+ The tropical theme visuals and soundtrack are spot on. + Great raw platforming on the secret stages which feel like a 3D World prototype. + Unique and well implemented FLUDD gameplay. Sunshine (75%): The good: + A true evolution of SM64, incredibly slick and very playable.

Feels out of place in a collection that should have instead included Galaxy 2. Unpleasant to play due to the clumsy and imprecise gameplay. The bad: - Has aged poorly like many early 3D games. + Great variety and ambition for its time. My summary of each: Super Mario 64 (60%): The good: + An excellent showcase of the 3D Mario foundation. It’s a poor look considering how well emulated the games are. The presentation is uncharacteristically bland, with a menu that looks like a cheap Android system. It’s wild how, whenever these musical bits would pop up, I could almost feel their respective generations’ controllers in my hands, like some sort of dorky phantom limb.38h PlayedA strong 80% for the overall package. And the scene-stealing nihilistic Luma is fittingly paired with the Super Mario Galaxy theme. Our brief glimpse at a herd of Yoshi (Yoshis?) out in the wild is accompanied by the familiar notes from Yoshi’s Island. 3 shines when Mario gets his Tanooki power-up during the climactic battle. Throughout the Mario Movie, we get musical nods to the entirety of the franchise. The first shot of Peach’s Castle was paired with “Inside the Castle Walls,” which took me back to the first time I ever held a Nintendo 64 controller at a pre-launch demo kiosk in a Toys “R” Us and had my mind blown by witnessing the future of 3D gaming. When Mario and Luigi venture down into the sewers of Brooklyn in the opening act, the subterranean melody of World 1-2 from the original game sets the scene. It’s remarkable how immediately transportive composer Brian Tyler’s take on the music of Koji Kondo and the entire Mario franchise is, as well as how the movie uses that magic to great effect. Movie’s Music Is at Its Best When It Celebrates Nintendo’s History While my eyes were darting around every frame of the Mario Movie soaking in every detail from the Punch-Out Pizzeria, to the memorabilia crammed into Mario’s bedroom, to the familiar Kongs packed in the stadium, it was my ears that were the doing the most work when it came to clocking callbacks to Nintendo’s storied history.

But while it’s clear that much of the joy of the Mario Movie will depend on your own history with the franchise, I wasn’t quite prepared for just how nostalgically powerful the incredible generation-spanning music would be, as well as how the wrong song at the wrong time could completely pull me out of the experience. A simple story crammed full with Nintendo Easter eggs and told at the breathless pace commonly found in previous Illumination animated films like Minions, Sing, and The Secret Life of Pets.

Movie was a lot of the things I expected it to be.

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