I've been thinking of dedicating a day of the week to a game topic close to my heart. I think Tuesday works because its a pretty boring week day in need of some love. I hereby dub Tuesdays "Retro Tuesdays and as such, each Tuesday I will write about a sweet game of yesteryear that I love or hate and was iconic for me in some way. I would be awesome if others grabbed some good or ill feeling out your mind and posted it on Tuesdays as well. See how that goes.
Without further ado..... "RETRO TUESDAY POST NUMBER A!"
Super Mario Brothers 2 is a game I will never stop loving. First off if you compare it to the rest of the original Super Mario Brothers games its a total odd duck. It did things in a Mario game few games continued and compared to Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World. Some of us know Super Mario Brothers 2 is actually Doki, Doki Panic rebranded. For more information on the history of Super Mario Brothers 2 read this(I heartily recommend it, its quite interesting):
http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb2_ddp.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._2
Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers 2 as we played in the USA because the original was seen as too difficult. Whatever the reason I am glad they shipped the game as I played it because the game is wonderful. The art style is very good, the music is iconic and the story is the best from my memory for a Mario game. Super Mario Brothers 2 shrugged off the princess saving in favor of saving the world of Subcon from the evil Wart. Right, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't feature Bowser as the badguy.
Super Mario Brothers 2 went so far as to allow you to jump on a bad guy(which didn't kill them) pick them up and toss them as a weapon. I also loved the magic potion that allowed you to enter a special dark world where you could find mushrooms to allow you more life and collect coins and enter warp zones.
Super Mario Brothers 2 also allowed you to pick what who the main character was. In Mario games typically you could only be Mario unless you were player 2 or in later Mario games 2-4. Super Mario Brothers 2 allowed you a choice between Mario, Luigi, Toad and the Princess. This is the only game to my memory where Mario was the worst character to chose as all the others were better in some way. To my memory Mario was kind of average, Luigi could jump very high, Toad was fast and the Princess could float. The character I picked 99% of the time was the Princess, she was mad overpowered and the game was so much easier when you played with her.
I recently went back to Super Mario Brothers and played the Super Mario All Stars version.
http://media.nintendo.com/nintendo/bin/KIXfK5Jg9lJrscFJmuyV_NH6eE_7i3jS/ISF4ETU5TyKHOMd7dYdBo6ZXeaDQR28C.jpg
Basically, All Stars is Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 2, Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario Brothers the Lost Levels. The SNES style graphics really make those games shine plus they add a save feature the original NES versions lacked.
When I think about awesome games that I love Super Mario Brothers 2 often comes to mind. I've played it recently so I know it still holds up well for me now. I often wish a modern Mario would pull elements from Mario 2 but it seems that Mario 2 will be off on its own which is just fine to me. I know others share my love for this game because of its uniqueness but we are a rare breed. A few years ago I took my love to another level and purchased this shirt. Yeah, I love the game that much.
http://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Bros-Mens-T-Shirt/dp/B0045OWO3S
Without further ado..... "RETRO TUESDAY POST NUMBER A!"
Super Mario Brothers 2 is a game I will never stop loving. First off if you compare it to the rest of the original Super Mario Brothers games its a total odd duck. It did things in a Mario game few games continued and compared to Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World. Some of us know Super Mario Brothers 2 is actually Doki, Doki Panic rebranded. For more information on the history of Super Mario Brothers 2 read this(I heartily recommend it, its quite interesting):
http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb2_ddp.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._2
Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers 2 as we played in the USA because the original was seen as too difficult. Whatever the reason I am glad they shipped the game as I played it because the game is wonderful. The art style is very good, the music is iconic and the story is the best from my memory for a Mario game. Super Mario Brothers 2 shrugged off the princess saving in favor of saving the world of Subcon from the evil Wart. Right, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't feature Bowser as the badguy.
Super Mario Brothers 2 went so far as to allow you to jump on a bad guy(which didn't kill them) pick them up and toss them as a weapon. I also loved the magic potion that allowed you to enter a special dark world where you could find mushrooms to allow you more life and collect coins and enter warp zones.
Super Mario Brothers 2 also allowed you to pick what who the main character was. In Mario games typically you could only be Mario unless you were player 2 or in later Mario games 2-4. Super Mario Brothers 2 allowed you a choice between Mario, Luigi, Toad and the Princess. This is the only game to my memory where Mario was the worst character to chose as all the others were better in some way. To my memory Mario was kind of average, Luigi could jump very high, Toad was fast and the Princess could float. The character I picked 99% of the time was the Princess, she was mad overpowered and the game was so much easier when you played with her.
I recently went back to Super Mario Brothers and played the Super Mario All Stars version.
http://media.nintendo.com/nintendo/bin/KIXfK5Jg9lJrscFJmuyV_NH6eE_7i3jS/ISF4ETU5TyKHOMd7dYdBo6ZXeaDQR28C.jpg
Basically, All Stars is Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 2, Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario Brothers the Lost Levels. The SNES style graphics really make those games shine plus they add a save feature the original NES versions lacked.
When I think about awesome games that I love Super Mario Brothers 2 often comes to mind. I've played it recently so I know it still holds up well for me now. I often wish a modern Mario would pull elements from Mario 2 but it seems that Mario 2 will be off on its own which is just fine to me. I know others share my love for this game because of its uniqueness but we are a rare breed. A few years ago I took my love to another level and purchased this shirt. Yeah, I love the game that much.
http://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Bros-Mens-T-Shirt/dp/B0045OWO3S
If you want to join this conversation you need to sign in.
Sign Up / Log In
If you want a really weird feeling, grab a famicom emulator and a Doki Doki Panic! rom. It's so weird to play what I always thought of as SMB2 with entirely different characters. What we came to know as the Lost Levels was freakin' hard though. Like, painfully hard at times. I understand why they rebranded Doki Doki Panic! as SMB2 for the US.
Thats a fun idea, I'll play it sometime. The lost levels was hard I don't remember getting much further than the first few levels.
I wish I could edit comments :)
At any rate, it was always so weird going from 1 to the US version of 2 and then 3. The style changed so drastically to 2, and then back to a more Mario formula for 3. It was actually kinda comforting to me when I realized that the SMB2 I knew and loved was originally a different game entirely, because I always wondered why they changed things so drastically. They explained it in the end with it all being Mario's dream, but that explanation fell flat for me.
Doki Doki Panic is actually a little harder than SMB2. To properly beat the game, you have to beat it with all four characters.
Some of the look of SMB2 (US) is explained by the origins of Doki Doki Panic. The game took place in an Arabian storybook (thus the Arabian setting for much of the game, and the level intro screens being pages from a book). It's a family of 4 (thus the 4 characters) trying to save captured children.
Overall I'm glad they rebranded it. I'm glad we got what we knew as SMB2, even if it wasn't quite accurate, because I doubt I would have ever played a game called "Dream Factory: Heart Pounding Panic" and SMB2 is one of my favorite games of all time.
SMB2 is one of my favorites as well. It's also one of the few NES games that's just as fun today as it was when it originally came out. Princess Toadstool's float was pretty over powered, but after beating the game at least a dozen times I started primarily playing as Toad because of how fast he was. Mario was meant to be the jack-of-all-trades in the game. Where all the other characters excelled at one thing and weaker in other areas Mario was suppose to have no exceptional strengths but also no weaknesses. But yeah, he was my least favorite character to pick. :)
WhiteboySlim: Which is why SMB2 is so interesting, Mario isn't that great. Kind of a nice change actually as it focuses less on Mario and more on the four characters or whatever you prefer. Kind of didn't like that about New Super Mario, you had for characters and they all played the same.
panickedthumb: The dream ending I like now and when I was a young pup. I think the idea that what you just did wasn't more than a dream is interesting because things are often temporary. When I was young id day dream things that were in my mind epic and then later forgotten. Something about the idea of it just being something that happens in the mundane afterward is kind of a downer and interesting at the same time. I didn't write about the dream part in my post because I didn't want to spoil it but that seems silly now as the game is over 10 years old. I guess that would be like me worrying about spoiling the reveal in Empire....
That all said, I view SMB2 and the gameboy version of Links Awakening similarly in that they both end with someone waking from a dream. But more on that in a future Retro Tuesday :)
I enjoyed SMB2 as well. I think I liked playing as the Princess because she could float through the air, although I knew that Toad could lift things such as vegetables quicker than anyone.
In played her for darn near every level except a few with Toad and Luigi.
LOL, Jon, you've got me wishing this were more like Facebook and I could "like" a comment or post. Hehehe. But anyway, you know what, this reminds me of Final Fantasy X-2. It seemed a LOT of people complained about that game, but I wasn't one of them! I had no problem with playing as one of the ladies of FFX. Heck, I enjoy playing as ChunLi in Street Fighter, just because I like to see women more than men. LOL As for the Super Mario Bros. world, the Princess (whether it be Peach or Daisy) was about all the female characters we could see or play as on screen.