Systems Release: Game Boy, 3DS
Release Dates: April 21, 1989 (JP) & July 31, 1989 (NA)
Publisher: Nintendo
Time Spent: 1 hour 26 minutes
I only have a brief history with Super Mario Land on the original Game Boy that lasted fewer than 30 minutes. In my memory, I was over at Dellanos' house playing his Game Boy (or was it our neighbor PVW?) and I gave Super Mario Land a try. I remember thinking that the game became rather blurry on the Game Boy screen, that the brick and ? blocks were tiny, and that the power-up mushrooms had a distinct look to them. I know I did not get very far in the game, maybe to or through 1-2, but just thinking that the game was more difficult than Super Mario Bros., possibly because of the blurriness of the screen and how sluggish it felt compared to other NES platformers at the time. That is not to say that the game is easy by any means and I fully acknowledge that playing with save states not only made the game more fun and less frustrating to play, but it did otherwise decrease my overall playtime as I did not have to replay whole sections of the earlier levels just to get back to where I lost all my lives.
When the Game Boy Switch Online app was announced and released back on February 8th, I immediately thought that Super Mario Land was going to be one of the featured games, which would have made sense as it was one of the launch titles when the Game Boy was released in 1989. But it was not announced. And that was when I felt like I wanted to play this game again, for the second time, 33 years later. So before the 3DS eShop closed down, I purchased the game, preserved for all time (or at least until my 3DS dies; again).
So now that all of that boring dribble is out of the way.
Super Mario Land was really a lot more fun than I was anticipating, not that I was going in expecting a poorly made attempt at a Super Mario Bros. platformer on the Game Boy, but I was expecting it to move about as well as
Castlevania: The Adventure, meaning like trying to run through murky knee deep sludge complete with motion blur turned on. I probably should have reread the
instruction manual to reorient myself with what the game was throwing at me because I definitely died a few times to the exploding Koopa shells (
they're called Nokobons thank you very much!) thinking that I was going to try and kick them. I think that was the only mechanic that initially threw me off as everything else felt very much in the realm of a Super Mario game. There were enemies to jump on, Mushroom power-ups, and not-fireball balls to throw at enemies.
I knew before going into the game that there were side-scrolling arcade-shooter-type levels but as previously mentioned, I had not reached those levels the first time around so that was a really fun and new experience. The submarine and plane levels really just felt like a Super Mario take on a Gradius stage and was more fun than a truly difficult stage. The level design was simple, but fitting for the game and setting. I genuinely wonder why Nintendo never went back to this type of level design in a Mario game, although I could be forgetting if they were included in Super Mario Land 2, or any of the Wario Land games (which I plan on replaying in the coming weeks/months/years?). They also introduced standard (non-boss) enemies that took more than one hit from the non-fireball Superball, although you could still stomp them in a single jump and then kick their flattened corpse.
My primary criticism of the game is the overall length and how the development team went about the level design. The game itself is pretty short, as it took me 1h 26m (although you could beat the game in just over 30 minutes, and that was using save states after each level; I only created a new save state at the beginning of each level and I only reloaded that save state if I lost all my lives so I would not have to start over from the beginning, I do have (some) standards. The game length does make sense because when Super Mario Land was released on the Game Boy, you had to power the unit with four AA batteries and there was no save option on the cartridge so you had to beat the game in a single sitting, just like every Super Mario game up until Super Mario World (1990). The level design often felt repetitive, although looking at level maps, while there might have been certain elements and patterns, but there were not whole sections copy/pasted to draw out the length of each level. Such as in 1-1, the pipe, ? Block and pyramids are all the same layout as the other two pipes you come out of after entering bonus coin areas. For a while, I genuinely questioned if I had been warped back to the beginning. I guess there is also the perception that the levels themselves feel like they were copy/pasted and that you are running through the same patterns of blocks and enemies. I cannot think of how else to explain it beyond that. All-in-all there are only 12 levels in SML split between four worlds and honestly, it probably only felt short because I was using save states.
I really hope that Nintendo decides to release Super Mario Land on the Game Boy Switch Online app-thing because it really is a fun game that should definitely not be lost to time. It was the introduction of Sarasaland, Daisy, arcade-shooter levels, and even using the non-fireball Superball to collect coins in certain areas. The music too also has top-notch Game Boy-quality melodies, which is saying something considering this was a launch title.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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