Finishing every part of Mario Wonder is no peach

theverge.com:

By Allison Johnson, a reviewer with 10 years of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.

My mission to 100 percent Super Mario Bros. Wonder officially started a couple of weeks ago, but really it began in the late ‘80s.

As a kid, I was certifiably bad at Mario. We didn’t have our own Nintendo console, so any time I spent playing Mario prior to that was at a friend’s or cousin’s house. I’d hold the second controller and wait my turn, marveling at how they just knew where the hidden boxes were, where to jump to the top of the screen and skip ahead three levels, and how to get to the very top of the flagpole every single time. As I struggled to clear the first few stages before running out of lives, it seemed obvious to me that I lacked some instinct that made my friends good at Mario and made me objectively terrible.

A few decades later, I found myself once again sitting on the couch in my pajamas playing a side-scrolling Mario game. And as I cruised through Mario Wonder’s delightful levels, I decided I would 100 percent the game after beating it. Why? Honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe partly because the game is so charming and I didn’t want to be done playing it yet. But I think at least part of the reason was to prove to myself that all these years later, maybe I am good at Mario. And what could be more definitive proof than collecting every seed, purple ten coin, and flagpole in the game?

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Picking up the extras that I’d missed the first time around started off easy — delightful, even. Mario Wonder is pretty forgiving, which