Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Platform: Game Boy First Released January 21, 1994 Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa Developed by Nintendo NO MODERN RELEASE* Listing on Mario Wiki
*I made a mistake when I first published this and said Wario Land is on Switch Online. It is not.
From here out, if there’s an option to do color versions of classic Game Boy titles (meaning more than just four Super Game Boy-like colors), I’m taking it. If home developers are going to go to all the trouble of colorizing these games, at least one person with a semi-big review platform should acknowledge them. All the color screenshots in this feature are from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition by korxo, who did a very good job given the limitations. Link to the Patch
The fire attack and the dash attacks don’t show up all too well in screenshots. Thankfully, I barely used the dragon hat.
Okay, I’m pretty sure this is the last game that’s officially part of the Super Mario franchise’s 8 bit and 16 bit era that I haven’t reviewed. Like Yoshi’s Island, it’s only technically part of the Super Mario franchise thanks to a subtitle and really exists to act as the starting point for its own spinoff franchise. As of this writing, there’s been eight Wario Land games (assuming you count Wario World for GameCube and Wario: Master of Disguise for Nintendo DS as “Wario Land” games, and I do), and it all started here with a game that built to the strengths of the Game Boy. It’s certainly not Mario-like. Wario Land is actually more of the spiritual successor to the legacy of Doki Doki Panic and later Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s a much, much slower action game with a focus on exploration. There’s no B-running and no fast reaction times required. Even when you’re being stalked by a killer Thwomp, the tempo is kept pretty low and the focus is on creating tension, not panic.
Actually, it does the “chase” gimmick twice, with the second time turning the Thwomp into a boat at the end.
Which isn’t to say there’s no action in Wario Land. Wario’s tackle is satisfying enough, and it’s always fun to pick up a downed enemy and throw them off their perch and to their death, hopefully involving lava. If it worked perfectly, the combat would be S-tier for 8-bits, but that’s not the case. Wario is one of the first 2D retro games I’ve reviewed where the physics are wonky to the point of being genuinely unpredictable, mostly thanks to the level layouts. If you attempt to pick up an enemy with any structure nearby, whatever you’re carrying will be knocked out of your hand, and the enemy might instead shuffle around like they’re square dancing upside-down around your sprite. There’s a roughness to Wario Land that’s obvious right from the start and sticks around until the bitter end.
This is not a traditional hop ‘n squash game. I took more damage fighting the most basic enemies than I did in all other Mario games in this marathon combined. I don’t know if a single goomba so much as nibbled at the tip of my boots in the Mario games, but these little things called Pirate Gooms got me several times. Usually because they recovered right as I was reaching them. I may or may not have lost lives to them as well. (cough) Hey, it wasn’t MY fault. It was the physics. I swear.
Thankfully, the combat takes a deep back seat to stellar level design, but even that has this undeniable roughness to it. Wario Land has one of the strangest progression structures I’ve encountered, as some early levels have multiple exits and branching paths, one of which leads to an entirely different game world that’s otherwise inaccessible. Hell, the very first level in the game takes place on a beach, and the level’s format changes after you beat the first game world and the tide comes in. It’s a great idea that had me so pumped-up to see what other wacky changes would happen to the game world.
And then, after the 23rd of 40 stages, the “multiple exits” concept is abandoned completely, never to return. In total, only five stages have hidden exits. Imagine if Super Mario World didn’t have any key holes after the halfway point. Well, Wario Land actually does that, and it’s so goddamn weird for it. The idea of changing world maps is also largely abandoned, as I’m pretty sure there’s only one instance of it with any consequence after the secret exits stop. A lot of games give off the impression of having more ambitious plans that were left on the drawing board, but with Wario Land, I really think that might be what happened. The only way I can make sense of the structure is that they ran out of time and had to delete multiple exits and possibly stages when the time came to code the game, only many earlier ones had to be left in because they stuck a game world off in the corner, where nothing else on the map can logically reach it, and there was nowhere else to hide the treasures within.
Unlike Mario World, the keys that unlock the fifteen hidden treasures are often placed away from the skull doors that hold them. Sometimes, they’re on the total opposite end of the level, and carrying the keys from Point A to Point B is a pain in the ass. In a good way, I mean. Thankfully, the keys don’t vanish if you scroll them off screen, and you can also use them to kill enemies.
The good news is that hidden doors aren’t the main thing you’re searching for in Wario Land. What you’re really trying to do is accumulate money to buy a bigger house than Mario lives in after Wario’s attempt to claim squatter’s rights in Super Mario Land 2 didn’t work out. The plan is to steal back a gold statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by Captain Syrup, the ruler of Brown Sugar Pirates (why is it always food-based names? Does Nintendo not feed their developers? It would explain a lot!). Surprisingly for a Nintendo game, Wario doesn’t intend to fetch the statue in order to court Peach. Oh no. Wario might be a greedy Mario doppelgänger, but he’s a greedy Mario doppelgänger who follows the golden rule: don’t stick your d*ck in crazy, and when the ruler of a country commissions a golden statue of themselves, it’s a safe bet they’re f*cking nuts. Go ahead and cringe, but Wario played Super Princess Peach. He knows what’s up. So he plans on ransoming the statue to raise funds to buy a castle. It’s the most petty reason to go on a harrowing adventure, and it ends with Mario stealing the statue anyway.
As luck would have it, the final boss is a genie and, once Wario has won the fight, he gets to make a wish. He probably should have made it “I hope that my action-adventure franchise doesn’t completely evaporate by the 2010s” but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because the absolute monarchy of the Mushroom Kingdom is so capitalist that even a genie needs to get a bag, to make Wario’s wish come true, you need to accumulate as much money as possible. The hidden treasures are given value in coins after you beat the genie, and I’m fairly certain that if you find all fifteen of them (and complete all forty courses as well), you will max out the coin bank and get the best ending, which is Wario getting his own planet.
Update: WRONG, you will need about 10K in coins plus the fifteen treasures plus have an all-clear for the forty courses to get Planet Wario.
Mario would later top this by getting his own galaxy. Always a bridesmaid, huh Wario?
Finding the treasures IS hugely satisfying because the game doesn’t tell you where they are. While the five stages with hidden exits are marked on the overworld map, there’s no indicators for which levels have treasures (something Virtual Boy Wario Land did). The only thing you can really use to help is the fact that the fifteen treasures have spots sequentially on the scoreboard. So if you’re missing the “G” treasure, it’s going to be found in one of the levels between where you found treasures “F” and “H.” I love this, and the only thing I wish for is that, once you found the treasures, the game told you what stages you found them in. I also wish Nintendo would build a much bigger game based around this idea. I found MOST of the treasures on my first playthrough, but the act of getting them was rarely a layup. In fact, the second-to-last one I could not find for the life of me.
When you do find the treasures, it’s a moment. It never feels anything short of great.
As a proof of concept first attempt at a new franchise, Wario Land holds up shockingly well. I don’t think it will be for everyone. The slow movement will be a major turnoff for a lot of players, as will be the clunky mechanics. It also has some exceptionally weak bosses. At one point during a boss fight, I was dodging attacks and hunkering down for a typical “three hits and your dead” type of battle. But after a few passes, nothing was happening, so I charged at the boss and it worked. When he was stunned, I picked him up and threw him in the lava and the fight was over. Curiosity got the better of me so I rewound the fight and this time, I charged as soon as I could. It worked.
Even with satisfying combat, I wouldn’t recommend playing Wario Land specifically for it. It’s just not polished enough for that. From an action perspective, it’s for sure the roughest 2D combat I can remember Nintendo doing, including Kid Icarus. But as a true treasure hunt game, I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having. Wario Land has NO bad levels among the forty total courses, which is nothing short of remarkable given the limitations of the Game Boy. And, as I said, even the basic enemies can pose a threat, so you can’t sleepwalk through it like you can the Virtual Boy sequel that was the only Wario Land I really ever played through all the way. Okay, so the difficulty is largely thanks to the janky physics and stiff jumping, but it’s charming even when it feels like it doesn’t work the way the developers intended.
The later levels that take on maze-like characteristics are so strong that I wouldn’t have minded if EVERY level had been that way. They basically did have that mentality for the sequels.
I’m sure a lot of people will say Virtual Boy Wario Land is the superior game, but I’m not going there. Both games are vastly underrated, but once you stack the eagle helmet and dragon helmet in VB Wario Land, it’s all over but the shouting. The game becomes too damn easy, and that broke my immersion a lot more than the eye-melting red and black visuals did. While there’s a few pits that I feel are too touchy and the collision is never as good as you want it to be, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 never allows you to go on cruise control. It’s an imperfect build of the perfect 8-bit mix of platforming, action, and exploration. But even the imperfection feels like it fits Wario like a glove. What other character could get away with a game that feels this unfinished? I assume since it was 1994, they thought the Game Boy was near the end of its life cycle and they had to rush it out. Hah. Verdict: YES!
Donkey Kong Country aka Super Donkey Kong (Japan) Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System First Released November 18, 1994 Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper Developed by Rare Ltd. Published by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Listing at Mario Wiki
Well, um, the rain still looks like rain! Or oatmeal. It kind of looks like oatmeal. But RAINING oatmeal.
I swear to God that I didn’t deliberately review this back-to-back with Super Mario Land 2 because both games were more focused on looking pretty than being mind-blowing from a gameplay perspective. Actually, I thought Donkey Kong Country had a much better chance of scoring a YES! than Super Mario Land 2 because it would still have the horsepower to pull off clever level design. And sometimes it does! Like, take a look at this:
Oof, that does not look beautiful. I bet it did in 1994, and that’s literally the only time it had to. No matter what anyone thinks, even Nintendo games (or games Nintendo paid to have made, as is the case with DKC) are ONLY made to appeal to gamers at the time of release, and if they happen to be valuable as catalog titles later, that’s just a bonus. I know people want to believe the mighty Nintendo plays 4D chess and has this big roadmap of when catalog titles will be worth money again, but they don’t. Nobody does. That’s why gaming licensing planks are so very, very one-sided and sh*tty.
You have to hit those STOP/GO barrels to freeze the red-eyed enemies, which turn into stones. You never know how much time you get for each barrel, and they staged the level in a way where the last few only give you a split second. It’s quite exciting, and the enemies are creepy enough. I just wish there were more stages that made me sit-up like that, but that wasn’t the point of Donkey Kong Country. It was made only to be 1994’s big smash hit, and if it’s worth some scratch in the 2020s, hey, lucky us. So when people say “Donkey Kong Country doesn’t hold up” it’s okay to say “well duh!” It accomplished exactly what it set out to do in 1994: curb stomp the 3DO into oblivion while keeping Nintendo fans on the hook while they got the platform that would come to be known as Nintendo 64 ready. “Holding up to the test of time” was not on the agenda.
You can’t say that they overplayed level gimmicks. Despite the fact that the STOP/GO barrels had legs as a gimmick, they only show up in that one level. These parrots only show up once too, though they’ll be featured characters in the sequel.
So in a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that any aspect of DKC holds up at all. I think my frustration with Donkey Kong Country is that it doesn’t feel like it squeezed all the potential out of the gameplay concepts it has. Maybe they were saving-up for the inevitable sequel, but I dunno. I’m a big fan of leaving it all on the court, and Rare sure as hell didn’t do that. It’s actually one of the most conservative games I’ve reviewed lately. As a franchise builder, few first steps are rarely this enticing and leave you wanting more in a bad way. Maybe any more bold ideas were canned for being too difficult when they were trying to make a game to appeal to everyone, including very young gamers, whom I’m guessing will like DKC in 2025 more than I did. I hate to guess on these things, but Donkey Kong Country seems like a great starting title for introducing young children to platforming. From what I can remember about the sequels’ difficulty, I’m guessing I won’t be able to say that about them.
Then again, there’s moments that feel like the bottom of the barrel is being scrapped. No pun intended, but this evil barrel is my least favorite boss trope: fighting the same regular enemies you’ve been killing en masse this whole time.
Even the Stampers recognized the game was too easy, but I think that could have been fixed by adding a difficulty toggle. A hard mode wouldn’t have been too hard. Just remove a lot of the DK barrels from stages. I took plenty of damage playing DKC, but I never had to wait more than a few seconds to undo that, so there was no tension. Still, the addition of Diddy Kong was probably the smartest move. What Donkey Kong Country really does right is removing hit points in favor of having two different characters, and whoever you’re playing as is lost when you get hit, at least until you find the next DK barrel two seconds later. Being able to swap between two characters who have different skills was also inspired. Diddy Kong can cartwheel through enemies and seems to have more hangtime when you cartwheel off a ledge before he has to jump. Plus he carries barrels in front of him, which makes it easier to uncover hidden doors. Meanwhile, with Donkey Kong you can do such tactics as tagging Diddy so you can use him instead. Again, a great idea that would be utilized better in the sequels. Are you noticing a theme here?
The only time I used Donkey Kong was when I was afraid of losing Diddy. It became clear really quickly why he’s not playable in the first two sequels.
Unlike Super Mario Land 2 which, besides having a lot of pointless bonus levels, really did nothing wrong besides having too basic of level design, Donkey Kong Country did PLENTY to leave me terminally annoyed. The methodology of 100%ing the game (or 101%ing because ain’t that quirky?) is strange. Every level has K-O-N-G tokens to find, some of which are so well hidden that I couldn’t find them. Sounds great, except they don’t contribute to the final completion percentage. Instead, acing the game only requires finding every bonus room. Probably not the best way to do it since there’s too many of them and they completely bust the game’s flow. My favorite levels were usually the ones that back-loaded the bonus rooms near the end of the stages. Those tended to have above-average level design. Hell, I normally hate swimming stages, but at least none of those have bonus rooms, so they were some of the better levels.
I found myself carrying barrels and walking up against walls because I was more focused on getting 100% than I was just enjoying the boilerplate, paint-by-numbers level design.
What wrecks the game’s tempo even worse than the bonus rooms are the animal tokens. No matter what you’re doing or where you are in a stage, once you collect the third and final token of any set, you drop what you’re doing and enter that specific animal’s bonus stage. It would make so much more sense to instead bank the reward until after you beat the level. That’s a time honored gaming tradition, right? But no, it’s an interruption, and not always (or ever) a welcome one. The levels take a while to finish, and it gets worse, because sometimes after the round is finished, it takes you quite far back in the level you were playing. Maybe even to the start of the stage.
Okay, so the animal bonus rounds are fun. Well, until you have 99 lives. Then they become annoying.
I did end up 101%ing Donkey Kong Country, but the irony is, I probably would have enjoyed my time with the game a lot more if I hadn’t bothered. I mean, not enough to give Donkey Kong Country a YES!, but it would have been a lot closer. I found myself deliberately avoiding animal tokens and losing the bonus rounds as soon as they started just to make them go faster. When just the act of finding the rooms is all you need, why bother? DKC is a game where lives are so plentiful that you’ll almost certainly not game over even if you struggle with some later stages. That’s a big if, by the way. The only stage I died more than twice on was the second mine cart stage, which shows up pretty late in the game. And it’s not that I never enjoyed the exploration aspect. Actually, I was happy that, if you miss a bonus room and have to replay the level, you don’t have to finish it to get credit for the stuff you missed. As soon as you locate the bonus rooms you missed, you can pause the game and press select and return to the map with full credit.
If the game had required all the letters, I would still be playing DKC, but it didn’t, and instead I’m trying to finish up this review as fast as I can.
There are a handful of gimmicky levels to keep the experience somewhat fresh, like the above screenshot. That treadmill runs on fuel barrels that you have to collect, and it kept my attention for the full length of the stage. The mine cart stages are some of the stronger auto-scrolling types of levels I’ve experienced, and a stage where you slide up and down ropes automatically actually provided a solid, enjoyable challenge. I’d say around a third of Donkey Kong Country holds up and remains clever today. But two-thirds of the game is too basic to hold up to the test of time. You never quite shake the proof-of-concept feeling when playing it, and that makes sense because the gameplay isn’t what they had to get working. Nintendo paid for a game that looked high tech enough to buy them time for the Nintendo 64. Donkey Kong Country for the third best-selling SNES game, so they got it. But being more bold and experimental with the level design? That came later, with the sequels.
Donkey Kong Country’s bosses are all dull, but King K. Rool takes the cake. His arena is much bigger than the screen, and his attack pattern is basically adding one pass across the full length of the arena after every hit. So when he drops cannonballs across the screen, instead of an exciting pattern like dodging them for several seconds, the cannonballs drop one at a time across the length of the screen. It’s the most unimaginative way of handling any boss, let alone a final one.
As a prototype for better games to come, Donkey Kong Country is a good start. It’s never BAD from a level design point of view and the barrels that you fire out of are fun enough, though not quite barrels of fun. The controls are pretty good, and it’s easy to get a feel for how long you can roll or cartwheel off a platform and float in the air before you have to jump. But the level themes are basic and dull and there’s not a big enough cast of enemies. The bosses are REALLY bad, too, and since they take even longer to fight than enemies in Mario games, they come across as punishment for finishing a world instead of a reward.
The barrels are certainly a great idea and probably the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that I feel they didn’t hold back on. They got every molecule of gameplay out of them without being boring. I really think they’re why this ended up such a potent franchise.
The test of time is cruel, and no games have a tougher time facing that test than games based around cutting edge graphics first and gameplay second. Since the graphics were the main selling point, I figure I should mention I thought the game was pretty damn ugly. The character models are fine, I guess, but the architecture is really rough, with backgrounds often looking like Sega CD levels of splotchy. The funny thing is, after Donkey Kong Country became the last big mega hit for the SNES, Nintendo would have given anything to have Yoshi’s Island look like this game, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because it was too far in development to change the entire art direction. That’s kind of hilarious, because Yoshi’s Island still looks good in 2025 including all its cutting edge special effects. Donkey Kong Country, well, doesn’t. These days, DKC is just another middle of the road SNES platformer that looked better in 1994 than other middle of the road platformers, but it did leave a franchise with much better games in its wake, so it has that going for it. Take that, Plok. Verdict: NO! But I want to talk about one last thing.
Donkey Kong Country: Competition Cartridge
My best score for Competition Cartridge. I couldn’t find what the highest scores were but there’s people who have scores in the 3,000s. Most of my runs also ended around the same spot, too.
There’s a version of Donkey Kong Country that acts as a spiritual successor to the 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge (which I reviewed in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review’s bonus section). It’s really well made, too and actually the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that unambiguously holds up. The timer stops during all transitions. There’s no overworld map, so finishing one stage takes you automatically to the next. They even redid what’s inside the bonus rooms to make the scoring for entering those rooms more logical, and the scoring system is, you know, fine. I actually had a lot more fun playing this than I did in anything in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. It’s fast-paced and genuinely exciting. So, why isn’t THIS on Switch Online? Unless Blockbuster Video’s IP holders also hold the publishing rights (don’t rule this out) I can’t think of any good reason. If you get a chance it’s worth checking out, though it’s probably not worth the $5,000 it fetches on Ebay. Verdict for Donkey Kong Country: Competition Edition: YES!
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins Platform: Game Boy First Released October 21, 1992 Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Listing at Mario Wiki Color screenshots are from Super Mario Land 2 DX by toruzz Link to the Patch
I really don’t think it’s Mario or Zelda or Kirby or Samus Aran that prove Nintendo is the Death Star of video games. It’s Wario. You know, the throwaway final boss in a Super Mario Bros. spin-off that went on to star in twenty games where his name appears in the title, and that’s not even considering that he’s one of the most popular characters in Mario Kart. Hell, Wario can even lay claim to being the star of a killer app for an entire video game platform. Okay, so it’s Virtual Boy, but it still counts. Meanwhile, Wart is like “f*cking seriously?”
I can’t imagine how mind-blowing seeing Super Mario Land 2 must have been in 1992. Mario as a Game Boy franchise went from looking like this:
To looking like this:
Cool. Nintendo set out to give players the Super Mario World experience on the Game Boy. A task that was basically impossible, but they really did give it the old college try. I suppose that’s why Mario Land 2 is maybe the weirdest game in the entire “Super Mario” franchise. Most of the rogues gallery are one-off enemies that don’t really feel like Mario baddies. This even includes things like pigs with cannons for snouts, a Kid Dracula-like vampire that shoots bats at Mario, and Jason Voorhees-like evil hockey masks complete with a f*cking knife sticking out of them. Seriously, what?
6 Golden Coins feels like it has just enough Mario staples like the mushrooms and fire flowers, Goombas and Koopa Troopas, or the right kind of destructible blocks to pass as a Mario game and not some kind of weird ROM hack. I assume this was done because turning a popular colorized 16-bit game into an 8-bit black and white game was too tall an order. If they copied too many enemies, then all they would be making is a much, much lesser version of the game everyone really liked. Which is sort of what they ended up with anyway, but I do kind of understand why they created such a large roster of new enemies and locations. Probably the best thing I can say about Mario Land 2 is it still feels pretty fresh. Instead of the typical hill stages, fire stages, ice stages, etc, you go into outer space, a graveyard, or a giant mechanical statue that Mario built to honor himself, I guess.
For seemingly no reason, here’s a stage where the ground is shaped like LEGO. It doesn’t do anything different. It’s just a floor, but, look, it’s shaped like LEGO (or Nintendo’s LEGO knock-off)!
So, uh, this is the one that gets me assassinated but I didn’t really like Mario Land 2 at all. I didn’t hate it or anything. It controls fine and has decent jumping physics, but I was just really bored playing it. I imagine a child in 1992 would be more than satisfied with this brisk, easy-going Mario game that looks great but had its potential held back by the Game Boy’s hardware limitations. While the enemy sprites might look original, they couldn’t really do anything creative with their placement or have too many on screen at once. Hell, the hockey masks are just normal Goombas that look different when you get right down to it. Granted, most enemies in Super Mario games are cannon fodder, but these ones are especially easy to deal with. Some of the indestructible underwater ones had a tight squeeze to avoid, but otherwise, there’s just not enough threats in Mario Land 2. The bosses are all pretty weak too.
Tatanga, the final boss from Mario Land 1, was the second boss I faced and the first enemy that damaged me at all. About three seconds after he got me with one of his projectiles, I nailed all three hits against him in a row because they didn’t give him hardly any invincibility frames. He basically reverse-stomped himself into my feet.
If the level design was amazing, that wouldn’t be a problem. But despite the original backdrops, I found myself listless playing the stages. Even the ones structured like mazes are too basic for their own good, and the act of exploring isn’t very rewarding because so many of the unlockable bonus stages feel samey. Only one of them provides any reward besides just an extra stage for the sake of an extra stage, and that’s a shortcut in the Macro Zone that skips two of the levels and takes you straight to the zone’s final stage. Okay, so it was cute that the moon got pissed off at me for getting the Space Zone’s bonus level, but the novelty wore off when I had to actually play the stage and it was just more of the same. I don’t mind the level count, but the bonus levels need a reason to exist. Hell, there’s even a random level in the map, the “Scenic Course” that just sort of is there for no reason besides “why not?” It does nothing. It unlocks nothing. It’s pointless. I think Nintendo was capable of better than that by 1992.
Hey, don’t look at me like that! You’re the one that only has two levels.
So, yeah, I’m not a fan of Super Mario Land 2. The rabbit ears aren’t a very fun power-up (they’re basically the racoon tail without the soaring through the sky part), the game is far too easy, and things like how carrying a turtle shell is done by balancing it on your head because they couldn’t squeeze in an animation of Mario carrying the shell thanks to the hardware limits made me cringe instead of smirk. Really, the only purpose Mario Land 2 serves today is being a reminder that ALL games are a product of their time. Most of Nintendo’s catalog holds up remarkably well to the test of time. It’s their most astonishing achievement. But the Game Boy wasn’t ever really meant to do that. It was designed to provide a lower cost portable experience that was good enough for the standards of over three decades ago.
You know, having the Three Little Pigs would have been a cute idea if I hadn’t already fought a completely different species of pig that shoots cannonballs at me. Do YOU guys shoot cannonballs? No? Then how come that thing wasn’t the boss and you are?
I actually tried to do this review back in January, when I reviewed Super Mario Land, but I got bored pretty quickly and shut it off. I gave the original game a YES! because, rough as it is, it’s a unique Mario experience unlike any other Super Mario game before or since, something you can’t really say about Mario Land 2. The two games have a lot in common. Like 6 Golden Coins, Mario Land 1 has unique-to-it locations, enemies, and themes. I guess I just like the idea of Mario exploring Ancient Egypt, Easter Island, and a world based on Chinese folklore more than lock blocks or a graveyard. But it’s not just that. Mario Land 1 feels like a one-off Mario gameplay experience. Mario Land 2’s gameplay is just the best approximation of Mario World they could muster within the limits of the Game Boy. An impressive engineering feat? Sure.
The level design just never rises above being okay. I’m happy I waited until after playing every other 80s and 90s Super Mario game to do 6 Golden Coins, because it really aged the worst out of any other game in the series. It just offers so very little that holds up. All that it really has left is a lot of personality, but hell, every Mario game has that, don’t you think?
Fated to age well? Nope, and that’s okay, because it worked for the kids of 1992. I’m happy for them. It’s just not 1992 anymore, and from the moment I booted up Mario Land 2, I couldn’t wait to be done with it. God, I really hope they don’t remake this one. Oh, Nintendo will eventually, but when it happens, I hope it’s a full reimagining with new level design and power-ups that keeps the basic frame work. The idea of Mario Land 2 is fine, but it’s a product of its time, and that product is about thirty years past its expiration date. Thanks for giving us Wario, though. I do like Wario. Verdict: NO!
Metroid: Zero Mission Platform: Game Boy Advance Released February 9, 2004 Directed by Yoshio Sakamoto Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription Listing at Metroid Wiki
ARE YOU SH*TING ME? How the heck did I miss 33% of the items? I knew I should have used a guide. Oh, and ignore my completion time, because I did rewind and use save states a lot to undo backtracking. At one point, I spent close to an hour trying to figure out how to get one super missile pick-up (this one) when I knew I had the stuff to get it, but I also wanted the best ending. I really thought I’d be further along in my Nintendo marathon, but trying to 100% every game is getting to be a pain, especially since I missed an energy tank in the first Metroid anyway (I didn’t get the one in Kraid’s chamber). For Zero Mission, I really did think I got most everything. I’m genuinely stunned I missed so much. I thought, at worst, I’d have like 90%.
It’s really not accurate to call Metroid: Zero Mission a remake of the original game that I just reviewed. There are winks to the original game, but calling this a “remake” is like saying the 2025 Superman movie is a direct remake of the old 1950s Kirk Alyn serial Atom Man vs. Superman. I mean, they’re both about Superman fighting Lex Luthor, who uses an artificially-created Kryptonite to neutralize Superman while unleashing a doomsday device on Metropolis. They’re practically identical! Except, no, they’re not really that similar at all. Zero Mission is barely even inspired by the original, and instead shares a small handful of similar rooms and a couple gags from the first game. Like, remember this GOTCHA?
I could have also done the Captain America “I understood that reference!” meme here.
But otherwise, this is basically more of a direct prequel to Super Metroid, like Nintendo said, “what if in 2004 we released what the 1986 game would have been like if we had made it in 1994 instead?” It’s Nintendo’s version of wish fulfillment. Which isn’t to say you should expect a game with as grand a scale as Super Metroid, either. I was actually surprised by how small the world of Metroid: Zero Mission is, even if you count all the Zero Suit stuff. I remembered the game being much bigger, but there really are only two “benchmark” boss fights before you tackle Mother Brain. Nintendo’s own version of Bulk & Skull, the dynamic duo of Kraid and Ridley. There’s other boss fights but not a single one of them shakes the “mini-boss” vibe, and hell, I beat Ridley in about twenty seconds. I even called my nephew and his friends over to watch the fight since they’re big Smash Bros. fans. “Hey kids, want to see me beat Ridley?” and the fight was over before the kids even finished talking about how cool a design it is.
Maybe I’m just good at fighting Ridley. I died against both Kraid and Mother Brain, but later on, I beat Robo Ridley only getting hit twice.
I guess I just expected to like Metroid: Zero Mission a lot more than I did. I was certain I’d be saying it’s one of the all-time great Game Boy Advance titles, but I’m not going there. Much like with Super Mario Bros. 3, eh, it’s fine. It just brings very little new to the table. The disappointing thing is, when it does manage to bring fresh ideas, they usually are fantastic. It’s such a small thing, but at one point you’re attacked by these annoying-as-hell space parasites. You can’t shoot them, and once they’re on you, you have to bomb them off. I kind of figured they only existed to be a tutorial for the bombs. Later in the game though, you have to deliberately infect yourself with the parasites, then lead them to these otherwise indestructible heart-shaped barriers. Apparently the parasites like them more than the taste of Samus’ armor.
Chow down, gang! Whoever eats the most will become the new Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea! (My sister read that and said “that’s not why she eats the heart. It’s to prove she’s carrying the Stallion who Mounts the World you idiot.” I feel so loved.)
It’s such wonderful world building that helps make Zebes feel like a genuinely organic, thriving ecosystem, but those moments are few and far between. Zero Mission just never successfully loses the vibe of being a lesser-version of Super Metroid. It sure doesn’t play as well. The movement and aiming is clunkier and the sense of exploration is muffled. The level design is fine, but it’s not amazing. If they were aiming for a sense of claustrophobia, great. I was kind of surprised that’s something that people craved from Metroid, but again, I got into the series through Metroid Prime. While it has plenty of moments of feeling closed-in, the thing *I* most directly associate with Metroid is the believable alien world. At the time I played Metroid Prime, I’d played a lot of first person shooters that controlled better and had better action, but it was the atmosphere and the settings (and the enemy design to a lesser degree) that immersed me like few games ever had. For a 2D game, Zero Mission does okay at that, but there’s not enough of a push towards giving it that lived-in feel.
This is the only cutscene that works, and it’s for one of my favorite game bosses. A giant one-eyed brain with spikes and tubes coming out of it that’s submerged in a giant glass jar is objectively terrifying. On the other hand, the one right before the Zero Suit section of the game was so damn silly that I chortled. It looked almost identical to the opening of the Mighty Mouse in the Great Space Chase, which a young Cathy Vice most certainly didn’t watch so much she wore out the VHS tape. I showed this joke to my parents and they both looked off into the distance like they were having flashbacks. You know, come to think of it, I “wore out” an awful lot of video tapes that my parents hated having to watch over and over again. I just gave them the stink eye, but they claim innocence. “We would never have broken your treasured video tapes, Cathy. We might have lied about our ability to find replacements, though.” Well, that’s fair.
Everything that happens until after the Mother Brain fight has the feel of going through the motions. There’s not really any new items or abilities. There’s lots of gizmos in the levels themselves that you can use to get around, but otherwise, this is just a boilerplate, paint-by-numbers Metroid adventure, and it’s good, really. It’s pretty much impossible to not enjoy Metroid once they perfected the formula. But I found myself waiting for something to happen that really made me sit up in my chair, and it just never happened. You beat Mother Brain, run away, and it feels like a decent but unspectacular game is over. Everything that happens afterward feels almost like a completely different game. I’m guessing they were aiming for an epilogue vibe. They failed badly at that.
The home stretch leading up to the battle with Mother Brain is probably the part of the game that feels most closely pulled from the original. In fact, it’s actually a safe bet to say that the only twist really is that you’re not playing the original game. It’s a little easier to dodge the bullets shot by the indestructible guns and you presumably have super missiles to make breaking through the barriers go faster. Then you get to the Mother Brain fight, and I felt it’s a massive letdown. It’s staged very poorly, with two single-block platforms and a pit of lava underneath you, with two guns continuously shooting at you AND those orange circles. This was a chance to fix one of the worst last boss fights Nintendo ever did, and they just made it SLIGHTLY more tolerable. The only new aspect is now Mother Brain’s eye must be shot, and it’s just not enough. How come Kraid and Ridley get whole new fighting styles but Mother Brain is only slightly updated? “Because she’s the last boss!” BUT SHE’S NOT! It’s a boring Robo Ridley fight that’s basically the same type of fight as Mother Brain with a small target that’s covered in glass that has to be shattered, then you have to wait for the glowing dot (an eye, if you will) to be vulnerable to shoot it with missiles. Only THAT fight doesn’t have lava and over four other things shooting at you from all angles while you balance on two small blocks. I would have preferred something truly fresh over a retread of the same old sh*t. Have the glass itself fight back, T-1000 style or something.
Yes, the Zero Suit stuff is fantastic. So fantastic that I kind of wish they had the guts to do that as the entire game. It pulls off genuinely scary stealth mechanics in 2D just about as good as a platforming-shooter can do. Okay, so it’s nowhere near as hair-raising as the evil Samus in Metroid Fusion was (the first time I realized a 2D game could be scary), but running from the Space Pirates was always exciting. Even if some of the moments chosen as the spot you run to that makes them give up and turn around made no sense at all.
“Duh, let’s see, I was right on her tail when she ran into this room, but she’s not here. All that’s here is this wall that both her and I can easily jump over. I’ll just assume she was so scared of me that all her atoms depolarized and she vanished. Good job, me! The literal brain that’s my boss would be so proud of me if she hadn’t just been killed by some blond chick wearing a superhero suit. Hey wait a second! I wonder if that blond chick wearing a different kind of superhero suit that I was just chasing knows her? Well, too late to ask, I suppose, on account of her atoms depolarizing. Hopefully when they make a game about this some day, all the little space pirates who play it won’t have their immersion completely shattered when they see how my victory over the blond girl who I’m pretty sure isn’t the same blond girl who killed Mother Brain plays out.”
Okay, so Zero Mission requires a LOT of suspension of disbelief at the ends of the chases, but most of the sneaking and running is very well done. I just wish it lasted a lot longer. Once you get the suit back, not only does the game go back to being paint-by-numbers Metroid, but the final stretch leading to the ending leans too heavily on a poorly-designed Space Jump. Metroid: Zero Mission’s jumping I think is the weakest link of the game. Even when you have the high jump, it never stops feeling too heavy to the point of being slightly uncomfortable. Oh, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. You’ll adapt to its limits and timing because they did a first-rate job of designing the levels in a way that puts a focus on the limits of your jumps. Eventually it’ll be intuitive, and that must be harder to do than it seems from a development standpoint because a lot of games where the jumping isn’t comfy never manage to recover like Zero Mission does, especially as quickly as it does. But it’s always the elephant in the room, and that elephant goes on a murderous rampage once you get the Space Jump.
This is one of those mechanics where you have to pause and shake feeling back into your hand.
Unlimited jumping WITH heavy jumping physics is a really, really bad idea, and so course it’s the primary gameplay mechanic of Metroid: Zero Mission’s climax. It’s actually exhausting to use, and in some (thankfully limited) instances, it crosses the line into outright bad game design when enemies shoot you out of the air. Since the heavy jumping leaves no elegance to the timing of when you have to press the button to jump higher, it turns what should be a fun superpower (it’s basically flying when you think about it) into a mindless button master. A chore that you have to do a lot at the end of the game. After the stellar Zero Suit stuff, it pretty much sours the finale of an otherwise perfectly decent Metroid game.
“Nice shootin’, Tex!”
So Metroid: Zero Mission blew-up what should have been a historically amazing ending to a game that already suffers from feeling more like DLC for Super Metroid with little in the way of worlds that are “new” to explore. BUT, the important stuff is all here. Zebes does feel like a living alien world at times. Instead of feeling like a series of samey platforms in a video game, it feels like you’re an intergalactic bounty hunter exploring caves and structures on a hostile planet. That’s what I want, so giving Zero Mission a YES! was easy. And yet, that Zero Suit stuff was such a tease because it worked. As silly and convoluted as it is, hell, stealth stuff in video games, even games more serious than this, are usually silly and convoluted. If I can’t deal with that sh*t, I wouldn’t like the genre at all.
I wonder if the underwhelming reaction to Metroid Fusion was the reason why Nintendo hasn’t done a full Zero Suit game in the style of Zero Mission’s finale, including using a stun gun instead of a deadly weapon. You know, Fusion had a weird suit instead of the normal one, therefore it’s not what people what. No, that’s not true though. I think people sh*t on Fusion because it’s basically a linear game, and the enemy/item format was lame as f*ck. You can learn lessons in critical failure (and Fusion didn’t fail critically. Nobody hates it or anything like that. It’s just not Metroid as we want Metroid to be) but you should never lose your willingness to experiment. I just find it hard to believe that the company that made an RPG series where the Mario cast are instead paper dolls or a Kirby game where he’s made out of yarn don’t have the balls to do a full 2D Zero Suit Samus game.
All I care about is having fun, and the Zero Suit gameplay is the highlight of Metroid: Zero Mission for the twenty to thirty minutes it lasts, if that. It’s one of the best sequences in the entire franchise regardless of whether I’m talking about two dimensions or three. Of course, the timing of when it happens is jarring and awkward. It makes it feel tacked-on, and it kind of is. The whole Chozo origin story is, too, and while the level themes when the Chozo drop awkwardly in and out of the narrative are cool (apparently the way to my heart is having hieroglyphs or petroglyphs in games) it feels shoehorned. I can’t help but wonder if they originally intended to start the game with the Zero Suit, since that would have made so much more sense, and they simply lost their nerve. I would have also been fine with a game where Samus has to abandon the suit multiple times throughout, perhaps to retrieve other times. They can come up with reasons why to do that. They’re smart. Either way, the Zero Suit deserves its own game. I think Zero Suit Samus could be a huge franchise for Nintendo. Not that they’re hurting for those, but there’s so many Mario spin-offs. Would one Samus spin-off kill them? Verdict: YES!
“Well…… she can’t draw worth a sh*t, so I guess our experiment to create the greatest artist in the galaxy was a complete failure. I haven’t been this disappointed since that giant, spiky, one-eyed brain we created went evil. Who could have seen that coming? Well, I suppose we should toss Samus in the incinerator and start over. She does pack a mean punch though. Meh, just slap some armor on her and tell everyone to pretend like we were trying to create the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter. Also, maybe we should stop toying with mother nature.”
Metroid Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Disk System First Released August 6, 1986 Directed by Satoru Okada Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Listing at Metroid Wiki
Metroid is one of the original “looks like it’s going to be fun but it ain’t” games.
Well, I reviewed Kid Icarus so I suppose I should also review the game that Nintendo thought was the better bet. They were probably right, too, though I can’t stress enough how miserable I was playing Metroid. I’m not ignorant enough to call it the worst Nintendo-developed game ever, but it certainly ranks among my least favorite games by them. Until this review, I’d never actually finished the original Metroid. Like most people my age, my first experience with the franchise was Metroid Prime, which I LOVED as a kid. It was a major milestone in my gaming life, but the larger franchise really wasn’t. I didn’t even play Fusion or Zero Mission on the GBA until many, many years later and my first experience with Super Metroid was on Virtual Console around the same time I played the GBA games. It wasn’t out of malice or anything. The funny thing is, my older readers probably couldn’t have imagined Metroid as a first person shooter, whereas myself and I imagine many people from my era couldn’t imagine it as anything else!
All credit where it’s due that they really did invent a lot of nifty ideas for how exploration could be handled in a 2D space. Metroid is a bonafide pioneer, and I’m saying that to remind the hardcore Metroid fans who do NOT like people talking smack on the original game that nothing I can say can take away from Metroid’s legacy.
I actually did own the original Metroid for my GBA. I hated it so much that I almost didn’t put Fusion and Zero Mission in my Game Boy Player. It wasn’t just the clunky, laggy mechanics either. By the way, if you’re curious why there’s lag, this is an excellent explanation video from Displaced Gamers, one of the absolute best gaming content creators on YouTube, who I discovered thanks to his video on the infamous dam stage from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, broken down into layman’s terms for dummies like me. But the movement, lag, etc? That didn’t turn me off Metroid, and hell, I think the jumping is pretty dang good, all things considered.
Since this is a largely negative review, I wanted to start off right away by saying the Morphing Ball is an inspired idea. One of the all-time great gaming concepts. It would have been really easy to just say “meh, make her crawl, whatever.” But no, she turns into a ball that even bounces when you fall. When I was a kid, I wondered “does that mean you can play basketball with Samus?” Ooh, I smell an idea for the next Camelot-developed Nintendo sports game! And while I’m on the subject, bring back Metroid Prime Pinball you bastards!
I could handle a challenge, but what I couldn’t handle was taking damage when the controls weren’t in my hands. I couldn’t handle not being able to aim in any direction but straight ahead or straight up. I couldn’t handle having no built-in map, which seems like a massive oversight even for the time period. Hell, even the original Zelda had a map. Many maps, actually, one that gives you an idea of your position in the overworld and one for each dungeon. I really couldn’t handle the repetitive level design. So, I put Metroid away, but thank goodness I plugged my nose and popped in Metroid Fusion, because THAT was the game where I became a fan of the larger franchise, and eventually I would be blown away by Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission, both of which are a LOT better than Fusion was.
This and the Ice Beam are just about as far as I’d made it in any previous attempt before I was too bored and/or frustrated to continue. But a review requires a full playthrough. And morphine, but despite my pleas, my family said it would count a relapse.
After close to twenty years and probably around three or four attempts to play Metroid, I finally told myself I HAD to finish it because it was the next, logical IGC review. Then I quit after thirty minutes and booted up Zero Mission. But then I rebooted Metroid and decided, screw (attack) it, I’ll cheat. So, yeah, I’m not following the rules of my Mario Marathon, IE no rewinding, no save states, no walkthrough. I used all three for Metroid because my ultimate goal is “find the fun, by any means necessary.” Now to clarify, I rewound only to shave time off exploration. In other words, if I went the wrong direction, I rewound it instead of turning around and fighting my way back. I used save states only at the end of the game with the Metroids, and I did use a full walkthrough of the game from WikiStrategy. BUT, I wasn’t glued to it, and not just because the map was small and couldn’t be zoomed-in without making it blurry. I swear! Armed with these tools, which leaves the raw combat and gameplay, did I find the fun that I never found in Metroid before? Well, no. Because, you know, it’s not a very fun game. Hell, the last hour was spent trying to inch my way towards Mother Brain with no means of fighting back. DOES THAT SOUND FUN?!
Actually, I used a combination of save states and rewind to deal with the Metroids because I couldn’t fight the f*cking things and running away was my only option. It turns out that the first Ice Gun I picked up I got out of order. Weirdly, that part happened before I went full tilt into cheating. Later, I got the second Ice Gun THEN the Wave Gun. Well, doing it that way took away my Ice Gun(s). I didn’t know you couldn’t kill the Metroids if you didn’t have the Ice Gun! The Ice Gun I didn’t intend to trade for the Wave Gun! I figured I’d have a wavy Ice Gun! What I’m trying to tell you is that I HAD NO MEANS TO KILL THE TITLE MONSTERS OF THE GAME! WHY WOULD THEY EVEN MAKE THIS A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN? YOU SONS OF BITCHES AT NINTENDO! I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU! I HATE YOUR STINKIN’ GUTS! I HOPE YOUR OATMEAL GETS REPLACED WITH MANURE! MANURE!!!
Metroid is even higher than Little Nemo: The Dream Master on my list of NES games that I seriously do not understand how anyone can be a fan of them or justify some of the level design or mechanical choices made by its developers. There’s some VERY bad game design in Metroid. The pain of the above screenshot is still pretty fresh, literally because I think I injured my throat from all the screaming. I think I had a half-dozen rage quits before reminding myself “you’re right at the end.” I also had to remind myself that I was originally tickled pink when I realized the Ice Gun was gone. When you pick up the Ice Gun, it MURDERS the combat. You can’t turn it on or off, so from the moment you have it, it actually increases the sponge of enemies, which are seemingly not damaged from the act of being frozen, but rather only from being unfrozen. Unless you want to freeze them, jump on them, and plant a bomb on them. If I were a space marine and had to do that, I think I’d probably die because enemies would ambush me while I stared longingly at my gigantic arm cannon saying “what happened? You used to be so cool.”
Or how about this sh*t? In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, VERY late in the game players encounter fake Bowsers in the middle of the levels, and it’s pretty awesome when it happens. I wonder if Metroid’s designers were sneaking a peek at that game’s development and saying “hey, we should do that!” Because this is a fake Kraid that uses the exact same sprite, only I encountered it well before the real one. And now I’m sparing a thought for someone who saw the Kraid statue in Brinstar, thought this WAS Kraid, beat it, then left this area and returned to the original hub world only to later realize the one they killed wasn’t the real one. IT HAD TO HAVE HAPPENED AT LEAST ONCE! There is some poor bastard out there who remembers the time they walked all the way to Mount Doom, then returned to the Shire only to realize they disposed of the mood ring they got at a flea market instead of the One Ring.
There’s been plenty of people who mention the sloppiness of getting life slapped when you enter a door by an enemy who is placed right on the other side, or the wave gun going through blocks, or the inconsistent item drops. But ignoring all those things, I think Metroid is just not that exciting of a game. There’s no elegance to the combat or the level design. Even for its era, it feels very un-Nintendo like in terms of intuitive combat or navigation. While the enemies explode with a nice crunch, there’s just not enough of them that are actually fun to kill. The lack of flexibility for the combat hurts a great deal. There’s also so many jumping corridors or areas of the game where the platforming layout feels samey. They even recycle the logic of the hidden areas. There’s a few duplicate rooms, the first of which usually has a fake-out hidden door that leads to a dead-end while the second has something in it at the same spot. And now that I really think about it, I’m guessing this is the case because it saved on memory space.
One aspect of the game I didn’t really struggle with was the bosses. Well, two out of the three of them. With autofire and the Wave Gun, I beat Ridley in a few seconds. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried the fight without it and it didn’t end so well for me. My props to anyone who actually got through this back in the day.
I already said the roster of enemies isn’t quite big enough, but you can still take steps to get the most mileage out of a limited roster by spacing them out or mixing them up the right way. Look at all the mileage Super Mario Bros. got out of its smaller roster of baddies. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hell, maybe Metroid’s enemies just have boring attack patterns and there was no actual usage to get out of them besides what we already got. None of them are implemented in a particularly clever way, or at least the ones that aren’t meant to be used as frozen platforms. Or perhaps it’s a combination of poor level layouts with inelegant enemies. The best way I can describe it is the original Metroid’s level design and enemy placement feels like the type of design you would commonly see if a game called Metroid Maker existed today. Tons of single block platforms to navigate and the same clusters of enemies spammed on them until they lose all their excitement, just like so many Mario Maker levels.
For all my bitching, the one mechanical part I don’t mind is the jumping. If Metroid’s platforming physics felt the same way Kid Icarus did, with floaty jumps and heavy momentum upon landing, Metroid would probably not be around today. This original Metroid game relies very heavily on single-block-wide platforms. They’re all over, and the big “escape the planet” finale is ONLY single-block platforms. Hell, these platforming layouts would have been tough even with Super Mario 1’s jumping physics, and that game was considered a major milestone in the history of video jumping. So, why isn’t Metroid? Because I think the jumping is reliable and solid, as long as you’re not buried in the lava. For all its problems, Metroid is a genuine step forward for Nintendo’s education on how to do perfect jumping in platform games.
An even better example of poor pacing is the locations of the items. Nintendo is good at hiding stuff in the Metroid games, but not in this one. Some of the missile upgrade locations reminded me of when I’d pester my exhausted and likely annoyed parents to re-hide easter eggs for the fifth time on Easter Sunday and they’d just lay them down around the couch, whining the whole time about how they thought I’d grow out of this by 36 years old. At one point, you can get five missile pick-ups in a span of a minute or two. I’m guessing they figured players would be overjoyed to find a treasure trove of missile upgrades. They didn’t know yet that hiding five upgrades so close together doesn’t leave any cool down time for players. By not spacing them out, they give players one exciting moment for the price of five. That’s a really lousy deal, especially when there’s plenty of dead spaces that could have been given new life by relocating four of those upgrades.
OH how I hated the whole finale. These indestructible guns combined with bubbles that just spawn from the void. I had to restart this last stretch of the game probably a dozen times just to have enough life to make it through, and it’s not like I was full of life after having no means of fighting back against the Metroids. Then Mother Brain nearly gave me a seizure at the end and I had to take a nap. Man, I hated Metroid. I really, really hated it. But, I got Metroid Prime out of it so, you know, thanks Metroid 1.
The good news is that Nintendo did get something priceless out of Metroid: experience. They also learned that gamers were very interested in the concept of fully interconnected, exploration-based space adventure. The concept was solid. This version might not have been very fun and was sure to age worse than most NES games, but as proof of concept for an entire genre, they could have done a lot worse than Metroid. It does a lot right. Shooting bubble doors to open them. The missiles. The Long Beam being an upgrade instead of the default range of your gun, which should be frustrating but instead feels like an earned moment. The Morphing Ball. Freezing enemies to use as platforms. The Screw Attack. Mother Brain. The whole vibe to this world. The Metroids themselves. And of course, Samus Aran. These are way cooler ideas than an Eggplant Wizard or building up to a climax where a character who already has had wings this entire f*cking time finally gets to fly. Metroid on the NES is one of the greatest foundations in gaming history. But I could have lived without actually playing through Metroid. Every house needs a solid foundation to build up from, but you can’t live in the foundation. Verdict: NO!
FYI, I played the Famicom Disk version, which has less lag, apparently. I tried to give myself the best possible way of having fun. I didn’t. Sorry, Metroid fans. For what it’s worth I plan on drooling all over Super Metroid soon.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder Platform: Nintendo Switch Released October 20, 2023 Directed by Shiro Mouri Developed by Nintendo Listing at Super Mario Wiki $59.99 paid for Mario’s visit to the Betty Ford Clinic in the making of this review.
It took 38 years but Nintendo finally figured out to just run with the “Mario on Drugs” joke.
The above screenshot is from the second level in the game. During the first stage, I was worried that I was heading for another New Super Mario Bros. “I guess this just isn’t for me” experience. And then in the second level, I dropped acid and the piranha plants started singing and having a parade, and I was hooked. Oh they don’t call it “acid.” They’re called “Wonder Flowers” but they have a psychedelic glow to them and they do things like make the pipes come to life like they’re inchworms or cause missiles dropping rainbow smoke trails behind them, and yes, even make you see dragons. This isn’t symbolism, people. This is as on the nose as it gets, and I’m there for it.
The only proof this isn’t really drugs: Mario actually caught the dragon.
For a while, I really thought Mario Wonder was cruising to the title of “best 2D Mario game” with no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. This was based largely on the stellar level design and batsh*t insane Wonder Effects. But some really head-scratching decisions made it an actual debate, which I’m grateful for because this would have been a pretty boring review for me otherwise. Which isn’t to say you can get bored playing Mario Wonder. Oh no. This is far and away better than any of the games in the New Super Mario Bros. franchise and a return to form for Mario as a 2D gaming stalwart. MOST of the levels are pretty damn amazing, and the three new power-ups are a lot of fun to use. I can’t really pretend this wasn’t the absolute best time I’ve ever had with a 2D Mario game, even with all the problems. Actually, the levels are so phenomenal that it’s kind of shocking the game did anything wrong at all, but it did.
The “Mario on Drugs” stuff really isn’t helped by the fact that the screen becomes trippy during the Wonder Effects. Again, this really isn’t winking. This is a drunk tapping you over and over saying “DO YOU GET IT?”
For one thing, the levels don’t scale right at all, nor are they ordered correctly. In the Magma World, there’s a level where evil popcorn kernels walk across giant rocks that heat up and cool down, and if they touch a hot surface (or are shot by a fireball) they pop and become evil popcorn. But, you can permanently deactivate the heating rocks by hitting them with water, either by throwing a pot of water at them or using Elephant Mario’s ability to store water in the trunk and spray it. It’s a fun stage, but then the stage you unlock is one of the “break time” stages. These are tiny micro levels that have a gimmick attached to them, some of which aren’t even real challenges and are just for funsies type of deals. Well, the break time stage in question is like a tutorial type of stage for the whole “get water on the heating/cooling rocks” concept. That’s not an exaggeration, either. It’s genuinely the type of brief micro stage that you would build to introduce a brand new gameplay concept, except you just finished a massive, difficult world built around the mechanic. What the hell?
This is the big stage in question. I had to beat it a third time to get the hidden exit, which a couple stages in each world has. Mario Wonder, from a pacing point of view, is heir-apparent to Super Mario World. They even have the same initials. Except they don’t because it’s not “Super Mario Wonder” but rather “Super Mario Bros. Wonder.”
I don’t want to imply that the “Break Time” or “Badge Challenge” micro stages are a complete disaster, because that’s not the case at all. Some of them had me smiling ear-to-ear. But the structure of the game, or rather the lack thereof, causes a lot of pacing problems. Sometimes the overworld maps are walled-off and sometimes you’re free to wander off the paved pathway and take a large cluster of levels, full-sized or micro, in any order you want. You also can’t rely on Wonder’s built-in quick travel to give you a proper level ordering either, because it always puts the full-sized levels ahead of the micro-levels. There is an attempt to tell you the scaling. The levels are given a one-through-five rating on their challenge, but I really didn’t feel they were accurate. I beat many four star levels on my first life and died a lot on plenty of two star stages.
Where you’re free to roam around the map, there’s lots of hidden stuff. Rarely a stage, and more typically Captain Toad who gives you 50 purple coins. Since you’re practically picking purple coins out of your ears, I don’t think the trade-off of a less logical level progression was worth it. I’d rather have the game follow a semi-strict linear progression with the occasional branching path. If 1991’s Super Mario World can do it brilliantly and still offer a sense of exploration and discovery even with paved pathways, then it’s proven that there is no need to suddenly allow players to walk around the map.
It feels like the developers just threw together the game’s courses and couldn’t decide on an order, so they gave up on the process almost entirely. But the example in the lava world I cited above was one of those pathway parts of the map. It wasn’t MY choice for how it played out. It was the development team’s choice. This isn’t a nothing-burger complaint, either. Pace and tempo matter a great deal. I put a very high premium on a game’s maintaining one consistent tempo of quality, and Wonder is all over the place. And some of the “break time” levels really are a complete waste of time, offering neither quirkiness nor challenge. It’s been a long, long time since I played a modern Nintendo game that had so many aspects of it that felt like placeholders for something bigger that just never got finished. They also should have probably somehow incentivized the badges that are outright handicaps. The one I hated the most sees you perpetually bouncing. I would never use it voluntarily, but they could have easily added some post-game content just by offering rewards for beating specific levels with specific badges. Without that, most badges will go completely unused outside of their micro-stages.
The new bubble power offers the same type of instakill satisfaction of the classic Super Mario fire flower (which is also in this game) but with the added benefit of being able to use the bubbles as boosts for your jumps. But, what really makes it work well is that it’s not effective enough to be able to use it to cheese stages. Its usefulness for platforming, even in multiplayer, is very situational, but in a good way. Actually, none of the power-ups are overpowered. There’s no p-wings or hammer bros. suits to wreck the difficulty curve. Probably a good thing, since Nintendo screwed the pooch on curve from the format alone. Also, since I couldn’t find a spot to talk about it, the drill power is one of the most satisfying Mario powers when you do a Bugs Bunny attack on enemies. Ain’t Mario a stinker?
And while I’m complaining about things, Mario Wonder has the typical mediocre 2D Mario bosses. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m deeply in the minority on that opinion, but I just never enjoy the traditional Mario “jump on the head” boss fight style. I can, and have, enjoyed it in other games, but for some reason, it’s always a letdown for me in a Mario game. Maybe it just doesn’t feel like it matches the epic scope and scale of the worlds themselves. But the fights with Bowser Jr. in Mario Wonder, even though it tries to change up the formula by giving the battles the “Wonder Effect” after the first hit, never felt big or climactic to me. I couldn’t wait for them to be over with and my motivation for them was purely “I don’t want to go through this again.” Hell, the “bosses” of the airships are a literal single button that must be pressed, and the act of getting to that button was so simple and easy to bypass the “logic” of the chamber, especially if you have a badge that boosts your jumping ability, that I was always startled that the fight was over when it was. I guess I just assume based on the enjoyment of the levels that they’re capable of better bosses.
I don’t think this was the wisest spell to cast, Bowser Jr. It’s right up there with Ralph Wiggum getting the first swing of the sword and stabbing himself through the heart. Holy crap, Bowser Jr. IS the Ralph Wiggum of Nintendo. I just spent five minutes staring off into space, imagining the implication of that. By the way, Mario Wonder’s co-op doesn’t have the old fashioned New Super Mario “bounce off each-other” mechanics, and so I actually had a really great time playing co-op with Sasha.
There’s fifty-six total Wonder Effects throughout the game, but a lot more levels than that, so many effects repeat, and not every effect is a winner. Some are typical video game stuff, like running away from the giant spiked ball, or even returning an old Mario item like Balloon Mario from Mario World. Others are more outlandish, like requiring you to jump in sync with a musical beat or answer trivia questions where, if you look closely, the things doing the trivia look kind of like the viruses from Dr. Mario. All of the Wonder Effects are fun, truly! Well, they’re fun ONCE, and if they were each unique to a specific stage, I wouldn’t even have this paragraph. But I grew bored with several effects. The most annoying repeat is “Wubba Mario” which they must have been really proud of because all four of its appearances happen around the same time and it’s even highlighted in a story-driven level where you rescue a bunch of trapped miners. But it’s really nothing special. I’ve played plenty of games where you’re a sticky mass that sticks to every surface. This has been done, and yet they gave this over to a not-unsubstantial portion of the game, and I kind of hate that they did that. The kids loved it, though.
And actually, I think the levels with Wubba Mario were some of the weaker ones in Mario Wonder. Between its four appearances, they could have constructed one ultimate level that took all the best bits of them and made a full stage out of it, and it would have been awesome and welcome. Or hell, spread it out! It’s a great big game. Nope. It really does kind of hit close to four in a row and it just kills the excitement of getting Wonder Flowers. By the way, you then have to repeat one of those levels, literally just play it one more time, to open the path to that world’s Special Stage level. It might be the best 2D Mario ever, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder is NOT perfect.
There’s also an “easy mode” in the form of the Yoshis or Nabbit, who only can die from things like lava and pits, but enemies don’t damage them and Nabbit doesn’t even get stun-locked. This is important, but first let me say that, like Super Mario World, there’s a bonus Special World where every stage is designed to be extra difficult. When I reviewed Super Mario World and didn’t struggle all that much with Special Stages (which, for the record, I did, the first time I played the game as a kid), someone said “have you considered that you’re just really good at video games?” Which is flattering, but if it were true I wouldn’t have needed over one-hundred combined lives over the course of three days just to beat this one level:
This is one of those levels where whole new swear words had to be invented. I think I got up to eleven syllables for one of them.
It’s called “Special Climb to the Beat” and allegedly jumping to the rhythm is the key to winning. Okay, so I’m tone deaf and I have shaky hands, so this was fated to be my mortal enemy anyway, but it also annihilated the kids too. I sincerely thought I would not be able to finish the game. I actually finished this review, but that niggling little voice that says “come on, you’re so close to acing the game” started screaming in the head, and I did eventually get to the top. And by the way: I HATE that getting the top of the flagpole is one of the requirements for 100%ing the game, because when I had to replay a few levels to unlock the ultimate final challenge (which is just a marathon of using ten of the badges, though there are a few checkpoints so it’s not THAT bad), for a few of them, the only thing I was missing was touching the top of the flag. There’s nothing worse than replaying a full stage just to do one thing at the very end differently. Anyway, back to the problem with the Yoshis and Nabbit.
Finally!
After beating the wall-jumping stage from hell, Sasha hopped on for co-op, and in fact, we beat four of the Special World levels on our first attempt WITH the purple coins and flagpole. But this is not a +1 in the “maybe she’s just good at video games” pile because co-op made it kind of easy AND the Yoshis made it even easier. Sasha, playing as Yoshi, could not be killed by enemies, and if only one of us was dead, we could come back to life just by our ghost hitting the other within “five seconds” but it’s really closer to eight or nine seconds. So after that stage that killed me a ton, we sort of flew through the Special World. If it took us twenty minutes total, I’d be stunned. Solo? Oh, these stages are brutal. But in co-op? We both died a lot AND beat the stages on our first try. Also, the Special World really isn’t THAT special. What made the Special World stand out in Mario World is that the levels were weird, experimental, and crazy. Well, that’s sort of the whole game of Mario Wonder, isn’t it? Wonder’s Special World stages are harder, but they’re not creatively better because the whole game is this kind of weird, experimental, and crazy.
Now here’s the good news: when Mario Wonder is at its best, it’s pure gaming euphoria. Well, I’d hope so since that’s sort of the point of drugs. One of the many reasons it stands tall over the New Super Mario games is that those always felt like they used the original 8-bit/16-bit games as little more than a checklist. “These are the things we need to put into the games, because nostalgia.” Not Wonder, though. It feels like it used the original games for inspiration to do a game that feels modern and not like a throwback. Which isn’t to say that the games don’t fit with those. The jumping physics are as intuitive as Mario World’s. The cast of enemies is right up there with Super Mario 3’s. The effort made to give each stage its own personality also matches Mario 3’s, and that’s where Wonder really shines. It feels like a true evolution instead of a cash-grab homage.
There are multiple levels in Mario Wonder that are very obviously not designed with co-op in mind. I’m totally fine with that because, say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. One of the reasons the New Super Mario series is so f*cking bland is because Nintendo put such a heavy premium on the co-op gameplay that came at the expense of the single player experience. Every single stage had to work with four players bouncing off each-other. They clearly didn’t give a crap about that with Wonder, because levels like this one, where you launch super high with each jump, caused more fatalities than a Mortal Kombat tournament. I’m all for it, too.
Like Mario 3, if any stage doesn’t “do it” for you, that’s fine because you’re one stage away from a completely unique experience. Even if the Wonder Effect is a repeat, how the stage is built, and the ebb and flow of it, will almost certainly feel like a one-off. It must be hard to do, because there’s not a lot of 2D platformers that can maintain that for the full length of the game. Even Mario World didn’t completely succeed there. With Mario Wonder, Nintendo has now done it twice in this franchise (probably three times since Yoshi’s Island kind of did it too).
Yes, yes, we all liked Limbo, Nintendo. I wonder if the elongated Mario being framed in silhouette like this was a joke against Limbo the indie game and limbo the thing drunk people throw their backs out doing. “Limbo under the bar when you’re stretched out like this, bitch!”
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the polished, modern Super Mario Bros. 3, and to a lesser extent, Super Mario World. What stood out to me in Mario 3 is how, in retrospect, Nintendo did a pretty poor job of incentivizing exploration of the stages. They jammed plenty of content if you do explore, but didn’t effectively corral players into it. The most important question a game designer can ask is “why?” As in “why would players find this stuff?” And I don’t think “just because” is a good answer. I don’t think Nintendo knew that “WHY?” was the be-all, end-all design question in 1988, but they sure did by 2023. Mario Wonder is the most effective 2D Mario for convincing players to see everything through natural gameplay mechanics. They asked themselves “WHY?” and came up with answers, and as a result, for all of its glaring flaws, Mario Wonder is the best 2D Mario game. Sorry, Super Mario Bros. 2 and ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros. 3, but you’ve finally been beaten.
As I stated in my Super Mario Advance 4 review, Mario 3 was a game made in Nintendo’s adolescence. As amazing for its time as the game was, it was also still a game being made by people who were still learning how to develop “Nintendo” style games. Almost exactly thirty-five years to the day after Mario 3 released for the first time and Super Mario Bros. Wonder hit stores, and it’s a game made by Nintendo designers who have graduated as game designers. They know what they’re doing now. They ask “WHY?” a lot, and they understand how to maximize every gameplay mechanic. Mario Wonder IS Mario 3, all grown-up. The irony is, there’s still a lot of gamers out there, 50-somethings, who insist they will NEVER play “modern crap” because they just know in their heart the classics can never be beaten. They refuse to grow up, and I’m very happy the people designing games at Nintendo aren’t like them. Growing up ain’t so bad after all. Verdict: YES!
They really did need better unlockables than this, though. Couldn’t they have given costumes for the characters?
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters Platform: Game Boy First Released November, 1991 Designed by Masafumi Sakashita Developed by Nintendo and Tose Co., Ltd UPDATE: Now Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Déjà vu.
Alright, let’s make this one go quickly. I’m not really THAT interested in the sequel to Kid Icarus. I’m only doing this because of a niggling little voice in my head asking how the f*ck Kid Icarus as a gaming franchise was in the same boat as Metroid to the point that they were basically identical twins for the first, oh, eight years of their existence. I know that’s stating the obvious, but when you lay out the comparisons, it’s actually jaw-dropping.
Both released in the United States in the Summer of 1987.
Nintendo opted to convert the save systems of the Famicom Disk System versions to a new password back-up system even though they had perfected the battery-backup format for Legend of Zelda (arguably their triplet since it was an FDS game released in 1986 which also debuted in the US in the Summer of 1987, but it had a different development team).
And both went on to get underwhelming Game Boy sequels made by literally the same lead designer, Masafumi Sakashita that fixed some problems but ended up much more bland than the original, as if they were afraid to experiment too much.
Kiss the memorable enemy sprites of the first game good bye. Myths’ enemy sprites suck. These things look like malicious portable electric fans.
It’s like the Kennedy/Lincoln comparison of Nintendo, only, you know, real. But Metroid went on to be one of the biggest franchises in Nintendo’s lineup while Kid Icarus apparently wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again. Oh, they say it had a game on 3DS but if it had basically no gameplay connection to Kid Icarus, is it really a sequel to Kid Icarus or a completely new game that just uses the name that was suddenly relevant again because Pit was in Super Smash Bros. You know, the famous fighting game franchise directed by the guy who did the Kid Icarus revival? I don’t really care if the 3DS game is good or not (I couldn’t play it without risking a live reenactment of the stoner film Idle Hands) because the actual Kid Icarus is just gone, like StarTropics, Wave Race, or Gyromite or modern stuff like Chibi Robo or Nintendogs. If I had to guess why, I’d say maybe Nintendo just realized Kid Icarus was never that good.
I thought the bosses of Kid Icarus were lame, but I’ll take them over these bosses that are so spongy and repetitive that all five boss battles become boring.
Kid Icarus on Game Boy is a much closer remake of the original than Return of Samus was for Metroid. If there was anything to salvage from Kid Icarus, this was the chance. And there are some improvements. There’s no falling deaths in this game, it controls MUCH better, and there’s also a much greater emphasis on exploration. The hammers that were only good for freeing NPCs to help you fight bosses now can uncover hidden doors. That’s a great idea. Zelda is basically based around how awesome hidden doors are. Well, except the stuff you uncover in Zelda helps you, and some of it is even essential to finishing the game. That’s not true of Kid Icarus GB, where I’m not sure I found a single hidden room that was actually worth seeking out.
The only hidden items of substance are keys that allow you to go back to already-visited rooms. This is another idea that should have been killed on the drawing board. Nearly every major risk/reward factor of the original game didn’t carry-over to the sequel. This isn’t specifically why the game died a miserable death, but the autopsy certainly lists it as contributing factor.
Most, if not all, of the hidden rooms I found offered a hot-spring to refill your life. That would have been swell, but they also added life drops, including hiding them in the fixtures you smash to reveal the doors to the hot springs. So in order to uncover a thing that refills your life, you have to collect things that refill your life. It made me realize how well done the original game’s damage/healing system was and how destructive just adding the ability to find health refills sitting around is. Hell, at one point the game teased that there was a hidden door at the entrance to the level I was on, so I jumped down to the beginning of the stage and found out that the hidden door was, you guessed it, a life refill. Well, that was totally worth starting the level over again.
I was confused at first by the level design, because the wrap-around playfield from the original game returns for the vertical stages, except now the playfield is wider than the screen is, so instead of walking through one edge of the screen and popping out the other side, you now scroll the screen like a cylinder. I never quite adapted to it, either. It was still disorienting right up until I walked through the final door of the final vertical stage.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters is one of the strangest cases of a failed sequel I’ve ever seen. It retains the three power-ups (with the same life-based requirements) and the exact level formula of the first game. Three vertical levels and a dungeon, then three side-scrolling stages and a dungeon, then three more vertical stages and a dungeon. The only change to the formula is that the shmup finale is replaced with an actual platforming level that features free-roaming flight. That part certainly works better and the stage is probably the highlight of the game because it’s the only part that doesn’t feel like it’s made by a game designer who keeps checking their watch. Even if, when you stop and think about it, it’s functionally identical to a swimming level in a Mario game. Pump a button to stay buoyant while you navigate tight squeezes. Okay, so you’re shooting arrows instead of fireballs, but it’s the same basic concept.
Whatever. At least the level design is okay here.
But while the finale might be tolerable, at least before you take on the slow, clunky final boss fight, nothing that happens before that final stage is worth anything. NONE of the vertical levels offer the same thrills as the highlights of the NES game’s climbing sequences. It’s not just because the stakes are removed, either. They’re just not that well designed. I thought Kid Icarus had some damn elegant enemy placement, especially considering the nightmarish development cycle. The Game Boy title’s enemies often feel arbitrary. Like “well, we have to put SOMETHING here” without having any logic of how that something relates to the landscape. They also somehow made the moving platforming even slower and more miserable to utilize.
The Grim Reapers are significantly less threatening this time around.
And then there’s the side-scrolling levels, which are a complete disaster because they’re completely spammed with doors to explore. Even if you pretend there are no hidden doors, by the mid-point of the game, Kid Icarus is so completely bloated with shops, enemy chambers, test chambers, arrow upgrades, and assorted other doors that the game has no flow to it at all. When the rooms continuously offer the same stuff, that gets boring. “Just don’t go into the rooms!” But nobody is going to do that. It’s up to the designers to assure that the pace and spacing of their game isn’t interrupted by useless gameplay stoppages. You can’t put that sh*t on players. Even if they had given an actual reason to go inside every single room, I don’t want level design where the main stage has a door every few seconds. The gameplay I’m actually here for isn’t going to be inside them.
This boss looks fantastic, but it’s AWFUL. It pokes its head out for a second or two, then retracts and does the same attack pattern with no variation until one of you dies.
For all of its many, MANY problems, I was never bored with Kid Icarus on the NES, at least until the final stage. Frustrated? Sure. Annoyed? Of course. But never bored. I was SO BORED playing Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. Even the dungeons were complete letdowns. The only reason I really played the Game Boy game was to experience three more dungeons, but these ones were smaller in scope and much easier to navigate, with no real sense that they’re trying to trick you into getting lost. In the NES game, you might have to climb down a ladder, then fall to the side in order to continue towards the boss. That idea is removed completely. They never even really feel maze-like. They feel slapped-together, because they probably are. Kid Icarus often had the vibe of a game that nobody had confidence in, but this sequel is so much worse because it just doesn’t feel like it comes from a place of inspiration. It feels like Nintendo poking Kid Icarus with a stick to see if it’s really dead, and it is.
It really doesn’t help that, by the time I reached the end, I was killing the Eggplant Wizards in one shot. There’s too many arrow upgrades. What’s really remarkable is those upgrades don’t make the bosses any less spongy. I’m shuddering thinking about “what if I hadn’t gotten those?” I’d probably still be fighting the second and third bosses. Oh, and you’ll note the items work in the dungeons this time.
Now, in fairness, this wasn’t Kid Icarus’ shot at redemption any more than Return of Samus was for Metroid. The redemption would have been an SNES game made by a team that was bound and determined to turn Kid Icarus into a flagship franchise. That’s what Super Metroid was, and that series has been a pretty damn big deal ever since. I said it was unfair, but if I had been a decision maker at Nintendo and had to do a Sophie’s Choice between these two, I’d have chosen Metroid as well. The truth is, Kid Icarus’ vertical gameplay was already topped by Super Mario Bros. 2, and the shooting mechanics with a colorful cast of enemies was topped by Metroid itself, and even the potential for a game based around flying was taken over by Kirby. What really is left for Kid Icarus? The dungeons? That’s what Zelda is for. The humor that the original designer didn’t even want in the first place? Hell, that could be any Nintendo game.
The boss chambers are bigger than the screen. Don’t you just LOVE fighting super-spongy bosses who make the fight last even longer by weaving in and out of the visible playfield. No? Yeah, me neither.
It kind of hit me while making this review that Kid Icarus is just a hodgepodge of gameplay concepts that Nintendo already was building other games heavily around. Everything bad about Kid Icarus WAS improved. It just wasn’t done in a Kid Icarus game. So, my new theory is that Kid Icarus went to video game heaven because it just didn’t offer anything that you couldn’t already get elsewhere from Nintendo. Why put the resources into rescuing a franchise whose core gameplay is already found in more viable titles? The only reason to even try would be if the game’s main reputation is anything but being “the janky one.” But even fans of Kid Icarus will concede that, among famous Nintendo-developed games, it’s “the janky one.” That’s why it died, and that’s why the 3DS game was completely different. Because it kind of had to be, because Kid Icarus as a concept was already dead and forgotten before I was even born. It’s the video game equivalent of an organ donor. Of Myths and Monsters isn’t a sequel. It’s a eulogy for a potential series that died, but in doing so, it might have saved others just by providing a road map of what not to do. Verdict: NO!
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 Platform: Game Boy Advance First Released July 11, 2003 (my 14th birthday!) Directed by Hiroyuki Kimura Developed by Nintendo Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription Listing at Mario Wiki
After not having that tough a time playing Lost Levels, I got swallowed by a goddamn fish three times.
Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the most celebrated video games ever, and one of the most studied. If you have twenty minutes to spare, well, please keep reading because I work really hard on these things. BUT if you have forty minutes, after me, go read everything Cutting Room Floor has on Mario 3 because it’s fascinating. The amount of drawing-board content that made it into the final game’s code rivals the volume of deleted content you’d see in something like a modern Grand Theft Auto game. It’s also the final console-based Super Mario game to first release before I was born. More importantly for the sake of this feature, Mario 3 is a game that I tend not to like anywhere near as much as my older readers, and I swear to God, it’s not just for the sake of being contrarian. Who would actually say something that’s good isn’t just to be a prick? Well, that’s not my argument with Mario 3 anyway. I like it a lot! I just don’t love it.
In the making of this review, I 100%ed Mario Advance 4. No levels were skipped. No P-Wings were used. I didn’t use rewind to cheat and I never laid down a single save state. I also got every Advance Coin and e-Coin out of the 38 E-Reader levels. Then I replayed probably 25% of the core levels to figure out why I was just not digging them as much as my older readers. The answer involves one-of-a-kind circumstances that can never be replicated along with a dash of science! And if you’re looking at the above picture and saying “hold on, what?” and you’re a Switch online expansion pack subscriber, stop reading now, pick up your Switch, open up Mario Advance 4 and go play the E-Reader levels. It’s cool. I already got your click. It might screw up my “average read time” though so just leave the window open. Thanks.
I can’t appreciate the level of anticipation that gamers of the 1980s went through in the lead-up to Mario 3’s release. I mean, of course there were games I looked forward to as a child, but Mario 3 was arguably the last major game to come out before anything resembling a console war was happening. It’s a situation that will likely never be replicated. The Genesis didn’t really blow up until 1991, so Nintendo stood alone and Mario 3 was the single biggest title that kids wanted. For anyone my age, go back to your childhood and think of the game you wanted the most, and now imagine it was the ONLY game in town, with McDonald’s Happy Meal toys and a cartoon series and motion picture tied into the advertising campaign. Yeah, this will never happen again.
I swear there will be a game review here. Eventually. But this stuff is important to the review I’m going with, trust me.
Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in North America a whopping 477 days AFTER the Famicom release. Publicly, Nintendo blames a ROM shortage, but I think there’s more to it. Oh, I’m sure there was some ROM manufacturing hiccup, but I think they took advantage of it because they didn’t want Mario 3 to cannibalize Game Boy sales. It was their first non-NES device that was released around the time Mario 3 was originally penciled-in and they sort of needed it to do really good to prove they weren’t a flash in the pan. Maybe selling millions of copies of Mario 3 AND millions of Game Boys in 1989 would have been a flex, but who knows? Maybe it could have gone the other way. Gaming had already crashed once, and asking for Mario 3 undermined the Game Boy’s pitch. This is still firmly the “most children’s bedrooms didn’t have a TV” era, and Nintendo’s pitch to parents was “buy your child a Game Boy and get the living room TV back!” But if children in 1989 were asked “it’s either a Game Boy or Mario 3, so take your pick” I think they pick Mario 3, don’t you? Hell, the most famous Mario 3 ad doesn’t show a single f*cking second of gameplay. That’s how hyped the game was, and if Nintendo forced a competition between their own products, I think Mario 3 would have left Game Boy in a smoking crater. Why even create the possibility for that scenario if you don’t need to?
Well, clearly they didn’t need to. Assuming I’m right, sitting from my comfortable distance decades later, I kind believe they were vindicated for the choice to delay. Game Boy was a big hit and Super Mario Land is one of the biggest sellers ever. So was Super Mario Bros. 3 for that matter. The extra time allowed Nintendo to go hard on the Mario 3 advertising with a media blitz that included a Happy Meal promotion at McDonald’s and a cartoon series that was so popular that reruns were still on TV when I was a child. I thought it was completely unwatchable when I was 6 years old and I think it’s still unwatchable now that I’m about to turn 36 years old. Okay, TECHNICALLY the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 aired after the game released, something I wish I had checked on before I watched the entire f*cking series, all twenty-six 10-minute-long shorts, for this feature. Here’s my review: Oh God, the Koopa Kids (who are all the wrong names for some reason, WTF is that about?) are a parody of Ninja Turtles. HAH, because they’re turtles! Someone got paid to make that connection. Oh God, Milli Vanilli is on the show. That sounds like I’m making a joke but I’m not. That’s really them. Oh God, Luigi’s a dog now. Is that a thing they planned for the game?
Nope, this doesn’t work for me. I need someone to take a drill to my head and get it out. I’m not kidding. It feels like The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 is digging at my skull from the inside. Get it out. GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT!
Most famously of all, Mario 3 was the climax of a feature length Nintendo/Universal Studios advertisement called The Wizard, which was released in theaters two months before Mario 3’s US debut. No need to drill this one out of my head. My film buff sister and her pretentious friends (sorry, sis) watched it during a “bad movie marathon” last year and honestly they didn’t think it was bad enough to be included, because it’s not so much “bad” as it is “completely shameless, cynical, and/or soulless.” Even though I was there ruining the experience for them by pointing out that not a single one of the video game scenes in that movie makes a lick of sense. Somehow Jimmy got 50,000 points on Double Dragon in approximately thirty seconds. I tried this myself, syncing Double Dragon for the NES with the scene in the movie. In my best run, my score from the opening cinematic (seen in the movie) until the time Fred Savage says “50,000?!” was 2,050 points.
I guess that’s why Jimmy is the Wizard and I’m not.
That’s even giving me a full extra second or two since Fred Savage needed a moment to process that his brother is obviously a legitimate wizard. As in a practitioner of sorcery and/or witchcraft who clearly possesses the Time Gem, and possibly all the other Infinity Gems which he used not wipe out half of all life in the universe but instead change the scoresheet for Double Dragon so that every landed shot scores about 4,000 points, give or take. Diabolic. Hey, it’s either that or there was a cigarette burn on the screen right where the score is displayed that looked like the number 50,000. What? It could happen! The Wizard is the definitive “kids’ product made by people cashing in on a kids’ trend who aren’t interested in figuring out why the popular thing is popular.” And it’s really bad about it, too. Even Roger Ebert said he knew that the shots of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that were purported to be of the third stage were only the first stage while Gene Siskel recognized that nobody who made this loved the games featured. It’s THAT obvious, even to a non-gamer. But ask gamers at the time if they remember that part, and they don’t. They remember this:
Even though that scene makes no sense either. Why would they be scoring points as soon as the host said “GO!” How would Jimmy even know the warp whistle is there? Why would warping boost his points? Shouldn’t he be scoring no points while he f*cks around with the warp whistle, and how did he even know how to activate it in the first place? Why would losing a life cost you points? If Jimmy lost so many points, how did he still win when Lucas is the only one on stage who never died? This thing has more plot holes in the big finale than all of Season 8 of Game of Thrones. I take back what I said about the Wizard, because it’s so much worse than simply being disinterested in what kids are into. It’s a movie made by people who think kids are stupid. Not that it matters. It more than doubled its modest $6 million budget at the box office, and that’s before you consider that normal Hollywood metrics don’t apply since the movie was not meant as a normal movie but as a feature length advertisement heavily subsidized by outside forces. Hell, even the finale I’m pretty sure was partially subsidized by the state of California for a sh*thole roadside attraction, the Cabazon Dinosaurs. I went there as a kid before it was turned into a creationist museum (I just found out it’s back to being a run of the mill tourist trap), and remember it had an intense musty smell.
Pictured above: how this review is going. But I do have a point: I want you to consider everything I talked about above. Prerelease circumstances that have never, and will never, be replicated. I think that’s part of the reason why Super Mario Bros. 3 is a huge deal to my older readers and not so much to my generation. I’ve met plenty of people who have it on their short list of “greatest video games of all-time.” I’m so sorry to my 40-something to 50-something readers, but I’ve never really understood it, because I don’t think Super Mario Bros. 3 should even be in the GOAT conversation. It’s fine. The flying racoon idea (with tail-whip attack) was inspired. Some of the levels are truly breath-taking. The enemy design especially never gets the credit it deserves. I think the roster of basic enemies is even better than Mario 2’s. Super Mario Bros. 3 is a solidly good game. Maybe even a great game. Maybe, as in I wouldn’t passionately argue against someone who wants to call it “great.” BUT, I do have a case to make against its greatness.
One of my biggest problems is that I think the Koopalings are boring bosses. They’re not that different from the Boom Booms in the fortresses (which I also think suck, they’re too easy to cheese). In fact, only this one pictured here feels different from the other six. Before fans get mad at me, I didn’t think they were particularly strong in Super Mario World either. Want to know the best appearance by the Koopa Kids? It’s EASILY Yoshi’s Safari (as seen in my Definitive Review of Nintendo light gun games), where each of them feels unique. Ironically, the game where you point a f*cking bazooka at them is the only one where they don’t feel like cannon fodder.
Mario 3’s base game only has a couple stages I’d consider to be particularly strong. Don’t read that as “she’s saying the levels suck” because I’m not. My attitude towards the base game in general is “it’s fine” and when it comes to the level design I’m going to stick with “it’s fine.” Except, you know, when it’s not. It just often feels like there’s no good incentives to explore the levels. Take level 2 – 1 for example. They built these two massive hollow structures that you literally walk over the top of. You can go inside them and collect an extra life and some coins. Except extra lives are plentiful and coins just aren’t enough of a reward. This is just bad risk/reward design and a poor use of real estate, and if this were ANY game but Super Mario Bros. 3, I think people would universally say this is nonsensical design.
As punishment for nonsensical design on the part of designers, I made Mario, their bread and butter, wear the Tanooki suit in the scorching-hot desert environment. You made me do this, Nintendo.
But that kind of head-scratching design is all over Super Mario Bros. 3. Even in levels that are fun to explore. You’ll notice that I didn’t say the structures themselves are stupid or anything because I’m not sh*ting on them. Their shapes are perfectly logical platforming game layouts. Good enemy placement on the inside. Not so much the roofs, which are, you know, the parts you have to actually walk across to get to the end of the stage, which is right there past the second structure. Hell, the second one didn’t even have a single enemy on its roof. But I think the little jumping flames inside the structures are quality enemies and a credible threat to Mario. There’s just not a good reason to go inside of them. This could have easily been fixed by creating some kind of circumstance that necessitates going through structures. A key. A switch. Anything besides a nominal reward with no risk/reward balance consideration.
The one thing about Mario 3 that I just plain do not like are the maps. I think the whole map system is TERRIBLE. Bypassing levels. Confusing pipes. The airships flying off to other parts of the map and creating busy work, especially if you went for a 100% like I did. Shouldn’t scoring a 100% in the world before you enter the castle just automatically anchor the airship so you don’t have to play fetch every single time you die on the stage?
But the thing that bothers me most about Mario 3, and this will annoy my older readers quite a bit I imagine: I think it’s too conservative. Like, the Tanooki suit can make invisible things visible, including platforms and doors. You can do a LOT with that idea, but they really didn’t. There’s only a small handful of uses for it, most of them quite subtle, and none of which made me sit up in my chair. The Hammer Bros. suit can kill enemies other suits can’t, but they never once built a stage specifically tailored to that strength. I hate to keep using the same argument, but if ANY OTHER GAME had an item like the Hammer Bros. suit and never once worked up the courage to make a level where it’s a necessity instead of a luxury item, I think the average gamer would question why they bothered. And you know they’re capable of better since they certainly did a good job building reasons to use Racoon Mario or even Frog Mario.
No complaints about the Frog Suit. It’s the one element of Super Mario Bros. 3 where the risk/reward factors are given proper balance. Okay, so the maps could have used much more clear indicators of what stages have practical usages for it.
Now, in fairness, Mario 3 does offer plenty of highlights. World 1, as in every single stage in Grass Land, is one of the most downright scientifically perfect opening sequences ever in any platform game. The absolute perfect education for everything to come. Along with Mario 1’s World 1, these stages could be the whole curriculum of game design school for how to introduce mechanics into your game. After World 1, the level design keeps up a consistent drip of uniqueness, including several one-off moments. You don’t expect that from a 1988 game. The most famous is, of course, the shoe. Hey, who doesn’t love the shoe? I mean, it would probably be lame as hell if it was just a regular roster item, but it ain’t! It just shows up in a seemingly random World 5 stage (specifically 5 – 3), gives you a short playground that takes under two minutes to beat even if you f*ck around, and then it’s taken away from you and never shows up again until it had its mystique utterly shat upon by about fifty-thousand uncreative people in Mario Maker.
It’s just so random, you know? “Hey, for this level, ride a shoe!” In fairness, if the shoe had been an option in World 7, you might as well gather the kids around and tell them that World 7 is going to a farm upstate where it’ll get to run around free and happy with all the other worlds.
That’s the thing though. For all my bitching, the bite-sized level format also kind of makes the game bullet-proof. Even when Mario 3 is outright bad, and on rare occasions it is, it’s still okay because, barring a loss of life, you’re two minutes or less away from something that’s different. Well, besides those damn airships, all of which felt interchangeable except the first one (again, perfectly balanced like everything else in World 1) and the last one (the series of speedy ones in World 8). I’m really not a fan of auto-scrolling in platforming games and I didn’t enjoy the airship concept at all. Otherwise, nobody can accuse the levels in Super Mario 3 of feeling samey. There’s clearly an effort being made to give stages individual personalities, unique game design goals, and their own one of a kind “vibe” for lack of a better term.
While World 1 might be “perfect” my favorite world, except for that busy-work-inducing map, is World 7. Something about it just worked for me.
That’s the ground Mario 3 really broke, and it’s VERY modern in that regard. A rapid-fire series of unique platforming challenges that hit one after another, with tonal whiplash that would leave you in a neck brace if it were any genre but a 2D platformer. That individualism overrides the actual gameplay content. While I might be very frustrated by how de-emphasized exploration is, I’m also picking nits with full knowledge that’s NOT the point. Mario 3 isn’t a five course meal. It’s a bag of potato chips. That’s not an insult, by the way. Who doesn’t pig out on potato chips? You can’t just stop at one! That’s the point! It’s why I don’t really think there were any truly stand-out “holy crap that level was amazing” moments in Mario 3. Instead, it just maintained a consistent tempo of quality stages, and I kept reaching into the bag to have another, and another, and another. If you want gourmet food, you want to play Super Mario World, where Nintendo applied the lessons they learned making Mario 3 to make much more logically-sound levels that have exploration highly incentivized.
Or you can play the E-Reader levels.
Yep, that’s the cape from Mario World. Yep, this is still Mario 3.
If you’re a Nintendo Switch Online expansion pack subscriber, you can play the E-Reader stages in Super Mario Advance 4, and trust me, they’re absolutely f*cking phenomenal. Well, 33 out of 38 of them, since the first five are just remakes of Mario 1’s World 1 and Level 2 – 2 because of-f*cking-course they would do that. If you want those to be fun, you have to make your own fun. I just flew around with the Mario World cape dive-bombing enemies out of spite. F*ck them.
Goomba: “Yep, this is going to hurt.”
Now don’t expect all of the E-Reader levels to offer some kind of hardcore white knuckle challenge. All of them have some kind of gimmick and several of them are just plain silly. But, they all remember to have fun. Okay, so maybe it IS a cinch to use the sticky blocks to run around a track. You just hold the B-button and forward on the D-Pad and watch the game beat itself with minimum effort, but that’s not the WHOLE stage. It’s there because that’s fun, and that should be all that matters. Even the weakest of the E-Reader stages are so damn charming in how out of f*cks they are about presenting any resistance when they could just have some toy for you to play with that they shoot the moon and becomes genius. Like at one point, a Boomerang Bros. shows up and he has a blue boomerang that, once you kill him, you get to pick up and throw at the next enemy. It happens once and never again and I LOVED IT!
I hope I didn’t just imply that some of the stages aren’t pretty tough, because THEY ARE. Most are middle of the road in terms of difficulty, but when the E-Reader levels show their teeth, they REALLY show their teeth.
Plus, nobody can accuse THESE levels of not wringing every drop of gameplay out of their real estate. The best way I can describe these stages is that they do for Super Mario Bros. 3 what the Special Zone stages in Super Mario World did for that game. This is the culmination of everything that has been learned by those who worked on these games saying “okay, let’s really show ’em what this engine can do.” As a result, the rough sloppiness of Mario 3’s level design is completely gone in these stages, replaced with fine-tuned level themes that very specifically require the players to explore. In fact, my absolute favorite levels of the core game, the ones that are mazes, are the main style of game in the E-Reader stages.
Oh it’s not just the items from Mario World that show up.
And even the gimmicky levels, like ones with timers so short that you only have 20 seconds, give players an actual reason to explore: the Advance Coins and the rarer e-Coins. I have no f*cking clue why these weren’t added to the core Mario Advance 4 game. Assuming they placed the coins in the right locations, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t have, it would have been transformative. I was constantly saying “what the f*ck was the point of having that entire section there?” That would have been off the table, but they didn’t do that and that’s pretty heartbreaking. When I did Mario Advance last week, I didn’t go for 100% of the post-game Yoshi Eggs. But, had they done the same kind of post-game bonus with Mario 3, I would still be playing Super Mario Advance 4 instead of writing this. I would have gone for 100% in the eighty-eight core levels just like I did with the thirty-eight E-Reader levels.
Oh, these stages are so good. They actually created space for 72 such stages. I wonder if, somewhere in the bowels of Nintendo’s archives, there’s even more of these waiting to be released.
That’s why, while I’m so happy I finally played Super Mario Bros. 3 for an IGC review, I also walk away feeling that it’s maybe the most overrated “all-time great” in terms of its actual content. It’s fine, but almost all my happiest moments came from playing the E-Reader levels. They felt more like the type of stages I would see in a Mario game from MY lifetime. I still think the core game isn’t as good as Mario 2 or Mario World. Not even close, and some of the ROM hacks I’ve played of Mario 3 annihilate it completely. So, why do older people tend to put this on such a pedestal? Is it really “you had to be there?” Well, yeah, but it’s much more complicated.
Okay, there’s SOME sloppiness. The Big Boo from Mario World returns a couple times in the E-Reader levels, but because you don’t have the ability to kick things upward in Mario 3’s engine like you can in Mario World, the fight is kind of janky.
I can’t imagine how big the leap from Super Mario Bros. 1 to Super Mario Bros. 3 must have felt for my older readers. Literally, I cannot, because there’s no comparison to anything in my gaming lifetime, especially since I just missed the jump from 2D to 3D. My gaming lifetime started in 1996, with the PS1, and really took off in 1998, when I got my Nintendo 64. If my parents had let me play Grand Theft Auto, then the jump from GTA 2 to GTA 3 would have been the Mario 1 to Mario 3 killer, but I was 10 and then 12 years old when those games came out and I wasn’t allowed to play them. My parents were afraid if I played the wrong kind of games, I’d become a cynical, foul-mouthed deviant. The results speak for themselves. Anyway, from a game design evolution point of view, I experienced a series of incremental steps forward. That’s kind of crazy when you think about how close I was to the dawn of games. I was only a decade late. Maybe a decade-and-a-half, but either way, I pretty much missed the age of big progress in game design entirely. And if you don’t think I’m so jealous of my older readers that they got to experience one gigantic leap forward after another that I want to swap their shoes with mouse traps, you’re wrong. You f*ckers were spoiled!
My favorite levels were almost always the fortresses. Anything that REQUIRED exploration and experimentation in Mario 3 was usually elite level design that holds up to the test of time.
But I also think those leaps might have made games seem better than they were. I’m not condescending my older readers, either. There’s actual science on this, and with games that make those gigantic leaps forward like Super Mario Bros. 3, it’s deeper than the simple nostalgia science of “Mario 3 is your favorite game because you played it as a child and didn’t have the burdens of adulthood weighing you down.” Oh no, it’s actually even more potent than that. Since the leap between Mario 1 and Mario 3 was so huge, it’s safe to say that Mario 3 was practically a whole new experience unlike anything you had experienced before. Agreed? Good. Well, get this: new experiences cause your brain to literally trip a sort of circuit breaker and go into a “recording” mode. And, of course, it does this with the brain’s favorite chemical: dopamine, which makes you even happier, which lights up even more neurons and gets them ready to record, which releases more dopamine, and so forth, and so forth. There’s actually a reason your brain is doing all this, too. Your brain is putting itself in a state for memories to form easier and last longer because it’s now operating under the assumption this new activity that you’re enjoying is one you will do again, so whatever you’re doing now, you’ll need to clearly remember what you did and how you did it so you can do it even better next time. Neat, huh? But consequently, anything similar that follows will lose that sense of “newness” so it won’t trigger the same reaction in your brain, and so you can NEVER replicate it. If you played Mario 3 when it was new in 1990, maybe that’s actually why nothing has felt quite as fun as it since. Your brain was literally configuring itself for almost all video games based on your experience playing Mario 3, and to assure that, it made you drunk on happiness. People my age aren’t looking down on you. We’re in the same boat with different games. For me, it was Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, and Goldeneye.
The hammer suit in Super Mario Bros. 3 has to be one of the most overpowered items ever in a Mario game. It’s ridiculously effective, taking out too many otherwise impervious enemies like the ghosts and thwomps and dry bones. They can even kill Bowser directly. I imagine this is why it’s not until the last third of the game that you can get it “naturally.” I got my first hammer suit at the end of world six in this play session. Fun fact: if you don’t count Mario Maker games, the hammer suit is the only item in the Mario 3 to never be reissued in future Mario games. It’s the Black Lotus of Mario items.
Well, unfortunately for Super Mario Bros. 3, I had played games like Mario 3 before I played it. I even played Mario World before I played Mario 3. That’s why it felt like a step backwards. I can’t stress enough that I’m not hating on Mario 3. The base game, all by itself, is fine. I’d even give it the title of “Mario game with the best first world and best final world.” World 8 not only feels fantastic, but genuinely climatic. That’s harder to do than you would think. It’s a milestone in terms of scope and roster of characters. It shouldn’t just be studied by would-be game makers for introductory stages, but also for basic enemy design. It might be the most up-tempo 8-bit action game EVER. Needless to say, it would get a YES! even without the bonus E-Reader content. It’s kind of impossible to not like it. Also, nothing I can say is going to take away from Mario 3’s place in history. It’s in Cooperstown. Its star is on the Walk of Fame. Even among legends, it’s a big deal.
Seriously, even the flying beetles get an unforgettable bonus stage. By the way, the E-Reader content is now 22 years old. I really think Nintendo is sitting on a winning lottery ticket with bonus content for older games. The engines themselves are so flexible that Nintendo could make 33 of some of the best Mario stages ever decades after the fact. So, why quit at all? Seriously, if Nintendo announced tomorrow that they were putting out an expansion pack for Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that added eight full-sized dungeons at a cost of $29.99, how many copies does the DLC pack sell? 500,000? A million? Two million? More? They could also use development of new content for old games as a way to train a new generation of designers on how to make “Nintendo-style” games, because that’s an art form I NEVER want to see lost, but it could happen. Big Shiggy Style, Tezuka, and the rest are aging-out. They’re not going to live forever, and neither are the people they already trained. But these older games are a proven stepping stone in learning how to make not just great video games, but timeless masterpieces. Such DLC will not eat into the profit of new games. Nobody is going to buy Link to the Past DLC in lieu of Breath of the Wild 3. They’ll buy both. It’s what Nintendo fans do, and they know that. New content for old games would ensure a brighter future for all of us. I want my nieces and nephew to have the quality of Nintendo games I have now when they’re senior citizens. Well, the best school for game design is the Nintendo catalog itself. By the way, a lot of people still think I’m a Nintendo hater. Do I really sound like one? Seriously?
Super Mario Bros. 3 is also a game where you can clearly feel the designer learning curve, and hell, I’d say it’s more obvious than even the original Super Mario Bros and probably the single roughest mainline “Super Mario” game ever made. They didn’t know exactly what they were doing yet, but they were getting better. You can even feel the progress as the game goes along with strong worlds like 5 and 7, and 8 really feeling like they’re putting it together and starting to get weird and experimental. And yet, you can also feel where they used the brakes just a little too much. So, I really hope my older readers aren’t offended when I say you probably liked Mario 3 more than “modern crap” because you were still developing as a person. But, here’s why that’s okay: because everything I dislike about Super Mario Bros. 3 is a result of the people who made it still developing as game designers. It’s Nintendo’s adolescence at its peak, where you can see that they’re going to go on to do some spectacular things, after they get done sprouting peach fuzz and popping zits. Verdict: YES!
All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. Platform: Famicom Disk System Released December 20, 1986 Developed by Nintendo Published by Fuji Television Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Mario Wiki
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic Platform: Famicom Disk System Released July 10, 1987 Directed by Kensuke Tanabe Developed by Nintendo Published by Fuji Television Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Mario Wiki
The 1up trick: masochists edition.
Between 1986 and 1987, Fuji Television and the Nippon Broadcasting System partnered with Nintendo for two games, one of which is fairly inconsequential, and the other is, well, consequential. Before there was Doki Doki Panic, there was All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. It’s based on a popular radio program called All Night Nippon that dates back to 1967 and still runs to this day. It’s a cultural institution in Japan on the level of, say, Saturday Night Live here in the United States. Hell, BIGGER than SNL, actually. So big that people lined up for days to snag one of the limited 1,000 copies that would be sold of this on December 20, 1986. Two-thousand copies were won by people who sent postcards to the station, while a pair of gaming magazines each gave away twenty copies, bringing the grand total to 3,040 total copies and making it a cherished collector’s item today that fetches $1,000 or more a copy on the open market. For a ROM hack. Hmph.
The Toads are replaced with the hosts, who were arguably among the biggest celebrities in Japan at the time.
Okay, so it’s not just a Super Mario Bros. 1 with the Goombas, Piranha Plants, and Toads replaced by the hosts of All Night Nippon. Three stages from the coin-op Vs. Super Mario Bros. and three stages from Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels were substituted for six other levels in the standard Super Mario 1 roster of thirty-two stages. Hell, level 8 – 4 is level 8 – 4 from Lost Levels. Additionally, the graphics are mostly taken from the original Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, with some small alterations to add a bit of a radio theme to a few bushes. There’s really only one reason to seek out this build of Super Mario and that’s the ability to play as Luigi, with all his quirks from Super Mario Bros. 2, in a game that’s mostly made out of Super Mario 1 stages. It makes for a genuinely fun novelty. For about twenty minutes, but hell, how much more Super Mario 1 can you possibly want? All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. Verdict: YES!
You can hit that question mark from a standing flat jump off the ground. Alright, go have fun cheesing (most) of the original game with Luigi’s jump. Not that it matters. The odds of this thing ever getting a re-release are probably lower than even something like Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.
Okay, okay. Nobody came here to read about an obscure version of Super Mario 1 so let’s get to Doki Doki Panic. When the original version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was sent to America, a guy named Howard Phillips (aka the guy from Nintendo Power magazine’s Howard & Nester), who was basically the best gamer on Nintendo of America’s staff, is credited with convincing NOA that it was too similar to the original game and too hard for American audiences and they should just ask for something else.
By this point, Nintendo of America knew Super Mario 3 was coming, but they didn’t want to waste at least a year waiting for it. Nintendo was arguably the hottest property in America and they knew they would need a lot more Mario to keep the NES’ momentum going. Instead of making a new game from the ground-up, they decided to take a game that was developed as part of a promotional event held by Fuji Television that was kind of like a World’s Fair or a carnival, replace the theme of masks with Mario-themed stuff, and swap out the Arabian-themed main characters created for the event with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and the Princess. If you want to know more, the Video Game Historian has you covered. I want to talk about the gameplay.
Despite looking like the character that evolved into Mario, Papa is actually the character that became Toad. By the way, due to the flashiness of exploding bombs and the speed at which the water is animated, I had to take full precautions playing Doki Doki Panic. I don’t advise this game for people who are photosensitive.
Doki Doki Panic might look exactly like Super Mario Bros. 2, but in terms of gameplay, this might actually still be the best build of it. Lately, I’ve been on a “games as a challenge” versus “games as an experience” kick. Lucky me that Doki Doki Panic and Super Mario Bros. 2, two versions of one game, exemplifies the difference between those two mindsets. I’ll be reviewing Super Mario Advance next (it’s up, click here), which is almost certainly the better EXPERIENCE. They added a lot of content, including a new boss and new stuff to find, plus it looks fantastic. But it’s also not exactly the most challenging game. In fact, you might look at the ability of Luigi and Princess Peach and shake your head, because they’re so clearly overpowered that they nullify entire segments of the game. Well, actually THEY don’t, but what you can do with them in Super Mario Bros. 2 does. Doki Doki Panic was NEVER meant to have B-running and jumping. The addition of that alone fundamentally changes the entire game experience for literally all four characters.
Besides B-running, the biggest missing element from Super Mario 2 is Clawgrip the Crab. Instead, you fight a third Mouser at the end of World 5. Since the Clawgrip fight is fantastic and the Mouser fight is the same one you’ve already done twice, only spongier, this was the right call. Nintendo would later change Super Mario Advance’s boss order, adding a new Robo-Birdo fight to the end of world three, but instead of doing a new boss for the end of world six, not only did they dump the second Tryclyde fight but they replaced him with Mouser. Sigh.
Now, I already love Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s my favorite 2D Mario game (well, unless you count ROM hacks) and it’s clearly a milestone in level design. Seriously, the twenty stages found in this game, each offering unique platforming challenges, are some of the most well designed Nintendo ever did in 8-bits. But, I also acknowledge it’s a very problematic game thanks to the ability to circumvent so much of that elegant level design by just B-running to higher platforms. Well, you can’t do that sh*t in Doki Doki Panic, and it’s transformative. Now, you have to make use of the FULL level layouts. Almost every single platform matters for at least one character. A door is well above your head? Better start stacking blocks or hitching a ride on an enemy. Want to make it across that waterfall? You’ll need every log or fish to do it, especially if you’re using Imajin (Mario) or Papa (Toad).
Peach’s floating trick obviously covers a lot less ground, and if you have it activated, any enemy who touches you will damage you. You have to let go of the jump button to be able to stand on enemies. Smart.
Yes, Lina (Princess Peach) and Mama (Luigi) can still use their abilities to bypass SOME relatively small sections (and the Luigi proxy’s jump somehow feels floatier but that might be just an illusion because of the sprite’s animation), but you’ll still need to actually use most of the terrain most of the time. Playing Doki Doki Panic is revealing of what a truly generational masterpiece Super Mario Bros. 2 is. You really do have to play this version of the game to appreciate how fine-tuned the levels are. Platforms that made no sense in Super Mario 2 are essential to finishing Doki Doki Panic, and thus the challenge is significantly increased. Mario 2’s difficulty scaling feels pretty wonky. Doki Doki scales much more naturally. By the way, if it sounds like the game’s pace is significantly slower, while it might be technically true, it never really feels like it. Weird, right? But it’s true because you’re having to pay closer attention. Slower movement doesn’t matter because Doki Doki has a faster happenings-tempo.
Like these things here? I didn’t get a picture of it, but there’s a moment during this sequence where you have a small space to build up a duck-jump that you have to do WHILE moving and WHILE dodging an enemy. It has no stakes at all in Mario 2 if you hold the B button down. Here, only the Luigi character can skip the ducking part.
Okay, so you can’t completely recreate the experience with a US copy just by avoiding running. There’s other small changes. Like, you know how satisfying it is to throw an enemy and have their dead body take out the next four or five enemies? That doesn’t work in Doki Doki Panic. While items like the vegetables can still take out multiple baddies, thrown enemies only kill the first enemy they make contact with. That doesn’t make that big a difference. There’s no sections built around the combo technique, probably because it was never meant to be a thing. You also don’t shrink when you’re down to your final hit and some of the enemy attack patterns are slightly modified. But, yeah, you’ll get 95% of the Doki Doki experience just by stopping yourself from using B-running. Give it a try!
Right up until the final two levels, you still feel the difference and might find your finger reaching for that B-button only to say “oh right!” I just beat Doki Doki Panic four times today and I was still doing it right up until the bitter end.
Also, similar to how you have to beat Lost Levels eight times to see everything, you have to beat Doki Doki Panic once with all four characters to unlock the “true ending.” While I would never have enjoyed putting that much work into the version of Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan got, I had no problem doing that with their quirky little FDS game that eventually became the whole world’s Super Mario Bros. 2. I have to assume someone at Nintendo, around the time Doki Doki Panic finished development, said “why the f*ck did we waste this on Fuji Television?” And it would have been a good question, because up to that point, I don’t think Nintendo had ever made a better game. I might enjoy the experience of playing Super Mario Advance more, but Doki Doki Panic is still the best all-encompassing package this specific game ever got. The version that offers both an experience and a challenge.
For all the credit Super Mario 1 gets, Doki Doki Panic feels like it takes the platforming genre in an even bolder direction. You can remove the timer and make a possibly slower exploration-based adventure that still retains all the tricky jumping and satisfying combat fans want out of the genre. Doki Doki Panic represented a leap in design logic that left gaming better for everyone. Will it ever get a re-release? I’d hope that Nintendo and Fuji Television could work something out. It’s been almost forty years and it’s the most important re-spriting in gaming history. Sure, we celebrate Super Mario Bros. 2 today, but that doesn’t mean we celebrate Doki Doki Panic at the same time. Instead, it’s been relegated to the status of being an answer to a trivia question. A historic footnote and nothing more, and I think that’s tragic. Really, you can play any version of this game and have a lot of fun, but you can only play one version that still does that while putting up a fight, and that’s Doki Doki Panic. Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic Verdict: YES!
Don’t worry, Wart. The rest of them won’t show up again, either.
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe Platform: Game Boy Color Released May 10, 1999 Directed by Toshiaki Suzuki Developed by Nintendo NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Mario Wiki
Yes, this is as cool as it looks.
Want to play the best-selling classic version of a Mario game that isn’t currently on Switch Online? Well, here it is. Even though fourteen years had passed and everyone and dog had probably already played Super Mario Bros. to death, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe sold a whopping five million copies on the Game Boy Color. Yeesh. One of those copies was purchased by my father with the intent to give it to his favorite daughter for her tenth birthday. But then Angela didn’t show up until 2010 so he gave it to me instead. And I…… never played it. Well, let me clarify: I threw it on for like fifteen minutes, but I had Pokemon to catch, and besides, there was an NES in our house. In fact, my pops had that NES longer than he’d had my mother. If I were to play Super Mario Bros. (and eventually I did), I’d rather play it on the NES than on this cramped-ass screen. Look how much is cut off:
Super Mario Bros. (1985 – NES)
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (1999 – Game Boy Color)
But the truth is I never would have played it anyway. I was not into old games and that’s all there was to it. There were some exceptions of course like Castlevania or Wizards & Warriors (and the latter was because I was killing time waiting for a new console releasing THAT NIGHT, the Dreamcast) but at that age? I was downright hostile towards any game released before I got into gaming, and I’m ashamed to admit that I remained that way well into my twenties. Today I’m just a couple weeks away from turning 36 years old and, according to Feedspot, I have the second best retro gaming website/blog in the world. Go figure, right? The only comfort I take from looking back on my attitude is that I clearly wasn’t some kind of exceptional brat, because the kids in my life now are the same way I was. Sometimes I catch them in the right mood and they’re eager to help Aunt Cathy with a review that I need a co-op partner or versus opponent for, but for the most part with the older games, even the good ones, they’d rather be playing anything else. That doesn’t make them brats. No, they’re snobs, and I was one of them.
The swimming stages are why I couldn’t excuse Super Adventure Island. Unless you want to count Jungle Hunt, this is the first platformer with swimming stages, and if ANY game with swimming stages could get away with at least one basic straight line map where you swim right until you reach a goal, it’s Super Mario Bros. But there’s not a single straight line swimming level in the entire game. Even Super Mario’s most basic swimming stages have suction holes and hard surfaces to swim around, plus one of the great unsung basic enemy designs in gaming history: the Blooper squids. They have the perfect attack pattern to create an element of danger for the swimming mechanics. Level 2 – 2 all by itself makes Super Adventure Island’s two swimming stages look cynical and lazy, because, you know, they are.
Okay, so I’m still not the biggest fan of Super Mario Bros. even though I’m embarrassed, even ashamed, of my past attitude towards retro gaming. But, if 10 year old me had ever bothered to finish a full cycle of levels for Super Mario Deluxe, I think I would have enjoyed a lot of the bonus content. The main game? Not so much. Oh, I’m not going to argue that it’s a bad game. It’s not. It saved video games from the Crash of ’83 for a reason. It’s fantastic. But this is NOT the way to play it unless you’re playing it in the 2000s on a Game Boy Color. The screen is too cramped, and even though some elements were slightly modified to account for that, it’s still the same game as it was in 1985, only formatted for the Game Boy Color’s smaller dimensions. It matters a lot, actually.
Like this, which you get a LOT less warning on.
I won’t argue that every stage suffers from the smaller screen. Hell, a few are even enhanced by it. The bridges with the flying Cheep-Cheeps, for example. The cramped screen adds to the tension. But those benefits are significantly outweighed by the cost to the elegant platforming and enemy attack patterns. For example, the Hammer Bros. jumping moves are ruined by the smaller screen. The dungeon levels especially suffer badly from having less space to measure your jumps. You can scroll the screen up and down, but it’s not just an up or down problem. Super Mario reignited gaming because of how precise the levels are made. The jumps. The enemy placement. So much of that is lost when it takes longer to scroll those elements into existence.
Level 8 – 3 is one of the few stages that benefits from the smaller playfield. That’s mostly because it doesn’t have platforming. It’s oriented like an avoider, which inherently lends itself to the more compact screen.
If this doesn’t sound worthy of the “Deluxe” stamp, it’s really not. That comes from all the extra content, but even that isn’t perfect. Going into this review, I intended to play EVERYTHING in Deluxe, including the Lost Levels, aka Super Mario Bros. 2: The Original Japanese Version. If you score 300,000 points in the main mode, you unlock it. In Deluxe, it’s called “Super Mario Bros. For Super Players” but it’s Lost Levels. Except, it’s not ALL of Lost Levels. It only has the first eight worlds. Fans will note that both the Japanese game and the version contained in Super Mario All-Stars has thirteen worlds. Well, like the original Super Mario Bros. 2, they have to be unlocked, right? Nope. There’s no way to play the missing five worlds in Deluxe. Since I really don’t want to play through these stages twice in order to see them all, I decided to opt out after a couple stages and, instead, I’ll review this version of them very soon:
Thank God that Mario Deluxe has more than just that. There’s two stand-out modes that make this worth a look. The first is “challenge mode” which presents players with three specific extra challenges for the thirty-two main levels of the original game. I’ve always enjoyed collecting mechanics, and challenge mode is what convinced me this could be worth re-releasing or adding to the Switch Online service. The first task in each stage is to find five red coins. These could be hidden in blocks, or at the tail-end of a 10-coin block. Some are moderately well hidden but I never struggled all that much to snag all five. However, most of the red coins were satisfying enough to snag.
Some coins you have to look for. Others are just placed wherever they have room. Not every level really lends itself to the challenge mode’s style.
The second challenge is to score a target amount of points, and the target isn’t just some token number. They fine-tuned the score to be challenging enough that I couldn’t just breeze through it. Even when I realized that I needed to try to always get all six fireworks at the end of levels, I still found myself coming short a lot. More than once, I finished exactly one coin’s point value short of reaching the goal. Weirdly, I never got frustrated when this happened. It was fun enough that I wanted to keep trying to get it.
Finally, challenge mode features a hidden Yoshi egg somewhere in each stage. Now these are the real tricky ones to find because they’re always in invisible blocks. In theory, they could be anywhere. In practice, there’s a clear logic to where they’re hidden, so it doesn’t feel like they just stuck the things in arbitrary locations. Even armed with that awareness, it often took me a couple minutes at least to find the egg, and I was ALWAYS happy when I did. This is a great mode that’s worth a look.
Okay, that Yoshi egg is really bad looking. It just sticks out like a sore thumb. By the way, there’s a versus mode that I couldn’t test.
The final gameplay option was easily the highlight of my play session with Deluxe: You VS. Boo, which unlocks at 100,000 points. Unlike the previous challenges, these aren’t modified versions of Super Mario’s existing levels. This mode features eight all-new levels, and with those new levels comes several new gameplay mechanics. The idea is you’re racing a Boo to the flagpole. The Boo can pass through solid objects, but it doesn’t hurt you to touch it. Along the way, you’ll encounter Face Blocks that activate or deactivate blocks that can create roadblocks OR become valuable platforms. As you race, Boo has the ability to activate the blocks in a way that screws you. There’s also numbered blocks that work like the face blocks, only they’re triggered automatically after counting down. And yes, if your timing and Boo’s timing are in sync, you can absolutely screw yourself because Boo hit the switch before you completed your jump.
There’s also a new kind of spring block and spiked blocks that become solid blocks. What makes this REALLY work is that all eight of these levels feature exceptionally fantastic level design. Seriously, these are some of the strongest levels in the entire Mario catalog. What I hate is how little weight is given to the racing scores themselves. As far as I could tell, the game doesn’t keep track of your time, at least in a way the player can see it. You have to use the countdown timer and keep track of it yourself. Well, except for the fact that, if you rematch the Boo on the same course, his next time will change relative to how well you did the last race. If you do well enough, he’ll even change colors. The one you want to unlock is the black Boo since that indicates the fastest times.
So yes, Nintendo probably should include Super Mario Bros. Deluxe in the Switch Online lineup. There’s some content here that’s worth a look. I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed the Boo racing, but the collect-a-thon had its charms, too. I’d even say this content by itself earned the “deluxe” title. BUT, if I had to choose between uploading this cramped-screen Game Boy Color version OR creating a whole new version of Super Mario Deluxe that uses the full dimensions. I’d rather have the new remake. Super Mario Bros. just plain isn’t made for this aspect ratio. I guess the Boo race feels optimized for it. I mean, kinda, but I’m pretty sure it would be better in full-screen as well. What I’m even more frustrated with is that in 1999, 10 year old me brushed-off Mario Deluxe as just an old game. If only I had actually played it, who knows? Maybe I’d have the #1 ranked site. Verdict: YES!
Hey, let’s get my fortune read!
I’m pretty sure that’s a weather report, not a fortune.
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Donkey Kong Country
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Metroid: Zero Mission
Metroid
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3
All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros.
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
Indie Gamer Chick 
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