#mainline-mario

#mainline-mario

Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do.

The set includes 12 toys, most of which are of different characters, but both Mario and get two. Mario gets one in his standard red-and-blue outfit, and another of him in his white-and-red look after undergoing a Fire Flower transformation. Bowser Jr. has one in his default form, while the other has him in his distorted Wonder look from Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

As you can see, this cartridge has Hollywood Video stickers on it. Which is interesting. And I wasn't able to find any record of the competitions being done at Hollywood Video. The 1995 competition was a Blockbuster competition. A major competitor, or the major competitor of Hollywood Video.

It's more fun to destroy something that doesn't look like it can be destroyed. It is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful. Levels needed lots of additional visual flourishes, ranging from patches of flowers and fauna to ornate rock formation and snaking, overgrown trees to make the destruction feel like the showstopper it was meant to be.

They've never all appeared together at once, except on lists of video game legends. And, surely, in the dreams of some gamers. They would certainly make a peculiar group: a mustachioed plumber, a fearless archeologist, a lightning-fast hedgehog, a warrior and a princess, a monkey in a tie, a marsupial in jeans and a strange yellow rodent. Outlandish, to those unfamiliar with them. But for those who know of their existence, these creatures are global icons.

Obviously, Escape from Ever After owes an awful lot to Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Hell, even the opening splash screen where the characters are lined up is basically a one-to-one recreation of the famous Nintendo title. It's like they ambled into Nintendo, stole Paper Mario, realised they couldn't sell it like that and quickly learned origami so they could toss some new characters in. A bit of paint later, and voila, new Paper Mario game...er, I mean, new game.

The big new mechanic for this title is that instead of Zone Shots from Mario Tennis Aces, you can equip each character with a different racket, similar to how you can choose between a range of vehicles in Mario Kart. Every racket features a different special ability that you can charge up by rallying back and forth. When the gauge is full, you can unleash a Fever Shot to potentially devastating results.

But while most of these characters look like Easter eggs, Yoshi appears to be a major part of the plot. We see Toad's reaction to a dinosaur randomly joining the team, and the teaser ends with Yoshi (now babysitting Baby Mario and Baby Luigi) facing off against an actual dinosaur, presumably a nod to Super Mario Odyssey. We don't know how that will end up, but the two clearly aren't part of the same species.

The Donkey Kong Country Returns HD free update is out today and adds Dixie Kong as a playable character along with her helicopter hair spin. It also adds a Turbo Attack mode which essentially turns every level into a speedrun challenge. Finally, a free Switch 2 upgrade will give the game better resolution, improved visuals, and faster load times. It'll also include support for GameShare so two players can play local coop on separate devices using only one copy of the game.