If I have to pick a Mario reskinned "remaster" (no more waterfall seizures, yey) of an unreleased Famicom game or a more difficult version of the previous game I'd pick the first one anytime.

It's still the original SMB1 at the core.
Just with mechanics that will make your life hell (Luigi being good at jumping but slippery and not controlling well as Mario, wind direction changing, more frustrating castle levels for the right path memorizations...).

Yeah, Mario wasn't that lucky (but not horrible either, for us westerns it was all still pretty cool) with the number two. With the number three, however...

SUPER MARIOTHON #1.5

Played on Nintendo Switch Online Emulator*

Holy Cannoli kids!, I'm Brandon, and I'm telling ya, if you play Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels without save states or rewinds, you're gonna turn into a goomba!

Joking aside. There's a lot I liked about this game and could actually appreciate without feeling the need to eat my controller. If I was a Japanese child in 1986, I don't know how I would've beaten this came without throwing my console out the window. Luckily I live in the era where we have emulators with save states and rewind, so let's drink to that and as I highlight the pros and cons of this video game!

What I like: In my original Super Mario Bros review, I said that I liked the game due to the progression of creative level design, and this is the game where you take those designs and you really gotta master them. It's a fascinating game to experience and play. Other than that, it's just the classic Mario formula.

What I dislike: The game... is really hard. Like, ridiculously hard. I had to do a LOT of guide searching, and was astonished at the creation in front of me. It's difficult and punishing as you progressed, but I really think Howard Phillips said it best “As I continued to play, I found that Super Mario Bros. 2 asked me again and again to take a leap of faith and that each of those leaps resulted in my immediate death. This was not a fun game to play. It was punishment. Undeserved punishment. I put down my controller astonished that Mr. Miyamoto has chosen to design such a painful game.” (Irwin). The level designs are fun, but the way some of the levels are used in practicality can be very annoying. It's difficult to maintain a mushroom (god forbid you eat one of the poison ones), the game is too reliant on the red piranha plant where moving through pipes is frustrating, and you don't get to use Super Mario or Fire Mario like you could in the original.

Other: When I was a little kid and learned about this game, I kinda scoffed at the idea that a game wouldn't be brought to the states because of it being "Too Difficult", but nowadays I completely understand why. It sucks all of the fun and joy out of you to where it would be easier to constantly cheat so you don't get bored. I am going to put this as 1.5 on the mariothon because of the fact that this feels more of an official Kaizo romhack than a dedicated game.

Works Cited:
Irwin, Jon. Super Mario Bros. 2. Boss Fight Books, 2014.

This game is a harder expansion of the original with some slight mechanical tweaks and palette-swapped tougher enemies, on those fronts it succeeds and can get much more challenging than the original or its arcade-exclusive revision, you are absolutely expected to have beaten and mastered the original and its controls to get into this one early on, but the later levels do get a bit overboard with some annoying beginners traps that you would only know existed from prior knowledge, as such doing the 1up trick is highly advisable as otherwise, you will probably begin to run dry as it escalates in challenge.

Graphically the game is almost identical but the tweaks and additions they made are generally all improvements, the font is more legible and easier to read, the mushrooms and many other background objects now have faces for the first time and the ground tiles look more naturalistic.

This being an FDS game you'd expect some usage of its additional hardware capabilities but sadly outside the theme when you rescue the Princess it's all exactly the same as the first, a missed opportunity to be sure.

Quite a lot of the hatred this game gets is understandable as on the face of it is a brutally hard and otherwise almost identical sequel, considered by some to be a prelude to the extremely hard kaizo hacks Mario games nowadays or similar ultra-hard indie platformers like Celeste or Super Meat Boy, but Lost Levels is the first of its kind and is generally viewed much more fondly in its home country than the rest of the world, perhaps because the Japanese audience took to heart that this is a game for those that had mastered the original and not something to be played sequentially straight after finishing the first. The game itself even emphasises that fact with two secret worlds after finishing the game once, World 9 which is an obvious reference to the minus world from the original Famicom version of SMB1, and upon beating the base game of Lost Levels 8 times you unlock worlds A through D. Given that World 9 can only be beaten in a single life, they obviously didn't expect anyone but masters to be able to complete such a challenge despite its relatively short length. The other additional worlds are merely an extra for those who are willing to go the distance, not something everyone needs to experience to feel satisfied completing the game.

On the whole, this is a competent, if derivative, sequel to SMB1 but I can see why NOA passed on it back in the day both for its similarity to the original and high difficulty, but with appropriate context and expectations this is a solid challenge for the SMB1 veteran.

(completed on mario all-stars)

world 5 has some of the best mario levels ever made

unfortunately, level 8-4 is the worst thing I have ever played

Attempting to seriously review every game I've played #3:
This game certainly earns its reputation of being incredibly difficult, but I honestly don't hate it? Sure, it's very hard, and very troll-y, but I never really found unfair, at least no less fair than the first game. Playing this game immediately after exhausting SMB1 also helps, since this was always intended to be essentially just more levels for people who had played the original game to death. The trolls are mostly just funny to me, and none of them actually permanently screw you over. Continues are no longer locked behind an easter egg, and there's an easy spot to do the 1-up trick on the first screen of the first level, so you're never going to be pressed for lives.

The graphical changes are very welcome and I'd be hard pressed to find a single sprite from SMB1 I like more than 2. It's a shame they didn't make use of the Disk System's extra sound channel to expand upon the music from the first game, but the soundtrack is so iconic that I really couldn't imagine it being different.

Another criticism I've seen leveled against this game is the choice to lock the extra worlds behind beating the game 8 times, and I really don't feel like that's a problem. These games were built for replays, and I genuinely think that they get better when you play them like that. Replaying the original game dozens of times to unlock the RetroAchivements for it gave me a much stronger appreciation of it than I ever thought I'd have. Plus, they are extra worlds, they're meant as a neat bonus for players who've mastered the base game.

I can understand disliking this game, but as someone who really appreciates the higher difficulty and improved graphics, I honestly like this more than SMB1.