awoolcott's Full Review: Classic NES Series: Super Mario Bros for GameBoy A...
Effectively, it all started here. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing when a game releases and not just invigorates a dead business, but also reinventing what a video game could be. Super Mario Bros. is that game. Not only was this NES launch game the grandfather of the traditional platform genre, it also rescued a stagnant business and gave Nintendo the first of many, many great mascots and franchises that defined the NES era. Naturally, this classic was meant to be part of the first wave of NES Classics for the GBA, and thus here it is, in all its glory. Sure, newer entries in the franchise have easily surpassed the original (SMB3 and Super Mario World, namely), but the original is still a challenging, entertaining, and fun game that is as good a game as it is a history lesson. Because without Super Mario Bros., who knows where we’d be right now instead of writing this.
Super Mario gave birth to most of the great characters and worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom; Bowser, Princess Toadstool, Toad, Koopa Troopas, and Goombas, to name a few. While Mario debuted in Donkey Kong (as Jumpman, the guy who was smart enough to save Pauline but not wise enough to stop her from getting kidnapped all the time), Luigi, his oft-forgotten brother, debuted in the crazy Mario Bros. game a few years earlier. This one set the stage for the entire franchise – Bowser, the huge koopa leader, kidnaps Princess Toadstool and hides her in his castle. As Mario (and Luigi if you play 2-player alternating mode, or linked play in this new GBA version…for better or worse), you must run through 8 different worlds, toppling the Bowser look-alike in each one, until you reach the end. You’re given three lives, and that’s it, unless you earn 1-ups along the way, and once you use them all…game over, period. Three lives, no continues, and a constant wave of enemies – sounds like fun!
So many great (and yeah, not so great) platform game functions made their debuts here. For instance, just the idea of leaping from place to place on the side-scrolling world was fairly new, and thanks to some hair-raising jumps (I’m sure everyone knows the agony of reaching the last part of world 8-3, only to screw up, miss the miniscule block, and fall to your death), intense challenge at times. Throughout the game, Mario has to collect coins (giving birth to the platform tradition of having ungodly amounts of collectible stuff to discover), stomp the crap out of stuff, and blast through each level and the traps that await. It all sounds easy, sure, but with no safety net like continues or many free lives, SMB can catch up with you, bite you square on the behind, and ruin your life. The enemies are well-planted, the traps and leaps are always put in unusual spots (especially later on, with some incredibly wide leaps to make), and there’s the whole ‘super Mario’ part, where collecting mushrooms and fire flowers can mean the difference between ease and challenge. The only savior is Warp Zones…with these, it’s possible to quickly leap from an early level to a later one, reducing the difficulty a smidge. I say smidge because well, level 8-1 through 8-4 are still some incredibly tough stuff.
For a game that’s 20 years old now (and yes, it makes me feel ancient to say I played this when it first came out), it holds up well, mostly due to the variety and challenge, along with the secrets. Finding hidden vines, pipes full of coins, free 1-ups hidden in strange places, Warp Zones, the fireworks trick at the end of a level (land the timer with the last digit as 6, 3, or 1) the 99 lives trick at the end of level 3-1, and of course, the minus world (all things that actually stuck around in the GBA conversion) is just the tip of the iceberg of secrets this game possesses. But it all comes back to variety…while some levels later on are facsimiles of earlier levels (especially the castle levels, with just increased difficulty getting through with more firegates and such), there’s a ton of different stuff. Underwater levels, levels where you’re leaping and dodging Bullet Bills, or Lakitu and his damned Spiny spawn, pure run and gun levels (as in, running and leaping and avoiding flying Cheep-Cheeps), and of course, traditional hop n’ bop platforming as well. Looking back, not only was this revolutionary at the time, it still is, seeing how many games in this genre still borrow so many traits from it and its sequels. Many have surpassed it as well, though even today, it’s extremely easy to leap in, smack this cart into your GBA, and play it like you’d never seen it before, no matter how many times you’ve played it and beat it in the past.
Visually, well…it still looks all right, but obviously dated. As a side-scroller, things move along nice and don’t slow down much, though you cannot actually go backwards in a level, one of the flaws of the early technology. The enemies are actually better detailed than Mario or Luigi, oddly. It’s still a colorful game that despite the technology isn’t too run-down today. Other SMB games obviously look better, but for 1985, hey, it ain’t all that bad. The audio naturally is all a bunch of blips and bloops, along with the very familiar music from every Mario game (you know exactly what I’m talking about, the level 1-1 and 1-2 music still is in any Mario Bros. game), and the sound effects for powerup collecting is primitive but familiar (one thing I love about Nintendo, their big franchises like Zelda, Metroid, and Mario still use the same music for powerups and whatnot. Creates continuity like nothing else). But as said in the Donkey Kong review, you aren’t buying this stuff for graphical or audio bliss.
The Bottom Line
It’s outdated. Its sequels have surpassed it. It’s pretty short once you get the game down. But who cares? Super Mario Bros is a classic game that not only helped create a new genre, but help Nintendo bring gaming back from the depths of extinction. For younger kids who may have started on Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine, this is a great history lesson of the origins of Mario, and for those of us old enough to remember this, a good way to revisit that history. When you strip a game down past its presentation, the merits of the gameplay has to stick out, and SMB does just that. Secrets, challenge, addictive play…these are the traits of SMB, and in 20 more years, when gaming will probably be played via chips implanted in your brain, it’ll still be the case.
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