A highly important and influential game, but it's qualities do extend beyond that. The game's movement system is phenomenal and a ton of fun to master. Learning how Mario's momentum works genuinely requires a lot of skill and patience but once you finally get it down you'll be bobbing and weaving through each level easily. The run button is core to all of this as knowing when you carefully platform and when to speed right through is key to mastering the movement. The problem is that the game's checkpoint system is absolutely asinine. The game has checkpoints but only mid level and not between worlds. Therefore, if you get a game over on world 8 you go all the way back to world 1, which is beyond frustrating and makes an otherwise solid platformer a slog. I think a good compromise would have been checkpointing at the beginning of each world, as it wouldn't trivialize the game's difficulty while also feeling much more fair. While the game itself isn't too long, a lot of the levels feel borderline copy pasted from one another, and the game can become a bit repetitive as a result.

While the game's visuals are basic and undetailed even by NES standards, I do think it's important to remember that this was the first time video game consoles could be on par visually with the arcade games of the early 1980s, so SMB1's presentation feels more impressive with that in mind, despite not being much of a looker. The creature and powerup designs are iconic and memorable as well. The soundtrack may be simplistic and technically very repetitive but it's so catchy and well thought out that it's hard to care!

Overall Super Mario Bros is worth a shot not just for its historical importance but also because it's just good fun. Normally I don't encourage savestates (they are a form of cheating) but in this case I'd save at the first level of every world for a better experience. It may be basic, but it holds up well enough to be enjoyable.