Holy shit you guys. Apparently 343, the company known for making the Halo games after Bungie moved on to Destiny, is working on a remake of Super Mario 64 called Super Mario 64 Anniversary and it looks sick as frigging hell. In fact, it might be the raddest iteration of Mario ever made.
According to a representative from 343 who addressed the leak this morning, the company is working to “bring Super Mario 64 to the modern era of gaming” by updating the look and feel while “maintaining the design that made it popular in the first place.” Basically, this thing is a whole love letter to the original masterpiece and you can practically taste the smooches all over the envelope.
So how did 343 bring this classic to 2020? Well first of all, they made our boy Mario jacked as all fuck. He’s packing absolute heat in this version of the game, which we have to imagine Miyamoto would have loved to include in the original release, but was limited by the technical abilities of the Nintendo 64.
Mario actually looks like a real man now, which is important because looking back on the old game, he actually looked like dog shit. Like his nose was way too big and he was too small and his head was giant. That makes no sense because people don’t look like that. Now when I look at Mario, I get turned on. Mario is hot, the way Nintendo would have wanted him to be. He’s a sexy plumber and he’s epic.
The environment is also finally textured. 343 threw a ton of textures onto all the surfaces of pretty much everything, making it look so real. It’s crazy, I actually loved Super Mario 64 back in the day but now when I look at it compared to 343’s remake it looks so… plain. It’s almost embarrassing how your eye is forced to focus on Mario while playing because of the simplistic environments. Now your eyes can feast upon hundreds of textures in every single view of the game, never once forcing you to focus on just some boring red guy.
But most importantly, 343 blasted the contrast up in Super Mario 64 Anniversary and thank god. If you look around in real life, you’ll quickly notice that it has super high contrast. That’s why upping the contrast in video games makes them look so much more realistic. Thank you, 343, for so dramatically increasing the contrast of Super Mario 64 Anniversary, finally bringing Super Mario 64 into the modern age of gaming.
I guess all I can say is this: as soon as I get my grubby sausage fingers onto a copy of Super Mario 64 Anniversary, I am beyond excited to take every copy I own of the original, and melt them in a big pile in my oven. Because those will be the Super Mario 64s of the past. And 343 is holding our hand as we step head first into the future. The future of this love letter to the original.
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