Super Mario Bros.

The original Super Mario Bros is one of the most important video games in the history of the medium. It was innovative and approachable. It is often cited as one of the stepping stones towards the video game industry recovering from the crash of 1983. Mario dethroned Pac Man as Mr. Video Game and gave the name meaning. He is one of the most iconic, recognizable, and celebrated names in all of entertainment; rivaling even Mickey Mouse. The pedestal Mario stands on grows more and more with each game released under his name and, despite the passage of time and the plumber's growing library of games, people still look back at this one with reverence as the one that pushed it all into stride. The legacy of Super Mario Bros is likely among the most incredible in the history of entertainment, however importance doesn't always imply greatness.

When I reviewed Pac Man, I gave it a very mixed score and that wasn't because I don't care about the yellow sphere's legacy. I judge games on fair terms through the perspective of when I play them. While I appreciate the legacy and impact of a beloved game and frequently discuss it, I don't let it cloud my judgment of the game itself including how it has aged. To some of you, it may seem unfair that I compare Pac Man, and second gen arcade game, to Super Mario, a third gen console game. I then ask, wouldn't it also feel unfair if I compared Super Mario 64, a fifth gen 3D collectathon, to Halo, a sixth gen first person shooter? Or Super Mario Galaxy, a seventh gen 3D collectathon, to Fortnite, an eighth gen third person shooter? My point is, there are some inherent aspects of past games that have no place in recent times. Unfortunately, nearly every arcade game in existence fits into this category. The video game medium has evolved so far past them to the point where nothing else about them, besides their legacy, can be appreciated. That’s just how getting old works. I critique games based on my enjoyment of them and that's how I will critique Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros was released on the Famicom in 1985 and the NES in 1986. Being the highly revered title title it is, it would see many re-releases on later platforms. Some of which are unofficial. For this review, I've played two different versions of the game: the NES rom and the fan made Flash port titled Super Mario Crossover. The latter is the one I’ve played throughout my childhood. It’s a flash port of the base Super Mario Bros game but overhauled with many additions: new characters, visual styles, soundtracks, cheats and many more. It even comes with the Special Edition and the Lost Levels; so you can consider it a port of those two games as well. Despite this, I tried my best to make the game look and play as closely as the original via the large selection of settings. For comparison, I also played the rom via emulation and the only differences I could find are the controls and visual resolution. Super Mario Crossover offers a pinch more precise control but not too much. I'll get into that in the review proper. The visuals in Crossover appear slightly more saturated than the original. The sprites also don't suffer from the same clipping as the original. It is the most accessible and best way to play the Super Mario Bros, Special and Lost Levels. You can find it on Flash Point. Now, I believe that’s way more introduction than needed. Let’s jump into the review.

While playing Super Mario Bros for this review, there was a lot I needed to re-learn. First was Mario’s movement. After playing a handful of Mario’s later games, going back to this is a major trip. Mario has a jump button and a run button. While walking, Mario has a slow startup. When running, he always feels like he’s on ice. It does not feel good. I don’t find Mario’s jump very reliable either. You can adjust his jump by how long you hold the jump button. The longer, the higher. He feels very heavy when in the air. Combined with his slippery movement, you will almost always either overshoot or undershoot jumps. Despite this, the level design isn’t very demanding. It was forgiving enough for me to get used to Mario’s imperfect controls.

There are a total of 8 batches of 4 levels in the game. Each batch is refereed to as a world. Yeah, imagine if there were eight earths in the solar system and you could just hop from one to the other. Jokes aside, I don’t remember encountering too many challenges in this game mostly because I would discover the warp zones. These hidden areas allow the player to skip forward in the game. They often contain one to three warp pipes that will transport Mario to a later world allowing the player to skip large chunks of the game. This is a key strategy in speed running the game and was my main strategy in beating it. For this review, however, I attempted to beat the game without using any warp zones an I could not make it past world 5. There are a total of 5 level dynamics: the surface, the sky, underground, underwater, and the castle. These dynamics are used interchangeably with the exception of the castle which is only used for every last level of each world. There are eight of these total. In each, Mario will fight Bowser, the main villain of the game. Bowser, also known as King Koopa, kidnapped Princess Peach, aka Princess Toadstool, and it’s Mario’s job to rescue her. A damsel in distress story, the most pre-21st century trend in all of storytelling. The fights with Bowser are all the same and very simple. Actually, if you utilize the right warp zones, you will only need to fight him once. In each fight, all you need to do is demolish the ground Bowser is standing on with an ax sitting behind him. He will fall into the lava pit repeatedly over and over again. No wonder he’s such a menace. He’s borderline fire proof. Too bad he’s too short to climb out within five minutes. The first 7 encounters with Bowser end with Toad infamously telling Mario “our princess is in another castle”. On the eighth, you rescue the princess and the game ends.

There is more to Super Mario Bros than its simple premise and standard setting platforming. Shaking things up, we have a variety of enemies and three total power ups. The main power up is the super mushroom which gives Mario a growth spurt and allows him to break certain blocks. This lasts till he gets hit by an obstacle or enemy losing the growth spurt and extra strength. Next, there is the fire flower which changes Mario’s clothes and grants him the ability to throw bouncing fire balls. One hit, though, and you lose everything; mushroom too. Lastly, there is the star power up which grants invincibility and allows Mario to kill enemies simply by touching them. This power up only lasts for a limited time expiring after about fifteen seconds.

There are many enemy types in the game such as the goomba, koopa troopa, cheep cheep, bullet bill, spikey, blooper, lakatu and hammer bro. Special mention to the latter three, they are a pain in the ass. I’m positive those are not all the enemies in the game. There are other mechanics like the one-up which can be achieved in many different ways. To name a few: 1up muchroom, 100 coins, killing a long string of enemies or however many points you need on the score board. The player will also have 400 seconds to beat each level of each world. When time runs out, Mario loses a life and the player needs to try the level all over again. Lose all of Mario’s lives and its game over.

Back in its day, Super Mario Bros was the greatest game ever made. Today, it is still among the greatest games ever made. Despite the imperfections, it has aged better than every game before it and most games after. It is truly among the earliest examples of an accessible, timeless, quality experience and it would’ve taken no less to make video games profitable again. It is a game that deserves its praised reputation by reinventing the standard of what a video game should be and, at the same time, leaving plenty of room for improvement.

Super Mario Bros, the sequel to a 1983 arcade game of a similar name, established a new standard in platforming. Bouncy sound effects, creative obstacle designs, bright colors and quirky mobs basically turned each level into a sort of vivid fairy tale adventure, whose quartet of stage backgrounds depict the 'story' in slow-motion, while joined by an equally simple set of memorable jingles (jovial to relaxed, ominous to eerie). Gameplay-wise, the best moments are largely due to its touch of self-inflicted humor, especially in the more difficult lategame levels that occasionally resemble a wild form of theater, punctuated by abrupt deaths (acting as punchlines) and shaken by fluctuating game speeds and enemy behavior. The effect of Koopas lazily moving about, to suddenly launching and rebounding off walls is both amusing and nerve-wracking, and their flawed hitboxes only add to the impression. Some exploration depth also surfaces in the case of warp pipes and invisible blocks, while their maze-like final stage ranks among their most noteworthy ideas, a brief preview of what's to come.

A milestone in 80s gaming, this release laid the foundations for several Mario games to follow: From the momentum-driven platforming (perfected by the technically brilliant SMB3), to the hidden secrets and level-skipping (stretched to astronomical heights in Mario World), to their sense of humor (leading to the slapstick chaos of Mario 64) and lastly, to their iconic artstyle (somewhat explored by Mario Sunshine's delightful aesthetic). However, several generations and graphical 'improvements' later, this remains their most visually distinguished effort.

The game that improved every aspect of the side-scrolling platformer overnight, SMB still holds its legacy quite well almost 40 years later and returning to it it still is an addicting platformer, even if graphically it looks like a New Mexico Indian tapestry. While its arguable that the series has suffered its various pitfalls in quality, this game for better or worse is definitely the series in its purest form. The only negative I can think of is that the constant scroll can easily trap you if you are not careful. A solid, if simplistic game. Though I feel SMB3 perfected everything about this.

Occasionally it's fun to tackle a super weird, obscure game like this, I mean, those turtles do NOT move like real turtles and that's kinda freaky tbh.

In all seriousness though this is a game that I become infinitely more amazed by with every passing moment that my interest in game design increases. When you look at the NES library it feels like this was one of the games that ended up aging the most gracefully, and I feel like this comes down to a lot of smaller individual reasons that end up building to one of the most iconic games ever made. I feel like the biggest of these comes from the way that this felt like it transcended a lot of trappings and holdovers from arcade systems that this era of gaming tended to suffer from, with the game never quite feeling as if it's got that underlying desire to watch their players lose time and time again. You can even see this in the way it establishes itself in that first world, almost acting as a series of tutorials to allow players to ease their way into the way the game operates, taking every opportunity to contextualise the various mechanics and teach them in a variety of ways, doing so in a rather elegant fashion for the most part.

I'd also argue that this was a game that didn't try being anything more than it could handle, with the majority of challenges even later on feeling designed more around Mario's somewhat clunky and slippery movement. Each challenge feels specifically designed around Mario's movement as opposed to almost feeling disconnected from how the game feels to play, which might seem like a relatively minor point to mention, but it really amazes me just how much effort was dedicated to creating a tightly focused and cohesive experience in an area that more often than not could have a habit of crafting certain challenges ill-suited to a specific gameplay style. While I mention Mario's controls feeling rather clunky and floaty I'd also argue that this was incredibly influential as being one of the absolute earliest platforming games to feature "good" controls that felt actually fun to play with, even if by more modern standards this obviously gets a bit outclassed.

I also find some of the ways that the game gets around hardware limitations and the like to be incredibly charming in the way they feel so distinctly "NES" in nature yet are still very clever and fun to mess around with and look into even today. The lack of saving and the problematic elements of the lives system is a big one in this regard to me, with the warp zones feeling more or less directly linked to these issues. It essentially provides a way of being able to start more or less from where you last got a game over by just needing to complete a tiny selection of levels and then being able to just take an alternate exit and warp ahead through huge chunks of the game. I think this is a cool idea to get around the lack of saving that often plagued the system without resorting to the password system, and it feels unique in the way that this is more or less a hidden feature that back then would have been incredibly exciting to play as a kid and either discover it on your own or have a friend talk about how they figured out a way to warp to world 4 immediately.

The level design in general is also pretty interesting in the way that there were only so many assets that could be used, so the 2nd half of the game ends up feeling like it took level concepts from those first 4 worlds and then simply made them harder, but managed to do it in such a way that made them feel genuinely unique and a natural progression from what the player learned up to that point. There's also the appeal of being able to point out these similarities between past levels and see how they were redefined for a harder challenge which is yet again a neat little thing that makes the game feel quite cool and further elevates those feelings about why this is such an iconic game. Sure, this might not be perfect, what with that previous mention of the controls not being the best by todays standards, not to mention how terrible some of the mazelike castle stages are, or even the fact that the boss fight at the end of each world is the same thing and was unremarkable even the first time, but still, this holds up so nicely. After playing and beating this for like, the 5th time, it becomes increasingly clear why so many design conventions lead back to this game.

*Super Mario Bros.* is what truly started it all. *Donkey Kong* may be the debut of the character and *Mario Bros.* may have introduced the name. But *Super Mario Bros.* is what really solidified this franchise as a true juggernaut in the gaming industry.

*Super Mario Bros.* was released in 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This game is one of the most important video games of all time. It revolutionized the 2D platformer, it made *Mario* the powerhouse he is, it put Nintendo on the map, it basically brought an end to the Video Game Crash of 1983. But has this game aged well?

The story of this game is a story we have since seen thousands of times. King Koopa has kidnapped Princess Toadstool and has changed the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom into bricks. Mario must travel the land and save her.

The gameplay is also pretty simple. There are 8 worlds with 4 levels each. You must make your way to the end of the level by stomping on enemies, jumping, and avoiding small death pits and enemies, and well... Not die. 3 Deaths and It's back to the beginning of the game. It's about mastery and memorization. You can also use power-ups. There's the 1-Up which increases your life counter by one, the Super Mushroom which makes Mario grow and take 2 hits to kill, the Fire Flower which allows you to shoot fireballs at enemies, and the Star which makes you invulnerable for a brief window of time.

The gameplay is extremely easy to understand and I never got confused with the controls. However, there is stuff that hasn't aged well. For starters, Mario is really stiff in this game. So dying is extremely easy. This makes the game extremely difficult toward the end and I can't tell if it's supposed to be as hard as it is.

*Super Mario Bros.* is an extremely important game. It has a simple story and controls. The game is fun and engaging throughout. Although there are moments in this game that hasn't aged well, it's still a fun time.

Part of me just wants to say "It's super mario bros, what else is there to say", but I should actually write something substantial here. I think for the time, this is an incredibly impressive and well made game. Everything that this franchise would go on to be all derives from here. The game is fun to play both in a speedrun style and taking slowly to discover all the secrets. There's a lot to be found, and I even found some new bits on my most recent playthrough. Many interesting ideas are on here and I'm sure they are executed the best they could have been for this game. However, despite all that's good about this game, there are many problems that make this hard to enjoy in the modern day. I wouldn't say the game is difficult, actually it's pretty easy compared to a lot of annoying arcade and NES games, but it still manages to be grating at times. Hammer Bros are the worst enemy this series ever conceived and the water levels are painful to get through. The game also gets quite repetitive by the end of it, you can tell they were starting to run out of ideas by then. It can be annoying to revisit and by my second playthrough of it I didn't find much reason to sit through it again. It's impressive and important, but still suffers being dated just due to the conditions of the time.