oldpuck
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As some of you know I didn't grow up much with games. We only had a NES as a kid, with one cartridge, and I wouldn't get to own my own console again till college when I got a DS Lite (that was stolen not much later). I just don't have the nostalgia that some of you have for the games of the 80s and 90s. But even in my extremely poor hometown, I always managed to find the kid with the GameBoy and convince them to give me a shot. I put whatever time into whatever game they already had in the cart and there was one game in particular that stood out for me.
Super Mario Land 2. Because it sucked.
Now, don't @ me. I've played it as an adult, and I really enjoy it. It's objectively more polished in almost every way than the first Super Mario Land. But as a kid, Super Mario Land 2 was an extremely claustrophobic. The larger sprites were more expressive, but they also made it hard to know if there were enemies off-screen, and moving at speed seemed to be full of cheesy death.
Super Mario Land plays fair. The physics are clunky, sure - Mario doesn't move in the air quite right - but the tiny sprites make it clear what you can and can't get to, and what enemies are around the corner. And the larger field lets Super Mario Land hide all sorts of secrets. There are many times moving through the game when you'll see a object that you can't reach, which clearly indicates that you missed a secret route earlier in the level.
Super Mario Land is also full of gameplay variety. The subworlds aren't just little coin areas, they're often simple puzzles that trap you till you figure out how to escape. With the exception of Goomba-like enemies, all the enemies in Land are unique, with surprises if you're used to the games - turtles that blow up! Skeleton fish that shoot up! Robots I guess!
The first shmup level - and if you've not played the game, it has shmup levels - was such a delight to me as a kid. I really struggled with the underwater sections of SMB, and I found the autoscrollers of SMB3 really scary, with lots of jumps I didn't know how to make and no time to plan. The submarine - along with tight fighting spaces you need to blast through - takes the adrenaline of the autoscroller and the different movement of the water levels and turns it into something I wanted to play again and again.
I like 6 Golden Coins now. It's been fun to revisit these games on NSO, all these games I only got to play 15 minutes of here or there when another kid took pity on me. But despite the jank - and I'm not so blinded by nostalgia I think "jank is part of the charm" - Super Mario Land is still this unassuming banger. So many GB games were "sequels" that were really just demakes or clones of their NES counterparts. But Land does genuinely new things, it genuinely innovates. And GameBoy growing pains, plus the SMB style sprite-work have left it a sort of evolutionary dead end, a vision of what Mario could be, but never again really was. And if you haven't played it, I think it's worth your time.
Also the music fucking SLAPS. Fun fact, it was the first Mario game with stereo sound. Everyone knows the World 1 music (or what Mario Maker has made people call "the superball music") but World 3 is the hidden great.
Super Mario Land 2. Because it sucked.
Now, don't @ me. I've played it as an adult, and I really enjoy it. It's objectively more polished in almost every way than the first Super Mario Land. But as a kid, Super Mario Land 2 was an extremely claustrophobic. The larger sprites were more expressive, but they also made it hard to know if there were enemies off-screen, and moving at speed seemed to be full of cheesy death.
Super Mario Land plays fair. The physics are clunky, sure - Mario doesn't move in the air quite right - but the tiny sprites make it clear what you can and can't get to, and what enemies are around the corner. And the larger field lets Super Mario Land hide all sorts of secrets. There are many times moving through the game when you'll see a object that you can't reach, which clearly indicates that you missed a secret route earlier in the level.
Super Mario Land is also full of gameplay variety. The subworlds aren't just little coin areas, they're often simple puzzles that trap you till you figure out how to escape. With the exception of Goomba-like enemies, all the enemies in Land are unique, with surprises if you're used to the games - turtles that blow up! Skeleton fish that shoot up! Robots I guess!
The first shmup level - and if you've not played the game, it has shmup levels - was such a delight to me as a kid. I really struggled with the underwater sections of SMB, and I found the autoscrollers of SMB3 really scary, with lots of jumps I didn't know how to make and no time to plan. The submarine - along with tight fighting spaces you need to blast through - takes the adrenaline of the autoscroller and the different movement of the water levels and turns it into something I wanted to play again and again.
I like 6 Golden Coins now. It's been fun to revisit these games on NSO, all these games I only got to play 15 minutes of here or there when another kid took pity on me. But despite the jank - and I'm not so blinded by nostalgia I think "jank is part of the charm" - Super Mario Land is still this unassuming banger. So many GB games were "sequels" that were really just demakes or clones of their NES counterparts. But Land does genuinely new things, it genuinely innovates. And GameBoy growing pains, plus the SMB style sprite-work have left it a sort of evolutionary dead end, a vision of what Mario could be, but never again really was. And if you haven't played it, I think it's worth your time.
Also the music fucking SLAPS. Fun fact, it was the first Mario game with stereo sound. Everyone knows the World 1 music (or what Mario Maker has made people call "the superball music") but World 3 is the hidden great.