Self-made misconceptions that you believed about games

[Pokun]

Yes and Donald Duck's last name is no doubt Duck as proved by countless Carl Barks comics. I think Miyamoto misunderstood this.
Speaking about Roger Rabbit that is also a brilliant example of meta-work where toon characters work like actors in animated films. Another is Wreckit Ralph where game characters go and socialize with each other between work, and even visit each other's game machines. I think Smash Bros series is maybe the best game example as it's more than a crossover fighting game, though the game characters are plush toys or trophies coming to life fighting each other. I really love this concept.


DRW, I don't understand where you want this discussion to go. I see little point in trying to disprove my already vague guesses with other equally vague guesses, and quibbling over my choice of words here and there. If you bought some official statement from Nintendo or other official source into light, it would be another thing though.

Brawl in the Family made a funny point, but I really don't believe it to be like that in the canon. Game characters doesn't age the same way as we do or Mario would have aged as well, there's no telling when in time what game takes place. I think Cranky is still the same old Cranky as in DKC1.


Edit: OK that English article about Mario's family name was just confusing and not very convincing so I found the Japanese article about the matter, and it seems the last name is indeed confirmed to be "Mario" by Miyamoto in 2015 during the 30th anniversary celebration, despite what they had said earlier. So I guess it's officially Mario Mario and Luigi Mario now.

Oh and about the stork, I don't get why DRW don't like the stork in Yoshi Island? Storks in stories don't carry mythological characters, but perfectly normal babies.

[dr_sloppy]

As a 7-8 year old kid at the time, I thought that the military captives one get to see right before and after a stage in Green Beret, actually were enslaved women who were forced to sit down knitting or something like that. An abuse of women, I found it to be.

I couldn't read English at the time, and the somewhat detail poor state of games back then at times led my imagination into going haywire.

Edit:
For quite some time, a friend of mine and I totally misunderstood the time counter in SMB; we read 'TIME' to mean 'hour' and hence figured that it meant that those poor plumbers would have to travel for days and weeks in order to clear a single level. The fact that 'TIME' translates as 'hour' and not 'hours' made us scratch our heads a wee bit, though. As we got to play more games it eventually dawned on us that we had it all wrong.

[TOUKO]

Otherwise there weren't much justified reasons to use a 65816 as the SFC's CPU

You forgot price(even in 90, the 68k was very expensive compared to 65xxx .) and customisation, the 68k customisation was not allowed by motorola until 92/93(more or less when the asic began to appear) .
And with a little effort, ricoh could easily have doubled the CPU frequency with a one phase design, without changing anything(same RAM/ROM),like hudson did with the pcengine CPU .

FM synthesis sounded much more high tech than the Waveform Memory technique (whatever they called it BiTD) used in the PCE so the sound in PCE sucked!

Because the PCE sound chip was used like a PSG, with basic wave (sinus,sawtooth,triangle), and not often complex ones, mainly in early games .
If you treat it like a PSG, it will sound like a PSG .

You can hear some PCE cover :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHcwt5Oh6O4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFRwRi1Zm-o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mumE3EWRW2w

The compo's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/fragmare/videos

[psycopathicteen]

Oh and about the stork, I don't get why DRW don't like the stork in Yoshi Island? Storks in stories don't carry mythological characters, but perfectly normal babies

Storks use to deliver babies from prostitutes before contraception was invented.

You forgot price(even in 90, the 68k was very expensive compared to 65xxx .) and customisation, the 68k customisation was not allowed by motorola until 92/93(more or less when the asic began to appear) .
And with a little effort, ricoh could easily have doubled the CPU frequency with a one phase design, without changing anything(same RAM/ROM),like hudson did with the pcengine CPU.

There's just so many memory speed optimizations Ricoh could've made. They could've speeded the chip up during dummy cycles, and they could've ignored the DRAM refresh cycle while the CPU wasn't trying to access it.

[DRW]

Oh and about the stork, I don't get why DRW don't like the stork in Yoshi Island? Storks in stories don't carry mythological characters, but perfectly normal babies.

Yes, but only in fairy tale worlds. This clashes with the idea of Mario being a regular guy from our world, an Italian living in Brooklyn.

It's not really a canon issue because that backstory was never in the games themselves. And with Nintendo establishing New Donk City, the franchise has basically cut all connections to our real world. And even before, Mario was established as being a native Mushroom Kingdom resident who, at best, might have lived in our world for a while.

But that's exactly what I don't like about this. I liked the idea of Mario being a regular guy from our world. The stork in "Yoshi's Island" was the first thing that I encountered that clashed with this world view. Up until "Super Mario World", Mario's commonly-known backstory was still possible. With "Yoshi's Island", this was destroyed.

And then, one after another, they cemented it more and more:

But "Donkey Kong" plays at a construction site, not in a fairytale kingdom.
--> They introduced Big City/Big Ape City from the Game Boy "Donkey Kong" games, so the old arcade games play there.

But Mario is an Italian.
--> They introduced fantasy creatures that talk with real world accents, so his Italian accent doesn't imply a connection to our world.

And the last, biggest "fuck you": Now, with "Super Mario Odyssey", they basically tell you: "You know what? Mario is not even a regular human. His big nose and head, his strangely-formed mustache? That's not just the drawing style. His world (the fantasy world) does have realistic-looking people. But Mario himself isn't even one of them. He's from some hobbit-like sub species."

Mario is not like Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" anymore. He's just another one of the Wonderland characters himself.

[tepples]

And if you need an example of what fans believed before Yoshi's Island, based on evidence from previous appearances of Earth in Mario deuterocanon (such as The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario Is Missing, and Mario's Time Machine): The AoSMB3 episode "Mush-Rumors" depicts a situation resembling that of National Lampoon's Vacation. Tourists from Wichita, Kansas, were heading for AoSMB3's Walley World analogue but took a wrong turn and entered a pipe to the Mushroom World.


Norman's nose makes Mario's look plausible

Will the sequel be called Super Mario Videopac in Europe? Worse yet, after the Odyssey and the Odyssey2/Videopac, the third Philips/Magnavox game console was the CD-i. Is Nintendo trying to prepare us for a Hotel Mario reboot?

[TOUKO]

There's just so many memory speed optimizations Ricoh could've made. They could've speeded the chip up during dummy cycles, and they could've ignored the DRAM refresh cycle while the CPU wasn't trying to access it.

Yes all those mistakes let me think that nintendo definitely wanted the most cheapest system to sold and nintendo for me has thinked of CPU upgrade as a part of the system for cheap .
This is why he don't have put any R&D in the CPU like they did with the SA-1 .

[93143]

To be fair, the CPU in the SNES was in fact a custom job with a neat multi-channel DMA/HDMA unit and some on-die timing logic. But they certainly did a 180 on their CPU strategy for the N64...

It's kinda interesting to look at the philosophical changes from console to console. With the Famicom, they knocked it out of the park, so the Super Famicom was fairly similar, though with a bunch of programmer QoL improvements and the pointless overscan removed by default. But the glaring weakness of the FC (the palette) was one of the SFC's strongest features and the logo reflected this. The major weakness of the Super Famicom was the CPU, and what bugged Miyamoto was the poor 3D, so the N64 was given a monstrous CPU that led to a shogi game being one of just three launch titles, and the graphics chip was sourced from SGI. The major weaknesses of the N64 were the crabbed, bottlenecked memory architecture and difficulty of optimizing for the graphics chip, so the Gamecube had lots of fast, low-latency 1T-SRAM, and the chipset was designed for maximum ease of use. It also had dedicated audio, the lack of which had hurt the N64, with a ton of ARAM accessible via DMA, the lack of which had hurt the SFC. The cartridge format doesn't seem to have bothered them as much; while the GC did have discs, it used proprietary miniature discs in a drive designed for high-speed access with minimal latency - basically an attempt to get some of the benefits of both carts and discs, while completely disregarding music and movie playback.

Apparently they were satisfied with the Gamecube, because then the Wii happened...

[Pokun]

But then with the failure of Wii U they decided to go a different route again with the Switch I guess.
The portable consoles are also interesting, I guess the Game Boy is heavily inspired by the Famicom but has some improvements that later made it into the Super Famicom (like ditching CHR-ROM, and including scanline counters). I don't know much about the GBA and later portable systems but it seems the GBA is the last Nintendo console that benefits from assembly programming, and the DS is the last to use classic things like hardware sprites. Feels a bit sad.

Oh and about the stork, I don't get why DRW don't like the stork in Yoshi Island? Storks in stories don't carry mythological characters, but perfectly normal babies.

Yes, but only in fairy tale worlds. This clashes with the idea of Mario being a regular guy from our world, an Italian living in Brooklyn.

It's not really a canon issue because that backstory was never in the games themselves. And with Nintendo establishing New Donk City, the franchise has basically cut all connections to our real world. And even before, Mario was established as being a native Mushroom Kingdom resident who, at best, might have lived in our world for a while.

But that's exactly what I don't like about this. I liked the idea of Mario being a regular guy from our world. The stork in "Yoshi's Island" was the first thing that I encountered that clashed with this world view. Up until "Super Mario World", Mario's commonly-known backstory was still possible. With "Yoshi's Island", this was destroyed.

And then, one after another, they cemented it more and more:

But "Donkey Kong" plays at a construction site, not in a fairytale kingdom.
--> They introduced Big City/Big Ape City from the Game Boy "Donkey Kong" games, so the old arcade games play there.

But Mario is an Italian.
--> They introduced fantasy creatures that talk with real world accents, so his Italian accent doesn't imply a connection to our world.

And the last, biggest "fuck you": Now, with "Super Mario Odyssey", they basically tell you: "You know what? Mario is not even a regular human. His big nose and head, his strangely-formed mustache? That's not just the drawing style. His world (the fantasy world) does have realistic-looking people. But Mario himself isn't even one of them. He's from some hobbit-like sub species."

Mario is not like Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" anymore. He's just another one of the Wonderland characters himself.

OK now I see what you mean. I remember when I first beat Yoshi Island I also thought it clashed a bit with Mario being from another world in the SMB backstory. But I figured that backstory was probably the interpretation of mostly American made media like the Voyager comics and Mario Super Show (the manual doesn't even mention Mario being from another world in neither Japanese nor English versions), although a similar concept shows up in that Japanese animated Mario movie though it's not canon. I think these American media and possibly NOA made up their own version of Mario and as more and more Mario games was released (especially games about his background like Yoshi Island) it was bound to clash with the canon Mario someday.
The same can be said about Zelda series, Link has a very defined personality in the voyager comics and animated series while in the games Nintendo have always been very careful about not giving him too much personality, and I prefer they'd keep it like that.

I don't mind if the story clashes with those silly shows, but I don't like when new Mario games clashes with old Mario games too much. For example Koopa only having one son in the current storyline despite having 7 kids in earlier canon.

The Mario series is taking place in many very different worlds all the time, I don't think New Donk City is special at all. It's just a world that obviously represents the atmosphere and spirit of the earliest Mario games like Donkey Kong, that was a redesigned Radar Scope with an American audience in mind. Mario is no hobit, his big nose is just about art style. The inhabitants of New Donk City are just drawn in a way to fit the atmosphere of their world which may clash a bit with Mario's current art style, making him stick out when visiting that world. But every world in Odyssey has their unique features while Mario always remains the same, I don't see a problem with that. Actually New Donk City makes me highly nostalgic. I kind of hope Donkey Kong (preferably with the old drawing style), Jr (the young ape) and Pauline will make an appearance there to complete the feeling.

[DRW]

But I figured that backstory was probably the interpretation of mostly American made media

The problem is that this backstory was not in just one work, but in several that don't have anything to do with each other. If both, the TV show and the unrelated movie depict Mario like that, you think it's the official storyline. Those educational games ("Mario is Missing", Mario's Time Machine") refer to Italy and Brooklyn as well.

Also, isn't "Italian plumber" something that really was a thing? Well, obviously, he's not an Italian anymore.

Link has a very defined personality in the voyager comics and animated series while in the games Nintendo have always been very careful about not giving him too much personality, and I prefer they'd keep it like that.

That's different. That's just his personality in this specific TV series. They didn't make Link like that in various unrelated products. (The comics are a tie-in to the TV show.) Unlike Mario whose Brooklyn home was carried over into the movie, despite the movie doing his own thing in every other instance.

The inhabitants of New Donk City are just drawn in a way to fit the atmosphere of their world which may clash a bit with Mario's current art style, making him stick out when visiting that world.

The thing is: Up until now, it looked like Mario is a regular human being and that his unrealistic proportions are simply the way the world is drawn.
I.e. if there was ever a cameo of Danny DeVito in the games, he would look vey similar to Mario.

But now we know that it's not just the drawing style: Humans like us actually exist as a separate species inside the "Super Mario" canon. Pauline is a regular human while Mario, Luigi and Princess Toadstool are of a separate species. Not only is Mario smaller than other people. All of the Mushroom Kingdom humans are merely a bit above waist height of regular people.
Danny DeVito inside the "Mario" universe would still look realistic next to a comic book Mario and he would be quite taller than Mario.

Also, this contradicts the old canon: In the old games, the size difference between Mario and Pauline was no bigger than the size difference between Mario and Princess Toadstool. But now, Mario is merely half as tall as Pauline, which means even Luigi would be smaller than Pauline.

I kind of hope Donkey Kong (preferably with the old drawing style), Jr (the young ape) and Pauline will make an appearance there to complete the feeling.

I doubt Donkey Kong will actually appear. And if he does, it will be the new one. But Pauline is already visible in the trailer.

[Pokun]

But I figured that backstory was probably the interpretation of mostly American made media

The problem is that this backstory was not in just one work, but in several that don't have anything to do with each other. If both, the TV show and the unrelated movie depict Mario like that, you think it's the official storyline. Those educational games ("Mario is Missing", Mario's Time Machine") refer to Italy and Brooklyn as well.

Because the American media inspired each other and the view they made up became a common in view of the Mario world, especially in the west. Even Charles Martinet's idea of Mario is also probably similar to that view, judging by some comments he made acting as Mario (not in any in-game lines though). Nintendo canonized some things that NOA came up with (like the names Mario and Luigi) but ignored other things. Mario being a plumber is canon, but I'm not sure about Mario being from Brooklyn ever was, or even what media came up with that idea.
Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine are both part of those American media I was talking about, I don't think they should be treated any differently just because they are games. They are not any more canon than Mario Super Show or the Hollywood movie. Nintendo licensed out their characters much more easily back then, now they wouldn't even let Mario appear in Wreck it Ralph without a hefty sum.

Link has a very defined personality in the voyager comics and animated series while in the games Nintendo have always been very careful about not giving him too much personality, and I prefer they'd keep it like that.

That's different. That's just his personality in this specific TV series. They didn't make Link like that in various unrelated products. (The comics are a tie-in to the TV show.) Unlike Mario whose Brooklyn home was carried over into the movie, despite the movie doing his own thing in every other instance.

Link had a similar personality (bad manners, sarcastic etc) in about all American made media of the time that I remember, including the Choose your own Adventure book. But that might also been a tie-in. But you are right that Link's personality was a bad example, of course they had to give him a personality or it would be hard to make any non-game fictional work with him since they can't have him being silent like an RPG hero (all Japanese Zelda manga also give him various personalities). What I meant was that American media painted up a view of the Zelda world similar that to what they did with Mario. This view however soon clashed with the games and was quickly forgotten, unlike the Mario view which still lingers despite the many conflicts with games like Yoshi Island.

The inhabitants of New Donk City are just drawn in a way to fit the atmosphere of their world which may clash a bit with Mario's current art style, making him stick out when visiting that world.

The thing is: Up until now, it looked like Mario is a regular human being and that his unrealistic proportions are simply the way the world is drawn.
I.e. if there was ever a cameo of Danny DeVito in the games, he would look vey similar to Mario.

But now we know that it's not just the drawing style: Humans like us actually exist as a separate species inside the "Super Mario" canon. Pauline is a regular human while Mario, Luigi and Princess Toadstool are of a separate species. Not only is Mario smaller than other people. All of the Mushroom Kingdom humans are merely a bit above waist height of regular people.
Danny DeVito inside the "Mario" universe would still look realistic next to a comic book Mario and he would be quite taller than Mario.

Also, this contradicts the old canon: In the old games, the size difference between Mario and Pauline was no bigger than the size difference between Mario and Princess Toadstool. But now, Mario is merely half as tall as Pauline, which means even Luigi would be smaller than Pauline.

I still think that Mario is a regular human being (not 100% sure but probably from the Mushroom Kingdom, the same race as Peach) and that his unrealistic proportions are simply the way the world is drawn. His proportions already is very different from Peach's, so that he's smaller than Pauline isn't surprising at all. Besides Pauline's modern design comes from the Mario vs Donkey Kong series.

I doubt Donkey Kong will actually appear. And if he does, it will be the new one. But Pauline is already visible in the trailer.

Yeah you are right, if Donkey shows up it will probably be the new Donkey, but he doesn't really fit this world so I guess not. Yeah Pauline is the one singing "Jump Up, Superstar!".

[DRW]

Because the American media inspired each other and the view they made up became a common in view of the Mario world, especially in the west.

That's why I think they should have included it into canon since the view was so widespread.

Even if we just look at the canon games, it fits into the overall atmosphere:

"Donkey Kong" is a shoutout to "King Kong" where a gorilla kidnaps a blond woman and climbs a building with her. And "King Kong" plays in New York.

Mario himself sticks out like a sore thumb in the "Super Mario Bros." games:
It's a fairytale world with royalty and antropomorphic turtles and mushrooms. Characters have names like Princess Peach Toadstool or Bowser Koopa.
And then you have Mario and Luigi: Two guys with realistic names, wearing realistic present-day working clothes instead of anything that would fit into the fairytale world of the Mushroom Kingdom.
And "Super Mario Bros." is somewhat a shoutout to "Alice in Wonderland", a game about a person from the regular world getting into a fantasy world.

O.k., in later games they included all the modern things that we have in our world as well. So Mario's clothes we not so out-of-place anymore when you know that the Mushroom Kingdom has planes, metropolises and all modern things as well.

The fact that the Brooklyn storyline comes from the American market shouldn't have stopped them. This is not Capcom we're talking about, where the American branch works completely for itself. This is Nintendo, a company run by a family. The guy in charge of the American market was the son-in-law of the Japanese boss. "Donkey Kong" only got created in the first place because the American market needed a new game.

They had the right to create their own official canon. I just think that they should have incorporated Mario's American backstory into the canon.

I still think that Mario is a regular human being (not 100% sure but probably from the Mushroom Kingdom, the same race as Peach) and that his unrealistic proportions are simply the way the world is drawn. His proportions already is very different from Peach's, so that he's smaller than Pauline isn't surprising at all.

He looks different from the Princess because she's a woman. Of course they'll draw female characters cuter. That's like with "The Flinstones" or "Popeye".

Also, it's not about the fact that he's smaller than Pauline, but that he's only half as tall as her now.
In older games, Mario was a bit smaller than the other characters because he's simply quite short. Luigi was basicaly as tall as Princess Toadstool. So, Pauline and the Princess would have been of similar height.
Today, Pauline and all the other New Donk City inhabitants tower over Mario (while Bowser and the Princess still seem to be the same size relative to Mario):

That's why I think it's not just the drawing style but an actual difference. Just like there are gorillas like Donkey and chimpanzees like Diddy and just like there are regular Koopa Troopers and the big versions that Bowser belongs to, there are Mushroom Kingdom inhabitants where the men have huge heads and round noses and are probably one meter in size. And there are the New Donk City inhabitants who are basically supposed to be people like us. But this wasn't established until now. Until now, there was no indication that Pauline would be almost twice as tall as Princess Toadstool.

(Some people think that Mario in "Super Mario Odyssey" is simply in his small, non-Super form. But this cannot be the explanation because in this case, are Bowser and the Princess in small form as well? The trailer doesn't look like Bowser is a huge Godzilla-like giant to Mario in this game. And as I said, the size difference between the Princess and Pauline is also totally off here.)

Besides Pauline's modern design comes from the Mario vs Donkey Kong series.

Actually, from the Game Boy "Donkey Kong" game from 1994.

[Pokun]

I understand that you didn't like Nintendo's choices, but if I were Miyamoto I wouldn't like that other people kept making up things about my characters on their own. Nintendo accepted some things from NOA, maybe partly because it was designed for an American market in the first place it, but I understand if there's a limit on how much you want people to take your work in an other direction than what you intended it to go in. And now Mario is a game icon, much bigger than the Popeye inspired comic character hero in a redesigned Radar Scope cabinet that he started as. It's not all just about America anymore.

OK that picture makes your point much more clear. Pauline's height has increased to make her fit with the rest of the characters in that world, so it's not comparable to Princess Toadstool. But do you really think Mario should've been drawn like that as well just so he can fit in better in the world? I think the fans wouldn't accept such a dramatic change.

I think Mario's small form is generally thought of as his normal height no? The Super Mario form is bigger than normal (on the other hand in the New Super Mario Bros games he looks normal in his Super form and super deformed in his small Mario form).

Anyway, your points are valid in a way and makes sense, but still IMHO it's all still just nitpicking about details, and it can all be hand waved like always in Mario games (Mario games shouldn't be taken seriously bla bla bla). I still think it's all about the style of the game and the different worlds it takes place in.

[DRW]

I understand that you didn't like Nintendo's choices, but if I were Miyamoto I wouldn't like that other people kept making up things about my characters on their own.

But Miyamoto created Mario as the everyman. "Donkey Kong" was created as a shoutout to "King Kong" and "Super Mario Bros." as a shoutout to "Alice in Wonderland". Mario got a real world name, a nationality and a real world job.

If Miyamoto didn't like the American background story, why didn't he invent its own, but where Mario is still from the real world? Why did Mario, the Italian plumber, have to become a Mushroom Kingdom native who was brought by the stork?

Why did Mario need a prequel with his baby self at all? If the games aren't about story, why do we need a game dealing specifically with Mario's backstory and with the start of his rivalry with Bowser (even making him some prophesized messiah type)?
Just keep making the games as you did for 15 years and just leave Mario's pre-"Super Mario Bros. 1" days pretty much unmentioned.

But do you really think Mario should've been drawn like that as well just so he can fit in better in the world?

No, in the contrary: I think that the New Donk City residents shouldn't have been designed in a realistic style.
Mario should be a regular human in his universe. The way Mario, Luigi and the Princess look like, that should be what homo sapiens looks like inside this world.

You can still create a modern city with skyscrapers, taxis and people in suits. But the people themselves should still be shown in the same style as Mario and the others.
Just because you have a big city instead of a mushroom-based kingdom doesn't mean that the characters in it have to look photo-realistic. Including realistically-looking characters into the comic book world simply means that Mario is actually a different species from the realistic people.

When celebrities cameo on "The Simpsons" or when the Simpsons visit New York, you don't see these non-Springfield characters with actual skin colors and realistic proportions. They are drawn in "Simpsons"-style because that's the way humans look like in that world.

I think Mario's small form is generally thought of as his normal height no? The Super Mario form is bigger than normal (on the other hand in the New Super Mario Bros games he looks normal in his Super form and super deformed in his small Mario form).

That was always pretty inconsistent.

In the old games, small Mario was called Mario and big Mario was called Super Mario. But all the other elements in the world are only to scale when he's big: A Koopa Trooper is a giant to small Mario, but a regular turtle to big Mario.

O.k., so maybe using a Super Mushroom is the defeault status for every Mushroom Kingdom inhabitant since it makes you stronger and protects you from harm. It's not your birth status, but a "medicine" that all of them use for most of the time.
Fair enough.

Now, enemies like Bowser and the Goombas obviously don't have a small and big form. Attacking Bowser doesn't make him small before another attack finishes him off. This only works for humans and mushrooms.
And still, when they gave official heights for the characters (like Mario being 1.55 m or so), they did so with the assumption that Mario is only slightly smaller than Bowser which means: Mario's official height is based on his super form, implying that this is his default size.
The same is true for "Yoshi's Island": Baby Mario's size relative to everything else implies the super form.

With Wario, it is even more clear: Big Wario is the regular Wario. And the small Wario is literally called Chibi Wario/Small Wario, complete with a ridiculous haircut and no hat.

(Fun fact: The German manual for "Super Mario Land 2" mentions Mario knowing Wario from his old days in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, this has no weight at all. And even the English manual only mentions their childhood days, but not the location.)

"Super Mario 64" is pretty strange as well: Bowser and the Goombas look like Mario and the Princess are in his small form. But the buildings are to scale to this small Mario.

So, can't we just declare "Super Mario World" as the big finale of the classic canon? That was the last game that still made sense. Let's put all the other games into a new continuity or several continuities.

Anyway, your points are valid in a way and makes sense, but still IMHO it's all still just nitpicking about details, and it can all be hand waved like always in Mario games (Mario games shouldn't be taken seriously bla bla bla). I still think it's all about the style of the game and the different worlds it takes place in.

Of course, when it's about actually playing the games, it doesn't matter. I don't sit there in front of my NES and think about the plot when I play it.
But it's an interesting thing for meta discussions like this one here.
If story shouldn't be analyzed, they shouldn't have invented any to begin with.

[tepples]

I thought a cut scene in Super Mario Galaxy already explained it: The universe goes through multiple generations, occasionally collapsing into a supermassive black hole and being reborn as a new canon.

(But then again, this might be full of crap. The cut scene appears 25% of the way through the game, after completing Bowser's Galaxy Reactor. I didn't make it past the game's 25% point before real life intervened.)