Between playing Super Mario Crossover and Rondo of Blood in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about mashups, crossovers, and other ways to get my peanut butter in your chocolate.
You know what? Scratch that last one. Also, I’m never eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups ever again.
Digression aside, mashups scratch a pattern-recognition itch. Humans see two related things and automatically think how well they’d fit together. Neuropsych types say that the neurons that fire together wire together and computational modelers talk about activation spreading by connection weight, but it’s all just the stuff that inspires GameFaqs character battles, Final Fantasy Dissidia, and delicious s’mores.
In the case of Super Mario Crossover, the game worked in part because its constituent games shared the same generation of game development. That is, the contemporaries of Super Mario Bros. shared mechanics, design philosophies, and influences. Just like most modern developers for the Wii are obsessed with accessibility, NES developers were influenced by the competitive and punishing gameplay from the golden years of the arcades. Why shouldn’t these games fit together?
This doesn’t diminish Exploding Rabbit’s achievement–”obvious in retrospect” is actually a synonym for brilliant–but it does suggest other possibilities. My pet mashup would be to import the four-player simultaneous gameplay mechanics from New SMB Wii into Super Mario Bros. 2. You’d have to figure out a workaround for bottlenecks like the flying carpets, but Mario’s subconscious is already built to accommodate each character, so four at once would plausibly work. Besides, multiplayer makes every game better.
Still, it seems like there must be other ideas out there, and I’d love to hear about any you’d care to post in the comments.
