My sisters and I loved Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. It’s a great game. I still sing the dungeon music to myself sometimes when I am in dangerous situations. BUT the game must have been developed by only children who never had to share anything a day in their lives– the game has no save feature. At no point in the game can you save and come back; you have to keep playing until you have beaten the entire game. Mom had little to no interest in video game time paradigms, so she didn’t know that the hour-long turns she allotted us were completely unfair.
The Middlest Sister 
I was addicted to Tetris on my Game Boy. To this day, when I hear that music, I begin to see blocks of different shapes and sizes. Fun post!
That sounds familiar! Tetris was as addictive as heroin. There should’ve been some type of rehab for recovering from that game.
I love Tetris. It will always have a special place in my heart. In high school, we programed it into our TI-83 calculators so that it looked like we were working very hard during calculus class. Ah, nerds.
Tetris for life! I was never good at the games where you get lives. And lose them. LOVE this post! And a few posts back I realized that I can hover over the pictures to get some secret funny text. It’s like I uncovered the hidden level!
Love the .gif
This is quickly becoming one of my favourite blogs. Excellent as always!
^^that was me (hadn’t logged in)
Sorry to be so cryptic! :)
Thanks! As yours is one of my favorites, that means a lot to me!
I love that you animated the panel – very cool :)
Oh and b.t.w. I was only child with one game boy and I still didn’t get any play time b/c my dad hogged it the entire time to play tetris ;)
Thanks for this, really enjoyed it
:) K.
Hahaha! I anticipate that my daughter will have that problem as well.
Nice work and nostalgic to boot.
Thank you!
I didn’t go through this as a kid because I didn’t care for video games, but I get the joy of going through it now with our one DS. Either the kids haven’t figured out the save feature on some of the games or they really don’t come with it and you have to play all the way through the level, but when their turn is up, things aren’t pretty. And I won’t even look at it to try to figure it out. Very cute post. Your artwork is amazing.
Thank you! That sounds frustrating.
Amazing – I missed the animation the first time around – I hope everyone catches that!
Thank you! I’m glad you caught it!
Oh the times on the road with the game boy…love this one :)
Yeah, I remember fighting off the waves of nausea in order to keep playing in the car.
Ha, that was amazing! I remember how you couldn’t save Mario on Game Boy, so frustrating. I probably would have tried harder to beat the game though if I could smash my brothers’ heads.
I don’t think I ever did beat the game.
You can save in Super Mario Land 2, which is an even better game. :)
Hilarious! Love the animation! You should design your own video games ;)
Ha! That would be great. “These graphics are crap! It looks like the designer just cut and pasted scraps of paper together!”
Awesome! I loved the added animation. (I’m betting it’s a good taste of the “big project” you’re working on right now.)
Egad, are those goombas or her sisters’ heads that Chrissy is jumping on?!
There used to be this Nintendo game called Island Adventure that my brother and I loved. It didn’t allow you to save games either. I recall staying downstairs in our basement playing it for 8 hours one day. Ugh.
That project is on hiatus until my husband and I are recovered from the solid week of work we spent on it trying to get the first draft out in time for Christmas. It’s a Christmas present for his step-father, so maybe by next Christmas it will actually be completely done! It’s a cut-paper music video of a ballad we wrote. There’s a lot of this right now, just to fill the parts I haven’t animated yet: https://themiddlestsister.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mikeplaysguitar.gif That’s my husband playing guitar! The song is 8 minutes long, so it’s a ridiculous amount of work.
I think I have Adventure Island on an NES emulator! If we lived closer, I would invite you over to play!
I had the same problem with Star Fox!
Who develops a game with no save feature?! It’s just cruel.
The folks who developed “Demon SOuls” and “Dark Souls”… but at least it lets you save just once before you power down. Of course, that doesn’t keep you from dying endlessly in the game.
That is so rad, Nicki. I am not getting any sound though…am I supposed to hear it or is that part of what’s missing? That will be amazing when it’s finished. What a great gift.
Adventure Island — that’s it! I had to google it just now and I absolutely remember that half-naked guy with the trucker hat. Good times. I’ll be over in a few minutes…
That’s just a link to an animated clip, no sound. We just got a good mic for recording, so we’ll re-record it in a few weeks and then I’ll get back to the animating. We have another song and music video in the works and I like that song better, so the ballad might be on hiatus even longer if we start working on the other one instead.
Top work there sis. I like your new-found boldness with the GIF bits.
Thanks! I’m still figuring it out, but I think it’s fun to make them :)
I´m afraid I´m just as unfair with my kids, as your mom was with you. :)
It’s okay. I understand :)
Why has no one yet mentioned the ‘dangerous situations’ you’re still finding yourself in?! I’m insanely curious now!
I breathe danger.
Nice work! You’ actually took scenes from the real game!
I failed a test in fifth grade because I was busy playing this exact game under the table at the time. (I started playing while waiting for the school bus.)
Tsk. I hope you at least saved Princess Daisy!
It was so good to see her not turn into a monster for a change!
Really? I know you can’t save in that game, but if I remember correctly, you can at least pause it.
I love the animation! You are so talented. Very cool! I had to giggle out loud at that last pic. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do that in real life? “Hey, you’re bugging me!” Bahloop, boop. Gone.
Thank you! I have definitely wished for a Superball once or twice.
So great! So creative!!! Love it!
Thank you! :)
Awh I miss my Game Boy, I remember how excited I got when I got the Game Boy Colour, no more Contrast Settings! I was elated!
Ah, memories :D
HAHHAHA, that’s too funny. This is why I feel lucky to have my own GameBoy and my brother had his own. I’m pretty sure there would have been more blood and tears otherwise.
Lucky!
Love this blog – you must spend hours creating these images! Planning to link to you on my blog…with full and clear credit fer sure!
Keep up the good work…this blog is a happy place.
Thank you! That’s so nice of you to say! I usually spend between 8-12 hours working on them every week, but this one was more complicated (and tiny! I didn’t have much of the lime-y green scrap paper, so the green panels are only 2.5″x2.5″. I used tweezers to position the teensy scraps in place.) This one took me at least 16 hours.
I just love your blog! I don’t know anything about gif, so could you tell me how it works?
Thanks! A .gif is a type of image file that allows for animated layers. You basically stack a bunch of digital images together in the same way you might have drawn in a flip book to make your drawing appear to move when the pages are turned very quickly. A .gif doesn’t support very many colors though compared to other image files, so you can’t get too fancy with it.
Ahhh Mario ♥
Also Castlevania, Tetris, Pinball, and Pokemon (yellow version) :-)
Oh, I devoted an entire summer to Pokemon.
Now I really want to ignore life and play Pokemon all day instead.
Reblogged this on shielakaushik.com and commented:
I just love her blog :-)
I still own my game boy!! Also, how long do your art drawings usually take you to complete?
Seriously? What kind of parents buy ONE Game Boy for five siblings to share? That’s an exercise in masochism if I ever saw one.