But I've got a lot more SMB-playing time under my belt than most relatively healthy people, and I notice things. Things that healthy people would probably consider nitpicks, but here they are:

The biggest gripe I have is the physics code that handles big mario colliding with a block from below. You enter the brick, it breaks apart, and you fall back down. What's wrong with that? For starters, this feels nasty. Have you ever grabbed a piece of rotten fruit? It's a lot like that. In the original, you smash the brick and bounce back down. It feels like a crisp, refreshing sip of Coca-Coal.

It has actual effects on the gameplay, too. If you're smashing a brick that's next to another, the other stops your movement. In the original game, your y never overlapped with the brick you were breaking, and you could retain speed. Yes, this has killed me.

That's the big one. I have other gripes, purely aesthetic.

Here's the big aesthetic gripe: “they” fucked up the rhythm of the Super Mario Bros theme. This probably doesn't help, but the original went:

doo, doo, doo... dodo... dodo... dodododo, dodo, doo, dododo...

and the all-stars version goes:

doo, doo, doo... dodo... dodo... dodododo, dodo, doo, do, dodo..

(that's not including the seven note intro)

The fuckup was kept in the title screen music of Super Mario 64. I don't know if Koji Kondo suddenly decided that he'd been wrong all along, but here's one situation in which backwards compatibility would've been called for.

Getting smaller: in the american SMB2, when you kill Birdo, the dino-bird egg-shooting thing, there's a short delay from when you hit it to when it dies and is thrown off the screen. This is very unpleasant. In the original, you hit it and it flew off in one smooth motion. It was great feedback.

Almost miniscule: the sound of stomping a goomba is awful. Goomba death should sound like a squeak toy, not like two blocks of wood slapping into each other.

That's it. The rest was great. All you have to do to satisfy me as a gamer is make good games and don't fuck them up. I don't see why that's so hard.

On Twitter: @mogwai_poet