Music of the Week, Vol. 5

I should really be calling these "music of the random period"... but at least the previous one never expires until a new one is posted. And this time, we have some fine medleys and remixes!

Reminder and instructions: (skip if you already know)
In the right column, under the links, you will find a player with five songs. Choose one of them and click the Play button to listen to that week's wondrous tracks! Beneath the player is a link to the corresponding post containing the download links plus their descriptions.
Please note that the downloads of previous weeks are no longer available - so be sure to check back every week if you are interested.

The Music of the Week from 5. to 11. of May is...

~Super Mario Bros. Medley (8-Bit Instrumental)
A classy conglomeration of many of our favourite songs by 8-Bit Instrumental. Those guys have a lot of other great old videogame tune remixes, too, so give them a listen. This band is a great way of introducing outsiders into video game music - "Look! It's not all boops and beeps, see!"

~Puzzle Mode (Tetris DS)
Yet another Yoshi's Cookie remix, but this time from the frighteningly difficult-to-find (at least in some areas) Tetris DS. This melody accompanies you through 200 great Tetris puzzles of varying difficulty, but constant fun factor - and you'll find itself humming along to it more often than you'd want to.

~The Crystal Stars (Paper Mario 2)
In the last boss fight of Paper Mario 2, true to around 90% of all the genre's games' example, the heroes cannot hurt the monster until some in-fight cutscene happens that shows them getting a morale boost, a healthy snack, an additional razor blade (Gillette FUSION!), whatever the plot demands. Normally, these scenes are boring, cliché and just clog up the otherwise interesting boss fight - but in PM2's case, a very rad march-style remix of the game's storyline theme remix is playing that really gives you the feeling that you are part of something heroic and important.

~Side A (Mario's Big Adventure)
Not much about this can really be said, except that it's a cheesy Japanese-lyric-added electronic-type vinyl remix of SMB's various themes. Listening to the "SUPAA MARIO" chorus is hilarious as the Underwhere, though. Oh, and this is the cover:

~Overture (Mario's Jungle Intro) (Nintendo Sound Adventures)
Another obscure Nintendo soundtrack, this time with a scary deep voice in a Hallelujah-filled void that constantly asks Mario who he is. And a short clip of the SMB tune repeating over and over while the voice explains that "this is the sound of Nintendo". I thought the sound of Nintendo was the background of the first level of the Donkey Kong arcade, but I guess I was wrong...

The Picture of the week is a particularly weird panel from the great comic Super Mario Adventures, which Waluigious will deal with in more detail soon. Oh yes, Bowser, this DOES look serious. You need to get your eyes straightened...

Don't forget to check back next week... no, really, I might actually update next week! With Waluigious™, you never know for sure!

~Waluigious: SUPAA MARIO!

In Which How Do Life Shrooms Work?

No, really. Since the beginning of time (or the beginning of video games, which is pretty much the same) players have been forced to accept the fact their characters have multiple lives and to never question it - putting big suspenders on everyone's disbelief. Of course, some games tried to handwave it away with some half-baked explanations - like the fairies from Zelda getting out of their bottles all by themselves (or, even worse, Link's last movement before dying is freeing a fairy). But doesn't the Mario series deserve a better rationalization of the life-savers' mysterious workings?

My theory (and keep in mind, Waluigious isn't called "Mario philosophy blog" for always stating canonized facts) is the following:

-1-Up Shrooms are obviously giving the user a chemical boost in case of death, since they require consumption to work - a 1-Up Shroom in your pocket won't help a thing, illustrated quite well in the Mario & Luigi series. Also, one can assume the effect wears off after a while, should the eater not die - explaining the Bros.' loss of lives between the games (and the occasional game with lives resetting upon turning off the console). A possible way for them to function is storing some chemical component in the bloodstream after digestion (or even instantly through the taste buds), which is then activated by some body reaction to death - either by the blood flow stopping or some signs of rigor mortis. The chemical then releases energy - enough to reactivate the bloodstream and to force the brain to control healing of whatever wound or condition caused the death. 1-Up Shrooms seem to work better if they are already (best, recently) ingested or are forced into the recently dead person's mouth - to reanimate beings that have been dead for quite a while, other methods are needed (see Bowser Jr's potion pot in NSMB).

-Life Shrooms from the Paper Mario games, on the other hand, can't be explained without involving magic. The basic difference between a 1-Up Shroom and a Life Shroom is that a Life Shroom won't revive you if you've eaten it before dying, and instead will only work the intended way if you leave it in your pocket - then it will come out and resurrect you. This looks strangely similar to the already mentioned Zelda fairies... one can assume the magic of the mushroom detects when its bearer is dying, bursts out and showers the corpse with a substance similar to the one the 1-Up Shroom uses, but working topically instead of internally. One question is left unanswered, though - how do the Life Shrooms revive Mario's fallen pals if all items in the inventory are clearly carried by the mustachioed protagonist? It could be that the magic detection field extends spherically about 2 meters into all directions of the mushroom, and that it picks up ANY dying beings within this area. Surprising evidence for this lies in the fact that Mario always stands back from his enemies - and always runs back to his initial position before any enemy can die after his attacks (watch the baddies' defeated spinning animations). This way, the Life Shroom cannot pick up the death aura of the adversaries, leaving its power to be used by Mario's party only.

-As for Pick Me Ups and similar items, they seem to be just concentrated 1-Up Shroom juice used in various forms. Now we only have to come up with a reason why defeating enemies will grant Mario extra lives... maybe he's some sort of Highlander, too? The coin collecting 1-Ups are easy to explain - the coins automatically buy 1-Up Shrooms for Mario off-screen - as witnessed in SM64 when he only got them while paying off the money.

Any comments, suggestions, critique or tactful "largest pile of rubbish ever" repartees are welcome. To not quote Sonic, "Exist and store information."

~Waluigious: Maybe the 1-Up Shrooms just base on extreme electric shocks?

In Which Another Mario Crossword Puzzle

Can you remember, back in Nov... Sept... August (darn!), when Walugious used to feature Mario-related crossword puzzles? This was a time when the world was still in order, when the air was pure and the Wii not cluttered with below-average third-party games. But guess what? Although we at Waluigious can't do much about the tidal bad game wave, the Mario Crosswords are back! In the words of Gwonam "Squadalah" of Koridai, "Isn't it beautiful?"

The fourth puzzle contains 35 bosses of various Mario games, ranging from the glaringly obvious to the ridiculously obscure - with the added twist that some clues can describe several different bosses, so the number of letters becomes the vital hint - and here it is:The answers are in this precautiously shrink-thumbnailed picture:
For the interested, the previous crossword puzzles can be found here, here and here respectively - and in this PDF, which will be updated as new ones get created.

~Waluigious: Yes, the boss of the Subspace Emissary IS a demonic butterfly.