So here we have a game that the Guinness Book of World Records proudly proclaims to be the best selling game of all time. When I went to the Guinness museum in Niagara Falls, they had a nice little display with a Game Boy Advance set up for anyone that wanted to play Mario 3 for themselves. And while I was eager to sit down and play through the entire game in that one sitting like the platforming geek that I am, this was New Year’s Eve and we were quickly running out of year. So I had to be on my merry way and get to the Loverboy concert. Silly little personal anecdote to bring up, but I thought it was a more original way to start a Mario 3 review than “Super Mario Bros 3 is one of the greatest games blah blah blah.” I will, however, be a sad man when I go to that same museum years from now and find a desktop set up and someone’s dwarf mage out in the middle of the desert in honor of World of Warcraft’s possible dethroning of this platforming icon.
While the 20-plus year old game had sold an excess of 17 million copies in its heyday, that its been released on the Wii Virtual Console is as good an excuse as any to give Super Mario Bros 3 the review treatment. After all, most NES games haven’t quite aged gracefully, so at least there exists a looming threat that I won’t be five-starring this reveled game.
The “plot” if you will, is a few coloured shades above most NES games in that you can figure out the gist of things without reading the manual. I’ll also argue Mario 3 is a few pixilated shades above most current games in that it needs no lengthy introductory cutscene to set itself up. Bowser has transformed the seven kings of the land into strange animals, Mario must do something about it. Simple, trivial, but non-intrusive to the game. Occasionally, when I reach the King’s castle and see the mutated royalty on his throne, I’d wish for the text dialogue Toad is spewing to hurry up so I can get back to my high-jumping action, but ‘tis a small complaint.
The core gameplay mechanics of a Mario game comprise of “run” and “jump” with an emphasis on the “jump”. It’s almost baffling to see a new player pick up the controller for the first time and not understand that holding the button will make you run faster and thus jump farther. Video game physics were strange back in the day. Along the way, a small Soviet armory’s worth of quirky power-ups trickle into the gameworld: a leaf will give players a Wright Brothers running-start style of flying, fire flowers let you spew flaming balls of American glory, a frog suit will make Mario a…frog, and swim better…there’s a plethora of small and odd powerups. While their strength is fleeting (take a single hit from an enemy and it’s back to being regular old chubby Mario), there’s an aura of uniqueness that comes in walking around with a Hammer Bros suit that most games of today seem to neglect. The power-ups are introduced at a gradual, logical pace and thus feel special rather than overbearing and done to death the way most games will treat a unique mechanic (think gun turrets in Killzone 2).
But whether players acknowledge it or not, it’s the level design that puts the game ahead of other would-be platformers, and games in general. Every individual stage has a unique layout, with unique enemies and obstacles, and unique solutions. There are also hidden paths, alternate routes, stashed away power-ups, and the presence of assorted coins and treats for players that feel inclined to explore with their flying raccoon tail powers. If the game has a stray weakness, it’s that you can’t replay levels at your leisure; say you want to relive the Kuribo’s Shoe level over and over, you’d have to replay the first 40-odd levels (or cheat and use the hidden whistle) to get there. Though perhaps the counter-argument to this statement is that this inhibits players from hoarding particular power-ups at will.
Between stages, there’s a sweeping overworld…now these have become common enough that seeing on in Mario 3 isn’t so much of a big deal. You get the occasional branching path that lets you choose one level if another gives you too many problems, but you’ll probably find yourself wanting to experience every individual level for yourself. Also between levels, you have a small sect of slot/memory-based games to earn extra lives and powerups. All of those funky-strange-groovy powerups can be hoarded in the overworld to a limited degree, and used at any point. So if you wanted to jump into a level and start with a super-star, you can! If you’re feeling really wily, see if you can beat the game without losing a Tanooki suit. While wearing a real life Tanooki suit. I’m sure someone has cosplayed as the thing before at least!
It’s amazing how no one really cared to question the strangeness of the Tanooki suit back in its heyday.
My real, real (for real this time) biggest gripe with the original game was how you couldn’t save your progress midway, but fortunately the Wii’s strange save feature corrects this.
Mario 3 is one of those games that manages to remain a great deal of fun, even after all of these years and having all-but-memorized every hidden trick and secret. The levels, the items, the overall wackiness, the inventive drug-fueled imagination, they’re all there. And the game only costs about $5 on the Virtual Console. Unless you already own some kind of previous version of Mario 3, you may as well grab this one.
5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment