Spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.
Controls:
- left/right: walk around
- up: ruminate
- down: smoke
About the game:
This is a shot at a collection of ideas I had a few years ago, about looking critically at the universe of Super Mario Bros. in light of the total lack of explicit narrative in the original game in particular. Who are these strange men? What motivates them? By what right do they wreak the havoc they do on this strange place? What do they feel about where they are and what they're doing?
And so, this is one lens through which to look at all that, with Luigi, the second brother, the also-ran, as a complicit onlooker, wandering now through some fractured, rotting liminal place in this strange world, reflecting on it all in scattered fragments.
And suddenly, the wayward image in my head of a space invader and a galaga bug sitting beside
eachother at a bar and talking about how life is short isn't really that far from being a reality!
Very deep, good work!
Oh thank god I finally got through all the text. (No offense, its's brilliant writing but it takes a while to get through)
This is genius, the music is very fitting and feels thoughtful in the best way. The animations and the way Luigi walks are great.
Reminds me of how I sometimes wondered about those games and what was going on.
Also, more recently, "Game Theory" on Youtube. Don't know if you've seen it. He compiled evidence for Mario being a animal-torturing psychopath and Princess Peach getting kidnapped by Bowser on purpose. I swear these games just get better as you get older. xD
Amazing!
My favorite thing is when Luigi has to turn around, and the new screen is the same as the old screen. An obstacle he's on the other side of, now, but to no purpose. An empty journey accomplishing nothing.
How can anyone see so many worlds and stay the same? What sort of person never learns, never changes, never loves?
It's a-you. It was a-always a-you.
I am Luigi.
The music is great too. I haven't even tried Pico's music editor yet, I don't know if I will be able to make a good thing with it.
I can't tell if this is genius, hilarious or shit
good job
Is there a rom or app coming out so I can play this when I'm offline
Update: thanks urbanmonk, I didn't know about pico8 and that it's still in development. I was hoping to play this on my mobile device but it's looks like that's not possible yet?
Update2: PLAYED IT ON MY PC. LOVED IT. COOL IDEA
Hey N8yo, just click the little picture in the top left corner of the webplayer to download the source then just load it up in PICO-8 locally!
Woo, Ennuigi showed up on Rock Paper Shotgun! Trying to talk up PICO 8 a little in the comments; I'm thrilled to see my little thing show up there, but I really hope they'll cover PICO 8 itself some time soon, because it seems like such a natural fit for their general sensibility as a PC gaming site.
don't forget the metafilter metalove: http://www.metafilter.com/151866/Was-it-darkness-or-the-shadow-of-my-brother
I found out about PICO 8 because Ennuigi popped up in a video game FB group I'm subscribed to. I'm pretty sure it's the most famous P8 game right now!
Hey, thanks for plugging pico-8! Another article today on a Japanese site: www.gamespark.jp/article/..
I also saw it show up on my Facebook feed a couple of times among unrelated circles of friends. Woo!
Perhaps I should look at installing some '# of PLAYS' counters..
No problem! Hopefully more folks chatter about it.
I saw the gamespark article but had to make do with Google's translation which was not great. But was nice to see some additional PICO 8 stuff getting attention in any case.
Can I find a text version of this so i can think more clearly on his thoughts and maybe translate them?
This was brilliant dude
if you've got Pico-8 you can click the logo next to the game and download the p8.png and look at the source code.
Wow, first try i didn't realize you could change the scenes, i stayed in the first panel, and i loved it anyway. Great work
This is perfect use of Pico-8, with its smallness. Very funny too. Very well executed of your idea for looking critically at the Mario World. Luigi chain smoking is funny and it's well animated and I love the way he ruminates and the music is great. I think you must be a perfectionist to have created this, because the gestalt of this is perfect.
Play this game listening to hurt and holy shit it just.... it just all makes sense man
I sure can't wait for that C&D.
On a more serious note, this is a really nice…
I can feel Ennuigi's dispirited heart in the music, too.
Someone needs Seroquel. I have never smoked, but I can see from this video how he relies on it to carry him through some heavy depression.
Just. Wow.
I love how he just slowly wanders arround the ruined kingdom, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to, very fitting.
this game has a wikipedia page, but the platform that was used to code it doesn't
WOW is this depressing! And heavy.
Did you come up with all the dialog yourself?
I'm just surprised at the part where the princess was asked why she stayed with Mario and the reply was that she had to be rescued. I figured that would be followed by Luigi thinking "But who will rescue us?"
As the author and a massive fan of PICO-8 beyond just my work with it, I would be delighted to see someone do the work to get PICO-8 a decent wikipedia page. I was pleased but surprised to see Ennuigi get one; on the couple of occasions that it has made the rounds on the internet I've mostly tried to use it as a chance to laud p8 as a platform and a learning tool. zep's work absolutely merits a proper writeup.
Did you come up with all the dialog yourself?
Yep, wrote most of it over the course of a day back in August 2015. There's a few literary allusions in there and a big debt to existentialism, noir fiction, and Werner Herzog, but none of the text is recycled from anywhere, just me filtering through a lot of pent-up thoughts about the series.
As the author and a massive fan of PICO-8 beyond just my work with it, I would be delighted to see someone do the work to get PICO-8 a decent wikipedia page.
I'd volunteer, as I've done a ton of Wikia work (I have several of my own and wrote every single game article on the Pico-8 wiki except for one, several of which were from scratch), but I'm rather wary of what Wikipedia demands as far as references go and have read online posts about people spending hours writing a Wikipedia article, put in references that seemed to mirror many other, accepted articles, then got an e-mail within a few hours stating their article had been deleted and they would never write one for Wikipedia ever again. Plus I'm not a tech person, so I'm not comfortable tackling something like that that I don't know if something is right or not.
I was pleased but surprised to see Ennuigi get one;
Same here, along with others talking about it around the net :)
There's a few literary allusions in there and a big debt to existentialism, noir fiction, and Werner Herzog, but none of the text is recycled from anywhere,
Yeah, I figured some stuff was influenced from somewhere. Lotta thoughts though, no matter where they came from!
Anyone who wants to navigate the Wikipedia approval process is welcome to crib from anything on the Pico-8 wiki, to the extent that that's allowed in Wikipedia. A Wikipedia article would need more than this but you can start here: http://pico-8.wikia.com/wiki/Pico8 Wikia content is licensed CC-BY-SA.
Here's the Edge magazine article as a print reference: http://www.pressreader.com/australia/edge/20160721/282273844706409
Watching this again, years later.
Very reflective. This is an old cart back when Pico-8 was just finding its own. And I believe it's Mario, but it could be Luigi for the green clothing.
It's interesting because when you take away the spritely music, the fun of jumping on monsters and saving the princess.
There is a deeper meaning in those bricks, those pipes, those tunnels, and those castles.
And who better to reflect than a smoking Luigi, up in age, likely can't jump anymore.
But yes - he can remember and does. He remembers the past. And as he reflects on it, today it's not quite so bright and cheerful. An aging Luigi in a modern age.
Wait till he finds out the entire super mario bros series (this is confirmed lore by nintendo) was political propaganda written by princess peach
This is amazing can't believe I'm just now finding out about it. This is one of those things where I can't tell if the proper reaction is to laugh or hope whoever made it is ok.
[Please log in to post a comment]
