I'm serious, BAIL.
You're still here, huh? I'm so sorry. I really am. I wanted to start every paragraph with I'm so sorry, but I realized that that would stop being funny. I can't guarantee this will be good. Or great. This book made me physically exhausted. I'm not even sure it's really like, that bad. I just... I dunno. But I'm sorry.
I read this book, Super Mario Bros 3: Brick by Brick, mostly because I hadn't known Bob Chipman as a game reviewer. Like, I don't really pay attention to media of any kind unless someone I know is excited about it. The exception being Sonic because no one I know cares about Sonic. I would be so lucky if someone wrote a love note in the form of a novel about Sonic CD... but there's enough of those "[Franchise] and Philosophy" type books that makes me think I'm OK without a loving send off to my favorite Sonic game. All this besides the point, I read this book because I thought it would be by a guy who loved games but didn't know much about them, you know, that kind of thing? Then I thought it would examine how Super Mario Bros. 3 (SMB3) was made... you know, referencing that "Brick by Brick" part of the title. This was not that.
I started reading this a long time ago, put it down and promptly forgot about it because it's not that great. But after I read an excerpt and put it down, even though I was still playing games I just never felt like writing about them anymore. This after a friend generously gifted me a game on Steam. I just was done with writing. I couldn't anymore. I had stuff in the works, it's still here, all unfinished and hard to look at. I was going to review Frantic Antics for Genesis, that was a game I recall my brother and I just giving up on. The Power Rangers game for SNES, like a full on beat-'em-up that we loved to play. I was going to review Ninja Turtles, which I had played with my film buff, Ninja Turtle fanatic friend I think twice and was itching to play again. I had started writing a bit on Don't Starve, which another friend of mine gifted to me because she wanted to see what I'd do with it. I had been researching the game at the time, and I don't think I played it even ONCE in the time after I got this book. I stopped playing all of the games I was planning on playing when I started reading this book. It just turned me off of them. I didn't stop gaming. I just stopped gaming with the intention to write.
Bob Chipman had been working for Escapist at the time. I liked Yahtzee, although not his opinions all the time. So I was on the Escapist for a good deal of time. I watched Jimquisition which I thought was interesting (with a great theme song). Then I found The Big Picture, one of his video series on Escapist. He also had Escape to the Movies, but I wasn't interested in that one. I liked The Big Picture. I thought Bob was a movie reviewer/analyst, not a games one. He, like the others who had written books, shamelessly plugged his book in his videos. I was interested in it, but not enough to buy it. It was $10 I had but I wasn't willing to put in his pocket. I liked the guy, but not that much. Eventually I lost interest in Yahtzee and stopped going to the Escapist.
Alright, if you read this far I'm going to spare you the rest of my life story discovering Bob Chipman, because who fucking cares right? Exactly. Well, the first like 86 or so pages of SMB3: Brick by Brick is basically this. It's a history of Bob's life and what Mario was doing at the time. Just like what I've written above, it has jack shit to do with the majority of the rest of the book. From here on I'll (try to) actually review the book for real, and all this crap about how I personally was introduced to Bob Chipman and how no one cares about Sonic means nothing in respect to the actual content. I wrote my intro that way because this is how a massive chunk of the book comes off to me. As far as I can tell, Bob did this as a device to frame the book in a "loving" type embrace. He wants you to see him as this ultimate lover of Mario-- the old Mario, the classic Mario-- who became disillusioned when Mario seemed to lose to Sonic and the Genesis (when was this? Did I miss this?) and eventually came back when the new Mario games resembled the older ones again.
To be perfectly fair, an introduction to how the game is connected to the author isn't a bad idea, but... not for 86 pages. There are 208 pages in my digital copy of the book, and I stopped reading the first time within the first 86 pages. And this stuff has nothing to do with SMB3, so like... just why, why would you put me through this? For an introduction, maybe 10 pages would've sufficed. On top of that, looking at the cover, what I expected from this book was some talk about the levels, the enemies, the history, and then probably an explanation as to how SMB3 is better than Sonic 3 and Knuckles by any definition of the phrase "greatest game ever made". I would say from that generation of games, the contender that Sonic 3 and Knuckles was going up against was Super Mario World... but that's just me though.
Instead the book starts with "the history," as part one is "A Brief History of Mario". Then part two is about Bob Chipman's life. He coins this part "My Life in the Mushroom Kingdom" but I mean it would have been much more interesting if he was on mushrooms or in Alice in Wonderland's Wonderland and that was what this part was about. Instead it's an auto-biography about some guy on the internet. This is different from, say, Fat Girl by Judith Moore. Where in that book she makes it perfectly clear that the book was about her and only her-- her struggles with her weight, her food issues, her image issues-- and sticks to that premise, this book set itself up as a book about SMB3 and instead there's a good portion of it that's just lollygagging around with Chipman and reading a history that I think Wikipedia did a better job summarizing. Part three was called "The Game" which encompassed "the levels" and "the enemies" part written on the cover. You know, until you get to part four, called "Super Mario Bros. 3: Beginning to End," which is of course... the levels and how you beat them Bob Chipman style.
I think maybe that the theme underlying the entire book was that SMB3 was "the greatest game of all time," but being a GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) is something that requires proof. Proof that Chipman doesn't really... give, like he's saying that it's his favorite and that's cool and all, but that doesn't mean that you get to decide what is or isn't a GOAT of a generation. My favorite Zelda game is Majora's Mask and my favorite Sonic game is Sonic CD. I know that the GOAT of each of those series isn't my favorite game, though. Chipman doesn't seem to have the awareness that just because he likes something doesn't mean it's a GOAT, but also that just because something isn't a GOAT doesn't mean that it isn't iconic.
BUT IS HE, THOUGH?
And I think part of the issue I had can be found in the introduction, where he does this "why even do this" retrospective type intro (by the way, this introduction wasn't in the table of contents, usually one would at least have "Introduction" in the table of contents) in which he's saying stuff like "It would probably make more sense to look at his career as a whole and not at one game," and "This isn't even the most important Mario game in any sense of the term," all of which are things that personally, I would hesitate to mention. He starts by saying "Why write a book about Super Mario Bros. 3? I'm going to assume somebody is asking that question. I am, and I'm the one writing the damn thing."
But I'm not asking that, and if someone is the answer to the question is pretty simple. He's written this book because he loves SMB3. Isn't that basically the only reason to write a book about one particular game in a series that isn't the highest grossing, the most troubling, the best selling, or any sort of record breaker as someone who isn't a novelist or a historian?
The introduction is a slog of a piece, though. He eventually says "I'm doing it because no one else has done it" even though people have done this very thing. Just not in novel form. People have critiqued games like this one in great detail. Some of them do it in videos, others in blog posts, some have written articles, and others through talks. But the idea that no one has looked deeply into games and really seen them for what they were to a generation is laughable. Chipman's entire job hinged on that. So I guess this was more like a "fuck ya'll, you ain't doin' it right" kind of move?
The collective response to Chipman, as written by Big Sean.
He tends to sway towards "big" words over using ones that people might better understand or even ones that he might better understand. For example, he calls Shigeru Miyamoto iconoclatic, meaning characterized by attack on cherished beliefs or institutions. Maybe he did demolish some walls back in the day when Mario was being made, but "iconoclast" is more or less synonymous with "critic," "renegade," and "dissenter." Miyamoto isn't really these things, in respect to his creations.
I'm dragging because the next two parts are literally why I stopped writing this blog. I'm serious, it's pretty bad. Bail now. Do it!
In a weird, almost reverent way, I think Chipman does view Miyamoto as a God among Man. He writes the creation of Mario as though he was trying to divine it from ancient scrolls. I know of Miyamoto because he created some of the GOATs in video games, but I don't really talk with video game designers who have made popular games like The NEW Super Mario Bros. I can't really say that people talk about him in whispers like he's a sorcerer who deigned himself to walk among the filth of man. Most people I know are equally likely to have criticized his work as they were to praise him. I think people admire him, but can still recognize his humanity. Chipman seems like he's unable to see Miyamoto as a human. Chipman sees Mario as a "perfect creation" come from a "perfect being" in a way that is almost revolting considering that Chipman was an adult when this was written.
It takes two pages to explain how Miyamoto created Mario, even though in the second paragraph on the first page, Chipman basically tells us exactly how it happened: Miyamoto thought up Mario himself. Literally all Chipman had to do after that was explain the first game Mario was in, but instead he writes Psalms about Miyamoto. It's annoying. I like Miyamoto, but not this much.
And in the third world he rose again, in accordance with his programming.
Going on, Chipman explains in many, many words how Mario appeared in a few other games before SMB3. This is the very thing he said the book wouldn't be. This book was claiming to have something in it that I felt I would be interested in, a story of the history of SMB3. SMB3 was the draw for the movie The Wizard, so I thought there would be some interesting backstory as to why they decided to make a movie to promote the game... or you know, some fascinating insight into what it took to make SMB3. But... no, Chipman just says in far too many words the same things that I already knew coming in. And I will admit that maybe someone somewhere got this book and wasn't already aware of these things. But they've been better written and summarized elsewhere. Plus, he said in the introduction that he wasn't going to be writing about Mario's career. But here we are reading about Mario's career!
He talks briefly about how the evil, nasty SEGA corporation created Sonic the Hedgehog, whose games were "edgy" (they were marketed that way) and made Nintendo seem "uncool" and how SEGA got the lucrative, full blood version of Mortal Kombat for the Genesis because of their painting of Nintendo as old stogy types. It was war, the Great Console War of 91. And then Sony, taken aback by Nintendo's betrayal after showing a system Nintendo had partnered with them to make and then back out of, created the Playstation in 94. How could they?
You MONSTER! Nintendo suffered at your hand. REPENT!
I mean his history is trying its best to be unbiased, but he keeps painting Nintendo like it's some underdog. Nintendo has been basically riding on nostalgia for years. The reason they can do that is because even back then when people were like, "Aww, Sonic's so edgy and cool," and "Mortal Kombat was ported to the Genesis," the most iconic games were still on Nintendo platforms. I mean Megaman was on Nintendo for a while. Final Fantasy. Mario. Zelda. These were/are all Nintendo franchises. Nintendo's GameBoy system is literally the only system that ended up with a successful set of handhelds following it (Sorry SEGA Game Gear. PSP did OK, considering) where there were even more games in these franchises to play. And even though Final Fantasy moved to Sony, they still published games like Tactics Advance (an amazing game, mind you) to the GameBoy Advance. Nintendo was never an underdog in this respect. But whenever Mario seems to be flagging in history, Chipman treats this like Nintendo's entire company suddenly went under.
Part two starts by explaining that Chipman and Mario were "born" in the same year. Chipman says "I can't remember a world without Mario" and to be fair, I can understand this. This is something that should have been in the introduction though.
Chipman explains that he wasn't a gamer as a child, but one of his friends had an NES and he saw the first Mario game he ever played, Super Mario Bros., and was immediately hooked. He couldn't get an NES right away, so he had to settle for playing with his dad's Atari system. But one day, he got an NES. He says he couldn't remember the hows or whys, just that there was a period when he didn't have an NES and a period when he did have one. All of this would have worked in the introduction, seriously.
The rest of this is stuff that really doesn't matter in the scheme of things. I'm glad I didn't pay for this, because it's just nothing to do with the focus of the book, SMB3. Never mind that he didn't like The Super Mario Bros. Super Show-- Were we watching the same thing? Did you not hear that theme song? Okay, it was actually pretty bad, but I loved it-- but most of this is just Chipman being like, "I was bad at school" and "I played video games to escape reality," which makes him like a good number of people in many ways. It also isn't interesting in a book about SMB3.
"Waahhh, life was hard once! No one has ever felt the way I feel! This book is definitely about SMB3 though!"
He eventually drops the bombshell that the reveal of SMB3 in The Wizard was burning into his memory, quite like the JFK assassination for his parents generation and the way 9/11 was for our generation. After I read that, I stopped writing this blog.
I mean... as someone who read Sonic Comics and watched Sonic SatAM, seeing Sonic the Fighters was like God's Gift to me. There, characters no one gave a shit about were given life. Sure, most people would go in and say "Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. I know them." But barely anyone had played Sonic CD, so no one knew Amy. And there she was in the game, fighting! If you played as her, you could even beat Metal Sonic, who had captured her in Sonic CD. Crazy! And then there were other characters no one cared about. Bean, who showed up in Tails' Adventures, for some reason being called Bean the Dynamite. Fang the Sniper, who I knew as Nack the Weasel. His sister Nic was in a group with Bark the Polar Bear, but I think Bark eventually just is someone who hangs out with Bean. And Espio the chameleon, part of the Chaotix group with Charmy and Vector. This was a crazy game for me made even stranger that it came to the US at all, mind you. And I don't think it's bigger than 9/11 or JFK's assassination, or even that big at all. I guess you could say that Lost World, which seems to me like it's the continuation of a scrapped, but really cool Sonic project that would have had Sonic in space in a Super Mario Galaxy and Sonic Colors way long ago, might have also been that way to me, considering how excited I was when I heard about it (although immediately after I was told it wasn't being developed anymore, so... sad face) would also be a "big event" for me. But they weren't so big that they matched up with these tragedies. Up until this point Chipman had been boring. He had been wordy. He had even been uninteresting. But this line was mind blowing. At first I stopped reading and thought I was reading it wrong or misunderstanding. But no, I was reading it correctly. After that I just kind of felt like Chipman was just trying to emphasize how big and amazing it was, but... why not like, "when [famous album by famous group] came out" as opposed to relating this happy event to two that are decidedly sad? I mean I just did not understand it.
I didn't take offense to it, but I saw it as something that just drew all the want to write about games out of me. Here was an adult who wrote about games and movies for a living, stating in no uncertain terms that not just did he compare reveal of SMB3 in The Wizard to 9/11, but he viewed the two as the same, emotionally. Personally, I can't live up to that. I would feel ashamed to write something like that. So I just... stopped writing and I stopped reading his book, too. I'm not sure if this will make sense to you guys, but after reading that far I just got...disillusioned. This guy was someone that people thought was an authority on films and games, at least, that's how he presented himself. And this is what he wrote? This is how he viewed a movie that wasn't that good? I could understand if he was a child, but he's an adult. He wrote this and he seemed to do it with no awareness at how just mindblowingly stupid the comparison was-- and he never fixed it, it was never edited out and wiped away for only his eyes to see. No, this is in a published book, a book that you can pay money for. I mean the line itself isn't really a bombshell of a line, but I remember reading it, closing Adobe Reader, and picking up my DS and thinking, "Nope. Millennium Girl. I'm just gonna play Millennium Girl. I don't care. I don't care anymore."
I came back to the book accidentally. I had abandoned it, but recently as I was going through my Dropbox I found it and all the weirdness came flooding back. I felt like if I sat down and finished this book, if I appraised it and reviewed it, if I found the things that were good in it ans also saw it's many (MANY) flaws, maybe I would be more interested in writing again. I also figured I should explain why I stopped writing in the first place. No matter the reason, this book was calling to me. "Finish me," it said, "Then write a review and drop off the face of the Earth, you piece of shit."
After Chipman writes about how two tragedies were the same to him as the tragedy that was The Wizard, I guess, he goes on to say that SEGA was fighting back with Sonic in 91. You know, that thing he said before? Yep. He repeats it here. He talks about how he was so firmly Team Mario, he actively hated Sonic and SEGA, like... he viewed SEGA as the enemy. Look, I enjoy being like, "Mario sucks," but I'm the first to admit I feel that way because I'm shit at Mario games, full stop. I've literally only been good at Super Mario World, and I'm not even fantastic at that game. But as much as I give Mario a hard time, even when I was 12 I knew that the "rivalry" wasn't a real thing. and Mario has brilliant games, really fun ones that I enjoy playing. Sonic also has fun games, but Sonic's are just more fun to me. Chipman is so firmly in love with Mario that his 12 year old self sees Mario as someone who is threatened by Sonic somehow.
He talks about the Super Mario Bros. Movie. This movie is literal garbage, in my opinion. My boyfriend loves it for some reason, I assume because Mario (although I'm not completely sure he's not just saying that to deliberately troll me since Mario sucks)? But it's pretty bad. Chipman describes the build up from the fervor of a really rabid fan particularly well, so I can sort of understand why some one might view it as a pretty big deal. It was bad, but Chipman at that time convinced himself it was good.
He talks about getting older and how the "Great Console Wars" were like his personal Vietnam. Ugh. Deep in the trenches of the Mushroom Kingdom, were we? I suspect that Sonic fans were bunkering up in Sandopolis at that time? I mean the comparisons he makes are just awful.
You guys never went through the strict training SEGA fans went through during the Great Console Wars.
He continues, saying that Nintendo and Sega were joined by Playstation in 94 (again, he mentioned this already so I really don't know why he decided that in his personal history he would rehash the history of the consoles) which tried to show Sega and Nintendo as child's stuff. Chipman refers to the black Genesis and the two grey Nintendo consoles as "candy-colored," which is odd. The only black candy I know is licorice, and I strain to even call that a candy.
He explains that Yoshi's Island was the game that broke the game's storyline by claiming Mario and Luigi were from Mushroom Kingdom and not from New York. He viewed it as "an early signal that [his] relationship with Mario and his world was fundamentally changing whether he wanted it to or not." Jesus H. Christ... I mean, the movie was only barely related to it, in the two cartoons I can remember prior to Yoshi's Island I think it's like only slightly related to the story of the games. You mean when Mario met Dracula in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show while he was in New York, that's canon? Come the hell on, man.
...Actually, let it be canon, this is the best.
All of this (watered down a LOT) could have just been his introduction. You know? But instead we're treated to this mess of a set of chapters, which leads directly into a part he labels "desertion" which is a period of his life in which he was uninterested in Mario. This is followed by another chapter, "A Decade in Darkness" in which he just talks about how he was basically doing anything but playing SMB3. You know that thing he's writing a book about? Yep. Anything but that. When finally he gets back into games, he wants to play the old ones from his childhood again, so he gets the GameBoy Advance that was modeled to look like the NES and gets all the new and old Mario games. Like who. the fuck. cares about this shit?
I wish I could explain the rest of this part in the loving detail that I explained the previous parts. But I can't. It's too long and too boring and just so pointless. I don't care about The Life and Times of Bob Chipman, I care about SMB3. Just get to the game already, sheesh.
I will however, talk briefly about this particularly strange scenelet he wrote up in his epilogue to this part. In it he says that he was going to try and find a Wii U, as his was delivered defective, and was in a line at a store with a woman and her son. He notes that the woman is likely to be picking up a pre-order, but that her son gave away that the pre-order was likely for a Wii U. He was decked out in Mario stuff. Chipman does what I think is standard for when you run into a kid as an adult. You smile, you nod. Maybe you say hi if the kid is super friendly. He says the kid looks up at him with a look of surprise, as if to ask "this big older guy knows Mario, too?"
Mmm, no Chipman, I'm not gonna buy that shit from you. Mario's a Big Fucking Deal to the point of almost ridiculousness. It would be weird if you didn't know who Mario was, not that you do know, and even if the kid is young enough to be like, "Older people know Mario too?" like... what, is his mother not a person who knows about Mario? What about his dad? Does he have no friends with siblings who might have played old Mario games? No neighbors? Like I doubt this kid was so shielded from reality that he hadn't come across someone older than him who had a general idea of who and what Mario was. So fuck this rite of passage, "you can have him now, kid," BS you're trying to pull. God. I hate this so much it's coming out of my PORES.
RUN ALREADY GET OUT OF HERE, YOU'RE ALMOST AT THE END!
He finishes by saying he hopes a young Mario fan might pick up this work. this fan would have never considered their "hobby" could hold deeper truths (I mean, judging by this novel, it can't so... I mean, this hypothetical fan's right, games are nothing) and this book would help them appreciate it. Uh, but I mean... you spent like a million trillion pages talking jack shit, so... no, I doubt it.
Finally we're at the game. Part three. The promised land. But don't worry, I don't have much to write here because Chipman says flat out, "I shouldn't have to explain the subject to you too much since the target audience of this book probably know a lot about Mario." OH YEAH? SO THOSE LAST SET OF PAGES, LIKE THOSE 50ISH PAGES BEFORE THIS, THAT WAS JUST STUFF THAT YOU WEREN'T EXPLAINING? IS THAT IT?!
God... fucking... I can't... this book though!
He basically copies stuff word for word from the manual, so if you're interested in this part I suggest finding a copy of the SMB3 manual online. However, he happens to bungle up a lot of things I thought were quite obvious about the game regardless. As an example, I always viewed SMB3 as a play about the Mario characters. That's why there were curtains and stuff, you know? So the manual refers to every creature in the game as characters... because that's what they were, "characters" in the SMB3 "play". It would also explain why Bowser had 7 kids for no reason. They're all also named after celebrities and musicians, which... reads to me like that "very special episode" of Captain Planet when like a bunch of really famous people playing themselves would be like, "Hey kids! Pollution is pretty bad right?" In that sense, this game's aesthetic is actually kind of cute, like maybe Mario's in the audience watching you as a player "act" through his adventures.
It never explained why Morton's so amazing, but god damn it, he's amazing.
There is some interesting stuff here, though. He explains the enemies pretty well, although again, this could have been done way earlier, my god. There are a lot of enemies and I would've been interested in concept art, things like that, but naw. This book isn't about that life. And despite the info being interesting, it comes across as a wall of text mass dump. To be honest, I would have preferred if he either analyzed the enemies as he came across them or went all out explaining their creation (which by all means could have been boring, I don't know) rather than kind of checklisting them in the beginning. He does just re-explain them later when he comes across them, so... maybe take this part out of the book?
With the ending of this section comes the beginning of the end of this book. Part four.
For starters, he points out that "Oh, the artwork seems to making out like this is a play" which... again, yes, that would explain why the characters and enemies are all called "characters" in the manual, which is basically like a playbill... so... yeah? Before this ingenious observation, he wrote a small diary entry that I believe has given me stage 3 lung cancer. Look, I wrote a review for Sonic CD, and I did it with way less aplomb than this. Like it's a game I love, but I don't need to catalogue my feelings and all that shit, no one cares. We came for SMB3. Just give us SMB3. Plus all of his diary entries are removable without affecting the book since we already read his life god damn story so... I mean if you can remove it and the story doesn't change, it's bad writing. Which is about half of this book, at this point.
So he starts explaining how to play the game, despite saying earlier that he doesn't want this to be a "strategy guide". He tells you exactly which "?" box gives you a mushroom in Level 1-1, he tells you exactly when you see your first Venus FireTrap (the Piranha Plant that spits fireballs), and he'll tell you how to get the first Super Leaf so you can become a tanooki.
Then he stops to tell you about the Tanooki suit in a sectioned off box he titles "The Tale of the Tail", and this is actually interesting except that within the first paragraph of this blurb, he's like, "I'll explain this (speaking about what a tanooki is) later". THEN WHY. DID YOU PUT THIS BOX HERE. NOW. AT THIS MOMENT. YOU MORON. If you're not going to explain exactly what the tanooki is and why flying is a power given to Mario from a suit that resembles a creature that firmly stays on the ground... why did you bring it up?
He explains how thrilling it is to have to run and jump to fly. Then he tells you where to get a 1-UP and where to find a P-Switch. In 1-2, he tells you where to find the secret room of coins. Literally every secret in the game he lays bare. And while I suppose it's not a bad thing to do, I'm disappointed. I mean, the fun of these kinds of games is finding the secrets yourself. Here Chipman is, claiming to have written something like a loving send-up to the game and the creators... and it's basically just a strategy guide with an auto-biography tacked onto it.
He continues, sometimes writing diary entries, sometimes those little blurbs with actual interesting information, sometimes writing a clear strategy guide, and the rest of the time kind of just writing a play by play of him playing the game. This reeks of someone who doesn't really know what audience they're going for. I don't think a Mario fan wants to read page after page of this. What, would older fans who played this game haven forgotten this game? Or younger fans who haven't played it are just like, "I'll never play that anyway... it's impossible to find on literally every Nintendo system and also on emulator sites?"
I legitimately realized after I wrote the last line of that paragraph that... yeah, that was probably his audience. God, help me.
The book itself is supposed to be a love letter to "the GOAT SMB3" but it's not really showing me love here. I see, when I read this, a religious fervor. Not love, but a "duty" to show this game in it's best light. Even when there are pieces that are more interesting than others, he tries to show all things being equal.
We know, for example, the birth of Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad. But how did the enemies get created? He mentions the chain chomp creation as Miyamoto creating a character that reminded him of a dog who lunged towards him to bite him as a child, only to be stopped by a chain. That's more interesting than half of this stuff. Maybe if he analyzed level design? Maybe if he stopped mis-characterizing things like getting a Fire Flower as "changing how you interact with the world"? I mean it doesn't really do that, I would say that the Fire Flower is a pretty regular way that Mario experiences the world. I don't know what would make this better.
I would love to know what went into making the puzzles for the P-switches, for instance. Or maybe if he learned who was behind the Sun that would just swing down out of the sky and try to kill you, I would love to know who was like "yep, this is a good idea," and why. Why is it a Sun, also? Maybe an analysis on how these old Mario games tended to stick to a particular gimmick per world and how that works as far as making a cohesive game? Or an in-depth analysis on the power-ups and how they're balanced? With every fortress he could explain the bosses and their differences and similarities more, but he just kind of doesn't do that, either. I mean... Kuribo's Shoe appears only in world 5-3, right? It would have been really cool if he used his status as an online reviewer-- you know, that job he's super lucky to have and gets him into panels with people who us normies could never hope to meet-- to somehow get an interview with someone who could explain "Well, we only have it in this level because of [reasons]" or just be like, "I dunno, we just didn't work it into any other place." I mean anything that's even slightly analysis based or just new information we can't get if we watch a video or search for "SMB3" on Google would be great.
Instead Bob goes back and forth this this odd coyness and intellectualism that doesn't really work. One moment he's like, "Hmm, what's that up there... ;)" and the next he's like, "Do this. That'll get you this." He stops to tell you about how he went to see Avengers five times and how it was amazing. He uses oxymoronic phrasing "casually apocalyptic" in a way that requires some explanation. He claims to be analyzing, but there's a point when he gets angry after using the Tanooki suit and then losing it, so he just rages through a level. If he was actually doing an analysis I would have been pissed off, but this is a thankfully short reprieve from a long, boring, cookie cutter set of "I did this, then this happened" remarks that at least this short break makes me feel like "Oh thank god, it's over. It's almost over."
His play through doesn't read like someone who is great at the game... and I mean, I love Sonic CD but I'm not the world's foremost authority on it, you know? I'm not the fastest or the best at it. that's why I don't speed run it or write books on it where I'm actively documenting my failures at it. Why Chipman chose to do this, I have no idea. I only barely remember SMB3, mostly because I'm bad at Mario games and this one in particular I'm terrible at. My brother was pretty good at them, though, and I remember Giant Land (I recall this being "Big Island) and Sky Land (I think this was called The Sky) best. I remember Giant Land because of the huge Goombas and the cute Kuribo's Shoe (which I knew of as the Goomba's shoe, we played All Stars' remake of this game not the original game). I liked Sky Land's map theme too. I mean I feel like Grass Land had the most easily recognizable one (similar to how everyone knew Sonic's Green Hill Zone theme). Water Land (Wasn't this Sea Side?) probably had one of the better ones also, since it's a very drowsy version of the underwater theme (which is amazing), so it feels like the map theme is kind of gearing you up to actually play. But I feel like the map themes hit their stride with Water Land, Giant Land, and Sky Land. It goes from drowsy to somewhat bubbly, and then Sky Land's more ambling tune. It feels like the game is asking you to wake up, since you're getting closer and closer to the end. After that all the themes aren't really as interesting or fun-- Ice Land's world has the high octave notes that people always attribute to ice, since ice and crystal "probably sound the same" I assume, but the map theme is boring; Pipe Maze has a pretty boring sparse tune that does kind of remind me of the music when you went into the pipes, but definitely isn't interesting in the over world; Dark Land lacks the oppressive power that the final levels in Sonic games had and so it doesn't speak to me much. But beyond that as a theme it does match the levels themselves until you reach the mini bosses, who all have the same relatively cheerful theme as ever. UGH NOW I'M ANALYZING SHIT. I remember this world, but not what went into completing it. Mostly because I personally never "had" to beat it. That's all I'll say about it without actually playing it. But even I'm nostalgic in ways about this game and even I don't understand like... why write this book?
This was a lot and I promised you'd be almost done by now.
And that's what this all comes down to in the end. I have no idea why Chipman wanted to write a tribute to this game. Everything I read in his book waxes poetic about nostalgia. His claims of this being a GOAT are chipped away by this boring, non-critical, wordy Let's Play he has for the entire end of the book. It is as though he spends the time writing this thinking, "They'll see how amazing this is" while writing in nostalgic, rose tinted glasses, unable to understand that for some of us, SMB3 is extremely boring in text form. If nostalgia was all it took to be a GOAT, then that would make this book utterly pointless for a different reason altogether.
But let me be clear, this book is pointless, like in a meandering, well meaning but poorly executed way. It idolizes Mario and Miyamoto and foams at the mouth over Chipman's life, but goes into a dry, sometimes uninterested tone when talking about the game. It isn't about the game, it's about Chipman and how he views the game. It's about how Chipman went through a period when he didn't think about Mario. It's about everything but SMB3. But it wants to much to be about SMB3 that it shoves the game into places it doesn't belong. It rambles and raves, but in the end it's gone nowhere and done nothing.
I spent a while slaving over this book, hoping it would get better after every page, but it didn't and it doesn't. Chipman clearly wishes for this to be a new medium for gaming media, but this book doesn't carve a path that Let's Plays hasn't already. Someone should have stopped him before this was published. I don't understand how there was no abort button for this trainwreck.
What, we just don't have these anymore?!
So would I recommend you buy this book and read it? No, of course not. Hell, after writing this, I can't promise I'll be back to write the review for the game someone gifted me and asked me to review. I wish I'd never set eyes on this book. I wish I'd never read it. It makes my head hurt and leaves me tired. It's a verbal onslaught that you have to weather like a storm. It's terrible. It's awful. I'm done with it, and for the life of me, I'll never ever look back on it again.
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