There’s a guy fairly recently that has been enjoying a few minutes of e-notoriety, because he’s producing recreations of particular cities’ public rail transportation maps, themed with Super Mario Bros. 3 sprites. At a quick glance, he’s done SMB3-themed maps for Portland, Washington D.C., and a few Canadian cities like Calgary, Montreal and Toronto.
I’ll admit that they’re cute, it’s kind of a creative idea, but the fact of the matter is that he’s still using someone else’s properties as its theme. Regardless, despite the fact that they are aesthetically pleasant to look at, the one glaring flaw in all of them is the fact that they’re all pretty general and standardized. Every single one of them is based on the SMB3 map of World 1, which is all pleasing, happy and green grassland.
I get what the guy is doing, and that he’s clearly going for consistency in his productions. But this is where I state that I live in reality, and the truth of the matter is that the world is not this happy-go-lucky, bobbing-in-the-wind green grassland. I can’t really speak most of the Canadian cities, but I have been to Portland, and I used to live in the D.C. area enough to have an opinion of his Metro map, but I didn’t really bother other than a few cursory snide, curmudgeon remarks with the latter.