Mario's Rabbit Hole into Wonderland (LTSI Write-Off)
Written: Aug 25 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A break from the traditional Mario formula
Cons: Often looked at as the crap game of the series
The Bottom Line: You use vegtables to defeat enemies? I guess you can forget what your parents said about them being good for you.
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| BaronSamedi3's Full Review: Super Mario Bros. 2 for Nintendo |
Its been about two decades since Nintendo finally brought the video game industry off life support after the infamous crash of 1983. And its becoming clearer and clearer that the Japs, who run Nintendo, don't think very highly of us Americans. They make some of the greatest games over in the land of the rising sun, so their gamers, of course, get first crack at them while we get stuck with magazine previews of how promising the game looks. Then they cancel the American translations of these games while feeding us varying ways of saying Americans are too dumb to play this game as excuses. Then we get stuck scanning internet sites and paying shipping and handling charges so we can play imports. Either that or we await re-release on the latest next-gen console.
Cases in point? Shenmue 2. We won't be getting a Dreamcast version in the States, and I don't want to buy an Xbox just so I won't be left hanging off a cliff in the story. And about half the Final Fantasy games. Of course, when they did finally start bringing new FF games Stateside, they had to be the worse ones. Final Fantasy 7. And they could have kept Final Fantasy 8 as far as I'm concerned. And Super Mario Bros. 2. Mario 2 used the same ol' Mario 1 formula, but they made it a million times harder. And so, thinking that the stupid Americans would be unable to keep from crying like babies about how unfair wind and poison mushrooms were, Nintendo took an older game called Doki Doki Panic, remade it with a Mario theme and threw that at us.It wasn't until the Super NES launch that real Mario 2 would make it to the States redubbed Lost Worlds on a Super NES Mario compilation.
Well, that last one was their loss. I didn't care near as much for real Mario 2 as I did for fake Mario 2. Wind and poison mushrooms sounded like good ideas in theory, but all they resulted in were a lot of broken controllers and missing hair follicles. Fake Mario 2, on the other hand, is still regarded as a classic and was one of the big launch games for the Game Boy Advance last year.
Sure, fake Mario 2 broke the traditional Mario mold, but that was exactly what made it memorable. The first time I played it, I actually made the mistake of thinking that Bowser and co. had learned their lessons (I'll save the fact that they didn't for another day and another article). Why? Because Mario 2 didn't take place in the Mushroom Kingdom that became almost the Middle-Earth of video games, but in a mysterious dream world. One night after a hard night of partying and drinking, Mario is sleeping off his hangover when he dreams about another world. He wakes up and all the alcohol starts taking effect again when he sees a door in his room that wasn't there when he went to sleep. He goes in and finds himself in the world he dreamed about. Apparently, the people of the dreamworld were once happy people who danced like fairies in the flower fields before an ugly wart (named, appropriatly enough, Wart) took over. Guess what Mario has to do!
Well, not just Mario but his little bro' Luigi, good friend Toad and 'special' friend Peach (hey, it's a kiddie game, after all). And all of them are right there at your beckoning call for you to use in your quest to save dreamworld. Now, if you can select four different characters, then that must mean they each have different abilities, right? Yep. This is the only Mario game in which jumping strength and strength matter. Jump is how high your character can jump and strength is what your character can do with his/her hands full. And Mario is the simple, average, well rounded Joe. Unless losing lives is your idea of a good time, you'll want to play through Mario 2 as either Toad or Luigi. Toad picks thing up the fastest and doesn't slow down when he runs with them. Luigi has only moderate strength, but when he jumps, he soars like my long-distance bills after I call Japanese video game companies to scream at them. Mario is average, as I've said, and Peach is dead last. Sure she can hover, but that really serves no purpose save letting perverted shyguys check out her panties.
Okay, any Mario vet knows why jumping is important, but why strength? Because you won't be jumping on top of bad guys to defeat them. Sure, you can still do it without any harm, but all that will result in is a short piggyback ride that will last until the bad guy rides you off the nearest cliff. So, jumping out, the makers of Mario 2 (or Doki Doki Panic) decided to allow you to dispose of enemies by having you do something you've always wanted to do-throw your vegtables at them! Yeah! As you plod along in dreamworld, you find little clumps of grass that you pick up. When you pick them up, you find that the inhabitants of dreamworld really like their turnips and onions. Having lived on a diet of pizza, pasta and lasagna, you then get disgusted and throw them at your foes, who must hate them even more than you do or else this method wouldn't work so easily. Now if only you could get this technique to work on Mom and Dad, you'd really be in business.
But every now and then, the game get smart on you and makes you do semi-complicated things like blow up walls and fight certain difficult sub-bosses and bosses without the aid of your veggies. So now you have to wise up yourself and figure out how you're gonna fight this big three-headed monster, and preferably avoid getting killed in the process. But don't worry, there's always something around available to throw. And as for the immovable walls, well, you can obtain the answers for those puzzles the same way your parents did in the 60's: Using the grass!
If you were a gamer during the prehistoric 8-bit era, you don't need grass to see how pretty the graphics were. Oh, you can see them! Look at all the pretty colors! And look at the pretty animation! Remember all those blocky figures from Mario 1? No more of them! Now you get real animated (isn't that an oxymoron?) sprites that move more than just their stumpy little legs.
Being on an 8-bit system, the backgrounds would of course be nonexistant. No pretty pictures there, save the occaissional tree. And the doors. Hey, it's a dreamworld, they can afford to place doors to another dimension right out in the middle of nowhere. And, let me say that Mario 2 has the best opening level ever in video games. You start by entering a floating door and falling through several screens before reaching the bottom, where you enter another door.
(excited, awed gasp!) I can see the music! Wait a minute, see the music? Did I use grass before writing this? Am I high right now? Geez, I gotta start... HEY KIDS!!! That's some great music in Mario 2, finest in the series, let me tell ya!!! Seriously, though, they must have paid a lot of money over at Nintendo for a composer of the caliber of the guy who composed the music for Mario 2. (oftheoftheofthe) The main theme is my favorite in the Mario series. It's very catchy, bouncy and upbeat.
Super Mario Bros. 2 is the second best Mario game out there (Super Mario World for the Super NES takes the top honor, of course). No, it's not a Mario game in the traditional sense, no, it's not as epic as Super Mario World or Super Mario Bros. 3, no, it's not as varied as those two games, no, it doesn't have the traditional power-ups, and no, you can't have any of my freakin' grass, ya sponge! But Mario 2 is no less than a classic in its own right, even if it's one of those love it or hate it games. Mario 2 may not even be a real Mario game, but it's such a great game that it has every right to be called one. Lost Worlds on the other hand...
This review is copyrighted blah blah blah... This review is part of a write-off called Let the Sunshine in, a tribute to the Great Mario, in honor of his new GameCube game. (gee, am I the first participant to post a review? Did I get the date right?) Here are the participants:
rader6795 (our host)
chris_billings
arada392
search66
Rock_On
jeremy1456
tanta07
pavona21
StarSoldier1
BaronSamedi3 (that's me. no go read more of my reviews)
Recommended:
Yes
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BaronSamedi3
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Location: Chicago
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Doing work on my blog: http://phoenixinquirer.wordpress.com/
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