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Game Review: Super Mario Land
2020-May-11, Monday 14:44
People talk online about how Super Mario Bros. 2 took the Mario series in a bizarre direction after the template set in Super Mario Bros. before Nintendo brought it back in Super Mario Bros. 3, but they don't really talk about how things immediately went sideways again. After Super Mario Bros. 3 had fireballs and stomping on enemies again and got rid of the life bar, Super Mario Land made things weird again. Superballs instead of fireballs? Exploding koopanokobons? Side-scrolling shooter stages? "Princess Daisy"? What is happening?
What is happening is that since this was a Game Boy game, it was worked on by Yokoi Gunpei instead of Miyamoto Shigeru, so Super Mario Land is a window into an alternate world where the team that designed Metroid and Game & Watch was the originator of the world's most famous video game character. If that had happened, maybe Mario would have starred in a series of best-selling danmaku games? Maybe the traditional Mario stage would have been a riff off a real-world location rather than being totally fantastical. Maybe Miyamoto would have designed Metroid.
A world as different from our own as Sarasaland is from the Mushroom Kingdom.
Click click boom.
( Read more... )
What is happening is that since this was a Game Boy game, it was worked on by Yokoi Gunpei instead of Miyamoto Shigeru, so Super Mario Land is a window into an alternate world where the team that designed Metroid and Game & Watch was the originator of the world's most famous video game character. If that had happened, maybe Mario would have starred in a series of best-selling danmaku games? Maybe the traditional Mario stage would have been a riff off a real-world location rather than being totally fantastical. Maybe Miyamoto would have designed Metroid.
A world as different from our own as Sarasaland is from the Mushroom Kingdom.
Click click boom.
( Read more... )
