Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic had Mario Bros POW blocks in it. We ought to be questioning whether SMB1 counts as a "real Mario game".

I think all that patter's died off now, anyway. Only really got loud when the first generation of NES nostalgia emerged in the mid-2000s, alongside the GBA NES Classics rereleases and screwattack.com. I don't think there's any controversy about the game among those under 25 years old. This is Mario 2, and Japan got a shitposty expansion pack in the form of a cheap Famicom Disk instead (initially).

Forget about other Mario games for a second. Mario 2 is a monster of a cartridge to put in your NES. Look at other puzzle-action games from the period. I don't think any of them measure up to this. I'm not talking Zelda 2. I'm talking Zelda 1. Unlike anything of this vintage, this doesn't feel like a handful of sprites and level concepts reassembled a half dozen times. In many ways, this is the first game that feels like what we've come to expect from Mario. Clever, funny ideas, slowly rolling out over a series of gradually more complex stages. You think you've got this shit figured out, but then there's shyguys on ostriches, rocketships that you pluck out the ground, and giant whales shooting ridable water out their blowholes. Yeah, you fight Birdo a bunch of times, but they're always playing around with the arenas and her abilities in a much more interesting way than stepping up to Bowser eight times. And you're not just solving puzzles, but making creative use of the levels. You're searching for secret areas and determining the best places to throw each magic potion. There's optional routes and shortcuts that you're not going to see unless you do everything perfectly. This feels like 90s game stuff, and when it came out, it was sharing shelf space with Ghostbusters and Mickey Mousecapade.

Following the precedent set by Donkey Kong, Mario Bros and Wrecking Crew, Mario and friends don't defeat enemies by jumping on them. That's Mushroom Kingdom rules. In Subcon, you pick them up and throw them at each other. It feels exciting, brandishing a physical weapon. This is Mario with a gun. It's kept satisfyingly tricky down to the diagonal arc of your throw and the effects of momentum that lead into it. It's also one of the (many) aspects of the game that had a direct influence on following Mario games, with you having the ability to grab Koopa shells and fly off with them in Mario 3. Having the ability to grab parts of the world and use them makes Mario feel much more tangible and filled with play potential, whereas the previous games presented everything as either a threat or a benign platform. You can use enemies as platforms, and discover alternate routes and shortcuts. Removing that time limit incentivises you to play around and try things. See what you can get away with. This was the Mario 64 playground appeal in 1988.

Oh, and when Miyamoto eventually got out of the logistical nightmare of managing N64 teams and made his big statement game with Pikmin? The one where you pluck sprouts out of the ground and add them to your party? He was thinking about Mario 2. Never let me see you undermine the significance of this game.

No previous Nintendo game had Mario 2's sense of character. Obviously, this is the game that provides players with four characters to choose from, each with their own statistics that play on their personalities, but it's filled with things that feel much more vibrant and individual than anything we'd seen in action games before. It doesn't feel bland or abstract in that way so many mid-80s games tend to. There's whimsy and warmth in the design. There's no need for the bomb-throwing boss to be a huge mouse with shades, but it just feels right, you know? For as outlandish as they may have seemed, there was a practicality to the design of SMB1's flat-headed Goombas and leaping, winged Cheep Cheeps. They let themselves loose on Mario 2, and it feels much more fun for it. This is the Kuribo's Shoe stepping through the door. Mario 2 is so fundamental in our affection for Nintendo.

With Doki Doki Panic, NES SMB2, Famicom Super Mario USA release, All-Stars, BS Super Mario USA, and eventually landing on the definitive release with Super Mario Advance, there's perhaps no game Nintendo reworked so frequently in such a small span of time as Mario 2. Imagine if they could have distributed software patches back then. I don't think it's over regrets for the game's technical shortcomings (though like most highly-ambitious NES cartridges, there are a fair few here). I theorise that Nintendo just think this game is really funny, and they wanted to use new technology to better showcase that. There's still a good sense of Mario 2's energy and humour in this release, though. Riding a flying Birdo egg to a distant off-screen island is one of the funniest bits of game design I can recall. SMB1 was fun, but did it ever make you laugh? "OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!", maybe - at a push - but the material's fairly worn-out by WORLD 7-4. Mario 1 feels like the NES Soccer developers really making a last-ditch effort to make something really worthwhile with their cheap little family computer, but Mario 2 feels like they were enjoying themselves and making each other laugh. Mario 1 is the Miyamoto we respect, but Mario 2 is the Miyamoto we love.

There's definitely aspects of this NES version that make it tough to recommend over Advance. Most glaring of all is how extra lives work. You collect coins in Subspace for a shot at a slotmachine after each level, and that's where you get about 90% of your lives. It's a total crapshoot, and if there's any skill to winning BONUS CHANCE, it's lost on me. There's no rolling dials like SMB3. Just flashing images. Given how stingy the rest of the game is at dolling out 1-ups, your chance of success leans quite hard on fate. Besides all the goofy cosmetic stuff, it's the generosity to players that really has me pushing the GBA cart over the old NES version. Anyone determined enough will be able to see the end of that game. I can't guarantee that here.

It's easy to accept on original hardware, though. Like you've just found a vintage amusement attraction at the end of a pier. Not everything completely works, but it remains very charming. In some ways, it feels older than it is, with the red velvet curtains that adorn the character select screen and the fairytale nature of the yume kojo. Again, there's no practical justification for these decisions, but they contribute massively to Mario 2's sense of fun and warmth. I have a real soft spot for it. It's just very hard for me to talk about how much I love Mario 2 without my brain going "CHOOSE A CHARACTER!" and "I AM THE GREAT WART! HAHAHA!". Man. Fuck this in the bin and get Advance on.

I didn’t have much of an expectation going into Super Mario Bros 2. I knew about its whole deal of being a reskinned version of Doki Doki Panic, but I never really knew what the game was actually like. And after now beating the game, I ended up being really impressed by Super Mario Bros 2. It’s such a unique game compared to other Mario titles, and it’s one I rather admire.

Without a doubt one thing that I ended up really enamored by was the level design. I wasn’t expecting it to be as fun as it ended up being. There were levels where you had to use enemies as platforms, but how you got there varied. There were levels where you had to dig through dirt to go down. There’s also just a noticeable amount of verticality to each level, which was refreshing to say the least. The game only has 20 levels, but they all stay rather varied and unique from each other, which is awesome.

Having multiple playable characters is always something I really adore. This is one of the few games out there of the main series Mario games that allow Peach and a Red Toad specifically to be playable, which is really cool. Each character has their own slight changes in how they play too, which makes me want to try beating the game as each of them individually. I however really only played as Peach, her hover ability is just really good and I didn’t want to play without it.

I never realized how boss-heavy this game is. If I’d have to hazard a guess, there’s likely 21 bosses total (though a majority of those are a variation of the same boss). It was really fun actually trying to beat each boss the best I could. I think the boss I struggled with the most though was the boss of World 5. On its own it’s not too difficult of a boss, but most of the time it’s offscreen, so it’s hard to tell exactly what it’s doing, which is when I most often got hit. If the screen just had more space so that I could see the boss, I’d likely have struggled significantly less. The other bosses though were really fun!

The only real critique I have of the game though is how its health system works. At the start of each level, you start out with 2 hit points. However, you can gain 2 more hit points in each level. You do this by finding a potion, and spawning a door that sends you to the reflected version of that area with a mushroom that grants you an additional hit point. The problem with that, is that the location you find the potion isn’t guaranteed to be where the mushroom is, and it’s not really obvious where it is either. You can only use a potion once, so if you miss it, you can never get it, which is bad because of how vital health is in the game. Only having 2 hits before death is rough, and you rarely have the ability to recover as well. Seemingly very rarely, health pickups will spawn from the bottom of the map, and heal only a single hit point when picked up. It being so rare makes health super important, but with how little health you have, some areas can definitely be rough.

That being aside I was still amazed by what Super Mario Bros 2 was able to accomplish. It just has a sort of vibe that’s different compared to other Marios of the time (though that’s likely because of it not originally being a Mario game). It just ended up being a really fun game that I’m glad I finally got to play.