Picture it: Christmas Day, 1991. I was seven years old, and an ear piercing shriek was about to shock and annoy an entire neighborhood in The Bronx after I unwrapped my Super Nintendo. I don't remember if we had family over, I don't remember if I kissed my mom good night, and I don't remember if I got slapped for being rude and ignoring everything else around me. I just remember the moment that I entered world 1-2, hit that block, and released an egg that hatched and introduced itself as a dinosaur named Yoshi. I had owned an NES and already been an avid Mario fan before I was able to walk, but my love affair with Nintendo began on that day.
Almost 22 years later, my love continues as strong as ever. I have followed Mario into the third dimension and into space, and have followed him into almost every single genre of spinoff games. Nintendo rarely misses the mark, and for the most part, all of these ventures have been met with critical and commercial acclaim (let's ignore the Virtual Boy. That was Wario's domain, and he doesn't give a shit what you think about him). To this day, though, there is a magic in Super Mario World that few games have been able to achieve since.
It may seem self indulgent to review a 22 year old game, but with its release on the Wii U's Virtual Console last week, Nintendo has made the game available to a new generation of gamers (many of whom weren't even born until years after this was released, as painful as that is is for me to admit), so I'm allowing myself the honor. Simply put: this is one of the greatest games ever made, and you should play it.
Story-wise there are not many surprises: Princess Peach (still Toadstool, here) has been kidnapped by Bowser, and you run after him from left to right, stomping on enemies and timing your jumps to arrive at the goal and eventually confront him in his castle. What the Mario series lacks in nuanced storytelling it has always made up for in gameplay, and the biggest innovation from the original games in the series was the addition of Yoshi. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto has since stated that he had wanted Mario to be able to ride a dinosaur as far back as the original Super Mario Bros, but the technology of the NES wasn't quite up for it. As gamers we tend to take this for granted now, but this mechanic added a whole new layer of depth to platforming. Yoshi wasn't an arbitrary gimmick like he has become in some of the more recent titles -- other than castles and fortresses, you could take Yoshi into any level with you, and it completely changed the way platformers were played. Though never necessary to complete the game, having Yoshi allowed you to access some of the secret areas, taught you to cope with prodigious survivor's guilt when you jumped off of his back to save yourself from a fall, and in general experience the fun of riding around on a dinosaur that can devour everything in its path. Also, for the first time, Mario had more than one kind of jump -- the more powerful spin jump allowed you to break blocks and squash enemies in exhange for sacrificing some height and control. This might seem like a small addition, but it opened up a whole other set of actions and ways to interact with the environment and changed slightly based on your power-ups. Fans of Mario 3 were disappointed at the removal of items like the now-classic Tanooki suit and the fan favorite Kuribo's Shoe, and Mario's abilities were reigned in a bit in favor of these two new features. Items were restricted to the magic cape (still my favorite way to fly in a Mario game) and fire power, but the focus on level design makes up for it in my mind. For the first time in a Mario title, it felt as if the gamer was given choices, and rewarded for exploration and experimentation. Level design is the strongest point of this game, and rediscovering all the secret exits and branching paths is just as fun now as it was the first fifty times through the game.
Graphically the game does hold up well even today. It's not the best looking game on the SNES, but it looks less dated than many ps1/n64 games. Backgrounds are repeated and some more variation and detail would be nice, but enemy sprites are fun and amusing and the world is consistently bright and charming. The Virtual Console version plays pretty much identically to the original. While I still think the game is best experienced with the SNES controller, the Wii U gamepad feels comfortable and relatively intuitive. Older fans may need a few minutes to adjust (as I did), but it quickly becomes second nature. The off-TV play feature is nice, particularly if you live with someone that would rather use that nice big fancy HD TV for something other than nostalgia. In fact, the game looks better and sharper on the Wii U Gamepad screen than on most current TVs. It's also sort of nice to be able to play the game without worrying about it freezing or your file getting erased. The ability to use the save state/restore option is also a welcome addition for those who want to cheat -- I mean, play cautiously. Because some of those later levels can still test even those of us that have the whole game memorized. That is the beauty of Nintendo -- this is a game that anyone from a young child to a jaded adult can pick up and play and enjoy. Children will delight in running through the levels making a mad dash to the finish line (and, hello, dinosaurs! A world made of chocolate!) while veterans will still be challenged by trying to collect the five dragon coins in each level and unlock the secret areas. This strategy of offering something for gamers of all levels was perfected later on in Yoshi's Island, but its origins are here.
You can breeze through the game in an afternoon off if you just want to get through it, but it is also possible to take your time and savor the experience. Exploration is rewarded with multiple paths through the map and two secret worlds, and even a second quest, of sorts. Mario fans will argue vehemently about which game is the best -- usually splitting the vote in three between this, Mario 3, and Mario 64, and while all three games are perfection, this gets the slight edge from me for ushering in Nintendo's golden age.
To one seven year old boy in The Bronx on Christmas Day in 1991, and roughly 20 million others like him, their first moments with this game were a glimpse into gaming's future. I'm sure most of us could not have imagined the kinds of things we'd be playing 20+ years later, and the massive worlds of games like Fallout and Skyrim. Technology has come a long way since then, but I'm glad that Nintendo keeps these titles in rotation to give a new generation of gamers a chance to discover the pure unadulterated joy of classic gameplay. For the rest of us, another playthrough is a fun reminder of a time when we were able to turn on a game and dive right into a fun, challenging, and creative world without having to first sit through hours of tutorials and exposition. The $8 price tag may seem steep considering how many other ways there are of playing this game, but if you don't already own this in some other way and have any interest at all in gaming, I think it is a must have. With game companies preying on gamer nostalgia, and indie developers creating some truly fantastic and innovate titles, 2D gaming is experiencing a renaissance, but to me it still never gets any better than this. Rating: A+
