“AN ARCHETYPAL BASEBALL BAT TO THE JAW”
I don’t think I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Bros. the intended way and I don’t think I ever will.
Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I played the original Super Mario Bros. unless it was on the Wii Virtual Console back when that was a thing, so maybe 10+ years ago? Sometime before middle school.
I finished the Super Mario All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 1 when I first moved to Oregon and now I’ve finished the original Super Mario Bros. and all I can think about is how much better the All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 1 is. Play that version instead! Or get your fill on the original I guess, do what you want. Be your own person.
Super Mario Bros. controls evergreen. Holds up surprisingly well. Not gonna break down each and every game design choice but it’s obvious that levels are built to encourage player mastery through discovery. It works!
I remember reading a quote from Yuji Naka about how Sonic was inspired by replaying through the first few levels of Mario after dying over and over. Playing through Super Mario Bros. again, almost 40 years after its conception, I feel like there is a certain poetry in how this quote is framed – as if the idea was to expand on Mario’s movement by creating a “faster” Mario, when in actuality, I feel as though this design ethos is reflected almost nowhere in the first Sonic game at all.
Mario feels more like a Sonic prototype than even the first Sonic game does. Players are given an astonishing amount of control over Mario’s movements. You can build up speed and gain height and distance by running, but you also need to plan around the ridiculous speed Mario can attain. This can cause friction as the game requires players compensate for Mario’s slippery movement. Don’t be intimidated! There’s a lot of nuance in Mario’s movement but the levels are constructed in a way that feels difficult but fair, accounting for players of all skill levels.
Yuji Naka was right in that he should want to complete World 1-1 as fast as he could, but this is by design. Not only the first levels, but every level is meant to push players towards being fast. Some levels almost feel suffocating, like you need to get through some areas as quickly as humanly possible. The stage timer and the inability to backtrack only reinforces this idea. The last few levels necessitate this mindset to an absurd degree.
Although, uh, the Naka quote specifically refers to the fact that he kept dying and had to restart the game from the very beginning (which I understand). I tried doing this playthrough without using save states – if I died, I sucked it up and made a beeline for the warp zones again. I did this maybe ten or fifteen times and just started using save states after each world. Sorry! It was really boring to keep playing the same level over and over again. The All Stars version actually lets you restart from the beginning of whichever world you died on instead of returning you to 1-1, which is the main reason I believe it’s the superior version.
My biggest complaints are that the game can be frustratingly punishing. I feel like unless you’re really scouring each and every coin and block in this game for extra lives, it gets in the way of the fast-paced platforming. Getting to the later worlds is no small feat but failing to learn enemy/environments in the paltry amount of attempts allotted to players and being booted back to World 1-1 can feel really mean and a little cheap!
Also, the Hammer Brothers. I’ve never been able to figure out these enemies. I understand them a little better now (they can only throw a maximum of around 6 hammers before they pause I believe) but these guys are real pains in the neck anyways. Apparently there’s hidden blocks in World 8-3 that can give you the powerups you need to transform into Fire Mario, which would definitely make the penultimate encounters with them easier, but there should still be a consistently more approachable strategy when dealing with them. It just feels like the game is going out of its way to inconvenience you instead of providing a fun or interesting challenge.
Overall though, I think Super Mario Bros. has aged remarkably well. These games are classics for a reason, after all!
Even so, the ridiculous difficulty and tedium of returning to the start of the game once you run out of lives did put a sour taste in my mouth. Even Mega Man felt relatively balanced (in terms of letting players retry levels after game over) until the very last level, where I think the difficulty goes way overboard.
Maybe you’ll get more out of this than I did. Either way I think you should play the All Stars version instead.
I don’t think I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Bros. the intended way and I don’t think I ever will.
Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I played the original Super Mario Bros. unless it was on the Wii Virtual Console back when that was a thing, so maybe 10+ years ago? Sometime before middle school.
I finished the Super Mario All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 1 when I first moved to Oregon and now I’ve finished the original Super Mario Bros. and all I can think about is how much better the All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 1 is. Play that version instead! Or get your fill on the original I guess, do what you want. Be your own person.
Super Mario Bros. controls evergreen. Holds up surprisingly well. Not gonna break down each and every game design choice but it’s obvious that levels are built to encourage player mastery through discovery. It works!
I remember reading a quote from Yuji Naka about how Sonic was inspired by replaying through the first few levels of Mario after dying over and over. Playing through Super Mario Bros. again, almost 40 years after its conception, I feel like there is a certain poetry in how this quote is framed – as if the idea was to expand on Mario’s movement by creating a “faster” Mario, when in actuality, I feel as though this design ethos is reflected almost nowhere in the first Sonic game at all.
Mario feels more like a Sonic prototype than even the first Sonic game does. Players are given an astonishing amount of control over Mario’s movements. You can build up speed and gain height and distance by running, but you also need to plan around the ridiculous speed Mario can attain. This can cause friction as the game requires players compensate for Mario’s slippery movement. Don’t be intimidated! There’s a lot of nuance in Mario’s movement but the levels are constructed in a way that feels difficult but fair, accounting for players of all skill levels.
Yuji Naka was right in that he should want to complete World 1-1 as fast as he could, but this is by design. Not only the first levels, but every level is meant to push players towards being fast. Some levels almost feel suffocating, like you need to get through some areas as quickly as humanly possible. The stage timer and the inability to backtrack only reinforces this idea. The last few levels necessitate this mindset to an absurd degree.
Although, uh, the Naka quote specifically refers to the fact that he kept dying and had to restart the game from the very beginning (which I understand). I tried doing this playthrough without using save states – if I died, I sucked it up and made a beeline for the warp zones again. I did this maybe ten or fifteen times and just started using save states after each world. Sorry! It was really boring to keep playing the same level over and over again. The All Stars version actually lets you restart from the beginning of whichever world you died on instead of returning you to 1-1, which is the main reason I believe it’s the superior version.
My biggest complaints are that the game can be frustratingly punishing. I feel like unless you’re really scouring each and every coin and block in this game for extra lives, it gets in the way of the fast-paced platforming. Getting to the later worlds is no small feat but failing to learn enemy/environments in the paltry amount of attempts allotted to players and being booted back to World 1-1 can feel really mean and a little cheap!
Also, the Hammer Brothers. I’ve never been able to figure out these enemies. I understand them a little better now (they can only throw a maximum of around 6 hammers before they pause I believe) but these guys are real pains in the neck anyways. Apparently there’s hidden blocks in World 8-3 that can give you the powerups you need to transform into Fire Mario, which would definitely make the penultimate encounters with them easier, but there should still be a consistently more approachable strategy when dealing with them. It just feels like the game is going out of its way to inconvenience you instead of providing a fun or interesting challenge.
Overall though, I think Super Mario Bros. has aged remarkably well. These games are classics for a reason, after all!
Even so, the ridiculous difficulty and tedium of returning to the start of the game once you run out of lives did put a sour taste in my mouth. Even Mega Man felt relatively balanced (in terms of letting players retry levels after game over) until the very last level, where I think the difficulty goes way overboard.
Maybe you’ll get more out of this than I did. Either way I think you should play the All Stars version instead.