Mario is Missing! (Super Nintendo) review on HonestGamers

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Review by R. W.
March 25, 2005

Everyone knows Mario is Missing! is a bad game, and I'm not here to dispute this fact.

The problem as I see it, though, is that Mario is Missing! is regarded as a bad game for the wrong reasons -- I doubt few of its many vocal critics have even bothered to consider just why it isn't any fun. These cynics see the phrase "educational Mario game" and immediately need no more conclusive reasoning to justify its failings as a title. "It was a bad idea from the start," they'll purport, and rather than look at why its workings fall flat -- and they certainly do -- they immediately jump to overly hyperbolic comparisons and rants on its humdrum superficial aspects.

Honestly, I don't see how education can be "a bad idea from the start," but then again, it's been a long time since I was in middle school.

Our premise here is simple, and perhaps best illustrated as such: "Mario is missing, dillhole. Go find him." Granted, the instruction manual spells it out a bit more delicately, but it ultimately boils down to this.

Assuming the role of twin brother and fan favorite Luigi, we'll have to negotiate our way through three castles headed by a trio of Bowser's sons. Rather than laden these fortresses with bubbling lava pits and spike-lined ceilings typical of a Mario adventure, each is now just a long, obstacle-less corridor. From this barren hallway we have access to five different portals that will warp us away to a foreign land, and once we clear them all, we'll unleash an underling whose head must be stomped on six times to progress to the next quintet.

Three castles with five portals each; I stress this not out of its importance, but merely because its annoying seeing twenty percent of this title's reviewers get something so simple wrong.

Each portal drops us into an unidentified city from around the globe, and our first job upon arrival is to determine exactly where we are. The first clues are aesthetic -- the types of structures scrolling in the background, the cultural music accompanying our strolls down the streets -- and are usually more than enough to narrow it down to a certain geographic region. From here we can go to our map screen and simply guess (you'll know if you did so correctly if you're suddenly riding Yoshi), or talk to some of the residents walking the streets for hints as to our locale. The problem with talking to these charisma-less strangers is that their tips are often so obvious, so blatant, the entire task of determining our whereabouts is made utterly pointless. Since there is no randomization, you might just remember the city if it's not your first trip through.

Luckily, there's a bit more to it than this. Each metropolis has had integral parts of three of its defining attractions stolen, and its up to us to recover and return them; for instance, in New York City we'll need to find Lady Liberty's torch, the statue of Prometheus overlooking Rockefeller center, and King Kong (because what else can you really steal from the Empire State Building?). To find these artifacts we have to jump on the heads of all the red-shelled Koopa Troopas roaming about the city streets until one coughs it up -- a sort of amusing process at first, but one that becomes an exercise in tedium later on.

Once reclaimed we'll need to haul the items to the appropriate information desks in the city, where we'll be asked two questions regarding the object to prove its genuineness. Before getting quizzed though, its best to read the paragraph of information available at the stand on the object -- merely gleaning over the blurb for key words and numbers will usually prove enough -- because the queries are often not on general everyman information. Answer the receptionist's pair of questions correctly and she'll gladly accept the item; answer wrong and you'll be labeled a fraud, and have to wait a minute or so before you can try your luck again.

Forgive me, for I see little educational value here.

Playing Mario is Missing! ends up being as stimulating as reading a stack of encyclopedia articles, because that's essentially what you're doing. You complete the tedious process of knocking off Koopas to find the object, you read a brief paragraph on it, and you try to retain the information in the pamphlet for the fifteen seconds necessary to answer the questions. Lather, rinse and repeat for forty-five different missing items. We're not reading memorable material in these articles either -- many of the questions deal with how old or tall a structure is, and after you finish playing you won't be able to recall any of these esoteric numbers or dates. In a few cases, these boring fact sheets don't even contain the information we're being asked about.

The problem with Mario is Missing! is not that it's an educational game. It's not that your character can't die. The problem here is that these creators based an entire game around reading abbreviated encyclopedia articles and assumed it would suffice as an educational title. It doesn't work that way.

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is a fellow education title, and likely helped inspire much of what is found here. MiM! clearly borrows the "query citizens to determine a location" theme, only in Carmen we were doing so to determine where to go next, not where we currently are. The clues in Carmen were also cleverly crafted to be suggestive of where to go while those here are blatantly dumb, but let's ignore this fact. Carmen succeeds because you actually have to piece together and discern clues from different citizens to solve a caper; in this dismal effort, all the information is thrown in front of you, and all you have to do is try to briefly memorize it and recognize two snippets of data to proceed.

The former results in information being committed to long-term memory because we actually need to think. With the latter, information bops in and out of our consciousness, never to be recalled again because we are not actually applying it to anything. Not only are we given a dull, repetitive design for a video game, but we can't even learn anything from it because we have neither a thought-provoking nor recurring application for the information it presents.

And that's why Mario is Missing! sucks ass.

Rating
2	Horrible You really don't want to play this. The gameplay is downright horrific, making the game not worth even a rental.
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Game Profile & Content

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Staff Score (Avg): N/A User Score (Avg): 2.0 Press Score (Avg): N/A
Reviews: 1 Guides: 1 Cheats: 0 Ratings: 1	High Scores: 0 Screenshots: 0 Videos: 0

Title: Mario is Missing!
Genre: Casual (Educational)
Publisher: Mindscape
Developer: Software Creations
Release Date: June, 1993
ESRB: N/A
Platforms: NES, SNES

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