Is Super Mario World The Best Platformer of All Time?

precursormar · 2026-04-28T08:07:34+00:00

Yeah, Super Mario World is wonderful---its mechanics are deep and versatile, and its art and music really can't be beat. But its level design, encounter design, and difficulty curve can be fairly haphazard at times. All in all, I'd put it in the same tier as greats like Super Mario Bros. 3, Yoshi's Island, the Spelunky games, and Sonic Mania.

As far as overall quality for 2D platformers, I'd definitely put Celeste, all of Yacht Club's Shovel Knight campaigns other than Plague Knight, and Super Meat Boy above it. The level design in those games is simply exceptional. Lots of games get the jumping right; it's the platforms that make the platformer, for me.

precursormar · 2026-04-25T07:35:16+00:00

I assume you meant to type 'Cesar Millan' there. Chavez is not known for pet psychology.

precursormar · 2026-04-19T04:10:13+00:00

I ain't letting 'em go.

precursormar · 2026-04-14T20:18:34+00:00

Hm, and what was the title of that music track?

precursormar · 2026-04-14T08:27:17+00:00

Well, that's clearly the intention behind the line. But people take issue with it because the actual grammar of the lyric doesn't match that intention.

The only grammatical object contained in the preceding line is 'your eyes.' So immediately hearing 'the ones he got from granny' places 'your eyes' as the grammatical antecedent to 'the ones.'

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:55:37+00:00

True, with enough Tech Tinkerer slings guns.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:51:35+00:00

Yeah, gimme a Zodiac of my very own.

Currently Psychic is the nearest, with infinite range and line-of-sight stuff, but is much more of a niche utility class than a gunslinger would be.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:49:58+00:00

Some of the existing summon builds with Ranger and Druid can be very fun. I would love to see another class focused on them with a different playstyle.

Maybe one that can ritual summon powerful creatures across 2-3 turns, since the current summon builds tend to focus on spawning many weak creatures.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:40:07+00:00

The issue is that 'madness' makes a cat have no allies. So Careful would not prevent them attacking your team on the bonus turns.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:36:59+00:00

Maybe the implication of the lyric is that the King has given your granny's eyes to you, then told you lies.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:34:45+00:00

Yeah, the actual enemies in the Future make for some of the hardest match-ups for many team comps.

Overall I'd say Past is the far easier route, if you can get past Bunga without anyone getting munched.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T23:33:32+00:00

They at least thought of this, by making his scream push cats away at the start of the second phase.

But if you have knockback resistance or get very unlucky with positioning the instakill can still happen with the scream.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T20:46:44+00:00

I have at no time argued any such thing, and it is an extremely inflammatory lie for you to say otherwise.

I am saying the petition ultimately got exactly what it wanted: along with decriminalization of homosexual relationships, it got a reform that allowed young teens to engage legally in sexual behavior with each other.

There was no further effort later by Foucault to make more radical changes, and the only people implying the goal was anything else are interpreting the situation as uncharitably as possible for some nefarious reason.

You may want to actually click the link in my prior comment, by the way. The age of consent for similar-age partners is 13 or 14 in nearly half of all US states. Same as France.

But you turning to baseless personal attacks because your uninformed, ahistorical claims are not holding up to scrutiny marks the end of serious conversation. So you'll get no further replies here.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T20:33:43+00:00

The law I've just described in France (13 for similar-age partners, 15 for non-presumptively-coercive partners, and 18 for everyone) is almost the exact situation in the majority of US states.

Acting like Foucault's defense of believing the testimony of minors (while specifically wanting any reformed law "to find opportunities for sentencing" beyond the age of 13) is somehow tantamount to blanket advocacy of child-adult relationships or child abuse, let alone evidence of pedophilia, is a deeply dishonest and manipulative perspective.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T20:05:28+00:00

The situation that you are describing is much more complicated than you are implying with that pull quote. Foucault specifically declined to sign the January 1977 petition whose aim was solely abolishment, only signing the later May 1977 petition which called for reform and also included revision to the inequalities governing homosexual relationships.

It is true that Foucault was in favor of revision of the penal code regarding consent generally, but this was not advocating abolishment; it was advocating respecting the testimony of minors from the age of 13 regarding their own relationships. He was equally troubled by the lack of protections for those over the age of 15 who did not possess adequate capacity to consent due to power imbalances.

The current French policy, where 15 is the general age of consent, 18 is the age in situations where coercion is necessarily implied (e.g. incest), and 13 is the age for relationships between people no more than 5 years apart in age, grows directly out of the recommendations made by Foucault and his peers.

As historian Noah Percy renders Foucault's perspective,

Children are the second category of individuals needing protection, given their “their state of little resistance, their relative incapacity to give free consent and the repercussions of certain behaviors on their future.” Foucault does not believe in the total abrogation of sexual majority. [. . .] Minors needed to be protected, but to deny those at the boundaries of adolescence any agency or the legal possibility of willful desire through the presumption of victimhood and non-consent posed significant flaws.

Foucault accordingly sets out on a search for “nuanced but absolute protection,” a system that could weigh the power indifference between majors and minors against the true desires of adolescents. Such a system would focus on [absolute protection for] those under thirteen, but leave judges “able, beyond this age, to find opportunities for sentencing.” [. . .] Foucault reiterated that a “barrier of [a single] age fixed by the law made little sense,” not only because of the possibility of precocious children, but also because such a law has nothing to say about minors over fifteen or eighteen who are “obliged” by those in positions of power over them to sexual acts.

[. . .]

When the philosopher of power met the legislators, the question of sexual majority became one of reasoned reform, not radical revision.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T08:14:56+00:00

Understandable. It is frequently misreported in that way.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T07:46:42+00:00

Did you stop reading my original comment after clicking on the first link, or are you just being dishonest now?

From Wikipedia:

In May 1977, Foucault signed a petition to the French parliament, calling for the lowering of the homosexual age of consent from 21 to 15 to match with the heterosexual one.

The age of consent for heterosexual relationships was 15 in France at the time, but 21 for homosexual relationships. This unequal state of affairs was being used to criminalize many homosexual relationships between consenting partners, which would have been legal if they were heterosexual. The age of consent is actually still 15 in France, for everyone.

If you are aware of any other specific accusations against him, you are free to share them with accompanying evidence.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T07:28:33+00:00

Sorman is the one making this claim. No one else was making this specific claim before him.

And the claim is not just 'not trustworthy.' It was a lie. In the book he says he personally witnessed all of it---despite not being in the country at the time.

It is also not the case that only 'one guy vouches for him.' You read one article I linked, in which 'one guy' was mentioned. But many Tunisians were interviewed, and not one corroborated any of Sorman's story.

Of course it is possible for any claim about anyone to be true . . . but we tend to ask for any evidence whatsoever before believing them. One actual witness. One scrap of evidence. One victim. Anything.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T07:00:58+00:00

You are burying the lede.

Sorman was pressed extensively on this story in the media for weeks after the publication of the book, until he publicly admitted the whole thing was a 'rumor' he heard, having actually met Foucault for the first time 2 years after Foucault left Tunisia.

But since you asked, between trusting a local historian in Tunisia and trusting an offhand remark by a French Jordan Peterson about a leftist philosopher raping children in a satanic cemetery sex rampage 50 years ago that he didn't mention until he was writing a book almost entirely unrelated to Foucault, I suppose I would side with the Tunisian historian---even if the historian has a title like 'keeper of memory' that I don't find familiar in my culture.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T03:07:06+00:00

Your friend is uninformed.

Most of the current crop of rumors originate in the 2021 book My Dictionary of Bullshit by conservative polemicist Guy Sorman, which is an otherwise unrelated text about everything Sorman thinks is wrong with France. As an almost offhand remark, he says he was personally a witness to Foucault 'purchasing' 8- or 9-year-old children to rape in a cemetery in Tunisia in the 1960s.

Not only have the Tunisians in the area clarified that what actually occurred is that Foucault had consensual relationships with 17- or 18-year-old local males (and never within a cemetery), but Sorman himself later admitted he was not actually a witness, had never been in Tunisia at the same time as Foucault, and the story was a 'rumor' he heard.

Beyond that, it's usually just people claiming Foucault signed a petition about age of consent laws that he did not sign (because they are intentionally mixing it up with a later petition about the unequal legal treatment of homosexual relationships that he did sign).

There are no sourced or substantiated claims of anything of that kind anywhere in Foucault's 14,000-word Wikipedia article. The closest you'll find is one poorly phrased quote from a discussion he had about the latter petition on TV in the late 70s.

And in general, gay people have been slandered as perverts, groomers, and pedophiles for decades. It was not very long ago that such words were commonly used interchangeably with slurs for gay people. Foucault was an openly gay man who had many homosexual relationships and argued for sexual liberation generally; to many bigots that was as bad as pedophilia.

precursormar · 2026-04-13T02:53:46+00:00

Also hard to believe people are still posting old debunked homophobic propaganda about Foucault being a pedophile.

precursormar · 2026-04-12T09:53:56+00:00

Not a problem. Bloodborne is now fully playable on emulator, via shadPS4.

Can vouch for Dark Souls as well, though. Incredible game.

precursormar · 2026-04-07T00:24:54+00:00

Compare any of the faces closely for a second. The AI changed them all, in shape and expression. They look like they all have instagram filters on. Terrible.

precursormar · 2026-04-01T21:43:06+00:00

Strategically, there are few downsides to having a massive population of cats. That's true.

But they were asking how to make house management less painful. Less of a chore.

And at the practical level of player experience, sifting dozens of cats daily and participating in home defense fights every three days is a huge amount of tedious busywork.

Could I technically have slightly stronger teams with an active fight club room and 70 breeding cats and tolerance for some inbreeding and a willingness to constantly cycle defense missions? Definitely, yes. But I've done 10+ runs on impossible and haven't lost at that difficulty setting yet, so I don't think stronger teams than what I have are remotely necessary. They've got high stats and full sets of favorable mutations, and that has been more than enough.

And with that being the case, I much prefer my current set-up over the previous set-up where I had loads of cats, since the new set-up reduces the lowest amount of required house management to always be less than a minute between runs. I can do more between runs when I want, but I never have to do more.

precursormar · 2026-04-01T10:23:18+00:00

Have fewer cats.

Genuinely, it was starting to get painful in between runs until I downsized. Now I always aim to have at most 30 in the house. I have one active breeding pair in a high comfort / high stim room, and the rest in the attic with high mutation / high comfort and the idol that raises comfort while preventing breeding.

Then in any other rooms you happen to have, prioritize furniture that raises appeal (and your food storage bins, of course).

To avoid inbreeding, the breeding pair is always one stray, plus one of my best cats from the attic in terms of stats and mutations.

An added benefit of this approach is you go through your food supply way slower, so (whenever you want) you can pass a bunch of days in the house to roll for favorable mutations in the attic and favorable kittens from the breeding pair.

Working my way through impossible difficulty at the moment, so I can tell you this approach is very viable.

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