🎉 Welcome 2024! Super Mario Wonder + Frieren

Happy 2024!

Super energized for 2024. I'm facing a bunch of challenges personally, professionally, and academically. I have some ideas I want to try, along with some new projects.

First project was Super Mario Bros Wonder. At first, I thought "It's an easy game", and in fact, comparing with Super Mario World from SNES, it's much easier, but Mario Wonder has its own hidden gems. It's cool to see a game made for a new generation, for example, short courses, and a bunch of 'crazy nonsense' things happening - like Rick and Morty, jokes, mechanics changes during a course. Nintendo really grasped the idea of how to 'tik-tok' a game. But on the other hand, the number of references to Super Mario Bros 3 from NES, probably to hook older audiences like me, is superb.

Another project for this year was finding a new anime. Since Boruto is on pause and the second season of Spy Family ended at Christmas, I read that a new anime, Frieren, was in the top position on MyAnimeList (passing Full Metal Alchemist, which is, by the way, my favorite one), and some colleagues told me to watch it.

I watched the first four episodes with my wife in one shot, and it's definitely on my list. The story is around an elf mage, who has a 1000-year life, basically her perception of the time is different. We can see a lot of Tolkien inspiration in the storytelling, and this flow of a different perception of time raises several questions about what's important, the people around us, our loved ones. In terms of art, like Full Metal Alchemist, it's a masterpiece.

Let's see what this year has in store for us.