I gotta come clean with a dirty secret real quick, y'all: I am the absolute worst at video games. Classic, modern, hand-held, in a box on the wall at some bar—I'm bad at all of them. My hand-eye coordination with the pixels and brightly colored buttons is pure tragedy. It's a coordination blind spot that had ruined many a cool date during which dudes would pull out a gaming system and suggest we play. (Maybe I need to consider what I'm tolerating on dates, now that I think about it.) Then I accidentally lodge Bowser face-down in a moat and I have no choice but to go home early. (Seriously, who are these guys who are allowing my lack of video game prowess to lessen their opinion of me?) The point is, considering my gaming inabilities, I am downright floored a human (or wizard? I'm not ruling that out) dominated all of Mario 64 in less time than it takes an average person to make breakfast. Mario has an impressive cult following anyway, so I suppose if one game were to be so thoroughly analyzed and loopholes painstakingly mapped, this would be it.
Experiencing Mario gleefully say "waaahoooo!" so many times in rapid succession deserves applause alone. On my second watch, I muted the video and just played Billy Squier. I'm not saying it made the viewing 500 percent more pleasurable, but it certainly didn't hurt. See what kind of little hacks you can glean from this truly uplifting, jaw-dropping run through Mario's jungle:
Still. So enchanted. So confused. Mostly enchanted, though.
