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How to turn Super Mario into one evil free-to-play game

For this year's Evil Game Design Challenge at Casual Connect, Greg Costikyan set his sights on retooling Super Mario Bros. 3 as a free-to-play casual title. The results are appropriately horrifying.
Casual Connect's Evil Game Design Challenge is about... well, designing a game to be as evil as possible. Manipulative, exploitative mechanics; brutal monetization; vapid appeals to a target demographic. You know the drill. This year, contestant Greg "Designer X" Costikyan came out ahead with his rendition of a free-to-play version of Super Mario Bros. 3, with in-app purchases, play gates, and cost-cutting measures intended to "deeply horrify fans of the original game," in the designer's words. You can check out the entire design presentation above. Personally, this editor wouldn't mind seeing a Super Maria Sisters, but the rest of it ("must uncheck tiny box or shared automatically"; "annoying confirm dialog for keyboard use when entering Flash full-screen") is properly terrifying.

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