Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Super Mario Brothers is Getting Harder

Huh, this is sort of interesting. Apparently Nintendo has been making games easier in part because it finds people can no longer beat the 1st level to the original Super Mario Brothers. From Nintendo President Satoru Iwata:

It may come as a shock to some of you that most gamers today can not finish the original Super Mario Brothers game on the Famicom. We have conducted this test over the past few years to see how difficult we should make our games and have found that the number of people unable to finish the first level is steadily increasing. This year, around 90 percent of the test participants were unable to complete the first level of Super Mario Brothers. We did not assist them in any way except by providing the exact same instruction manual we used back then. Many of them did not read it and the few that did stopped after the first page which did not cover any of the game mechanics.

UPDATE (7/7/13): As Rafi points out in the comments, it looks like this is satirical. One of the other stories on the site is CHILDREN WHO PICK A SIDE IN CONSOLE WARS ARE 90 PERCENT MORE LIKELY TO JOIN A GANG. Sorry about that.

July 4, 2013 // This post is about: , , ,

Did blowing on your Nintendo game actually help?

Mental Floss answers the most important question of our time: Does blowing in your Nintendo game actually help?

The answer: No. It actually can hurt the game and cause the connections to rust. So how, then, did blowing in your game spread? Their experts weigh in:

It was very much a hive-mind kind of thing, something that all kids did, and many still do on modern cartridge based systems. Prior to the NES I don’t recall people blowing into Atari or any other cartridge-based hardware that predated the NES (though that likely spoke to the general reliability of that hardware versus the dreaded front-loading Nintendo 72 Pin connectors). I suppose it has a lot to do with the placebo effect. US NES hardware required, on most games, optimal connection across up to 72 pins as well as communication with a security lock-out chip. The theory that ‘dust’ could be a legitimate inhibitor and that ‘blowing it out’ was the solution, still sounds silly to me when I say it out loud.

[Via Reverend Dave]

September 24, 2012 // This post is about: ,