Yeah, I know I’ve been going a little crazy with the video posts lazy, so I’ll follow it up with an in-depth analysis, just so I’m not being *that* lazy with my blogging. But you have to watch the video first, of how one man proposed to his special lady.

For any non-nerds out there who are confused, what this guy did was use a program to modify Super Mario World to get it to spell out his proposal. So first off, let’s look at what he did right:

• He involved Super Mario
• There’s a beagle at the end

And no, he does not get points for having a ring and getting on one knee – those are standard parts of a proposal, and so no bonus points are awarded.

But what about what this fella did wrong?  For starters, he didn’t actually speak the words “will you marry me” – he let the game do it for him.  Yes, yes, I get that that was his whole plan.  But even though he had the coins spell out his question, he still should have repeated the question when she looked down at him holding the ring.  Watch the awkward pause from 1.01 through 1.04.  Note that the girl looks back at the screen before saying “yes.”  She’s looking for something else – some other confirmation that she is in fact being proposed to. But the guy doesn’t say anything. He’s just there, motionless, holding the ring for three awkward seconds. Hey look, I know that those four words are hard to say, but that’s kind of the point.

Also, the fact that he proposed with Super Mario is really only romantic if the girl is also into Super Mario, which she clearly isn’t. Watch the way she plays at the beginning of the video. She doesn’t kill a single Rex. (Sure they require two jumps to kill, but she didn’t even flatten them with one jump!) She ducks underneath the Banzai Bill when she was just regular Mario and could have simply ran underneath it. She misses the second Yoshi Coin, despite the fact that it requires a simple jump off of a ledge to retrieve it. And worst of all, despite the fact that there are coins pointing downwards toward the pipe she was supposed to go in, she keeps trying to run through the solid wall in front of her. Hell, you could argue that she didn’t even notice that the coins spelled out her name before her boyfriend told her to just keep running. All of which points to the fact that she is simply not an avid fan of Super Mario. Which means the proposal is more about what the guy likes, and not about what the girl likes. This is a serious offense. Its like when the sports fan drags his girlfriend to a ballgame to propose on the Jumbotron, even though she has no interest in sports. (Yes, I had considered proposing at Shea Stadium, but I knew that would have been far more special for me than for Courtney. Although it would have been pretty sweet if I was able to involve Mr. Met *and* the Pepsi Party Patrol…)

All in all I give this guy credit for proposing in an unusual way, and he’s gotten close to 200,000 views on YouTube as of now, so clearly people think its at least interesting. (And the way he used the level ending music at the end was a definite nice touch.) But in the end he made the proposal more about his technical hacking skills than about Lisa, and that’s just not right.

Hell, if he was going to propose in their basement, he might as well have just had the beagle give her the ring.