With some moderate exceptions, most of Super Mario Bros 3 is pretty easy, especially if you’ve accumulated extra lives in the many easy ways the game gives you. Anyone who was able to win either of the first two games no doubt walked through this one with ease. That is until they got to World 8.
Prior to the internet, glitches in games (that could be repeated) were insanely popular. It felt like you had a special secret that few people had: breaking a game programmed by gods. Of course, I learned about glitches from Nintendo Power. Still, breaking a game could often be more fun than trying to win it outright. And there’s nothing more fun than trying to enter Super Mario Bros’ minus world, if your idea of fun is trying to make awkward jumps forty-eight times in a row while the clock of death is winding down.
Super Mario Brothers 2 introduced a lot of cool, quirky gameplay aspects to the series, but one of my personal favorites was the idea the jumping onto an enemy’s back might not immediately kill said enemy. The idea of riding on an enemy over an otherwise deadly obstacle opened the game’s level design up to all sorts of interesting possibilities. My favorite of which is today’s moment.
“I hate that fish. He just gulps you and you’re dead. Fucking bullshit.”
– Some eloquent YouTube Commenter
You get messily devoured a couple of times the first time you encounter him. After all, he’s one of the very few enemies that can kill Mario no matter how powered up he is. He feeds on your complacency. He doesn’t care that you have a raccoon tail or a fire flower (well, technically, he might care a bit about that). You’re just swimming along, and suddenly – GULP – you’re back to the world map. You’re just bait to him.
Throughout Super Mario Brother 2, you’ve digging up turnips, carrots, and parsnips. With the exception of the odd potion bottle, these are things you might expect to be planted within the soil. You fling these tubers at enemies to knock them out. Everything is working as God intended it.
Pictured: Something you might expect to find sprouting from the soil.
I’ve decided to team up with Nibbishment to do a series of posts about various video games we’ve both enjoyed way too much. There are so many sites out there that review games as a whole, but we’ll be eschewing that and just picking out our favorite moments. The ones that gives us goosebumps or made us shout “Radical!” because we were hip 80’s kids. We’ll split the workload here, but we’ll be cross-posting.
Our first list will run down the three SMB games released for the NES. Delightfully, we discovered we shared very similar feel-good moments so there was little argument. Hopefully, you’ll feel just a bit of the adrenaline we did while recounting the best moments these games had to offer.