Great video, adds a lot of details that were new to me even though I knew the basic story. Highly recommend 1.5x playback speed to save your sanity, though.
The craziest part to me is that Doki Doki Panic is a sort of franchise tie in cash grab. Imagine if any other one time festival marketed a video game today. You'd immediately assume the game was rubbish. Even the Mario Olympics games I hear are decent I always assume are going to be terrible just by their nature. Yet Mario 2 is pretty fun.
At 19:40, the narrator mentions that nintendo swapped in a crab enemy to mario bros to replace the mouser enemy from doki doki. I don't remember any crab enemy when I played mario as a kid, and i do recognize that mouse bomb enemy. Am I wrong here?
The crab is a boss of world 5. But Mouser is still in the game at the end of world 1. I remember the crab boss being easier compared to Mouser, and thinking they should be swapped.
Wow, its crazy how much good content (be that youtube videos, channels or books) is created lately in game history category. It's about time, because this can be the last moment to preserve it (the original creators aren't getting younger).
I love it.
The fact they stopped a NA release of the sequel because Howard Phillips review is amazing to me. Today we see still have games being released regardless if they should (Cyberpunk, Battlefield). Also it proves the importance of play testing to decide if the game is fun for the target demographic. I wonder if Miyamoto took this realization to heart and that is why we see his games so successful.
That’s easy to do when games are simple to make as they were back then.
Today? There’s too much at stake. $100 million dollar budgets, years of work, crushing deadlines, no way they would bring it all to a halt over one review. Besides, a lot of people will just buy whatever shit you put out as long as the hype is enough, and most games make most of their revenue in those early days after release.
And in the end, if you fuck up real bad, you can just release patches.
It's hard to even imagine this happening now, but it really does seem like it was a smart decision and Howard Phillips was completely correct (based on his gut reaction to playing the Japanese super mario bros 2) about what people did and didn't want, and it definitely does seem like the mario games went in the direction of not being so hard after that, although it's impossible to know if that was the specific reason.
Also, relating to difficult it's interesting that the original game that SMB2 in the U.S. was based on didn't have the B-run ability, and that change made the game substantially easier. Though in that case they may have decided they had to add it in order to be consistent to SMB1, and the decrease in difficulty was just an unintended side-effect. (Also, not having a save feature made the U.S. version a lot harder, so maybe that balances out with adding the run ability.)
This game came out not too long after the video game crash, which happened because the market was flooded by games that were just bad. Nintendo worked really hard to recreate consumer trust by making sure any released game was great.
Shesez just put out an incredibly detailed video covering the differences between the original game and SMB2 - manuals and packaging as well as the gameplay and graphics:
cool video, a few things were surprising, Nintendo had one person who they turned to to decide if a game would be released in the US. And this same person disagreed with the original idea of super mario bros. 2 being to similar to the original and they decided to change it! I could never see game studios now doing that.
It must have been interesting to be at nintendo at that time. Simultaneously exploding in popularity while being so focused on creating joyful products.
