Game One
It starts.
This journey into years past, a collection of games spanning
my entire life…of course it would start with this. Super Mario Bros. What
hasn’t been said about this game? There shouldn’t be a person out there who has
played a video game who hasn’t played this one. It’s where everyone should
start.
Release in Japan, 13 September 1985 and in America…we aren’t
sure and will never know….but sometime in ’85 or ’86 some say as early as
October 18th or November 17th but regardless, this simple
platformer game in which you are a plumber named Mario Mario or his brother
Luigi Mario must travel across the Mushroom Kingdom and fight off Bowser’s evil
army to rescue the Princess Toadstool.
Now while this tried and true formula of save the girl, save
the world has recently caused some up roar, there isn’t really a much more
simple way to engage the player. He took her, go rescue. The misdirection of
the Toads after every Bowser…(clone? Robot? Is it actually Bowser?) fight keeps
pushing you to continue, knowing that eventually you will find the princess.
It’s simple, it’s to the point, and it keeps you playing. And this is a great
thing because playing this game is still remarkably fun even 25+ years later.
And hard. God damn this game is a challenge. Luckily this game isn’t cheap when
it comes to difficulty, and that’s because of two reasons. The levels, and the
controls.
Each of these levels are laid out pretty damn close to
perfectly, keeping a sense of flow that other platformers strive for. This game
doesn’t try to slow you down or trick you , it expects you to go as fast as you
can through it, and instead of intense memorization of the levels, you can
trust your sense of reaction to get you through. This is all thanks to the near
perfect controls, which are about as clean and crisp as you can make them.
Mario moves quickly and jumps high and fast enough so that once you know the
levels you can blow through them and feel like a champ when you hit the top of
that flagpole. I put emphasis on the “once you know the levels” part because
this game also doesn’t really let you make mistakes. Seriously, go pop in
whatever copy you have of this and play 1-1 see if you die…I’ll wait…
See? You fucking forgot about Mario and then a turtle bit
the shit out of your ass. It’s cool I know how it feels. After about an hour of
playing , I made it to world 4-2 before I game over’d on day one…In which I
would have played more, but I spent all day getting everything set up so by the
time I started to play it was already like 11:45pm….I had work in the
morning…I’m a busy man…leave me alone. Day two fared better but I fucked up and died on 8-3...
The Next Day
I beat it fucking! yes! I actually destroyed it…didn’t use
any shortcuts, but I did have to restart a bunch of times because world 5-3 and
8-all are total bullshit…(fucking hammer bros) that’s one down and like another
hundred to get through…but hopefully they’ll be quick.
So I’m not going to rate this or whatever because it doesn’t
matter. If you don’t have a copy of this game, go get one. If you have never
played this game or haven’t in a while go do it. Seriously, this is arguably
the most important game ever made. Maybe next to pong or fucking …I dunno
Pac-Man. Just go play it for like 20 minutes.
On to the next one,
Nick
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