There are some games that feel as though they resent the player for daring to boot them up. Then there are some that clearly want you to have a bad time. But then there's SMB: The Lost Levels. The "true" sequel to Super Mario Bros, and honestly the worst Mario game ever made.

The one saving grace of this dire game is that there are some genuinely amusing moments. There's a cruel streak running through the Lost Levels a mile wide, but sometimes it's delicious. Some deaths and trolls are hilariously evil. Poison mushrooms remain to this day one of the greatest jokes ever rendered in digital form, and the bollocks warp zone might just top it as even funnier. Most people know about these things though, even if they've never touched the game, and the rest of it is just pretty bad. The first SMB was already pretty tricky, but relatively fair, so trying to up the difficulty without altering the core mechanics just means increasing the bullshit in the game. Finnicky jumps and hordes of the worst enemies from the first game combine with yet more awful "puzzle" levels (these take the form of arbitrarily guessing a path and repeating the same stretch of level over and over till you guess right) to produce an agonisingly annoying experience. Even outside of its most torturous levels, the rest of the game is just quite dull, with almost no new assets or songs to motivate you through all the guff.

When I'm not playing the Lost Levels, I'm sometimes tempted to look on it with some fondness. There's something undeniably funny about it, aside from its intentional prank moments, the whole game is a joke. Imagining the swathes of Japanese children anxiously awaiting the sequel to their favourite game, only to open it on Christmas or their birthday to find something that wouldn't look out of place in Guantanamo Bay is schadenfreude on a godlike level. But actually playing the game makes me want to break my switch in half, and it's largely quite lazy. More interesting than its Western counterpart, but barely.

Attempting to seriously review every game I've played #7:
2 years late and barely recognizable, Pac-Man hit the Atari 2600, a system which it probably never should've touched. The attempt is admirable, but the VCS was clearly showing its age by 1982, and it was not suited to ports of the games that were popular in arcades. At the time this was pretty much the closest you could get to Pac-Man at home, but just a year later the Intellivision got its own port of the game, which is much more arcade accurate, and even the cancelled Coleco port holds up better.

This game is semi-often cited as one of the causes of the crash of 1983, and while it's far from the worst 2600 game on the market at the time, it's an easy one to pick on. The 2600 simply was not good enough at this point to handle the types of games that it was being tasked with, and if a console that was already 5 years old was propping up the entire North American video game market, it's not hard to see why it would crash.

I've focused a lot on this game's historical context, and not very much on the game itself, and that's because there really isn't much to say. Everything about this game feels like a weird bootleg version of itself both mechanically and visually. The maze is heavily simplified even compared to the original game, the ghost AI is less interesting, and it's just generally much easier.

Unless you have a strong desire to, don't play this version. The arcade version is available on pretty much every system nowadays anyway, while the only way to play this port legally is on the original hardware.