19 Things Video Game Fans Are SICK Of

14. Thinking References Matter More Than Plot

This one's about video game movies rather than games themselves, but my brother in Miyamoto is it annoying.

After 2023's surprisingly good Mario Bros. movie, sequel Super Mario Galaxy was a crushing disappointment. Rather than write a coherent plot, Illumination Studios simply threw as many references to the games as they could on-screen to distract the gamers in the audience into thinking they were having fun. This tendency came to a head in the concluding fight, which features (deep breath) the antagonist of Mario Sunshine summoning a dragon from Mario Odyssey, which is defeated with a power up from Mario Galaxy. Naturally, neither the dragon or power-up are once alluded to in the story, because who has time to set up plot points when there are so many references to cram in?

Video game fans heading to the cinema nowadays have the inverse problem faced by those of us who packed cinemas in the nineties. Back then Hollywood held a callous indifference towards video game properties, resulting in cinematic dumpster fires like the original Super Mario Bros. movie (where Bowser was a human-lizard man and Goombas were transformed from two foot mushrooms into hulking reptiles in trench coats). 

These days, cinema executives show their contempt by taking the opposite tack and overloading their movies with references to the original games. It's as if they think gamers are so easy to please that we'll be happy to sit through a terrible movie as long as it contains enough nods and winks to our favourite hobby.