Background:
- I was not a NES kid. Not by choice, just lack of exposure given where I grew up.
- I loved and beat Mario Bros on the Game&Watch. No easy feat.
- I loved and beat Super Mario Land 1 and 2 several times.
- The first time I played any NES or SNES Mario game with my girlfriend, now wife. She remains an absolute top-tier Mario platformer.
- Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 have both been GOTY game for me. I think they are among the most perfect games ever made.
So the first few hundred times I have tried to beat a 2D Mario game on a home console have not been pleasant. In fact, they still are not pleasant -- at least for anyone who could observe me hopelessly crawling my way through a game. I am very, very poor at controlling Mario. I routinely, seemingly for no reason, jump into a hole killing myself. I will jump on a koopa, then jump on his shell, then land on the shell. I will catch projectiles that kill me, but miss 1UP's and mushrooms. EDIT: VIdeo provided below at Foolz request.
But, I figured. What the fuck. I am a grown man, I am capable of beating games, therefore, I will beat Mario Bros for the NES.
Today, after several hundred attempts in the last 2 weeks, I made it past 3-4 and started level 4. Now I get it. When I hit 3-3 for the 60th or so time, something stuck me -- this is what it felt like when I'm playing Super Mario Galaxy. I'm dieing a lot, but I'm not frustrated. I'm the problem, not the game. And as I replayed level 3-1 through 3-3 endlessly I was getting better. Not mastering, but not dieing either. Then I turned it off. Then a few seconds later I'd turn it back on and give it "one more go". Just as I did with Super Mario Galaxy.
Then it occurred to me that Mrs. Aspro didn't come out of the womb mastering Mario. She probably, at the age of 5 or 6 or whatever, was going through what I was going through now, to the point where today when she picks up the controller it's all muscle memory.
Onto world 4!
I don't remember the last time I didn't use warp pipes, and I'm not good enough to go through the entire game without losing a few lives or with only small Mario. Last time I played (last month, I believe), I got to 8-1 and started trying to get more lives by doing the shell + pipe trick. Died every time, and I just decided to end Mario's life there, as I didn't think I had enough lives to go through the world and face the real Bowser.
But I do remember that once, as a little kid, I beat the game twice in a row (without shutting the system off) and almost beat it a third time. All the goombas turn into buzzy beetles after you beat it once, so the subsequent times were harder.