Super Mario World (singleplayer) Review

I am incapable of writing this review (therefore you should keep reading). No seriously, I haven't played Super Mario Bros. 2, 3, and 1, so I can't tell you if this one is better than those.

However, I did play New Super Mario Bros., and I even played Super Mario World! (Super Mario World has better level design and has better controls).

And knowing that you already know why these 2D Mario Bros. games are fun, I will only discuss Super Mario World's faults:

It seems that Nintendo knew the lives system was annoying.

(What is the lives system?) In these Mario games, you begin with a small amount of lives. Every time you die in a level, you lose a life, and if you lose all your lives, game over occurs. The console will note your death, and you'll have to start from the very beginning; all the levels you unlocked are relocked, which is annoying. So, what Nintendo did to preclude the pain was put in levels that allow you to maxout your lives to 99 in minutes (here's an example). I'm assuming they put these in on purpose (because they did). Many game designers would say "it's an exploit of the rules and is bad game design," but I say it's a secret designed to be found by curious humans (proof: that hyperlinked level has "secret" as part of its title). And what joy it must have been to discover this secret, unless of course the player had already lost the game many times before finding it out....

And now, on to the actually bad stuff!

Super Mario World's last -- and hardest -- levels don't have checkpoints. Most of the game's levels have checkpoints halfway through them, and when you die you can restart from them. But, perhaps to reinforce the epicness of the final levels, Nintendo threw out the pain-relieving checkpoints. What?

To make these levels worse, the game doesn't let you stack powerups the way they should be stacked (i.e. the New Super Mario Bros. way; yes, NSMB has an advantage). Super Mario World's most common powerups give you, among other things, two hit points before dying. You can carry two of these powerups at a time; one will be active; one will be in reserve. If you get hurt while carrying them, you'll lose the active one, and the other will fall from the sky for you to grab. If you lose that powerup, then you've lost your powerups, are very unlikely to gain the level's few powerups, and you'll likely need to travel back to much easier levels, via the world map, to get some more; you'll have to waste your time playing levels you were done with. It took me an hour and a half just to finish the final bits of the game. Some of you will finish faster, yeah that's nice, but it's still horrible evil level design (the final boss fight is good).

But these are just the last two levels. Overall the game's difficulty feels to me "just right" for a new player to the games. To veteran players of other old school Mario games I didn't play, well, you might as well skip Super Mario World, especially if you played Super Mario Bros. 3. Youtube tells me that Super Mario World is similar enough to those games (and so much easier than SMB 3) that you'll have little to gain from this one. There'll basically be no challenge for you, and the novelty of the experience won't be so novel.

9/10


Super Mario World was originally released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1990. It is available for the Wii (virtual console); you will need a classic controller to play it.