Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 6, 2025 by 8 Comments

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!

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The Mod Complex: Episode Two – Super MODio Bros. 3 (CONTAINS THE GREATEST 2D MARIO GAME OF ALL-TIME!)

May 30, 2022 by 9 Comments

Some ROM hackers are capable of absolutely amazing things. Sure, some are content to just draw dicks on Punch-Out!! fighters, or change Mario to Wario in the original Super Mario Bros. It makes wadding through the literal thousands of ROM hacks out there tedious. It’s exhausting trying to find the good stuff. So, from here out, I’m going to help y’all find those must play games. The ones that use the original game as a base for an entirely new adventure.

EPISODE TWO: SUPER MODIO BROS. 3

Spent an hour trying to think of the title and that’s what I came up with.

There’s no denying that Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the greatest games of all-time. It’s universally accepted. I know this because I catch holy hell anytime I note it’s my third favorite 2D Mario game, behind Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario World. I wrote a lengthy love letter to Mario 2, and I’ve openly said that Mario World is the best-controlling 2D platformer ever, even if I’m not totally blown away by the level design at times. Mario 3 is somewhere below those two. I’m not in love with the auto-scrolling airship levels, or the bite-sized Hammer Bros. encounters, and I think a few of the worlds are full of stinkeroos of levels (2 and 6 spring to mind).

Super Mario Bros. 3 (Japan) (Rev A)-220522-011422

I get that Mario 3 was THE gaming event of a generation that came before me, but it’s literally insane that people are offended that you don’t call a game “the greatest of all-time.” If it is for you, good for you. It’s not for me. It’s not even in the top fifty. It wasn’t an event in my life. Fun fact: Super Mario Bros. 3 actually made its American debut when it was added to Play-Choice 10 arcade machines in the United States on July 15, 1989. That’s exactly four days after I was born! I didn’t really play it until it became Super Mario Advance 4 (which released in Japan on July 11, 2003, which happens to have been my 14th birthday!). And, you know, it was great! It’s Mario 3! Mario 3 is great!

And it proved to be an inspiration for a new generation of game makers. Now, Nintendo obviously knows what a talented developer with a vision and the proper tools can do with the foundations they’ve laid with the Super Mario franchise. That’s why Super Mario Maker happened. The modding community has done some incredible things with Super Mario 3. I have four such experiences for you to check out, two of which left me in tears because I was just so overjoyed with how good they were. Let’s begin and end with those!

Never judge a book by its cover.. or a game by its title screen. Going off this, I figured this would be awful. I never imagined I was about to discover one of the greatest Mario games ever made.

Super Mario Ultimate

Normally, Mario Ultimate would be the type of ROM hack I’m not looking for. It’s mostly a respriting and level remix of Mario 3. It doesn’t add a whole lot new to the formula, but there are some tweaks. Like, there’s a reserve item now, and that’s really cool. A couple stages feature a small green block that acts as a platform that you have to push into position. There’s a handful of new enemies and new behaviors. But, beyond that, it’s what you expect from a run-of-the-mill Mario 3 ROM hack, right down to an over-emphasis on previously underutilized powers like the Frog Suit and especially the Tanooki suit. With so many mods that add whole new powers and gameplay mechanics, why would I even bother with this?

Because it might actually be in the discussion for best 2D Mario game ever made.

It even has difficulty settings. I played on “Gamer” and have no clue what “hard” means. This was pretty damn hard on Gamer, so who knows?

I’m not exaggerating when I say that, if Nintendo had released Super Mario Ultimate, it would be considered a landmark in platform gaming level design. Mario Ultimate makes you realize how pedestrian the levels in Mario 3 are. Oh, it’s full of many fine levels, no doubt. That’s why it’s an all-timer. BUT, having replayed Mario 3 after I ran through this game, I was struck by how basic they are. They still boil down to “go from POINT A to POINT B” for the most part. The most experimental Nintendo got with it was, like, making one of the airship stages go really, really fast. Even that’s mundane.

There’s a huge emphasis on close shaves between you and the blade things there. It works though. It’s one of the most thrilling Mario games for sure.

Super Mario Ultimate feels like a mad scientist looked at all the base tools and physics of Mario 3 and said “how can I screw around with this in a way where a player must use it to clear a stage?” Like, you know those windmill platforms that spin around and can knock you across the stage? Well, what if you put one of those next to an ice platform and made it slide the player like a curling stone? Or what if you had to use the Tanooki Suit’s statue on the right side of a moving platform and have the platform shove you past obstacles? That’s the type of design you see in Super Mario Ultimate. While it has a handful of basic levels, most of the design is based around using the already-existing gameplay in unique ways.

The puzzles aren’t of the Baba is You thinking-cap variety. More like finding your way through things. Like here, there’s a shell that breaks through blocks, and tons of invisible blocks that you have to hit to create a pathway for the shell to eventually set off a block that creates a vine that lets you get out of the stage. And no, you can’t cheese your way through these levels with P-Wings. Trust me, I tried.

And it’s brilliant! There’s a few stages that feel weirdly janky, but certainly no weirder or haphazard as the Special World levels from Super Mario World. Hell, that’s actually the closest comparison I could come up with for Super Mario Ultimate: like someone had the Special World mentality of Mario World spread over the course of an entire game. A series of high-concept stages, executed flawlessly in a way that is sure to surprise even the most hardened Mario fan. It’s dazzling and left me in tears when I finished the final stage. I never imagined I’d play another 2D Mario game this good.

There’s several “lost woods” style “where the HELL is the exit?” stages, but all of them are super fun to play, with none of them using space logic. You can sort out all of them through trial and error.

It almost feels like Mario 3 if Mario 3 had puzzle elements. There’s new ideas like racing to reach a platform before a vine gets to it. If you fail at that, it’s okay. Just go through a door and the room resets for you to try again. If a stage requires a specific suit for you to complete it, you’ll be provided with it at the start of the level. Now granted, I used save states heavily while I played it, but I tried to avoid things like rewinding (except to grab media) because I wanted to experience the game’s intended difficulty. Which is pretty well balanced. It’s hard, for sure, but in a good way. It definitely frustrates you, sure, but Super Mario Ultimate never fully angers you.

You get tons of Tanooki Suits and a smattering of Frog Suits to help you out. The card matching game seriously gives you like four Tanooki suits in Super Mario Ultimate. Oh, and the game goes nuts with the bouncing music blocks.

It’s not all perfect. I think the game overuses quicksand. I’d never of been able to finish this if I didn’t have autofire for some of the sections to take the edge off the required button-mashing. I also wish more had been done to alter the fights with the Koopalings at the end of each world. As far as I can tell, only one of the six was toyed with: the one who balances on a ball added platforms to playfield that made the fight feel totally fresh. On the other hand, the Boom-Boom fights at the end of castles, after a few basic ones, have been totally freshened-up, and some of them are jaw-dropping in how they work. While I’m on the subject, there’s THREE possible final levels, each with a unique way arena for battling Bowser. Play all three. Trust me. They’re awesome.

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Probably the biggest problem with Super Mario Ultimate is that the best levels are mostly in the final two worlds. But, that might work in service to the game. It’s one of very few titles I’ve ever played that gets better as it goes along. Often I’m anxious for a game to be over by time I reach the end. For Super Mario Ultimate, I probably would have gone another five or six full game worlds at the rate it was going. It never got boring. Every time I thought I’d seen it all and the developer HAD to be out of ideas, yet another new concept would be introduced. Oh, it’s the last world? How about a puzzle where you have to guide Goombas down a series of platforms so you can spring off one and reach a pipe? The best thing I can say about Super Mario Ultimate: I might look back on it as the best 2D Mario game I’ve ever played. Only time will tell. That time being a week later, when I played the last game featured today. Anyway, get Mario Ultimate here.

Mario Adventure

By acclimation, Mario Adventure isn’t merely just one of the best Mario 3 ROM Hacks, but possibly the greatest ROM Hack of all time. I’m not even close to going that far. It’s FINE, but I found Ultimate to have much stronger level design. Here, the entire game is modified. New levels. New powers. New ideas. But, moderate level design and one game-ruining power. Unlike Mario Ultimate, this isn’t an attempt to build the most elaborate levels. Instead, this is a full reboot.

Some major changes: Fire Mario can jump super high (like Luigi in Mario 2), fireballs you spit travel in a straight line instead of hopping along the ground (but can curve around blocks) and there’s no lives. Instead of 1up Mushrooms, you get 50 coin mushrooms. Using the toad houses costs 300 coins, while the match-the-symbols roulette costs 100 coins and rewards you with items.

The first major thing you notice is that levels can have one of five different randomly-selected weather conditions: early morning, afternoon, night, rain, and snow. As far as I can tell, the only one that makes a difference is the snow setting, which makes EVERYTHING slippery. Even things like standing on the item blocks, you’ll slip and slide around. It makes solving some stages a miserable experience. This is somewhat tempered by the treasure-hunt feel of Mario Adventure. Each of the main seven game worlds has a key hidden somewhere in it. You have to find an invisible music note that will launch you to a special room that contains it. When you beat a game world, you get a clue that vaguely guides you to the key’s location. So vaguely that I resorted to a guide. I wish I could say this freshens up the whole experience, but I was actually pretty bored with it after a couple worlds.

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Then there’s the new power-ups. An invisible cap that is.. uh.. honestly I couldn’t figure out a use for it. But then there’s the magic wand, which turns you into Magic Mario. It works like the fire flower in Mario Adventure does, where you shoot projectiles that travel in a straight line instead of hopping across the ground. But, instead of fireballs, you shoot stars. The stars kill everything. Even if it’s a normally indestructible thing, don’t worry, the stars take it out. The end of stage Boom-Booms? Dead. In one hit. For real. Having trouble with the Boos? They die too. It’s absurdly over-powered. Also, once you have the wand it takes a whopping three hits to knock the suit off you. The only drawback is that, if you need a turtle shell to break a block, you can’t be Magic Mario because jumping on a turtle with the suit on kills the turtle and destroys the shell in one hit. Don’t worry though, because this is one of those mods that lets you bank an item like Mario World, and so you can swap Magic Mario for Racoon Mario just long enough to do what you need with the turtle. There’s a reason Nintendo has never included an item this over-powered in a game. Because it ruins everything.

One consistently mediocre aspect of ALL these Mario 3 mods (except the last one in this feature): the Koopalings are just shitty bosses. They’re boring. They’re too easy. They’re all sorta samey. And I’m not a fan of saying “well the point isn’t the bosses.” The point of Blaster Master isn’t the bosses, but holy shit, are they some damn memorable bosses. Even Nintendo understood the importance of them, because Doki Doki Panic had three Mousers. For Mario 2, Nintendo replaced one of them with an original character: a giant crab named Clawgrip.

I’m certainly not calling Mario Adventure mediocre or anything. For those in the generation before me, where Super Mario 3’s release was THE event of their childhood, they’ll certainly enjoy this a lot more than me. But, the difference between Mario Adventure and the best games featured in the Mod Complex: this feels like a ROM Hack. There’s a lack of authenticity. Ideally, the sweet spot is the ability to believe that Nintendo would put out something close to the hack. I never got that out of Mario Adventure. It’s a solid effort with some neat ideas, but I just didn’t feel it. It’s telling that, of the four games highlighted in this feature, this is the only I didn’t bother finishing, and the only of the three I’m not awarding my seal of approval to. But I do think Mario 3 mega fans will get a kick out of it, apparently, since many name it the greatest ROM hack of all time. I assume they didn’t play the other three games featured here. Anyway, get Mario Adventure here.

Mario in: Some Usual Day

I really should write these things right after I finish playing. I completed Some Usual Day six days ago, and I liked it, but now that I’m writing it the review of it, the only parts that still stand out to me is there’s a Zelda II themed dungeon and Boom-Boom jumped extra high. I had to go through the screencaps I took of it to remind myself “oh right, that was good. That was good too! That was really good. Eh, the Koopa Kids suck, but THAT was good..” You know what? This is a damn fine take on Mario 3, and I feel guilty that it just had the misfortune of being swallowed-up by the last game I played in Episode 2 of The Mod Complex.

It’s sort of hard to forget this part, really. AND YES, this is exactly what you want it to be: a Zelda II Dungeon-type-maze, only it’s Mario 3.

Some Usual Day is a solid, enjoyable, professional-quality take on Mario 3. It’s, more or less, like a more by-the-books expansion of Super Mario Bros. 3, with several twists. There’s special coins in the stages, though I’m not even sure if I figured out what they’re for. There’s only four game worlds, but the effort at making the levels be a joy to play is clear. Give me four worlds that are never boring over eight hit-and-miss ones any day of the week. It does manage to bring some fun twists, too. The Fire Flower stacks with other suits, so you can fly through the air as Racoon Mario and carpet-bomb enemies with fireballs, or be Frog Fire Mario (SO HELPFUL in many stages, to the point that I realize how much the real Mario 3 should have had this be a thing). Even funnier, you can have the firepower when you’re little Mario. It’s always good for a laugh.

Some Usual Day is loaded with secrets, and one day, I will go back and look for them. But, as good a time as I had, it still was just more Mario 3. It felt like finding an old pair of tennis shoes in the closet, putting them on, and remembering how good THIS pair felt. Walk around in them a bit, but as good as they feel, who wears Reebok Pumps anymore?

And it does manage to bring the clever occasionally. Like, one stage will start and you’ll immediately see coins arranged to spell-out GO! and you’re like “huh, what’s that about?” And then you see a sign post that says “HURRY-UP, MARIO!” and you look at the timer, and it’s already down to 90 seconds. “Oh.” AND IT WORKS because the level is designed as an intense maze. Great! Love it! Whereas Super Mario Ultimate wowed me with a mad scientist vibe, the level design of Some Usual Day feels almost scholarly, as if designed by the best student in Level Design 101. Nothing too radical or experimental, but just flawlessly designed and paced stages that highlight what a terrific game Mario 3 already was.

I wish it did more with the bosses. I just assumed that Mario 3’s engine, besides the iconic Bowser fight, just didn’t lend itself to good bosses. Then I played the next game, and uh.. yea, this could have done a lot better. Excellent Bowser fights, though.

And, really, that’s all I have to say. Grab Mario in Some Usual Day here. It actually gave me very little to criticize, which is annoying, because, you know, I’m goddamned Indie Gamer Chick and bitching about little things is my job. I guess Mario in Some Usual Day is remarkable in that sense. It doesn’t give me a lot to work with on the flip side. Which is, you know, my side. The side people used to come read this blog for. I dunno what to say. It’s not Some Usual Day.

Christ, that was tortured.

Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix

After one-and-a-half worlds, I almost walked away from Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix. Originally, I had Mario Ultimate as the finale of Mod Complex: Episode 2, and had intended Mix to be the buffer game I talked about in snarky, flattering but underwhelming terms. It made sense to me. Ultimate was so good it left me in tears. Do you know when the last time a retro game did that to me? Gunstar Heroes, which I played for the first time in 2018. It’s a rarity. Surely, it wouldn’t happen twice in one Mod Complex episode.

Make sure you read ALL THIS, because I think, as a review, I need to describe my full experience playing Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix to understand my verdict on this one.

Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix allows you to choose between Mario, Luigi, or Toad. Do they have different jumping physics? Different play speeds? Do you have to switch between them to access some secrets or clear specific goals? NOPE! Luigi and Toad play exactly the same as Mario. And that’s FINE! Trust me, this game does enough. Oh boy, does it do enough.

I beat World 1 of Mario Mix, which is a tribute to the original Super Mario Bros and remakes many levels beat-for-beat, only it’s Super Mario 3’s engine. Impressive? Sure. Mimicry done right is crazy impressive, and Mario Mix did change-up the formula a touch by adding three hidden Star Coins in each stage to give it added play value. You’ll recall it’s the exact same trick Nintendo themselves used for Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on the Game Boy Color to give people who are sick of the same game they’ve played a million times before added value. It worked then, and it works here. They’re fun to collect. But, I already played these stages before. Hell, the thing I just referenced WAS a 1999 remake of Super Mario 1! This shit has been remade to death already! STOP DOING IT!!

“Wee! Look, I went down a pipe! Just like I did in 1987.” Spoiler: Mario Mix is actually amazing on a level I’ve never before experienced. I just wish worlds 1 and 2 paid tribute to the SPIRIT of the original games with new stuff instead of just rebuilding the same old levels.

And then, Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix got really weird. World 2 is based on Super Mario Bros. 2. As in re-skinned, over-powered Doki Doki Panic. Now, I’ve lubricated all-over Mario 2 already. It WAS my previous favorite 2D Mario game. And while playing that game with Mario 3’s physics sounds like a fun experiment, and trust me, this is THOSE STAGES, so convincing that it blew my mind at the effort that must have gone into building them, those stages only work to the degree they did within Mario 2’s engine. Transplant Mario 3’s engine, physics, and powers into that, and it becomes just very bland. Never totally boring, because I was just fascinated by the total dissonance of it all. But it was the same issue: been there, done that. Hello, Mario 2 has been remade before as the goddamned flagship launch game of the Game Boy Advance, Super Mario Advance. AND DO YOU FUCKING PEOPLE REMEMBER MARIO ALL-STARS?! I get what Mario Mix was trying to be: a tribute to all things Mario, but after two levels of World 2, I said “you know what? This isn’t for me.”

The Star Coins are one of the highlights. They take-up the spot that previously held the cards you got at the end of stages in Mario 3 (that whole thing is replaced by a flagpole). These days, I rarely try to ace levels. Only two recent games were so fun I actively sought out EVERYTHING: Mario Odyssey and Mario Mix. If Super Mario Odyssey is the 3D Mario formula made perfect, then Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix is the 2D Mario formula made perfect.

So, I quit. I wrote up a few paragraphs about Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix (which I’ll just call Mario Mix from here out if it’s okay with you) comparing it to Mario Maker’s user levels. Anyone who has played any of Nintendo’s Mario Maker games knows 90% of the user-made levels are remakes of the same fucking levels we’ve all played a thousand times. Seriously, if I ever see Level 1 – 1 of Mario 1 again (or Green Hill from Sonic for that matter) I’m going to fucking scream! Was I impressed with how World 1 has Bowser battles that shirk the “make Bowser crack through the floor” in favor of playing like the Bowser battles in Mario 1, only with Mario 3 physics? Sure. That’s way cool. Hey, Mario 3 DIDN’T do that, so it must have taken effort to include it here and make it feel totally convincing and not janky.

Instead of an axe at the end of the bridge, it’s a P-Switch, which is a lot more Mario-ish than an axe anyway so I’ll allow it. But, as impressive as it is that a convincing version of the Bowser battles from Mario 1 are here in a game built with Mario 3’s engine, it’s also a stark reminder how far boss battles have come in the four decades since. Fighting Bowser in Mario 1 is just not fun. Period.

Let me be clear about something: I was very impressed by the professionalism of Mario Mix. It never feels at all like a ROM hack. It feels like what Nintendo is doing right now with Mario Kart 8: re-releasing old stuff with the new game’s physics as DLC. If Super Mario Bros. 3 had come out for the very first time in 2020, this feels like something Nintendo would up-sell for it in 2022. Some people want that. Some people want to have pool cues shoved up their asses and broken off for sexual pleasure. I don’t understand those people, and I don’t understand people who want to play the same shit over and over.

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Then, I realized I didn’t capture enough screenshots for my write-up, and I had some down time, so after finishing the previous three games, I decided “I should at least finish World 2, to play this Mario 2 as Mario 3 train-wreck out.” While it didn’t get better, because the two game styles just simply are not compatible, no matter what, even with all the effort in the world and the best of intentions, I wanted to finish it. And then Birdo showed up, and it wasn’t simply like a reskin of a Koopa Kid or something. It felt just like the Birdo fight from Mario 2, ONLY IF that had never happened and Birdo had started in Mario 3 all along. It felt good! It worked! It was fun! It was even fresh, somehow! Did it breathe interest into the game? Not at all. I was still like “yea, really good boss fight, but I still have to play levels to get there.”

Mouser shows up too! And yes, HIS FIGHT IS BETTER TOO! He throws Bob-Ombs at you that you have to throw back and he jumps back and forth between platforms. It’s not a slouch. I had a lot of people tell me the Koopalings being cinches to defeat didn’t matter, but you know what? Mario Mix has some genuinely difficult bosses. BUT, what’s really impressive about Mario Mix’s boss fights is, unlike many ROM hacks, you can’t see the “seams” of where they modified existing stuff within the game code to create a slightly new thing. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what existing Mario 3 things the bosses were built out of to play as well and as new feeling and fresh as they do.

Then Wart showed up as the final boss of World 2.

Fucking WART!

And, it felt great! Unlike the Birdo fight, this one didn’t try to be a 100% 1-to-1 copy of the feel of the battle from Mario 2. The “feed him to beat him” mechanic didn’t carry-over (I assume they wanted to but couldn’t make it work), so while Wart uses the same pattern of spitting bubbles from Mario 2, the way you hit him (throwing enemies at him) is different, AND THEN once you hit him, a whole-new attack cycle is added. It made the whole thing feel fresh, new, and SO FUN! I was totally impressed by the effort. Zero jank. Totally professional, and very creative. THIS IS HOW YOU DO A TRIBUTE, I thought. And, it was also the turning point.

Wart’s battle is a joy to play. I mean, tough too, but not punishingly difficult. So many ROM hacks fall into the trap of “make hardest, most GOTCHA!-riddled Mario levels possible” (see also Mario Maker). Every level in Mix is balanced and fine-tuned for proper difficult scaling on a level that would be the envy of most professional developers. Only ONE TIME the entire game did a bullshit GOTCHA! get me and I’m not even entirely sure it was a deliberate thing.

Once you get past World 2, Super Mario Bros. 3 Mix becomes a candidate for the greatest video game ever made.

Not greatest ROM hack.

Not greatest Mario game.

GREATEST VIDEO GAME!

It just never takes its foot off the gas from that point on. Everything after World 2 feels fresh, new, polished, professional, and incredible! Every single level is a joy. It’s still, at heart, a tribute to Mario’s platform games, but it’s so much more. Mario Mix captures what makes the Super Mario series fun, and cuts out almost all the garbage. It’s like the best the gameplay style can do, over and over and over and over and over, for hours. There’s so much content, and so many surprises. It’s why I can’t excuse the Koopalings for other ROM Hacks, because they’re not here. There’s original bosses here, somehow done in the Mario 3 engine that feel nothing like anything in Mario 3, that are so fun to play. It PAYS TRIBUTE to games like Mario Land, Mario Land 2, Mario Sunshine, and even Mario Galaxy while feeling completely original, and it’s AWESOME!!

Yep, that’s Yoshi! You know, I once played a homebrew of Mario World on the NES (I think it was a Chinese bootleg) and it was horrible, especially using Yoshi. Here, Yoshi plays REALLY well, though not perfect. The eating enemy mechanic feels spot-on. But, dismounting him for super jumps is significantly more difficult to do, to the point that it’s literally the only reminder you’re actually playing a ROM hack and not a big-budget, massive development team first-party Nintendo Mario 3 expansion pack.

Mario Mix is perfection, and a big part of that is the discipline the developer showed with pacing. Hell, you don’t even get some of the suits Mario can use until very late in the main quest. It’s like the opposite of Mario Adventure, where the Magic Mario Suit just totally kills the tension and excitement dead. The powers here, like the Penguin Suit and the Boomerang Suit are teased in the menu on the map screen, but you don’t get them until later (in the case of the Boomerang suit, MUCH later) and they’re balanced and fun when you finally do. You might be better off with a Fire Flower than the boomerangs. You might want to be a Racoon instead of a penguin in some levels. Even the real Mario 3 didn’t do that stuff right. Once you get the Hammer Bros. Suit, the game’s more or less over. Not here.

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Mario Mix is not without issue. Tributes to the ghost houses from Mario World are here, but they suffer from horrific slowdown. Some emulators can eliminate that, but if you play on one that can’t, you might be stuck playing close to whole levels in slow motion. World 8 – 1 had me briefly worried Mario Mix had lost the plot when it reverted to Mario 1 level copying, especially when it had so much slowdown that is wasn’t enjoyable at all. Thankfully, hardware problems to that degree didn’t crop up again, and the levels that followed righted the ship. In fact, that’s my only major complaint. Well, besides the fact that the maybe-greatest-game-ever doesn’t show up until you reach the boss of World 2.

UPDATE MAY 31, 2022: Actually, slowdown seems to crop up a bit more often in the after-the-main-quest Comet challenges, sometimes brutally so. There’s more than enough content in the main game to justify my lovesick puppy shit you’re seeing in this feature, but in fairness, I got that part wrong. Slowdown is all over the bonus material and somewhat muffles the fun. Oh, not ruins it. This is the first NES game I’ve ever played that I’m going for a 100% completion on.

This is why Episode 3 of Mod Complex will be a while: after I finish writing this, I’m going back to Mario Mix right away to 100% it. I only found one single access point to World 0, the hidden bonus world, and I want MORE! And even this doesn’t scratch the surface of all the extra content the developers included beyond the main quest. This thing is overstuffed with entertaining diversions and extras.

Worlds 3 – 8 though? Wow. Just.. wow! Never dull, never boring, consistently surprising, often creative, and ALWAYS fun. And that’s why anyone should be playing games. Honestly, they’d never do it, but Nintendo should just buy Mario Mix and slap a $50 tag on it. It’s that good. It’s got that much value in it. When you beat the game, a second quest pops up that adds the comet challenges from Mario Galaxy to most of the levels. There’s secrets all over Mario Mix, including the Mario World concept of some levels having multiple exits. There’s a whole secret world that I’ve only played one level of thus far, but that level, like most others in Mix, was excellent. This is the rare 8-bit game that I’ve beaten the final boss of (a pretty good, but not spectacular, twist on the “let Bowser break through the floor” fight at the end of Mario 3) and I’m going to keep playing for a while yet. I want to find all the secrets. I want to do all the comet challenges. I want to score a 100%, and I’ll never be bored doing it. Hell, even those World 1 and 2 levels that I was not in love with, with the inclusion of the comet challenges, now I am.

I thought I’d seen it all, but then a world that’s a tribute to Mario Galaxy shows up, complete with crazy gravity effects, and it’s everything you want a 2D Mario Galaxy to be. The gravity works. The level design built around it works. It’s unbelievable. As in I literally do not believe this game exists. I’m in a coma in some hospital somewhere and this is my coma dream, right?

Here we are, almost eleven full years into my Indie Gamer Chick existence, and the best indie I’ve ever played is a ROM hack of Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s better than any 2D Mario game Nintendo has ever made. It might be the best Mario game of all-time, period (though, I did really love Mario Odyssey, so I have to think about it a LONG time). Hell, it might be the best video game I’ve ever played. Mario Ultimate left me in tears of joy, but Mario Mix left in tears of pure euphoria because I’d had such an incredible time and I wasn’t even remotely done with it yet. I can’t put it #1 on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. It would be weird, when this is.. in polite terms.. a grey-area, but for now, whatever is ranked #1 (currently Dead Cells) will have an asterisk on it, because some guy and his siblings took the already stupendous Super Mario Bros. 3, tinkered around with it, and turned in this: Mario’s finest hour. Get it here.

And only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of Mario fans will ever play it, let alone know about it.

Heartbreaking, huh?

And I’m finally done with episode two. MARIO MIX COMET PURPLE COIN CHALLENGES, HERE I COME!!

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