Indie developer Stabyourself has released a new method of putting shells through portals.
Indie games can be wonderful in their own right, but sometimes fill a purpose that so-called regular developers cannot: squishing together our favorite franchises into sweet, sweet crossover sandwiches. Sometimes it doesn’t work; melding something like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing with Superman 64, for example, would likely be a gigantic unpalatable mess. But if that’s like a pickle and horseradish gyro, then Stabyourself’s new, downloadable Mario–Portal blend, Mari0, is like a peanut butter and marshmallow-fluff sub! (That’s supposed to mean it’s good, by the way).
Taking cues from Minecraft, Team Fortress and Portal, Mari0 is a platforming mishmash of features and gameplay. At first, the game seems to be nothing more than the original Super Mario Brothers with a portal gun (which should be enough for most of you already) but digging deeper reveals a bevy of interesting, and sometimes flat out strange, new features. Firstly, there’s the fact that Mario no longer has to save the princess alone. He can now bring along three additional “Mario”s to help out in real-time coop (even though that’s just asking for awkward when you finally find her). Next, there’s the visuals. The game comes with multiple filters to adjust how things look, while Mario himself has over thirty different silly hats to sport during his adventures. There’s even a robust level editor that lets Mario move and redistribute the blocks around him, letting you modify your favorite level or create something wholly new.
Stabyourself might not have the friendliest handle on the web, but it sure seems to like us enough to program Mari0 for free, and release it on all major desktop platforms: Windows, OSX, and Linux. You can pick up the quirky little title right now from the developer’s website, where (ahem) there’s also a donate button so you can support its general efforts if you feel like it.
Source: PC World
