Introduction & Bias:
Oh, man, oh, man. Here it is: my first game review and it's for a classic. It might seem like a bit of a cop out to review one of the best games on the system first but there is a good reason for that. When the NES was launched on October 18, 1985 it was released with 17 launch titles. Since I am limiting myself to reviewing the games chronologically I wanted to start this project with a bang. Star Wars Episode 4 didn't start out with the boring stuff, did it? No, you got a shootout to establish conflict and to start with some excitement. So let's do this.
As far as bias is concerned let me put it this way; I'm willing to bet that 95% of the people who owned an NES got to experience Super Mario Brothers one way or another. I certainly did. It was bundled with my NES along with Duck Hunt at purchase. I played the game so much when I was a kid that when I played it for my review I remembered virtually everything that I had experienced before. I loved playing SMB as a kid. It was one of my favorite games so I am heavily biased in favor of Super Mario Brothers. But here we are thirty years later. Does Super Mario Brothers still hold up? Let's dig in.
First Impressions & Conveyance:
OK, let's turn on that game and see what we get. First, you get the title screen. It's honestly a little eerie to see the title displayed without any music but we can roll with it.
If you have some patience (which I sorely lacked as a kid) the game will begin playing a demonstration. The demo has Mario run to the right, defeat the first goomba, get the mushroom powerup, and then proceed to quickly get wrecked by the following two goombas. It's an easy target to say that the guy who programmed the demo was a lousy player but think about it; you just learned almost everything you need to know!
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| Not pictured: Lack of music |
You move to the right. The brown thing is your enemy. You kill it by jumping on it. You get the mushroom powerup from the question mark box. You get big when you get the mushroom. Getting hit while big causes you to shrink. Getting hit while small kills you. Bam. Tutorial over. You spent a total of 20 seconds learning how to play.
And what is this game, anyway? It's a platformer game so you will find yourself running and jumping over and past different obstacles to get to your goal. It is not stated at the beginning of the game but your character is the titular Mario of the Mario Brothers. Mario was originally a plumber from Brooklyn who was called to the Mushroom Kingdom to save Princess Toadstool from the evil King Koopa. Not a lot of names are used in the game. The manual was used for the story, instead. Mario’s goal is to make his way through eight worlds of four stages a piece to find and save the princess. Super Mario Brothers did not invent the platform genre but it certainly did almost everything it could right. I mean if you read the manual you will know the rules. If you watch the demo you know the rules. But what if you just hit start and go?
The amazing part of this game's conveyance is that you can learn all you need to know on your own quite reasonably. I mentioned in my opening post that I died to that first enemy you can possibly encounter. I imagine that many players did but that is a mistake you only make once. The goomba's head forms a point. Don't you just want to jump on that? You only have two action buttons and one of them is for jumping. That is not a lot of tools in your arsenal.
Next you come up to the flashing question mark boxes. Jumping on them doesn't do anything so your only other choice is to jump from underneath. Bam, next lesson learned. Now you have your mushroom. Once you have the mushroom your movements sound bigger and more powerful so you keep going right. You can't go left. The screen won't let you so you press on. You encounter pipes. Once again you have few options. If you are clever enough to experiment with them you may choose to go down one of those pipes and you are rewarded with an early coin bonus. Even if you don't think of going into the pipe your first try, the transition between the first two stages forces Mario to walk into a pipe to get to the next level. The game tells you that traveling through pipes is an option. Cliffs look dangerous and it only takes screwing up once to know that they should be avoided. The game never hides anything down a cliff or asks you to go down to progress so that rule is never broken.
Everything feels natural during gameplay. The rules are quickly established and some challenges are foreshadowed. Late in the first stage there is a small staircase made of blocks. The player has to jump over a small pit to proceed but the pit is not bottomless. If the player messes up they can try again. Immediately afterward the player must jump over a nearly identical staircase to cross a bottomless pit. The player was prepared for this obstacle and now they can overcome it without using too many of their finite lives.
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| Pictured: Learning |
Very soon the player knows virtually everything they need to know. The game gets full marks for conveyance. Well done. What about the rest of the game?
Experience & Presentation:
Super Mario Brothers marked a lot of firsts for video games. With the palette ability of the NES, Nintendo could make the background a color other than black. With multiple sound channels on the NES, Nintendo could play music and sound effects at the same time. This was a huge improvement to what was available before. The old Atari games of the early 80’s? If you go back and watch videos of those games you would notice that only one sound is played at a time. Sounds may interrupt each other and sometimes sounds take precedence above others but it is always only one sound at a time. Check out the link below for footage from several Atari 2600 games.
Back in 1985 this was a mind-blowing leap forward in presentation. The music and graphics still hold up today. There were a total of maybe six music tracks in the whole game and all of them are classics in their own way. Nobuo Uematsu, the composer for many Final Fantasy games jokingly suggested that the original Mario brothers theme should be Japan's national anthem due to how much that piece became associated with Japan’s culture. Today Nintendo still uses it in their Mario games when they can. It's easy to hum, it's catchy, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.
The graphics do their job, too. Everything is easily defined. Mario is always easy to spot against the background. Enemies look like enemies. Friendly items look friendly. You are often given enough information to know how to react to things intuitively. The first weapon you have is your ability to jump on things. What about the things you can't jump on? Those things have teeth, they have spikes, they are made out of fire. Do you want to jump on spikes and fire? I don't.
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| Pictured: Jumping hazard |
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the journey itself. As the player crosses the game's four-stage worlds you come across patterns in the world layout. The first stage is typically an overworld type of level that is set outside. Then the player goes into some sub-area like a dungeon or an underwater stage. Then the third stage is set in the sky with many more bottomless pits to contend with. Finally the fourth stage takes place in one of King Koopa's castles. The transition between the stages is telegraphed. Going into a dungeon? You get there in a pipe. Going into a castle? You walk into the castle first. Then when you come out of the castle and enter the next world you arrive in a familiar place but with a twist. Maybe a new enemy type is introduced. Maybe it is night. Maybe it is snowy out. The player is taken on a trip throughout the game. It is a long quest to get to the princess and the journey feels like a worthy one.
The game is not a cakewalk, either. I didn't beat the game in my hour of playing. I was out of practice to be certain but I wanted to try to play all of the stages that I could. Obviously the biggest thing stopping me from completing the game was the fact that Mario does have a limited number of lives. Deplete those lives and it is game over. When the player gets a game over they start all the way at the beginning. I got two game overs during my hour of playtime. Both times they happened in the harder Koopa castles. Since I attempted to cover as much of the game as possible I used another clever feature of Super Mario Brothers: the warp zone.
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| Not pictured: Pride |
A handful of stages give the player secret areas to access later worlds. I probably used them to what was the intended effect. When I died on say, world 6-4, I restarted the game and took the warp zone up to world 7. Speedrunners and casual players alike can use these warp zones to find a quick way to get to the game's final world. I wanted to experience the whole game if I could so I did not skip ahead more than a single stage when I attempted to catch back up to where I was before. I ended up losing my last life for the second time at world 7-4 with just a couple of minutes left in my review hour. I spent the remaining time recording my thoughts because I would not make it back to where I wanted to be with the time I had left.
Most of my thoughts have already gushed onto this article but I am not 100% positive about this game. There are three aspects of the game that are detrimental to gameplay.
First, there are a couple of Koopa castles that are actually mazes. The player must go through a series of branching paths in the correct order to proceed to the next section of the castle. The player does not get any immediate indication that the correct choice was made. This problem is alleviated a little bit because the first time this gimmick occurs is in a pretty short stage. Still, that is information the player should have and future versions of SMB fixed this.
Second, is the hitbox surrounding King Koopa. There are empty pixels around Koopa's sprite that can still harm Mario. Usually the hitboxes are spot on but it is a little heartbreaking to think you are going to clear a jump over Koopa only to die by hitting nothing.
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| Pictured: Total bullshit |
Finally, the last item that I dislike is an aspect of the jump physics. Controlling Mario most of the time is great. Running and jumping feel fantastic. The stage obstacles tend to be placed so that they can be handled with little improvisation if the player is moving at full speed. If the player is forced to stop then they will find that Mario does not cover nearly as much forward distance from a standing jump. While this is more realistic, the problem is that there are too many places in the game where a running jump is required to cover the distance needed. Attempting to make these jumps from a standing start creates some undue tension and frustration. I am playing an American plumber in some place called the Mushroom Kingdom. Realism in this instance can take a back seat. There is a method of building up speed by jumping against the left side of the screen to get a running start but this is not communicated in-game. Future Mario games improve on this but for right now we just have this Mario game. Since this is a launch title for the NES I will take what I can get.
Verdict & Score:
Let me put it to you this way. Super Mario Brothers can still inspire me to write a three page single-spaced essay thirty years after its release. The game spawned a massive franchise that still sees new titles almost annually and has provided the world with gaming's most recognizable mascot. All of my issues with the game are minor compared to my overwhelmingly positive experience. It is so impressive that the game managed to invent or use the tools on hand to create such an excellent game for an opening title for the NES library. This game was so polished for the 1985 audience that it helped video game consoles become a mainstay in millions of homes across the world. That is a hobby that continues to this day.
Mario earns an 8/10. Even after 30 years, Mario is still a truly great game.
Factoids & Trivia:
Wow. So much of this game has been documented and documented well. If anything, Mario and the stories surrounding its creation, Nintendo's history, and its creator deserve several posts on their own. I will revisit Mario in the future but for now I must move on.
Coming up next I will begin my reviews of NES launch titles that required a peripheral controller so I will begin with my favorite one: the Zapper. What better way to talk about the Zapper than with our old friend Duck Hunt?
Sources:
Box Cover image:
Atari 2600 gameplay footage:
Mario theme:
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