OK, you got me. I'm cheating. The rules for the Pi Reviews were that I would review games which I hadn't beaten before that I was going to beat on the Pi. The truth is that I actually have beaten Super Mario World several times before, but I simply love it to death, beat it again on the Pi, and decided to take this chance to talk about it again.
If you put a gun to my head, and asked me to choose my favorite video game series of all time, it would be very difficult to choose. There are many series which I really love, such as Zelda, Mega Man, Donkey Kong Country, Mass Effect, MLB: The Show, Super Smash Bros., and Street Fighter. But the two that will likely always be top two for me would be Final Fantasy and Mario (just limited to the main series games, not including the sports titles, Mario Kart, FF Adventure and Tactics, etc., many of which are also excellent). But if I had to pick, I think I'd take Mario, for three reasons.
First, essentially every main entry into the Mario franchise has been superb at launch, and has aged remarkably well. Basically the only Mario games which I do not love are Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario World 2 (generally my answer to the question "which games do you not like that everyone else loves" along with Ocarina of Time. But that's another blog topic for another time. Please don't kill me.) Even those two games, however, are actually quite technically competent, fantastically creative, and quite fun at times. I just think they're the worst of the series. I simply can't say the same for Final Fantasy. The NES-PS2 era were great at the time, but most have not aged well. And some really weren't all the great to begin with. FFIII (the one that was never released in North America until the DS version) is simply not good. FFVIII also struggles at times to separate itself from its titanic predecessor, X has dreadful voice acting, and XII's battle system is a bit too much watching and not enough playing. But the main problem with FF has been how poorly some of the entries have visually aged, and particularly the PS1 entries. As much as I love FFVII, the visuals on the characters when they are not in the battle screen are just dreadful.
Be honest with yourself. Does that look good? Look at those hoofs! Err....hands
Second, the fantastic learning and design at play involved with Mario games means that you are constantly in action, which means you're constantly having fun! It's very easy to spend 10-15 minutes at a time tinkering with job configurations in FFV, or rearranging materia in FFVII, or switching equipment in any Final Fantasy game. While these are largely necessary elements to the genre, these down time moments become less appealing to me as I get older, and especially as I have less time in which to play. Mario maximizes fun, whereas Final Fantasy maximizes immersion. Immersion is great, but it increasingly takes a back seat to fun for me these days.
Third, the storied history of Mario is just too fond for me to even allow comparison to Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy is the dominant force in JRPGs, particularly in America, where Dragon Quest never really took off. But Mario taught the entire game industry vital lessons at every step in gaming history.
Donkey Kong was a revolution in arcade games, and made it possible to develop and build interesting characters in video games.
Super Mario Bros. is unquestionably the most important video game in history. It rescued home video game consoles from the city dump and put them back in every American's living room. It showed us a world that didn't just have a black background with space ships shooting aliens. It had seamless side scrolling. It had so many secrets to discover, encouraging interaction and learning both within the game, and across the gaming community. It made us realize how vitally important music is for video games. It made "Nintendo" a synonym for video games for an entire generation of moms. And it spawned all of the phenomenal sequels and startup games that came after.
Super Mario 64 literally created interesting 3D video games at the console level, and has aged so very well.
Super Mario Galaxy showed how excellently motion controls could be adapted into really good video games.
But my personal favorite Mario Game, and one of my top 5 games of all time, is Super Mario World.
It plays perfectly.
It looks perfect.
It sounds perfect.
It simplifies the number of items and powerups from SMB3, but gives you so many varied locations in which to use those items that it never feels like a downgrade.
It has an enormous and completely interconnected world map, through which you can revisit your favorite levels as many times as you want. And there are so many levels with secret exits that finding them all without any help would be a massive undertaking.
The Super Nintendo is my favorite system, and Super Mario World is my favorite game on that system (sorry Earthbound and Chrono Trigger!). The reason that SNES is my favorite is that to me, the SNES was where gaming reached a crossroads, and the SNES took the right path. Cartridges could now hold massively detailed and enormous worlds in them, making it so that you did not have to make your games dreadfully difficult in order to ensure that the player would get his money's worth out of a short game through endless repetition. Save batteries becoming more commonplace ensured that you didn't have to complete a game in one sitting. With the right design, you could make a game challenging, but make part of that challenge the pure fun and ecstasy of exploring a massive world. Super Mario World set the stage for the pure fun of the SNES, compared to the artificially frustrating challenge of NES and earlier games. It's one of very few games to which I will assign a perfect 10/10. It's the one game I recommend to anyone who's never played video games, or has never been able to get into them. It's the perfect bad day game, and the perfect good day game. Go beat it if you haven't!
-TRO
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