Screamin’ J. Plant 🇨🇦

You may recall that I was working on an update to my own Nintendo-themed resource pack. Unfortunately My hard-drive got fried and I lost all that work and need to start over. Fortunately, I was documenting all the major changes in Bluesky posts so I'll refer back to that when my life calms down.

Minecraft's Alex character dressed in a suit of copper armour, which in the Mario Mash-up pack looks like a doctor's uniform (Dr. Mario's specifically.)

All of the armour sets in the Mario Mash-up Pack are based on powerup suits, but for the new copper armour I guess they decided to do something a bit different. This new set lets you dress as Dr. Mario. It's weird but I kind of dig it. Better than some of the other armour sets they have.

Copper golems in the Mario Mash-Up pack.

Artwork of a Gearmo character from Super Mario Galaxy.

Slightly rusted Gearmo copper golem.

The copper golems however are based on the Gearmo from Super Mario Galaxy. That makes perfect sense to me.

An enemy from a past update to the Mario Mash-up Pack, depicting the Stray as a blue drybones with what I am assured is a Super Gem from Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker on its chest. This doesn't seem to be a reference to any existing Mario enemy. Image courtesy of Weird Mario Enemies on Tumblr.

An evoker as depicted in the Mario Mash-up Pack. It's a turquoise magikoopa without a pointy hat (the witches by comparison are magikoopas WITH pointy hats) and oh yes it inexplicably has sunglasses. Honestly some of these choices feel like a mod made by a kid. Image courtesy of the Weird Mario Enemies Tumblr.

They did not however update the spawn eggs. Which is a shame, because Mario-themed spawn eggs would be neat, though doing so would force them to confront some of their dumbest choices of the past, like Blue Turnip Drybones or Sunglasses Magikoopa With Shower Cap.

3x3 painting of Poochy in Minecraft's Mario Mash-up pack.

All of the music discs in the Mario Mash-up pack. They all look like coloured music notes. Specifically I think it's the music notes from Super Mario Galaxy, but I'm not 100% certain on that.

They did go back and update the "Dennis" painting and the new music disc that they missed in the last update. The painting is that of Poochy, and the music disc is... one of these. I've forgotten already which one is new.

Shelves in the Mario Mash-up Pack. Nothing strikes me as being a reference to anything strictly "Mario" about this.

Copper chests in the Mario Mash-up Pack. They seem to be nothing more than copper versions of the chests that are already in this pack.

Often very late to update after a new version, this time the Minecraft Mario Mash-up pack was very punctual with their update (I noticed a few weeks ago and haven't gotten around to a review. It's not a big one so I'll tack it onto the last thread. Here's a couple things I don't think are references

Which iteration?

YouTube video by pixeltea Luigi's Mansion in the style of Danny Elfman (The Nightmare Before Christmas)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNOL...

Spike dressed as a skeleton, throwing a pumpkin instead of a spike ball.

Pauline and DK as witches. DK’s broom is breaking for some reason. Ninji is dressed as a little winged devil.

Peach dressed in her usual witch outfit, lacking the self-awareness not to put her crown on clumsily over her witch hat.

The full promo image released by Nintendo.

I feel like they could’ve been more creative with costumes than making nearly 40% of them witches, but it’s nice to see DK and Pauline being included, and I love seeing C-listers like Spike and Ninji in costumes.

A purple-skinned Wario with a screw sticking out of his skull, but wearing a nice suit jacket like he just got out of church.

Nintendo released an updated promotional “Mario X Halloween” image with some new costumed characters, and I gotta say: This zombie/Frankenstein Wario looks a bit too put-together. Wario has looked worse at some job interviews than he does here.

Oooh. I considered Rhino in my predictions. Should’ve stuck with my gut.

Yeah it looks like the used the extra trigger buttons to allow for two different intensities of FLUDD spray. I think the ideal solution given the default hardware would be to let you hold one of the extra triggers to enable gyro-based analogue input.

I think they did something like it in 3D Allstars, but I’ll have to look it up.

I think there are some half-measure solutions that could work well. Like letting you use the extra L trigger in place of clicking the gamecube trigger, or clicking a stick in to do a drizzle. Wouldn’t give you the full spectrum of analog control, but it would give you a range of options.

Has Nintendo done anything on Gamecube Classics Luigi’s Mansion to accommodate the lack of analog triggers on Switch 2, or do I need to get a Gamecube controller to do a powerful blast versus a drizzle of water/ice/fire?

it's weird to me that Archie Comics apparently still has a regular comic book sized monthly issues business going on behind their booming "digests sold by the checkout business"
has anybody ever met anyone who has read a regular sized Archie?

My other big complaint with the game is that it isn’t really possible to unlock all the abilities in such a way that there’s any game left to utilize those abilities in.

If the hard mode repopulates defeated monsters after a few days like the older games, then it might be worth replaying for me. Really though what I need is for Bingo Battle to return since Dandori multiplayer is too focused on out-optimizing than out-witting your opponent.

I have to assume Jax will be a rabbit, Gangle maybe a cat like Blanca, and I’ll guess Kinger is an Octopus. If Cain were on the table, I’d guess alligator.

Have you chosen the species for the other characters? I kind of want to predict them, but don’t want to influence you.

You kids like Sabrina Carpenter? well I know about another carpenter who had some strange things to say, and did some miraculous works, and had a black cat named Salem Saberhagen, and she- ah sorry, not Carpenter, let me start over.

I interpreted it in Bananza as the animals and rocks talking in their own languages, and we can hear Pauline because she speaks human language. I think one of the loading screen tips say that Pauline’s “perfect pitch” allows her to understand these languages.

It’s much easier for a team to convince an exec to localize a game in 5 more languages if it only means 5 more actors, 5 more studio bookings, etc; than if your game has 50 characters and suddenly 5 languages turns into 250 actors.

I meant that what to us feels like lazy implementation of voice acting, is actually a very intentional game-scope decision to remove barriers in translating a game to more languages. Not to say greed and a lack of ambition aren’t factors here too, but voice acting x localizing is a ballooning cost.

Left: close-up photo of a customer parking sign using a clean, simple Calibri or similar font Right: distant photo, zoomed in to show how the phone has AI-upscaled the image. Going by this it would appear that the customer parking text uses a childish handwritten font.

To whomever is designing modern phone cameras to automatically AI-upscale photos to make their customers feel like they’re taking better photos than they actually are: I’d prefer a blurry or pixelated image to whatever this is.

(Left: Close-up photo of sign, Right: AI-upscale of distant photo)

And notably, the Pauline’s “Bananza” songs are lyrically simple to eliminate the need to localize, or at least streamline the process by not requiring a full localization of each song.

Nintendo’s approach to voice acting recently has been very focused on prioritizing keeping costs down for localization. Mario Wonder and Donkey Kong Bananza both confine their voice acting to a single character which makes the prospect of localizing to many languages a lot lore manageable.

This is why Aardman mixes all their clay colours on-set.

The orange colours down below are the colours that match outdoors, though slightly different colours are required when you’re in the shade vs the sun. And any of these matches look equally wrong when not viewed in their designated environment.

My job in a nutshell.