Super Mario World played with voice controls will send your blood pressure through the roof
Buttons are so 20th century
A streamer has cleared all of Super Mario World's first area entirely with voice controls.
Twitch streamer juzcook took on the task of tackling Super Mario World's demanding platforming stages with nothing but voice commands and infinite patience. In place of a gamepad, juzcook used the program VoiceBot to set up a series of macro commands that would feed an emulator the desired inputs; for instance, saying "tap right" to have Mario take a step to the right or "jump left" to send him springing to the left.
I did something dumb 🤓 pic.twitter.com/6veAEQ39kiJanuary 26, 2021
There are two main problems with this approach: it takes a lot longer to say "jump left" than it does to press left and B at the same time, and it takes a little bit on top of that for the program to recognize each command then feed the appropriate input into the game. These are extremely pertinent issues when attempting to leap over a series of bottomless pits or directly on top of Iggy Koopa's weird little head.
World 1 has been conquered in a single sitting without a Gameover! Found some nice backup strats tonight 🥳 pic.twitter.com/lcUJynQEr9January 27, 2021
Still, juzcook eventually managed to finish World 1 after giving the macros a few optimization passes and more specific commands, and the voice-activated struggle will continue as the streamer takes on the rest of the game. Just thinking about trying some of those Chocolate Island stages with nothing but repeated shouts of "Jump!" and "Stop!" is enough to give us the shivers, but we have faith.
Bowser's Fury doesn't support voice commands, but it does turn everything into cats, and that's probably a lot better for your blood pressure.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.