Super Mario Land review

Game: Super Mario Land
Platform: Game Boy
Genre: Action (Platformer)
Developer: Nintendo

Reader review by sgreenwell

Date unavailable

Super Mario Land was the first ''Mario game'' released for the Game Boy. As such, it could have been a stinky festering piece of cow ''dung'' and still succeed saleswise, because of the stellear reputation of Mario. However, Super Mario Land is a pretty good game, providing very good traditional Mario gameplay.

In Super Mario Land, you play the role of Mario. There's a HUGGGGGEEEEEE change from past Mario's though - you're rescuing princess DAISY, NOT Toadstool. This adventure takes place in a different dimension from the Mushroom Kingdom, and the enemy is Tatanga. Interestingly, he may rank as the least popular Mario villain of all-time; he is the only one that was never really mentioned again in future games.

Anyways, Tatanga wants to kill you, and the Princess, you don't really want to die, blah blah blah, eat some cake, blah blah blah, happy ending, blah, have seventy thousand plumber babies, the end. It's a plotline that you'd typically see in a Disney movie. And as most people know, Nintendo is the Disney of the gaming industry.

The gameplay is traditional Mario, make no bones about it. You venture from left to right, no going backwards. Most enemies are killed by jumping on them, unless they have spikes or something nasty like that. You also have the traditional power-ups, such as fireballs from flowers, invincibility from starmen, and ''magical mushrooms''.

All of this reminds me that the original creator of Mario must have had one hell of a time thinking of the concept. Honestly, an Italian plumber who gets more powerful after munching on pretty multi-colored mushrooms and ''flowers''? Me thinks some programmers should lay off the brown acid...

Back to the game though. Super Mario Land is not a difficult game if you're sober. It relies mainly on instincts and memorization skills. The enemies are always in the same place, and always attack the same way. All it takes to beat the game is to memorize the patterns. None of the enemies are all that hard, most of the difficulty arises from jumps. The relativately low difficultly makes Super Mario Land a good game for beginning gamers.

Is it fun? Well, if you REALLY liked any other Mario game, then you'll like this one. It's more of the same. However, if you hate Mario games with a passion, then this game isn't going to change your mind. It's traditional, through and through.

Graphically, Super Mario Land suffers from the same problem that a lot of Game Boy games suffer from - graphical blur. When you're running on the screen, it can become a bit tricky to see where you're going. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot to say, as it's the traditional grey, green, and sickish yellow color scheme.

Musically, Super Mario Land isn't half bad. There's more than a few catchy tunes abound, and the Game Boy speaker doesn't mutilate them horribly. You can do a LOT worse than Super Mario Land...

Overall, Super Mario Land is an excellent platformer for the Game Boy. If you find it for less than twenty bucks, it's a very good purchase. It can provide a lot of good adventuring time.

Rating: 10/10

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