why did no one tell me about this
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Memorability in terms of being able to specifically recall the individual elements of every stage is not really what I look for in SMB or SMB2J. What I’m looking for is interesting iteration that is fun in the moment, especially if you’re trying to get through the stages as quickly as possible. I think asking for something else is trying to impose latter conditions for the series – obviously themed stages and worlds – onto what worked just fine for those initial forays
Also, I think the reason why so many people warp in SMB is because it is a fairly difficult game
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Yeah, I don’t think the fact that I didn’t remember any of SMB1’s level design is in itself damning in any way: I just forgot what it was like to play the game, and rather than play it again I just wanted to read something written by someone who had done it carefully.
I have no memory of having fully completed everything in NSMB.
Thanks for these Parish blogs, sleepysmiles. I find his justifications for his rankings of the Mario games a little hard to make sense of, as his criteria seem pretty all over the place. I wish his list was better argued (disclosure: making this statement after a friend voiced something similar to me). But the blog has some really interesting bits on Mario and other games. Particularly enjoying his thoughts on Zelda 2.
I’ve been playing Mario games off an on the last 48 hours and am probably going to keep at it, since
SMB is really maybe my actual favorite Mario game. Mario’s movement still feels best to me in that game. I really like the arcade-derived iterations-with-variation level design, which does a pretty good job of thoroughly excavating the core ideas of the limited mechanics. These are even further refined in SMB2, the rare sequel that actually demands of you mastery of its predecessor. I admire the hell out of that, but SMB is such a good, well-realized package in and of itself.
But then SMB3 is what I keep going back to as my favorite. But I have the hardest time with that game and critical distance. I played the hell out of both SMB and SMB3 as a kid, but SMB3 is basically the water I swam in. They’re such different games, and I love that every level feels distinct enough that I feel like I could point to an overworld map and tell you which level is which. I’m not entirely sure if the esteem I hold this distinctiveness in is because it’s so excellent or because I played it when I was 7 and its weird and expansive aesthetic owns a significant amount of my imagination.
Of course, stacking these two childhood favorites against more recent games is hard and nostalgia (a nostalgia i continually renew by playing each NES Mario for at least a bit every year) is fearsome. Memorability seems like a lacking metric when I played each of those games’ first stages, at least, dozens or hundres of times and have made it through all post-SMW Marios approximately once or less.
But at the same time, I still marvel at the design of SMB and SMB3 even as I’ve picked at the secrets through playing them over and over again, discussing them, and analyzing them.
I dunno. It’s late and this post is mostly rehashing stuff that’s been said. But I wanted to add something more than my little hit-and-run list. Peace.
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I still sit around and daydream about seeing any prototypes or design documents for Tezuka Takashi’s dream of an isometric Super Mario Bros. 3.
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Is it possible that any of this made it in to Mario RPG?
Good question! This is where I admit I’ve never played Mario RPG outside of maybe a Toys R Us demo in 1996.
It’s so good and weird! Way more depth than the paper mario games imo
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The epistemology at work in my previous post was at least 50% a joke, but like any good joke it was worth taking seriously. By that I mean that the top 10 list there is astonishingly correct (for me), and the process of making it was less onerous than if I did it in the way a normal, functioning human would.
Commentary on some selected games:
This game is best enjoyed in 2-player mode, with a couple extra people watching on the couch laughing at your every mistake (and willing to swap out with you when you get tired). Warpless only. The only problem with this approach is the difficulty of finding 4+ people willing to marathon through a 29-year old vidcon (I did it like once or twice during college (highly recommended)).
Stages are short by technical necessity (as they’re loaded directly to the cartridge’s 8k of onboard ram (limiting their size to, uh… about 16x2 screens (though most are only 1/2 or 3/4 that size))). This works heavily in the game’s favor as an alternating multiplayer experience, since it’s only ever a minute or two from being your turn again. Likewise, the forced smallness of the levels means that they are denser than nearly every subsequent 2D Mario, both in terms of challenges and secrets. (For reference, the average SMW level is about twice as long as the average SMB3 level, going by VGMaps.) These are design decisions that I am heavily biased towards (at least when it comes to classic Mary-o).
The world maps deserve special mention here for being a lot more game-y than subsequent titles. Game overs are an Actual Possibility when playing (especially with a player 2), and the design of the maps takes that into account. Upon getting a game over, you only lose progress for stages cleared by that particular player (denoted by the M and L tiles on the map). Conversely, completing stages like fortresses opens up locks that stay open regardless of who game-overs, thus making them act as mid-world checkpoints. Also, some other stages, like all the world 8 autoscrollers, stay persistently completed upon game-overing. These bits of design might be something experienced players would never encounter, but I feel that future Mario games lost something without these design wrinkles.
This game was impenetrable to me until I realized that it was designed by intelligent people. At that point the game became a sort of blessed communion. I attempted to understand the ‘language’ that the game’s designers crafted the world with, for which I was rewarded, and then they would attempt to subvert my understanding of that language, again and again and again. It felt not just like I was playing a videogame, but also that I was playing mindgames against the designers themselves.
I very much prefer the FDS version, with it’s 8-bit aesthetics and per-world continues, to the All-Star version, which has questionable artwork and per-level saves.
Wait, I just remembered that this game uses emojis in its dialogue.
zero stars
Talk of the scrapped isometric SMB3 makes me think of the checkboard floor used in that game occasionally, which in turn makes me think of the idea of a belt-scrolling Mario game. Then I realize that, in many respects this game functions as both, depending on the camera angle.
Why every Mario game hasn’t featured SMB2u’s playable cast will forever be a mystery to me.
This game qualifies as a Mario because you can goomba-stomp a lot of things, and there are invisible blocks in the air containing power-ups.
Playing through the game normally is fun, but attempting to find all of the crystals in a given stage is more fun. Some of those crystals are rather cleverly hidden!
If I had not counted the non-Marios as Marios, then I would have had Luigi U and Mario Land 1 at the end of the list.
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I like all of this. Back in 1992, two cousins and I marathoned the game without warps (we left the NES on overnight). It was pretty ideal, and I’d imagine even more so with more people. I think the next time I’m with 3 or more friends we should try to do this, ront to back.
I didn’t know about the technical limitations of level sizes. But it makes sense. In recent replays of SMB3, I’ve been impressed by how much shorter stages tend to be and how much I think that adds to their memorability. Their more typically have a central, defining level design feature, making it easy to point to “the one with the one thing” as opposed to the greater variations contained in other levels. In SMW2 Yoshi’s Island, for example, stages are so long that I can’t really recall the sequence of stages or sequences within stages. The flow w/r/t multiplayer is a great point.
BTW, how does SB feel about Super Mario All-Stars’s visuals overall? I think SMB and SMB2J are the ugliest conversions (though I was very excited about them 24 years ago because they were 16-bit and therefore better) while I think SMB3 suffers somewhat for the lack of the original’s high visual contrast and newly over-busy backgrounds.
Yeah, I think the All-Stars versions are downgrades across the board, but 3 isn’t too bad. However, for me, the Mario games aren’t particularly good aesthetically, in general (with some obvious exceptions), so it’s not a huge deal. Like, I don’t care enough about SMB1’s aesthetics to hate the SNES version that much, though it’s clearly worse. If someone were getting into Mario, I’d still recommend All Stars just for the sheer bang-for-the-buck value, plus Lost Levels, plus the SNES having a better controller and not as much of a hassle to get it working. Then, if they really love the games, sure, I’d say “by the way the NES versions are less ugly”
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I have feelings about this.
So first
Super Mario Land barely qualifies as a “core” Mario game - Polygon
fuck you Polygon.
The second. Genre
The fact they say ‘Super Mario’ games only is weird. People have brought up where’s kart, tennis, ect. I think this is fair. More interestingly where does ‘Mario Brothers’ itself go? Why is that not ranked here? I know Super isn’t in the title but it seems like it’s relevant to this list, and I’m sure it would be fairly low which is important for context given that SMB, SMB3, and Mario 64 feel like they have to be judged separately (and in a way they do Felix hit on a lot of this) but it shows that not oldies are golden. But it feels like a line is being drawn to platformers, but is excluding games with other characters like SML3, which was a great game and feels like a bizarre line to draw. What’s more odd is that we’re considering 3d and 2d platformers the same despite the fact that they are clearly not, there’s no seeming nod to that mechanical truth. Which is odd given that I don’t think anyone cares about Mario, people like mario games because they’re fun to play and it’s a brand that carries excellence, but Mario himself is nothing more than an avatar, he has no significant personality
The third. Legacy
More than any other line of games I think trying to judge “objectively” becomes an issue. How can you be? You have to come at it with a lense of how does the game play today, but in doing so you’d be avoiding unshakable pillars of the medium. Like does Odyssey play better than 64? I’d hope so, but how do you even talk about 3D platformers without at some point evoking the name of Mario64? How do you talk about platformers without talking about SMB or SMB3? Few games have left their mark on the medium like these, I mean how many games have a jump button that didn’t make sense because you would hardly jump in the game but it was ingrained in people’s minds that video game characters jump, this is where that comes from. Clearly, SMB wasn’t the first game to have a jumping character, but it’s the most known for that and has been for a long time.
So even discussing the medium will likely evoke one of these games, trying to compare sequels and saying well I’d HOPE they made a better game since the 80’s is a mindset I appreciate, but claiming NSMBWiiU is better seems insane with the initial NSMB game is at the bottom of the list, and certainly was more fresh, and did most of the tricks of its successors. Polygon’s list just feels like it’s fighting the assumptions to make the list more exciting, but it’s just kinda dumb… so Polygon gonna Polygon I guess.
To the all-star bit, I really liked the SMB in all-star and thought it just looked better, I don’t get why people don’t like it but to each their own.
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that the list starts with some shit about “but how was each game in the year it came out??” betrays that it is garbage
not all games are timeless, for sure, but most great ones are, and certainly every “main” non-nsmb mario game is
also i sincerely doubt that jeremy parish can easily finish smb1 without warps in an under an hour
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I just found out that in Mario Odyssey if you pick Random for your outfit, your hat and clothes change every time you die. With that new info, I want to re-do my list:
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Mario Odyssey
- Super Mario World
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Hachimachi. Evaluating games as of their release is some real hot trash.
Pong on the 2600 is the best Mario Game Forever.
Cool Thread. I had saw those MC Mario CD at Book Offs here and kept forgetting to see what they were about!
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