Believe it or not, there was once a legitimate rivalry between Sonic and Mario over who was the better mascot and who had the better games. And as someone who grew up with a Master System and then a Genesis, I was obviously on Team Sonic - the quick blue hedgehog jumps over the fat plumber. Imagine my surprise on a revisit when it turns out I like the first Super Mario game far more than the first Sonic game (which came out nearly six years later!)
The controls aren't the easiest to get used to especially by today's standards - Mario slips and slides with a slightly unintuitive momentum, making it feel like the player has to fight against the game in order to keep him from running facefirst into hazards. However, this battle against the controls is extremely rewarding to eventually overcome, and at the heart of it is the run button. By being able to speed Mario up and slow him down at the drop of a hat, it opens the door for some really cool momentum-based platforming tricks; this is incidentally what makes Mario far more satisfying to speedrun (ironically) than Sonic, whose momentum the player has far less control over.
One thing that SMB does far better than nearly all its contemporaries is provide a low skill floor to go with its high skill ceiling. Playing a safe, careful, deliberate game with minimal use of the run button will get you as far as 75% of the way through the game before World 7 arrives to kick your teeth in. Being able to see 6 worlds worth of bite-sized stages with interesting gimmicks that don't overstay their welcome provides fantastic motivation to keep returning to the game and improve your skill incrementally in order to see the last stages through to the end.
I feel like this would be a 3.5 or 4-star game, but having spent the past couple of years revisiting older games, I have to add at least a half-star to SMB for being an absolute windmill dunk in the context of the era it was released in. It's not perfect, but as far as first entries in beloved series go, on a scale from Street Fighter to Doom, it's far far closer to the latter.
The controls aren't the easiest to get used to especially by today's standards - Mario slips and slides with a slightly unintuitive momentum, making it feel like the player has to fight against the game in order to keep him from running facefirst into hazards. However, this battle against the controls is extremely rewarding to eventually overcome, and at the heart of it is the run button. By being able to speed Mario up and slow him down at the drop of a hat, it opens the door for some really cool momentum-based platforming tricks; this is incidentally what makes Mario far more satisfying to speedrun (ironically) than Sonic, whose momentum the player has far less control over.
One thing that SMB does far better than nearly all its contemporaries is provide a low skill floor to go with its high skill ceiling. Playing a safe, careful, deliberate game with minimal use of the run button will get you as far as 75% of the way through the game before World 7 arrives to kick your teeth in. Being able to see 6 worlds worth of bite-sized stages with interesting gimmicks that don't overstay their welcome provides fantastic motivation to keep returning to the game and improve your skill incrementally in order to see the last stages through to the end.
I feel like this would be a 3.5 or 4-star game, but having spent the past couple of years revisiting older games, I have to add at least a half-star to SMB for being an absolute windmill dunk in the context of the era it was released in. It's not perfect, but as far as first entries in beloved series go, on a scale from Street Fighter to Doom, it's far far closer to the latter.
Shenobi
1 year ago
Grew up with NES and Sega consoles and yeah, Sonic 2 was great, but Mario any day of the week over Sonic for best games. My wife will fight me on that, but she doesn't have to know that I said so.