Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Game Boy Color Review)

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.