Tag Archives: toad

[NYCC 2013] Hands-on with Super Mario 3D World

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A new 3D Mario platformer is upon us, and this time it’s taking after the 3DS outing. Super Mario 3D World expands on the foundation of the previous 3D Land game and adds two more characters in the fray, Peach and Toad. Mario is your standard character. Luigi can jump higher than his brother (with the trade-off being low traction). Peach can float for across the air a la Super Mario Bros. 2. And Toad can run faster that any other character. Gameplay can be done on both the TV and on the Gamepad’s screen.

Hit the jump to see gameplay of World 4-2 with James.

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With Peach Playable In Super Mario 3D World, What’s Bowser Planning? Is He Even The Main Villain?

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Is he even the villain

After one of Nintendo’s Direct Presentations earlier this summer, one of the smaller surprises of the broadcast was Super Mario 3D World‘s revelation of Peach as a playable character. While she’s been playable in other Mario games, like Mario Kart, Mario Golf, Mario Party, and a couple of the RPG games, you don’t really see her taking center stage as a playable character in a straight-up platformer. Her first foray as a playable character started way back in our version of Super Mario Bros. 2. What she lacked in turnip-pulling strength, she made up for in her ability to float. In more recent times, she starred in her own game, Super Princess Peach, which flipped the script and put her in charge of the saving duty.

So now Peach is playable once again in a mainline Mario platformer. Awesome. But what about Bowser? What’s he scheming in all of this? Is he even involved in any of this? Let’s theorize on this a bit.

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Art of the Week: Feature 4 – robotpencil

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You may have remembered some time last year that his artwork was featured on Kotaku. Well since then, robotpencil, real name Anthony Jones, has seen his popularity sky rocket and is reaping the benefits of his exposure since now he works at Sony Santa Monica. He is concept artist with them and is working on a few projects, including a graphic novel. His main base of operations is his website, but he is also on deviantART as well. What helped his popularity to grow was his interpretations of the Mario crew that the was shown in the initial Kotaku feature. It was reminiscent of the fan film There Will Be Brawl (and the movie that inspired it, There Will Be Blood). The manner in which he handled the subject matter made it stand out amongst other realistic reinterpretations of the Mario cast, in which a lot of them felt more like parodies of GTA that tried to hard, thus became distracting. Here, Mr. Jones interprets them in a manner that is believable. We can believe that Mario is a tough ol’ bastard, that Luigi is down on his luck, that Toad is a drug pusher, and that Peach has done more “work” outside being a princess. Many on dA are proud of what he has accomplished since his feature and wish him the best of luck.

After the break, you can see a small sample of his other fanart work below. But I’m only scraping the tip of the iceberg as I’m only showing what I can show, in keeping with the theme of the blog. He has a lot more amazing original artwork as well that deserves just as much attention. See it all on his website and deviantART gallery.

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