super Mario World, there's just dolphins you run on. Oh, yeah. How deep does this go?

Making that long about it. Donkey Kong's a dolphin. You mentioned Yoshi. You want to talk about Yoshi because that is kind of a big deal in this game. It's a 3D Mario game and you can ride Yoshi. Because they didn't give them to you in 64. Right. You could just talk to him at the end.

It makes a came or her. I don't know if it's him or her at this point. It them. We talked with this in the Yoshi, yeah. Oh, no. Based on Smash Brothers brawl dialogue with Snake and Otokon, Yoshi is

masculine pronouns. So Yoshi's a he. So Yoshi comes in really nice tropical colors in this game, which I like. and Yoshi doesn't make anything easy for you. If anything, your platforming is harder, but you can jump a little bit higher and a little bit further. Yeah, and actually accessing Yoshi is a pain

because it's like you have to look at the kind of fruit that's coming out of the thought bubble coming out of the egg and then bring that fruit to the egg. And for some reason, Yoshi dissolves in water. What is that? That is horrified. Yoshi's paint. It's a gameplay thing that Yoshi,

just like we don't want you to take Yoshi into water that just they can gate here. keep things. It'd be great if he jumped out of it like Mario and the lava, but I kept losing Yoshi in the water in that hub level. It's like, I've got to find the right fruit again, carry it over, give it to the egg. Because durians are hard to find. Yeah, they are.

I feel like we've been so negative. But Yoshi does vomit. Oh, yeah. Yoshi vomiting fruit juice was so weird, too. I was like, we, Yoshi throws eggs and he eats things. He's not known for vomiting stuff. Or he's known for even spitting out fire or spitting an eye,

but not spitting, probably, as they call it in the game, not, not vomit. Yeah, I mean, I think. being negative, but I think we're also being tough affair. It's like, we're not like, these game developers are stupid. It's just like, no, they had no time. Right. And this was the context of a 3D platformer in 2002 and how there was no

rules for 3D controls in 2002. Plus, as I mentioned, I think this should be Jeremy Parrish's favorite Mario game. Yeah. Why is that? All right. So, uh, you like a game called Goonies, right? And you like jet packs. And you know what I was saying? Jetpack Goonies would be the greatest game ever. This is

Mario 64 with a jetpack. Yeah, but it's not Metroidvania, man. It's your dream. No, it's not a 2B platformer either. So I guess I'm waiting the jetpack too much. You are. The jet pack should be liberating, and it is to a degree. So it is your favorite game.

No, like the jetpack in this is, again, it kind of works like the flutter jump. It is not, I mean, you can shoot yourself into the air later, but you're not flying around freely, which is what I really want from a jet pack. So a flood is unlockable in Odyssey, which you guys can take that. that idea, Nintendo. Go ahead, take it. I liked in Galaxy, they replaced the hover with just like, you get one extra spin in the air if you need to buy some time. It makes

you just waggle the Wii movies. That was the new Super Mario Brothers innovation, right? Yeah, but the things I like in this game to say positive things are the set pieces, I feel like there would have been more of if they had more time, like the squid fights. They reuse that over and over again because that was one of the good ideas that they came up with that worked well. When you're

cleaning the eel's teeth underwater, that's really cool. But then there's a bunch of, like, copy paste things that aren't clearly weren't designed for the levels they're in. Just like every level has a chase with the Il Pantissimo guy and a chase with the Shadow Mario guy. Some stages I can be like, oh, I can see how this works here.

Some stages, just like, they just made it work here because they needed two more shines for every stage. Those are the hardest parts of the general. I hate stuff. Yeah. I did like Mario's wall jumping works pretty fun in that game too. Yeah, when we add the flood to it. Is this the first

Mario game to have a wall jump? That's become a 64 had it. No, 64 had it, but there weren't Yeah, I remember the level where you go up on the ship that's on the track? Oh, yeah. In that level, there's that big cement area where you do have to wall jump to get all the floor. Yeah, I don't really think of doing that much wall jumping in Mario 64, but I guess you're right, it was there. They don't give you too many spaces to do it. But in this one right from the start, they're like, here's two walls together and go to it.

To keep this episode negative as it's intended, I will say the wall jump was not fully figured out yet. It was a step above Mario 64, but playing it now after playing a lot of Mario games with wall jumps, There's a certain context that Mario has to be in to activate the wall jump. There are certain jumps he can't wall jump out of. And that kept screwing me up. It's like you have to jump in this manner to go into a wall jump. And that's where that side jump comes in really hand. You can side jump to a wall jump and then use flood.

And there's that No Key Bay, which is super vertical. That's the one where it's like water at the bottom and then like cliff face all the way up. You can see like little holes in the face. That's a great platforming level. It has like all the even the, you know, the bouncy lines and everything. Yeah, I look that a lot. But you need those skills for. it. Like, you're not going to get through it otherwise.

Right. But I feel like Mario's wall jump now is like Mega Man X wall jump where it's like as soon as you touch a surface, you're sliding down it. You can kick off of it. Yeah. And, well, another positive thing I'll say about this one is that. I like the, I like the return of the climbing on great stuff that was from. Yeah, I like that. From Super Mario world. It, uh, just the animation of Mario kind of like walking on monkey or monkey bars kind of hanging from it and holding the great stuff. Yeah. It even has the little, uh, blue. doors that you punch and you can spin around and yeah like it can be a little complicated in 3D space but I think for the most part it works pretty well yeah the it becomes kind of an indoor thing which is even

harder like more claustrophobic for Mario being stuck in there especially when you've got flood on your back but I liked it was a nice kind of throwback to original classic Mario games that they would put into this which I was definitely looking for that they could add into this new Mario game. I wanted something familiar because it felt so weird

to be on basically Mario's Hawaiian vacation. Oh, this is the Hawaii episode. It is. Oh, no, I understand. The problem is this game is cursed by the Tiki guy.

It's to win the surfing contest. If you ever get 120 sprites and then you go back to start you start the game over, it's crazy to see how much brighter the game gets because each sprite lightens the sun. Yeah, when I was playing it

on the stream, people were like, why is this game so gloomy? There's something wrong with your system? But, no, it's actually just how the game is designed because it's dark and gloomy, there are no shines. What was I going to say? Oh, speaking of indoor spaces, something I really did like about this game

was how they tried to change and re-contextualize some Mario standards. And one of the ones that really sticks out in memory is the hotel, which is basically, it functions like a ghost house. Hotel Mario, that's a bad game. But it's different. Like, it's not the same.

ghost house that you're always playing through in Mario games. Now it's like a haunted hotel on this tropical island. And there are fun things like that throughout the game where you're like, oh, this is like this maps onto a Mario kind of standard. And it does that in a way that Mario games don't really do anymore. Like, you know, you play a New Super Mario Brothers game and it's the same set of stages for the most part. Like you'll occasionally see something like the Da Vinci stage in New Super Bowlry Brothers Wii. you. But for the most part, it's just like, here's the ghost house, here's the ice level, here's the volcano stage, here's the water stage. And you're like, yeah, okay, I've seen these

already. This game, every stage is a water stage. And so everything becomes different. And they've re-contextualized to fit, you know, Mario's Hawaiian vacation, which is nice. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, there's, there are some fun things, too. I also, at least like that it, it becomes kind of a sister game to Luigi's Mansion by having Professor EGAD make the thing and basically they become the backpack brothers for

on the GameCube in the first two years. It's funny, Professor EGad makes tools for Evil 2. The evil paintbrush that Shedomar uses has the EGAD logo on it. EGAD made it. I mean, maybe it was stolen by Bowser Jr., I forget, so maybe we can't blame EGAD for selling weapons to

evil emperors like Bowser. EGAD might be their father. EGAD might be their father, too. We don't know. Oh, man, I don't even want to know what that guy does. A weapon is morally neutral. It's all about who wields it. Paint brushes kill people, not people.

Wait, no, it's the other way around. Sorry. So, Bob, I haven't seen you turn red and apoplectic with anger, so we haven't really talked enough about blue coins. Oh, my God. Okay, so this is the most, like, GTA collectible garbo in the world where... It's DK64. Yeah, actually, yeah.

But this reminds me of, like, pigeons or whatever. actually in a game that would come much later I'm retroactively applying it to this but yeah blue coins I don't know how many of them there are in the world at the very least they let you there are 240 oh my gosh as many as this is yes and again in elegant is a word I use a lot in this podcast another in elegant I it's an okay idea in elegantly applied where when you collect a blue coin you can save the game and it's collected automatically I mean it saves automatically that's great the problem is they're just arbitrarily placed there some of Some only exist in instance versions of that world.

And there's no clear way. So to explain that if you go in on Sprite 5. Yes, exactly. And that's a boss fight. There might be a blue coin, like, way up in the platforming area. Right. You have no indication that that's going to be there. Right.

It's like one of the versions of the beach stage is you're on a sandbird and running across it. There are blue coins in that section of it. So, again, this is like basically, A, it's built in for just, you know superfluous content but also it's just like this is like hint book material prime hint book material and I really don't know how you keep track of which ones you have and which ones you don't

yeah is that you can't keep track like I ended up with you know 236 or something back of the day I never sorted it out that's worse than crackdown I went into the game thinking I'll get all these and then I read about what you had to do like spray this wall why I don't know just do it here's a blue coin yeah it just I don't

want to go through all this yuck yeah that's I didn't I didn't do all that either. I was like, I got it. But then again, I was, in my first play-through of Super Mario 64, I thought, I have, I got all the stars I need to be Bowser. I don't need one-twenty. Really? Yeah, I know.

I'm a phony. I would do it in later ones. I guess you never unlocked Wario as a playable character. It actually happens. But I want to say, again, I'm sympathetic towards Nintendo. They had a game that was not a complete game, and they were trying to find a way to blow tits to make it meet a state. standard of what a complete game would be in 2002. You don't even have to touch any of these blue coins, and you shouldn't because you'll

just make yourself mad, I think. I just like, don't, if you see one, grab it. If not, don't worry about it. Just ignore the blue coins. Because the reward for getting all the shines is, what, a new shirt for Mario? Is that basically it? Do you just get a new... There's a skin?

Yeah, you basically just get a new Mario skin. I think that's it. Yeah. Yeah. I did not get all the shines. I just... Well, I mean, I never did, but I know... Do you guys feel the same way about corox seeds?

You get a Golden Duky? I love that because it punishes you for being a completionette. It's just like, I can't believe you did this A, but B, you wasted your life. Yeah, it's really funny. Here's a trophy. This is shit for wasting your time. Another thing I did like in Super Mario Sunshine, well, first off, I liked that before it came out, it was only being called Mario Sunshine by Nintendo, and then they're like, no, no, it's Super Mario Sunshine.

And I want them to keep that super moniker forever. It's dumb. It doesn't really need to be there. You can just call it Mario. But these are Super Mario games, and I just like that. But also, there are some good boss fights in it. I like the, I remember really enjoying the silhouette Manta or Shadow Manta, the, you know, the one that divides up a lot? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, God. I like that one. You know, it just, it was hard. Yeah, oh, it was fine. It draws the paint all over, all divides. So confirm from Wikia, if you get all 120 shines, that involves getting all the blue coins. Your reward is sunglasses and a new shirt. Not worth it at all.

Don't do it. You just look at a picture of that. Yes, exactly. You guys just don't understand collectibles. I don't. Once YouTube existed, I was like, well, I'll never collect anything again to see a secret ending. I'll just watch it on here. Well, I got into the strategy guide writing business many, many years ago.

We're very different people. It's irresistible for me. All right. a negative episode, and we're going to make up for that. But first, I'd like to wrap this episode. I know that sounds contradictory, but I'll explain. I'd like to wrap this episode by asking you, how can Mario Odyssey build on this game without succumbing to its flaws?

I'm curious to hear what you have to think. So, Bob, what do you think? I think there's no way it could exhibit the same flaws as this game, the ones that bother me the most, because I feel like in a modern context, the things that bother me the most about Mario Sunshine are not really in games anymore. I would trust Nintendo not to put them in a game. So my biggest problem with this game is the lack of checkpointing

and the punishment of making you do something over again. That is no longer in video games for the most part. I mean, I think we've gotten rid of that. It was fine for the time. I'm sorry if you think I'm being whiny, but I don't like being punished by my punishment being, repeat this easy thing. I hate that.

Bob, you really enjoyed Dark Souls. So I don't think anyone's going to, anyone who knows you is going to think, what a weak sauce baby. I mean, but like Dark Souls has tons of checks. points more than Super Mario Sunshine, but that, and I feel like I'm hoping at least Nintendo had a complete development cycle, and I feel like they've learned enough about what common sense is in an open world game that they will be smart enough.

I mean, I think they proved with Zelda, which is going to be a very different game than Mario Odyssey will be, which is a different game than Mario Odyssey will be. They have figured out a lot that I think we assume they wouldn't, so I trust them a lot more now. I feel like they are ready to make this a really good open world game. Yeah, I think Odyssey can build itself around less need for completionism. The corox seed thing you mentioned reminded me too. Like I felt comfortable with the coroxedes and like, if I find them, I find them, but

nobody's pushing me to do this. It's not a push to do it. And I hope that one of the early examples I've seen of getting moons in Odyssey is like, Mario just sits on a bench next to a guy and then he says, nobody would sit next next to. to me. Thank you. And then you get a moon. It doesn't take you out of the level.

Yeah, it doesn't take you out of the level. And it's just little moments like that. And I think they, I'm hoping that is a sign that they found a lot of novel ways to, to give you the equivalent of a shine in this game without, without a lot of work, without a lot of bloats. And also, if they want to give you, they have more, they know what they want to do more so instead of like just spreading it out. And same to the simplicity of possessing other people.

just being a different character with different abilities, that's so much more clear, I think, than just all the different tools you have a flood at one time of like, well, this flood pack can do like 18 different things at once instead of I have a T. Rex in front of me. I know what that does. Or I have a bullet bullet bill in front of me, and I know what that does. Yeah, I mean, I'm not as negative on this game. It's my second favorite three Mario game. I think 64 than this and then galaxies after that.

Wow. But it's only because of the, I really like the secrets and exploration. And I feel like those games just completely lost track of that. And I know Odyssey has that because I played a lot of it. And that's great. I also really think it's important that Mario's stepped away from the Mushroom Kingdom because I think the Mushroom Kingdom is boring as fuck. And I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of the mushrooms. I'm sick of the castle. I'm sick of the Gumbas. I don't ever need to play those again. And I'm really excited that it's going to completely different worlds. And I think each, and it's also based on vacation, right? It's like, ostensibly these are the places. No, no, they said this.

Developers went to these places on vacation. And that's why they're included in, and for the very same reason, Mario Sunshine exists is that Japanese tourists going to Hawaii. It's a very popular thing to do. And that's why they chose the same. As for myself, I, yeah, I don't know specifically what I would say, but I'm pretty confident that Super Mario Sunshine was a moment of like sort of reflection and crisis for Nintendo that they stepped back and said, that's not really what we meant to do.

That didn't come out the way we intended. And that, you know, pretty much everything they've done with Mario since then has been in some way a reaction to Mario Sunshine to like go back and find the heart of Mario. The next game that they made was New Super Mario Brothers, which was the biggest possible return to Super Mario. Mario Bros. and Super Mario Brothers 3 on NES. And, you know, they've kind of rebuilt the series from that. So I'm ready for them to go into a more open world setting, you know, and see what they can accomplish. But I think what they really need to do is make sure that Mario's core skills are intrinsic to Mario. Don't lean on something like flood. Don't, don't overcomplicate it. And, you know, when you go into other creatures or other things and possess them, if you get different. different powers that way, that's okay. Like, I feel like that there's a clear division between Mario and Mario, like, possessing something. But as long as Mario himself is just like...

Andrews because we did it. Yep. There you go. But as long as you just, you know, are Mario and do the Mario things that Mario does when your Mario. Shake your hands. That'll be, that'll make a big difference. And of course, you know, stuff like better camera controls, you know, customization.

That'll be fine. Like, they'll do that. have to do that with the game now. Okay, so that wraps it up for this episode. And boy, we sure did rain on this tropical vacation, but here's the thing. We received so many letters about this game, more than two dozen letters from listeners that, and most of them are pretty positive. There's some negative in there, but for the most part, it's a pretty upbeat set of letters.

So we are going to dedicate an entire retronauts micro to the letter bag, the man, mailbag for Super Mario Sunshine. So if you have enjoyed this episode or actually if you've been very angry about this episode, come back on Friday, there's going to be a bunch of opinions that aren't ours about Super Mario Sunshine. So please look forward to that. People say we like Nintendo too much. This is a remedy for all those people.

Yeah, take that. And who was the director on this game, Poizumi? He was, yes. I feel like if we sat him down and gave him a bullet point a list of our problems with the game, he would agree with us. I feel like we're not being unfair. Totally do that A3 next year. Like, the answer to your past crime, sir.

Yeah, I don't care what you're promoting here. Let's talk about Mario Sunshine. I'm not saying I would actually do this. I'm saying hypothetically, if he were to ask for it. I think he'd agree with this. That was his directorial debut, and he's directing. Well, he's like the dude now. He was, I was so happy for him, but that he was right in front of the big switch reveal.

It was Koizumi. Like, Koizumi was the guy showing off, like, here's what the switch does. There's all these things. Like, he's definitely in the post. The most Awada Nintendo era, he's stepping up as a spokesman. He's a Miyamoto protege. Yeah, I think he really gets it for sure. Yeah, hopefully Kappi is not another flood.

That's all I can hope. All right. So if you've been listening, then you've been listening to Retronauts, and that's been us, these people here in this room. Retronauts, of course, is a podcast that you can find on iTunes, on Podcast One, on the podcast One app, and at Retronauts.com. We are supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts, and your support keeps this podcast going. So please support us.

That would be great. I personally am Jeremy Parrish. You can find me at Gamespite on Twitter and at Retronuts.com because that's this website that I'm managing these days. And it's pretty cool. You should read it. Let's go around clown or clownter, clownter cock. I'll accept clownter cockwise. I don't know.

Cockwise. We're talking about finishes in this episode. That is the worst spoonerism. Sorry about that. Counterclockwise, yes. That's a lot of clowns doing some stuff I don't want to talk about. Sam? No, no, he's counterclockwise.

Oh, me. Okay, sorry, I was thinking about clowns and horrible acts. Well, I'm Bob Mackey, everybody. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. Thanks for listening to Retronauts, by the way. My other podcast is Talking Simpsons every Wednesday on the Lasertime Podcast Network, a new episode of The Simpsons we explored. In chronological order, we should be in season six at some point by the time this

launches, and we also have a Patreon. I'll let Henry talk to you about that. Yes, we're supported on patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, where you can find every episode a week early as well as a ton of extras, and it's what me and Bob do. Well, it's what I do full-time. Bob does, splits his time between those and retronauts.

And also, you can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And I can say one more positive thing about Super Mario Sunshine is that I would play it a million times before any Sonic Adventure game. You made a lot more people mad with that. I'm Sam Claiborne.

I do a lot of things at IGN. One of those is that I'm on a show every week called Game Scoop, where we play 20 questions and guess the origin of or the name of an old game. It's really fun. Check it out. All right. And that's it for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks for listening.

And check back on Friday because here come letters. Thank you. Hey there, Retronauts fans. I'm happy to announce that Jeremy and myself will be hitting the road once again for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this October 20th to 22nd at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. And for the first time, we'll have a table on the show floor so you can chat with us and buy authentic Retronauts merchandise. And that's not all. At this year's PRGE will also be hosting a live panel called Behind the scenes of Metal Gear, featuring guests who worked on actual Metal Gear games. It will be held on Sunday, October 22nd, at noon, so we hope to see you there. We're also putting together another Retronauts meetup, which always ends up being the highlight of our trip. For more on this and all of our other Portland plans, be sure to follow us on Twitter at Retronaut so you can stay completely up to date on everything we're doing.

Remember, that's the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, October 20th to 22nd at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Be there. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate.

Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been tried. charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.