How to make the perfect Mario game

I have an idea for the greatest Mario game ever. Looking at this old concept art from Super Mario Bros 3 I started thinking, what if there was a Mario game that really looked like this. As a kid the simple sprites Nintendo’s amazing entertainment system was generating on screen were given life by my vibrant imagination. They truly looked to me like the colorful images in the game’s manual. With age this lively imagination has all but died. What I now see when booting up SMB3 on the Virtual Console is a bunch of pixels just barely coming together to look like something resembling a fat plumber with a raccoon tail.

Nintendo has tried to update the graphics in their later releases like New Super Mario Bros but the horrible 3D models almost make me miss the 48 colors of the NES color palette. The gameplay is still there but the visuals have evolved in to something so fugly the Spartans would have thrown it right down the Apothetae after it popped its deformed head out of its mothers beef curtains.

Now beautiful 2D games on the Wii like Muramasa and a Boy and his Blob have proven that this need not be the case. They have shown us what lovely two dimensional masterpieces the Wii can spit out. So it shouldn’t be too hard to make a new 2D Mario with graphics resembling this wonderful concept art. They could use the Wii’s more than adequate processing power to recreate what Mario and his friends looked like in my imagination as a kid.

Just look at this art and imagine how freaking fantastic it would be to play a 2D Mario game that actually looked like this.