Are those clouds smiling? What’s there to smile about? These Scarface mushrooms are made of poison! You got your poison mushrooms, both above and below in so-called Bonus Areas, which were considered safe zones in the original. The opening game of the level is on par with a late level in the original. Even in a sequel, where the assumption is the player knows the basics from having played the previous game, you usually get a slow drop into a warm bath reintroduction to the game world. Usually, the first few levels of a game are spent getting the player acclimated to their surroundings. This, of course, was because that version had a lot of little helpful tweaks the original game doesn’t, such as being able to adjust your jumps on the fly, as the SMAS game uses the same basic physics as Super Mario Bros. I had played through the Super Mario All-Stars version on the SNES, and I remember not having too difficult of a time. I played this game for the first time when it came out on the WiiU. This game was marketed as a game for “Super Players” in Japan and was designed to be a sort of Hardcore Mode, or whatever they call the really tough modes in games I’m not good at. Merciless unfair gameplay and possible emotional manipulation? I’m not the fun police, but that doesn’t sound like a good time to me. Then the game punishes you and basically tells you it’s your fault. The game puts you into unwinnable circumstances where you have no chance of success without psychic knowledge or blind luck. Maybe Howard Phillips was on to something. Then, the game tries to make you feel like it’s your fault when honestly, the game often does not exactly play fair. It’s trying to subvert your every expectation and lure you into certain death. At every turn this game is trying to sucker you into a trap. The point is, this version of the game is a bear to control and the people who designed the levels knew that. “I’m holding the button in, Hypothetical Speedrunner Know-It-All!” – some speedrunner reading this, talking out loud like some know-it-all I don’t know about you, but I still have no idea why sometimes I’ll bounce off something and shoot 50′ into the air and sometimes I just go ploop and barely get any height at all. Nope, these are good old fashioned original-recipe Mario controls. Mario still runs and jumps just like he did in the last one, which means he doesn’t have his helpfully-tweaked, 16-bit-remake moves that provide a bit more margin for error. If you look at the start screen, the level format, the Koji Kondo score, it’s all the same. Sure, the shrubbery is teased out a little bit more, and the clouds all have these silly grins now, but this is still Super Mario Bros. The original version is something altogether different. While some may think they’ve played The Lost Levels via the SNES version from Super Mario All-Stars, they haven’t gotten the full experience Japanese gamers got back in 1986. It was deemed too hard for Western audiences and was even rejected by Nintendo’s official president of mirth, Howard Phillips (the bow-tie guy from Nintendo Power!), for simply not being fun to play. There actually was a true sequel to Super Mario Bros., and it was only released in Japan. While some are aware the sequel we got in America was actually a reskinned version of a Japanese game called Doki-Doki Panic, except with Mario characters replacing the original playable characters, that’s only part of the story. I’m paraphrasing the plot, but the part about them all A Nightmare on Elm Street-ing the same dream is true. 2, they still think of Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool, and Toad all having the same dream about pulling veggies out of the ground, fighting egg-producing champion, Birdo, and seeking Wart-the one-time-only Big Bad of the Mario franchise. I assume even now when people think of Super Mario Bros. Oh well, best not to think too deeply on all this. Maybe none of that happened-even though Shy Guys were still a thing afterwards. Maybe there never was an adventure where the brothers Mario went off to some dreamland called Subcon, to fight an obese frog, with his friends. 2 for the Famicom, a maddeningly difficult game that is in many ways an anti-Nintendo game. This week we look at the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. Each week, we’ll take a unique look at each game in the series, and discuss aspects you may not have considered. Hot on the heels of our popular dive into The Legend of Zelda franchise, we now jump, stomp, and dive into the most iconic and popular video game franchise ever, the Super Mario Bros.
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