If you could go back in time before there were Super Nintendos or SEGA Genesis and you had this game cartridge of the third Mario adventure then you'd be confident knowing you had the best game that will ever enter any NES or Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember grade school buddies who'd only pack their Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge and toothbrush for spending the nights on weekends knowing once they pulled it out of their bag they'd be the hero of the sleepover.
Depending on where you lived, Japan in 1988, the USA in 1990, or Europe in 1991, it's been over three decades that this gem of video gaming history has been available as a Nintendo game cartridge or at least since the late 1990s as an illegal ROM file that can be emulated by a PC like I did for this post using my crummy old Samsung phone. So what makes this game still fun after all these years while the other Nintendo ROM files only offer a brief moment of nostalgia only to last a few seconds before the crappy gameplay and graphics anger me leaving me wondering how or why we'd play and even spend money on such "entertainment". I don't know what went down in Nintendo back in the late 1980s, but I have no doubt Miyamoto told his small team of around ten people that he wanted them to create the greatest video game of all time and that's exactly what they did. It would be cool to travel back with the time machine and show them the Super Mario animation that just came out to show them what a big deal Mario has become and how the many creative decisions made then have become Mario lore and still entertaining people today.
I doubt if I make another 8-bit video game post after this. After clearing the original Zelda, the first and second Mario games, and now this one, I failed to see any interesting games to play in the long list of ROM files. It is interesting to see that every game ever made for the original Nintendo Entertainment System all together even including all the Japanese versions consists of less than a gigabyte of data. However, I would only choose about a dozen games still worth playing today and I've already cleared and posted about them all here with the Hive Gaming community.
As a lifelong gamer and teacher for over a quarter century, I decided to merge the two in what I call Conversation Gaming. It all started back in 2015 when the PlayStation 4 was still a new machine and I would bring it to my business English school and play GTA and FIFA with my adult students angering my boss and coworkers in the beginning as they felt I wasn't doing any work and just having fun with the students. After about a month I agreed with my manager that I was using the PlayStation as a crutch and not doing my job but after a few weeks without the PlayStation, he got sick of the constant requests to bring it back. Maybe bringing the PlayStation to work was a scam or a crutch but after all these years many of those students told me they never learned better than when they were playing exciting video games with their teacher. With all of this new metaverse technology, VR, and endless growing gaming culture, I know that I will turn conversation gaming into a huge brand name or a franchise, but as of right now, in 2023, it's just me running the dot com, failed YouTube channel, and small Hive account. Right now the only income I earn from Conversation Gaming is from Hive blockchain gaming posts like this one, but I know I'll be doing this in full VR on the PlayStation 6 soon enough so might as well re-live some classic games and hopefully earn enough to get a PlayStation 5 along the way. The PlayStation 5 has been out for so long that there are hopefully enough games to keep me happy, unlike the PlayStation 4 or 3 days where I felt I was always waiting for the next GTA or Star Wars game. Well, I don't even have a PlayStation 3 or PSP these days so I'll have to stick to old-school Nintendo games that my phone can emulate. The 8-bit Nintendo games worked great on the phone as there were only two action buttons, A and B, and they don't get confused when trying to control characters using touchscreen inputs, but like I said, I've exhausted the collection of 8-bit games so I guess I'll have to move up to Super Nintendo and SEGA games from here.
Most people have no idea that you can emulate these old-school games on your phone so when they see me playing this game and hear the familiar coin and jumping sounds they'll usually smile. When kids see me playing they'll ask their parents to load it for them, but they'll never find it much less the ROM files. I'll load the right emulator and email the ROM files to anybody who asks but most people think they can just go to the app store and find it which of course they never will.
Thanks for reading about my gaming adventure today. I made this post completely on my phone using Ecency, NostalgiaNES Lite, and Google Photos to crop the screenshots to a 16:9 ratio, and GIF Maker-Editor for the cover.
