Apparently, the existence of Super Mario Bros. 2 is the stuff of legend. After the success of Nintendo's break out game for the NES gaming console, the designer of Super Mario Bros., Shigeru Miyamoto, came up with a sequel much harder than the first. His sequel, however, either looked too much like the original game or was too difficult, and an alternate sequel game was eventually released for the American market instead. The American version is generally forgotten, but the legend of the real sequel game lived on.
Recently, this mythic version was released for play in the United States on the Nintendo Wii 20 years after the original game was released. Entitled Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, it almost seems to solidfy Miyamoto's stature as a true artist based on this review by Slate:
In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it—I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as "a giant puzzle and practical joke" isn't far off.Perhaps there is some reason to all of that Japanese quirkiness after all.That sadistic torment, however, is central to the game's appeal. Unlike most game designers, who make sequels that are identical to their predecessors, only with better graphics, Miyamoto used the Real Super Mario Bros. 2 to do something new and dangerous, turning his original and beloved game on its head. Once you accept that mushrooms and warp zones can be punishments rather than rewards, you start to question the nature of the game and to ponder strategic gambits you would never have considered while playing the original Super Mario Bros. Upon discovering the Warp Zone to World 1, I contemplated letting the clock on Level 3-1 expire—a tactic that would have caused Mario to lose a life but would have allowed him to stay on the third level.
1 comment:
Interesting. I would think that if something like this were to have happened in today's time, it would have been embraced.
It would have been a cool puzzle to try and solve, but maybe we just weren't that sophisticated back then. Actually, there is no "maybe," we weren't that sophisticated. Our time was spent trying to see who could get past level 18 on Tetris.
Post a Comment