Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 72: Super Mario Sunshine mailbag

Episode Date: October 20, 2017

Yeah, it's another Mario mailbag as our Sunshine episode received way too many listener letters to be contained in the main episode. Sam, Henry, Bob, and Jeremy offer equal time to some very different Sunshine opinions than our own

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 Retronaut's 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.

This week in Retronauts, a sunnier disposition. a Retronauts micro episode that's a little different than usual. This is a follow-up to the episode that went up earlier this week, wherein we talked about and complained about Super Mario Sunshine a lot. I think we were pretty fair to the game, even if we were a bit harsh. But I know that there are a lot of people who have very positive thoughts about Super Mario Sunshine and some people with negative thoughts. And I know this because more than two dozen of you wrote in to my request for letters about this game. That was way too. too many to fit into the episode. So we're dedicating this micro episode to Super Mario Sunshine. So if you thought that we were too harsh on Super Mario Sunshine, well, here is a gentle hug for your soul. So as last time, I am Jeremy Parrish and with me going around clockwise this time. Hey, I'm Samuel Claiborne.

I work at IGN.com. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert again. Love me some Mario. Not this game, though. I am Bob Mackey, I regret nothing, but it's okay to like things and dislike them. All right, so I think we've kind of been over our feelings on the game, but you guys are welcome to jump in at any time during these letters and offer feedback, opinions, advice.

I just write you a few letters. What's that? Will you read mine? Did you write me a letter? Just now. Did you? Okay. I'll have to check that out.

All right, from All right, from Alejandro, Juan Madrid. I wanted to say with regards to Mario Sunshine, I remember playing it for the first time in the summer of like 2007 or so. It's pretty late. I was on summer break from UC Santa Cruz and it was super hot in L.A. is so hot that if I sat anywhere but in front of the fan, it would be unbearable in my apartment. But along came Super Mario Sunshine and its tropical theme and water mechanics. That atmosphere helped me to imagine I was there and not sweating profusely in my room. I was able to put my mind to it long enough to ignore the heat and get through the main game. Screw those floating block challenge levels, though.

So wait a minute. We have confirmed that the game is at least better than heat. stroke. Yes. Okay. Cool. Positive. Positive thinking. I mean, don't you guys think that the constraint on this game in its cycle was a little bit

that they needed a game out for GameCube? Oh, for sure. Yeah. But a lot that it was summer and it was hot and they wanted to get a summer game out. Yeah. I think that's like seriously something that Nintendo would do. I mean, its launch doesn't seem like a coincidence at all, you know. Yeah.

It would be weird to play this game in like January. Mm-hmm. Especially if it came out then, right? Right. That doesn't make, it actually is a seasonal feeling game. Yeah, it's a tough one to sell at over. It's like, it's Black Friday by Super Mario Sunshine. Yeah, I feel like someone mentioned earlier, like this came out in July in Japan and then at the end of August in the U.S., so it kind of missed the peak season for it.

And that is something that is a hazard. That happened with the Boktai games also, which were really dependent on the sunshine. They came out just in time for summer in Japan. the localization slowed them down and they came out at like the beginning of autumn in America. So people were like, I can't play this game. It's getting too cold now. Hey, the sun is in your hands. Use that instead.

I can't warm my body with bacti, only my heart. Hi, my name is Daniel Velasquez, proud supporter of retronauts in Mexico. About a year ago, I got my GameCube out of storage and decided to give Mario Sunshine a whirl. Although I agree, it doesn't look and play as well as I remember, in part because I don't have a CRT TV relying around, it took Mario 64 and added more layers of complexity. Seeing as though many enjoyed the bonus levels that took away that complexity,

it begs the question as to what fits and what doesn't in this type of game. I, for one, enjoyed looking back at it to see the direct connection it has with Odyssey. Like, what fits, like, what's better, the not having the flood or having the flood? I guess, or like, how complex should a game like this be? What actually fits with, I guess, you know,

expectations of Mario. From Nate Lynch. The only bad thing with Super Mario Sunshine are the character designs. The Pianta, Nochi, and Bowser Jr. are all terrible. However, I'll always defend the controls. I love the different flood nozzles and enjoy the puzzles they bring to the table. They're all pretty fun to goof around with. The rocket nozzle in particular being my favorite.

The levels without flood are fun too, but they highlight how punishing not having a whoops hover back to the platform button can be. If you absolutely must 100% the game, I can see why the blue coins would be a chore, but I enjoyed finding them for the most part. That's because I didn't force myself to spend hours collecting every single one for days on end. I just grabbed them whenever I felt like playing after I got all the main shines. I think if you're able to set aside how important Mario 64 was historically, Mario Sunshine is the better game. I never understood why I get so much hate.

We didn't touch upon the enemies in our big podcast about this, but I feel like that's another shortcoming where they didn't want to reuse regular enemies, and I understand why it's a new setting, but the enemies they do come up with are just sort of nondescript blobs of color, and they're not memorable at all. Those stupid little bird dudes that flip you into the air on the beach, I hate them so much. I hate them, but at least that's a good design for an enemy, but I'm just thinking of, like, how many enemies are just like these blobs that are, like, moving around towards you with, like, eyes on them? There's the World War II movie inspired beach approach.

I love that. You're throwing bombs back at him, yeah. Yeah, I thought that was really clever. It's like a saving private Ryan moment, Mario. Some of those are like variants on Mario enemies, but the whole cloth creations they made are just sort of bleh. From James Fletcher, I've always been really mixed on Super Mario Sunshine. There's a lot of set pieces I still regard with fondness,

the shadow Mario bits, the theme park stage, the blast off nozzle, but there were so many tedious parts. The one I really remember are the blue coins, which I think are one of the worst collectible items in all of video games. They're hidden all over the stage and once you collect them, they never appear again. This wouldn't be a problem

except there's no tally of them in the game, so it's impossible to know how many or which ones you've collected. On the right side, that and Donkey Kong 64 broke me of the need to have to collect everything in a platformer. One thing that has redeemed the game

is watching it run at games done quick. Watching a run at the level, at that level, made me realize there was a fun Mario game beneath it all. It's made me want to revisit it for the first time in years, though I probably won't unless Nintendo puts out a remake.

Sounds like they had aversion therapy to collect the thons there. His message was like, if you're the best person ever at this game, it can be fun. But that speed run is great. I have seen several of those.

They are really cool. From Phoenix Marino Ramer. Let me preface this by saying I've actually played through Super Mario Sunshine recently, so I'm not just coasting on nostalgia here. I really, really love Mario Sunshine. It's easily my favorite 3D

Mario game despite its flaws. For me, a lot of it has to do with a sense of place and space. No other Mario game has done such an excellent job of rooting you into a world. Super Mario 64 is the only other one that really feels like a contiguous place, but it's kind of hollow and doesn't feel as real to me. The aesthetic is colorful, so colorful, in fact, that everything looks full to bursting with fruit juice. It's so pretty in such a particular way that it makes me want to eat everything, if that makes

sense. I agree. It doesn't even... Or barf juice. Yeah. It doesn't even better job than Windwaker of showing off one of the things the GameCube does best, water. I see why it was called Project Dolphin.

I feel people don't talk enough about how gorgeous the water is in some GameCube games. We didn't talk about that. That is a good point. It looks good. I didn't think about how an impetus could have been like, oh, this water looks way better than what we could have done on the N64. Let's do a ton of stuff with water. One of my favorite water features is that Mario can go into water and then all the gunk that's on him, he is sturdy, which is really cool. It floats up to the surface around, like kind of a slick.

And then you can also do the spin and flick all the gunk off. All right, yeah. Like a puppy. One of the absolute most important things to me in games is that it feels like a real place. It needs to have a good aesthetic design and internal consistency. Mario Sunshine has this in excess. Everything about it lends to the feeling of being a real locale you're traversing. They did an excellent job of updating and hiding the level-based nature that was held over from 64.

The fact that you can see distant low-poly versions of the other levels from whatever level you happen to be in is one of the most excellent sense of place details I've seen in any game. I can't think of any other level-based platformer that does this. Like the roller coasters way in the distance on the separate island and see. So cool.

Good point. Wow, man, everyone is just disagreeing with us about everything. From David Mussel. I loved the cinematic opening. Oh, my. It felt like a big step for Mario at the time. I liked the big levels full of personality. But by the third or fourth shine, they seem stale.

Blue coins were the coroc seeds of the day, except minus the fun of finding them. Some decent boss battles except the last one, and some great platforming in the flood-free zones. And don't forget that Mario scat music. All in all, a fine game, but not up to Mario standards. The past letter, yeah, I would say the cohesive world design is one of the game's greatest strengths. I will agree with that. Welcome and enter the center off my Super Mario adventure. Joshua Anderson

Fouts around my way think it's strange But there's a villain to blame Even my Marci thinks I'm crazy But I got to rescue Daisy shine just a few months ago when summer was starting, and it seemed like the perfect fit. But man, did it not hold up? Sure, the camera isn't great and the levels are somewhat visually monotonous, but the real problem is that the game is unintuitive and unfair in a way that's surprising for Nintendo. There's some mission objectives that are just obtuse, like the

bit with the flowers and the Yoshi eggs in Pena Park. And there's bits where the lives system gets in the way, like when you have to take Yoshi on a minutes-long boat ride in the overall to access an incredibly difficult bonus level. I love that. Run out of lives there, got to do that minute long minutes long boat ride again if Nintendo ever does a Wind Waker style remake where they iron out some frustrations give it another go

otherwise this is ooh this is gonna make some people angry the Zelda 2 of 3D Mario games which we all love too hard too obtuse for completionists only ooh ouch I would agree

oh we're gonna have some fist fights here some fisticus well I don't think Zelda 2 is my second favorite Zelda game so I'm not with him there I like Zelda 2. It also needs a remake. If they're doing it's a much Metroid 2, they can do Zelda 2.

If Metroid 2 gets it, it's about time Zelda 2, I agree. From Alan Tallaga, I absolutely loved Super Mario Sunshine, but I have resisted the urge to play it a second time because I can't separate the game from the context in which I played it. After a solid first-year lineup, GameCube is headed into the golden age of a second-year console. Mario Sunshine wasn't a solitary game. It was the vanguard of the meaty, full-featured Nintendo titles that were on the way.

So what if the camera controls are a bit off? This weird Animal Crossing game was about to take over an entire wing of my dorm. I.L. Delphino was underwhelming as a hub world, but Metroid Prime was out in a couple of months. There was a lack of level variety in Mario, but come on, that Zelda game is beautiful, even if people are knocking it online. Super Mario Sunshine felt like the first step into a larger world of Nintendo, and I loved it for that. I absolutely love Super Mario Sunshine. I will never play it again. Wow. That's funny. I like that. from Ethan Morris.

The key aspect to Mario Sunshine to remember is the creativity. That's a buzzword applied to every 3D Mario game, but the creativity displayed in a Mario Galaxy game or a Mario 3D location game fits very comfortably inside the box for what a 3D platformer is. You start at the beginning of a level, your goal is to reach the end of the linear level where there's a flagpole or star.

To cross the space, you'll need to jump, swim, and glide to avoid the many moving obstacles. But with Sunshine got creative, it genuinely went for it. Sometimes it's a rail shooter. Sometimes it's a physics box rolling watermelons around. Sometimes it's a top-down adventure game in a haunted hotel. Sometimes it's a Pachinko game. The one-off ideas are endless.

And sometimes when this game goes off the rails, it doesn't work well. But the towering ambition of it is something that's cast a shadow over every Mario game since. I think Galaxy had those qualities. You know, there's like the whole Yoshi slide levels. It's very diverse. Or the bubble level where you kind of have to like grapple to different stars in front of of you. Yeah, I love that.

I thought you were going to say the bubble as you have to roll down a... Oh, that too. Yeah, yeah. This guy knows how to speak to me. Sunshine is the Final Fantasy 8

or Metal Gear Solid 2 of Mario games. Uneven, easily exploited, and weird. But also aiming at a target so ambitious that only now with Mario Odyssey, do we see another Mario game playing in the same open world?

Anything goes design space. Mario Sunshine was the future. And then there's a big rant directed at me about Castlevania Circle of the Moon. Skip that. Wow. Final Fantasy 8, that is really, I like that comparison a lot. That feels really accurate to me. Yeah, like, just that alone makes me want to go spend a lot more time with Mario Sunshine. Did someone use the Mario Sunshine prop to complain about Circle of the Moon towards you? Okay, man. Come on, guys.

Wait, do you, are you pro or con circle of the moon? I didn't hear that. That's another letter section. Oh, who isn't? I mean, come on. Apparently that guy. Lots of strong people. A lot of strong-minded people. From Matt Bixler, Super Mario Sunshine was the transition between Mario 64 and Mario, Galaxy, Nintendo had to go through. They polished off the rough edges from Mario's first 3D adventure, and while they were at it, they gave a few new things a few new things a shot.

They experimented and leaned into things like voice acting and a few new moves from Mario, and you know what? Maybe they didn't work. Without trying the scattered handful of new things Nintendo tried, they wouldn't have been able to find that sweet spot that was Galaxy. This is all on the side to the fact that Sunshine isn't even that bad of a game. It simply isn't knocked out of the park good that we expect from Nintendo. If this were some new IP from a studio that didn't have Nintendo's pedigree,

it would probably be remembered as some hidden gym on the GameCube with one or two things that don't quite work. And you'd probably be an animal. I buy that argument. Not the animal one, but if someone else had made it, we'd think more kindly of it. Like Billy Hatcher? Yeah.

Or Ty the Tasmanian devil? I'd probably. Tiger. Justin gets to a point that I kind of touched on, I think, in the full episode. I haven't played Sunshine for many years, but the main memory of it is that after years of identicate 3D platformers with the same lava, water, garden-type worlds

that Mario 64 had, a game set in a tropical paradise was a revelation. The number of shrines affected how the game world looked as the sunshine returned, and Flood helped mitigate how hard some stages were by allowing you to hover back to safety if you made a mistake, a year before sands of time allowed you to rewind.

Not the best Mario game, but definitely the most interesting. That's a good point. from Retronauts East regular Chris Sims. Mario Sunshine rules. Keep in mind, I say this as quite possibly the only person in the world who doesn't like Mario 64. But Sunshine delivered on exactly what I wanted from a 3D Mario game. Man, I can hear his voice in my mind saying all this and that shit-eating grin on his face.

There's just so much different stuff to do from the standard clean-up-the-paint stuff to those weird little fetch quests all the way down to those dizzyingly acrophobic bonus levels that almost gave me panic attacks when I'd say. slip off an edge. On top of that, incorporating water not just as a boundary and an obstacle, but is something that turned a traditional adversarial environmental hazard into a save zone and an ammo dump. That's a great twist on how Mario had worked for the past two decades. Plus, Mario Sunshine actually has one of my favorite Mario levels of all time, the mysterious Hotel Delphino. The idea of Mario having to make his way through secret passages in a confined environment is one that I love, and one that is only matched by the pretty similar setup in Paper Mario Sticker Star.

Oh, boy. And so first says that he likes it more than Super Mario 64, then compliments Sticker Star. And Sticker Star is good. I like Sticker Star more than most, too. But I know it is a detested game, but... Sticker Star is good. Sure. You, I heard that tone of consciousness.

From Joseph Gordon. In defense of Super Mario Sunshine, it had big shoes to fill. This is the first 3D Mario game that had to come up with a gameplay mechanic that went beyond Well, Kiss Margaret, it's 3D and it's fun to jump around while the Elmer Flood system

feels like it could have been more fully realized It feels like it's missing modes The game has a colorful living art style Sounds the Nightmare Dahl cutscenes that make it an excellent choice for an HD remaster The biggest knocks against the game are of course the camera and some of the late game design choices

which in total seem like annoyances more than knocks on the overall packages. But if it didn't carry the weight of being a Mario game, we might remember it more fondly. And, of course, without that notoriety, were at some kind of third-party hidden Jim and said it would probably be revealed. Revereed as a cult classic with a slew of glowing retrospectives about how it deserves a modern sequel. That's like Beyond Good and Evil. Guilty as charged. I was thinking a Beyond Good and Evil to say.

Boy, boy, howdy. Beyond Good and Evil, too, is not a game I want. There's a swearing monkey in it. It was a, we'll always have the trailer reveal and then Michelle Ansell's tears. before the reality set in on that. But there's some real clownter-cockwise going on. I don't remember that was on the other episode. I know.

Yes. We've got continuity here. This is a sequel. We've got continuity here. This is a sequel. And go, oh, oh, carry on number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, 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. One of my favorite gaming memories as a kid was always the ride home from picking up a new game. Sitting in the backseat, pouring over the manual of a brand new purchase, anticipating the moment I'd get home.

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It is best Mario Brothers free A fresh 8-bit I'm packed with a boom And you're off to the kingdom Of the magic mushroom So get with the flow And act like you know

Or your may as well Be playing bingo Because it's official Because if we tested From Jacob Proctor Retro Not's crew GameCue was my first home console And Super Mario Sunshine

Was the first Mario game I really played at length I have endless memories of playing this game And loved every single second of it I have played it again in recent years and remember how frustrating it can be at times there are too many to list them all,

but the Pichinko level cleaning eel teeth being 1% away from cleaning the beach of electric goo in the hotel maze all spring to mine. I feel like too many times they tried to ask you to do things that the physics couldn't quite keep up with, like the underside of Pianta village, most of Pennapark, and the entirety of Nochi Bay. Yet despite its mechanical shortcomings,

I still love the style and charm of the game. And it is my favorite Mario game to this day, though I have long since given up hope defending it. I, like Bob, have undergone the arduous process of attaining the game ISO as my copy is long but of it unplayable due to overuse. I hope Nintendo will see the light, the sunshine, and make it available on Switch soon.

He mentioned the... Sorry, Henry. Go ahead. P.S. Flaming But Ground Pound is still the best. Well, I wonder with the lack of an HD remake or even really like flashback stages in other games, like, I wonder if there is a sense of shame among Nintendo EAD or just like,

shame's in a strong where, I mean, that they don't feel like revisiting it at all. I kind of get that feeling. Did he mention the camera in that letter? Did I hear something about the camera? I don't think so. I thought I heard something about the camera. I did want to mention, I've neglected to mention this on the last podcast we did,

but the most infamous, I mean, early 3D cameras are not good, but I think the most infamous moment in the game is the Ferris wheel stage, which is when I stopped playing it for this podcast. It's like, you have to constantly wrestle the camera. It's like, no, I want to float behind this wall. every time you were trying to climb the Ferris wheel I feel like that would have been fixed.

Kind of good girders are always in the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have strong memories of that. I feel like if you mention that to anyone who's played this game, they'll immediately remember it. Crumple to the ground.

Just like big blocks of color obscuring the screen. Yeah. I really feel like they could do a remaster of this game and make it great. I feel like there are some pretty fundamental, simple things to fix. And if they did that,

like fix the camera, change how blue coins work. We've got ourselves a really good game. What if they just add flood levels as the bonus levels in Odyssey? Let's do that instead. Just snaps on Flood and you do some flood levels. I mean, the Odyssey seems to have a million references to every Mario game, so I would not be shocked to see Flood appear too.

Donkey Kong might even be back. Oh, I'm sure Donkey Kong's in that game. But will Lady be back? Pauline's back, but his lady? No, it's just Pauline. Also, that reminds me, too, the flood. The only other time I feel like I've seen Flood and stuff is Smash Brothers. And I was really bad when Flood became his attack.

And also Skyward. Aren't Pianta and something else? Oh, they're in there. Like, there's like Mario Kart track said in Delphino. That's right. They bring it back, but I mean Flood specifically. In Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, the Pianta people are like the mafia. Yeah, that was funny.

I did like that. I forgot about that. All right, from Alexander Vanderclip. The oft-limited lack of environmental variation in Super Mario Sunshine is one of the game's biggest assets, in my opinion. Like Firewatch, it feels like a mini vacation in winter months. Super Mario Sunshine got me through a really tough and cold semester during my freshman year in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Ooh, the U.P. Man, okay, I feel you.

Can't show that on your hand. No. The sun disappeared for weeks at a time, so I would sit by the heater in my cinderblock dorm room and disappear into Isle-Dafino whenever I had a free evening. As a Mario game, I'm not sure it holds up quite as well. well as Mario 64, though it's still immensely satisfying to navigate the world with the same controls. As a cheap remedy for seasonal effective disorder, it's pretty much the gold standard. I love that. It's great. From Nguan Guterres, yes, Jeremy, your positive memories were a lie.

Super Mario Sunshine had a solid conceptual gameplay mechanic, but the execution is quite poor by Nintendo standards. I have no doubt that this is the weakest 3D Mario game of all. I'd venture to say even perhaps the weakest Super Mario game overall. I save it for the other episode, buddy. Musically and graphically, the game is great from my perspective, and the flood mechanics are pretty solid, but the problem has to do with the camera and its effects on gameplay. But this is not evident at the beginning of the game,

where there isn't a steep difficulty. Once the challenge increases, the flaws become so evident that the game becomes frustrating and stops being fun. It seems to me that the game was rushed, and the small refinements that would follow the quality assurance phase were not done as thoroughly as with previous and following marks. Mario 3D games.

I blame the fans that were dissatisfied with Luigi's Mansion that forced Nintendo to speed up development of the game and release it before it was 100%

ready. Makes sense to me? I buy that theory. Finally, a negative email we agree with. Here's another one from Dan Fight, our friend. He's a like-minded person,

so that's why we like him. Super Mario Sunshine was the first Mario game ever to leave me feeling wanting. I was very excited to get my hands on it, having played and replayed Super Mario 64 many times over. Finally, a sequel.

I remember enjoying the new movement options that the water gun unlocked, but I also remember never getting the hang of spraying water as an attack, nor was it fun to meticulously aim the cannon to clean up the mini-patches of ink or dirt or whatever murky-colored filth Mario had to deal with in the game. My biggest takeaway was the ending. I remember getting enough shines to open the gate to the final battle, which normally would mean nothing, as I would have insisted on getting them all before attempting the final battle la Mario 64, but instead I took it.

a chance on Bowser and beat him in one try. I distinctly remember the sensation of that's it as the credits rolled. Thankfully, I recovered, but I've never given Sunshine a second chance. Yeah, that hot tub Bowser battle, not one of my favorite Bowser. I don't remember the fight. I just remember the cutscene.

I think a lot of it is like steering. Do you run around the rim of the... I think you have to steer your way towards it. You know how you push, you jump on a leaf and you use water to shoot yourself around. Isn't part of the boss fight that? Yeah. That's not good.

It's not a great mechanic. Yeah. And that does remind me to, I meant to say this on the regular one, that they, playing Super Mario Sunshine gave me this moment of like the magic of Nintendo games going away a little bit because I knew what textures were in games and I knew to complain about textures, but I never thought that in a Nintendo game. And then when I'm like starting up Sunshine, I'm like, boy, that wall texture looks bad. And then I just did think like, oh, yeah, this is a game made of textures.

This is not a magical fun ride. This is, uh, I'm depressed. Interesting. I guess they're hot so no one or no friends because all you got to do is rescue the girl so welcome to Super Mario. For Maram Corrigion. I think what stands out most in Mario Sunshine

is the unifying tropical theme. Almost every Mario game or maybe all of them have a variety of worlds. But Mario Sunshine feels like one place. It's a big playground where you have so much to do a direct contest, contrast to the later Super Mario galaxies where you have less to do but across a wider variety of platforming challenges.

The camera can be wonky and Galaxy Lent itself really well to avoiding the problem with its smaller environments, but Sunshine is its own brand of Zany and creative gameplay that Nintendo hasn't really explored since 2002. Those early 2000s were Nintendo's real experimental years with 3D gaming, and I'm glad we got our tropical Mario, cell-shaded and nautical Zelda, first-person Metroid, two-person Mario Cart, I forgot about, we didn't mention that, but yeah, loads of new IPs. These all felt like ideas that flew in the face of what the series stood for, but they all stand out for me in meaningful ways, even if Super Mario Sunshine is seemingly the black sheep of the 3D Mario

games. I still think it's a classic adventure. Matthew Silvestri says, Mario Sunshine was a letdown for me, and I think age played a role. I played Mario 64 when I was 10 and it was magic. I played Sunshine when I was 16, and Mario had a talking hose on his back. I ended up... I was 20.

I was like, hey, Goober, what's with the hose? I was a little older, and I really liked it. But yeah, revisiting him... Were you writing about games when... Not professionally, but I had, you know, my own site. Sure. I think I wrote a very glowing review of it for my site. I definitely can't think of my history of that game without game journalism covering it.

And that's a neat distinction because like 64, like really I just read about it, Nintendo Power. And then a little bit maybe IGin 64 at the time, but, you know, that was early. No, no, that was predating. Yeah, yeah, I guess it wouldn't have been. Let's see. I ended taking a break from games after this. I got back into them over time, but I haven't paid. picked up Sunshine again. I'm interested to hear everyone's

thoughts. Just a couple more to go. From Dylan G. Mario Sunshine feels to me at odds with itself. The introduction of flood gives the game a lot of mechanical depth that I don't think any Mario game has had sense. Non-essential techniques like Mario's backflip or spraying the ground before diving

in order to slide around super fast helped to make the mere act of traversal very intrinsically fun. Miyamoto has stated in the past that the development for Mario 64 started out by focusing on making the action of Mario chasing a rabbit fun, and I would conjecture that the development team for Sunshine spent a considerable amount of time just nailing down the new flood mechanics. I have to wonder if they ran out of time because I feel

as though very few levels in Mario 64 gel well with the mechanics. Some stages like Bianco Hills and Nochi Bay have enough interesting verticality to complement the flood mechanics, but levels like gelato or Serena Beach are so small and featureless that you might as well almost not have flood at all. While the secret floodless stages can be fun, their presence really emphasizes how otherwise lackluster, the main level design can be. And as such, the Shadow Mario Missions fall even flatter than they need to. Tell me about it. But there's a lot to like about Mario Sunshine.

The sheer amount of padding makes it feel very half-baked. There were definitely other attachments. And in two different interviews, the director and producer talk about how they were removed. I think Miamud had mentioned this at 1.2. They were removed because they're too gun-like, and Nintendo was, you know, very, very cautious about that. And now Mario is in a game with rabbits shooting people. Dang. All right.

With goofball laser guns. Three more to go. From Andre Bevick. The flood was a contrivance. Basically, it existed to give players that extra platforming leeway, coasting to a ledge rather than narrow missing it. Here's the twist, though. That was actually enough to make the game more relaxing and satisfying than Mario 64 for me.

Both games had bad cameras, but in sunshine, the depth perception frustration was cordoned off into the challenge levels. I mean, yeah, the correction of the flood is really, really cool. It's just a neat platformer change. Just like Zelda and Zelda now, how you can climb everything. I think, you know, that adds this element to exploration. It's great. So does the flood. Those are both interesting ways to interact in a 3D environment that are new, a novel.

From Aaron Povolish. Let's see. One of my favorite encounters in Super Mario Sunshine is the electric manta ray fight outside the hotel. It multiplies into smaller rays when you squirt it, and the whole landscape is swarming. with them quickly, eventually progressing to hunting down the tiny few ones that remain. It reminds me of the marching Mildy fight in Yoshi's Island on Super Nies. The best parts of Super Mario Sunshine from me are the areas where you are stripped of the flood and forced to navigate platforming challenges.

These scenes are memorable because you get accustomed to using flood's hover ability both to make precise landings and save yourself for misjumps, only to have it taken away from the most focused challenges of the entire game. Nintendo also must have thought highly of these stages because they later made an entire game out of them and called it Super Mario Galaxy. It's funny as some people, the exact things they're calling out as their least favorite parts of the game or the exact things other people call it as their favorite. Let's see. Aaron Kearns finally says, I am one of those rare people who never really got into Mario 64.

While a lot of people think Mario is fun to control that game, I found the wide range of movesets and contextual actions. Actions meant that I would have a lot of trouble getting Mario to do the specific things that I wanted of him at any time. The restrictive jump physics, starting to lose my ability to read here, felt like a decade's worth. a regression back to the original Super Mario Brothers. But even worse, I would regularly misjudge a jump trajectory and find out, wind up flinging Mario way into the abyss all too often. You'd think that with a reduced move set, reduction of death pits, and the addition of a device that gave Mario significantly increased aerial mobility, that Super Mario

Sunshine would be the game for me, right? The answer to that is, no, actually. At least not most of the time. Super Mario Sunshine winds up being two games. One's a fun variation on normal Mario platforming where you get a jetpack to help yourself move around the stage and reach high platforming, high platforms, move around curves and just go really fast across parts of

the level. The other is a simulation of community service janitorial work. The sort of labor is so unpleasant that we literally have to force people to do it in the real world as punishment. They don't have fun backpacks that if they had a cool backpack, maybe more people would do it.

I think I would have appreciated a new play control re-release of the game. Aiming the spray nozzle is tedious, trying to do it with any level of precision grinds Mario to a halt. With the use of some motion or pointer-based aiming, we would at least be able to focus our spray on a certain location on screen, while also being able to dodge enemies and move around reliably. Even just having the focus spray mode use the C-stick to aim while the left stick is free for movement of Mario himself would have been significantly better than the controls

we got. I think this kind of sums up our feelings. I want to enjoy this game. Mario games always feel really inviting, and it's hard to not get drawn in by them when it comes down to it. But due to the many frustrating changes this game made over Mario 64 that it didn't have to I find it really hard to do so. Still, my heart holds out for another Mario game that does this jetpack aided platforming correctly with none

of the extraneous features and mechanics patting it out. A new play control that would be a much more intense, I think, redesign and say the Pickman new play control games, right? Yeah, because Pickman already has a cursor. They're just changing the means of how you

move that cursor. Yeah, it would be a lot more intense just to make it to change up the way Flood shoots at things and points at it for a, well now you wouldn't even make a new play control for we, it would be on the switch I guess. Boy, that'd be a tough one. Well, you've got the gyro, so.

Yeah, that's true. Actually, the gyro would work pretty well. It works in Splatoon, right? They should call it a Super Mario Sunshine Splatoon Edition and just to give it all the Splatoon gameplay. Super Mario Suntoon, Splat Shine. I can't believe everybody universally agrees that

being a janitor and spraying graffiti off the wall is so much worse than being a plumber and getting crabs out of the sewers. I guess I'd rather do graffiti than go in the sewers. They don't smell like poo gas. Yeah. I'm pretty sure those piazza guys smell like poo gas, too. They just look like it. They have no mouths, yet they talk endlessly.

I have no mouth, but yet I must smell like excrescence. All right. Well, anyway, thanks everyone who wrote in. I think that's a pretty broad spectrum of opinions. and definitely levens some of our negativity. So if you were hurt and saddened by what we said about Mario Sunshine, it's okay, people here, have your back.

Yeah, no one is right and the search for truth is meaningless. And there's no hope and there's no point to anything, as we've all right. Yeah, well, really, Mario Sunshine has put Bob into a really positive mood, so that's great.

But no, thanks for listening to this episode. And I don't know if we'll ever do this kind of like standalone letters mailback episode again. Maybe. Can't say. I guess if you guys write in a ton of letters about another topic sometime, we might. But anyway, thanks Bob and Henry and Samuel. Thank you.

All of you for sharing your feedback on this letter's mailbag episode and on Mario Sunshine in general. Why don't you guys, let's do the rotation thing and talk about who we are and where you can find us again? Sure. My name is Samuel Claiborne. I'm the managing editor at IGN.com, and I'm on a couple shows like Nintendo Voice Chat and Game Scoop, which I recommend you check. out if you like this type of thing. And I'm H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter. You can follow me there, and I do a podcast with Bob Mackie and our friend Chris Anteastern

is Talking Simpsons, where we talk about every episode of The Simpsons from the beginning, and then you can support us on patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. But if you just love The Simpsons, check it out. We go through every episode chronologically from the beginning, dissecting them all piece by piece, and it's a lot of fun. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. This is Bob Manky, by the way. And I am Jeremy Parrish.

You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. I write for Retronuts.com, which is also where you can find this podcast in addition to iTunes, podcast one, and the Podcast One app. We are supporting this podcast through Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts if you give us $3 a month. We will let you listen to our podcasts early without ads at a higher bit rate. It's pretty cool. So help me and Bob turn this in. to a business so that we can feed our families or whatever.

It'd be great. In the meantime, thanks again for listening. Thanks for writing everyone who wrote in. I hope I got everyone's letters. There were a lot of them. We'll be back again in a few days with a full episode. So please look forward to that. And in another two weeks with another micro episode.

And call her number nine for one million dollars, Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Tollas. 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. Oh, shit. 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... the White House, his 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 a 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 officers 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 say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.