Really really potent childhood memory, of a quality I'm absolutely not going to be able to communicate to you in this post, of the font size being slightly smaller on the description of power balloons in the Super Mario World instruction booklet. Obviously the actual reason it's smaller is because there's more text and it wouldn't fit in the box otherwise, but that's not the kind of explanation you think of when you're five, and I instinctively read it as whispering, or speaking softly as you might to a child who's drifting off to sleep. The contrast between what struck me as the dreamlike body horror in "Mario's body will swell up" vs the carefree gentleness suggested by "drift through the sky" spoken in the soft cooing voice my inner ear was providing gave the text a deeply uncanny, unsettling feel, like a nightmare that hasn't quite realized it's a nightmare yet. It didn't help that Mario's balloon form is not illustrated anywhere in the manual, and the power-up doesn't appear until fairly late in the game (late enough that I was too bad-at-games to get that far for a long time), so I only had these words and my own imagination to try to understand what the "swelling up and then drifting away" might actually look like. This little snippet of text from the manual has stuck with me more profoundly than probably any of the actual content of the game ever did.
