Subpar Nintendo Characters Resurrected for 'Super Mario Bros. Leftovers'
While the 15 to 25-year-old consoles of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) will eventually die, many of its classic, eight-bit video game characters apparently have enough extra lives to keep slaying baddies well into the 21st century.
To wit, in late April, a programmer named Jay Pavlina lovingly re-created all of "Super Mario Brothers" in the multimedia software Flash for play on a computer .
But Pavlina added a twist for his so-called "Super Mario Bros. Crossover ": gamers could play as several original old-school heroes, including Link from "The Legend of Zelda," Samus from "Metroid," and MegaMan.
Then, in late May, Ryu Hayabusa from "Ninja Gaiden" was added to the game, a character that Pavlina said he had to cut from the first version of Crossover in an interview with GameXplain.
Many other recognizable NES characters did not make the roster for Crossover. Now some of them have been humorously programmed and inserted into "Super Mario Bros. Leftovers" by Dueling Analogs, a web comic.
Among the rejects is a motorcycle racer from "Excitebike," Lizzie the lizard from "Rampage," and Pac-Man, who recently celebrated his 30th birthday as an arcade game with a Pac-Man Google logo game .
Watch the video above to see how these decidedly lamer characters and others might have fared in the Mushroom Kingdom of "Super Mario Brothers."
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