Grand Poo Bear

Friday/Saturday recommendation time. This time, someone I'm almost positive my readership will have zero interest in. Well, I've got to show the full spectrum of my colours.

With sports out for the count (I'm still very sad about this, for the record) a lot of people are noting the existence of eSports again. I've watched some competitive video games in my day, but honestly most of my video game watching is people casually playing Mario games. Mario is a very easy game to watch, because everybody more or less knows how it works and what the objective is. If you're watching speedrunners, they may be using tricks and glitches that are confusing, but for casual players just enjoying hard games or hacks (tweaked games made by fans), it's pretty self-explanatory. Also, because it's an old game aimed at a younger audience, the community has a lot of people of all ages and genders that aren't toxic as $*@^, which is nice.

My recommendation is one of the most popular Mario streamers, Grand Poo Bear (pictured above). He's a good gateway into this if you're even remotely interested and on the more mature side. He just got a new YouTube editor, and as with all change online, it's not something I immediately jump on, seems a bit more jazzed up and maybe aimed at a younger crowd, but it's good enough.

My suggestion would be to start with his playthrough of Grand Poo World II (a great hack), or maybe just whatever new mario-themed video came out. I'm not too worried about finding the BEST video, since nobody's going to be interested, but you might legitimately like it if you wanted to kill some time.