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Super Mario Bros. review

Game: Super Mario Bros.
Platform: NES
Genre: Action (Platformer)
Developer: Nintendo

Reader review by sgreenwell

Date unavailable

Super Mario Brothers is a game centering around the drug paraphanial of the early 1960's counter cult-

Errr, wait, I'm mistaking it with Woodstock. Which isn't hard to do if you REALLY think about it (eating mushrooms to become ''super'', wink wink nudge nudge, say no more). Super Mario Brothers is the classic platformer game which first introduced the world to Mario. It would spawn countless imitators and earn billions of dollars for its creator, Nintendo, and revitalized the sagging video game landscape.

In Super Mario Brothers, you control Mario, or if you're the second player, Luigi. You journey from left to right, defeating all the monsters in the way by jumping on their heads. You goal is to jump and run your way through the stages to eventually find the Princess Toadstool, who the evil King Koopa kidnapped. Exciting, eh?

Compared to today's games, Super Mario Brothers is extremely simply. There's only two buttons, with two options - jump and run. Hold down the keypad and the run button, and you run. Press the jump button, and you jump. The run button can also be used to throw fireballs, but that's only when you have Fire Mario. That's all there is to it, and it's kept that simplistic throughout the entire game.

As a result, the game can become pretty tedious compared to today's games. There's no real reward for accomplishing things in the game, except for high point totals and a very bad ending. But at the time, Super Mario Brothers was the best thing out there. The action was exciting (hard to imagine in this age) and the control was tight, all that was needed for a successful platformer/action game.

Graphically, Super Mario Brothers was great for its time... That's a nice way of putting that it looks really really bad now. Most of the graphics look like they've been washed eight to twenty times; all of the colors are faded, except for brown. The color brown is present in nearly every enemy and every stage. And it looks like... Well, let's not say what it looks like...

Super Mario Brothers does feature an excellent midi soundtrack, one of the best of all-time. Its tunes are classic, and instantly recognizable to most gamers. They've even been remixed and covered by popular DJ's and bands. One of the strongest points of the game.

Overall, Super Mario Brothers is a classic game, and deserves a ten. Is it still an amazingly fun game to play? No, but it should be required playing for any true gamer, to remind them what gaming was like back in the day, before even the Genesis and Super Nintendo generation.

Rating: 10/10

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