Mario madness

I have been on this Mario craze lately. I dug up my old SNES and played through all the old Mario platformers. Starting with the All-Stars remakes of one, two and three. Then I moved on to Mario World and after that back to Lost Levels aka the Japanese Super Mario Bros 2.

  
 
  
Surprisingly on this playthrough it was the Lost Levels that I had the most fun with. Maybes this is because it's still relatively new to me. I did play a little of the All-Stars remake as a kid but the difficulty was simply too high for me to get much enjoyment out if it back then. A year or two ago I played some of the Famicom game on the Wii Virtual Console but quickly gave up after realizing that the only way to beat it was by using the Koopa shell trick to get a ridiculous amount of lives.

  
 
  
The All-Stars remake which I started playing the other day offers a more elegant solution. Instead of kicking you back to the beginning of the first level of the World upon Game Over it lets you start at the beginning of the specific level instead. In effect giving you unlimited lives. This is a very welcome change since the brutal difficulty often forces you to replay the same level a dozen times.

  
 
  
The original Famicom game was never released outside of Japan because of its somewhat extreme difficulty. But it is not really the difficulty that is the problem. It is the traditional Super Mario Bros setup which gives you 5 lives then kicks you back to the beginning of the world, that is designed for a game which doesn't require you to replay the same level 20 times. When the difficulty is turned up so high that the game becomes more about memorization that formula simply doesn't work. Thankfully whatever team over at Nintendo handled the SNES port realized this and fixed the game. Making it not only playable but a highly enjoyable challenge.