I’ve been wanting to talk about the new Super Paper Mario game coming out for Nintendo Wii. However, I was never quite sure what to say about it. When I heard in class today someone who said they often compared ideas of games to actual texts, then it hit me. To get an idea of what this game is about, here is a video:

http://media.gameinformer.com/downloads/downloads2014/movies/2007/spm/spm-3.wmv

In the video a guy demonstrates how to play the game and a basic idea of what it is about. What I found most intriguing in this particular video was when he demoed a familiar stage from Super Mario Bros. To view the stage in 3D is really neat, especially since most everyone has played it back in the day. As a fan of Mario, it’s a bit mind-blowing to think that there was more to the 2D world of the old Mario Bros. games.

I then started to draw parallels to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” As a reader, we often view the text by blindly following Hamlet and not noticing much of anything else that surrounds Hamlet. A reader tends to only think that there is a story about Hamlet and nothing else. Later there comes a film called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” The movie follows these two characters that played a fairly minor roll in the actual play, yet we see how the play unfolds from their perspective. The movie takes on a humorous perspective, for example, when they spy on Hamlet by himself giving a soliloquy they think he’s crazy.

It’s this idea, that I was able to somewhat compare to Super Paper Mario. And Super Mario Bros. Much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it’s a bit funny to think that the character Mario was running in a straight line and jumping over pipes when he could “see” that he could just walk around them. It becomes a whole new view on a classic text. The possibilities are endless in expanding a text like Shakespeare’s if you take a slightly different perspective on it. As with Mario, it becomes even more apparent the videogames can do the same thing.