Kratos recently callꦛed for an end ꩵto the console war. I couldn't agree with the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War more. Yes, the advent of social media has exacerbated the toxic behavior exhibited between people who don't play their games on the same platforms, but the war has been raging on long before people were being mean on Twitter, Facebook, even Bebo. Remember Bebo? Anyway, before there was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation vs. Xbox, there was Nintendo vs. Sega, except for the first few blissful years of my life, I loved one without even knowing that an arguably far bigger rival was out there living it💯s best life.
I don't remember how exactly it came into my possession, but my first console was a Mega Drive. That naturally led to a mild obsession with Sonic that continues to this day. Mild might be underselling it somewhat as 30 years later, the blue blur and various other characters from Emerald Hill are tattooed up my arm. Back to 1993 and four-year-old me sat in the living room playing Sonic 2, Ecco the Dolp🌜hin, and Aladdin (wh♉at a game), blissfully unaware there was another option out there.
That blissful ignorance continued for two more years until I went to my cousin's house and saw his SNES. I didn't even know what it was, but after my life had revolved around gaming for the prior two years, I was incredibly excited to discover there was a whole other library of games with their own platform out there, not to mention Nintendo's own equivalent of Sonic, Mario. The first and only game I played on my cousin's SNES was Super Mario All-Stars. Quite the introduction as it quickly caught me up on everything Mario had done so far.
I quite literally had to be torn away from the SNES when it was time to go home, something I realize was probably a bigger to-do than I recall for my parents now I experience having to pry a Switch out of my own three-year-old's hands on a daily basis. What I do vividly remember is the car ride home. While my love for Sonic hadn't dissipated, I was questioning everything I thought I knew about games. I had been living in a bubble, completely unaware that Nintendo and Mario even existed.
I questioned whether I liked Mario more than Sonic, and why I had not been offered up a choice between a Mega Drive and SNES years before. Sonic has influenced my life for a long time (did I mention the tattoos?) and to this day I wonder if my parents had come home with a SNES instead of a Mega Drive 30 years ago, would I now have Luigi, Peach, and Bowser scrawled up my forearm instead? Thoughts I had pushed deep down inside until recently as the arrival of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Super Mario Bros. Movie has brought them bubbling to the surface.
At 33, I feel like I'm having that Mario All-Stars revelation at my cousin's house all over again. I've not seen the Mario movie at the time of typing this, but I will have done by the time you read it. I don't need to have seen it to know that Nintendo and Illumination have gone in a very different direction with the adaptation than Paramount and Sega did with Sonic. The hedgehog was plonked down in the real world, alone, forced to forge a bond with humans. Nintendo has gone down the purely animated route, introducing an entire cast of characters from the Mushroom Kingdom to the big screen right from the off.
Now the movie is here, I'm having those same feelings I did on that car ride home from my cousin's house. I adore the Sonic movies and feel validated every time someone who isn't obsessed with the games likes them too. However, now Mario has his own movie, and I will almost definitely love that too, I'm wondering whether Sega did the right thing. Getting loads of characters out there all at once and putting them in a world anyone who has played even a single Mario game will instantly recognize. Would that have worked for Sonic?
What I can realize now that was probably a little much for my five-year-old brain to handle is both Sonic and Mario's ways of doing things can co-exist, both in video games and on the big screen. If anything, Sega's drastically different approach to a Sonic movie is probably a good thing. While Sonic games still exist, Nintendo's consoles have outlasted Sega's by more than two decades at this point. Even though there will be comparisons drawn, it isn't as easy to compare the Mario movie to the Sonic ones since they are so different, while comparing their 2D sidescrollers was easy and inevitable. I know all of that as I type it here, but rest assured it will continue to keep me up at night long after I've been to see the Mario movie.
