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retro: super mario world

Posted by Laura Mar 22, 2010 Posted in retro

When I was young… well, younger than I am now, a friend came over with a most peculiar looking item called a Game Boy Advance. I had seen them featured on CBBC Newsround (yes, I was one of those children) and was of course familiar with their predecessor the Game Boy Colour, which as far as I was concerned played Pokemon Yellow and nothing else. Anyway, my friend had a copy of what I’ve now realised was probably Super Mario Advance 2, and we played through the first few levels until getting stumped by an egg shooting… thing. Delighted and addicted, I got my own Game Boy Advance soon after, and picked up what I thought was the only Mario game that existed and so had to be the same as my friend’s (hey, I was a kid and in my house we mostly read books and listened to Classic FM, none of this 8 bit crap) but what was instead, it turned out, the game that would become my favourite Mario incarnation ever: Super Mario World.

For me, Super Mario World became the definitive Mario game. The music, the level design; I know the first two worlds like the back of my hand. Around the Vanilla Dome it all goes a bit hazy because I was stuck there forever as a child, and to be honest I’m still stuck now as I procured a copy for my SNES and am bamboozled continually by the end world castle, but I do recall I actually finished the game somehow so clearly I wasn’t actually born with my thumbs on backwards as the evidence may suggest.
Sadly the original Game Boy Advance version is now lost (as if memory serves it actually belonged to my little sister and I, er, obtained it through persuasive negotiation until she suddenly became taller than me) and the downloaded Wii version is now also lost due to the whole theft thing, so when I picked up my SNES I decided a copy of Super Mario World was an absolute must-have. There are so many things I love about this game that I do believe it requires bullet points to avoid becoming a wall of text.


The first world map.

  • the music – I frequently bounce around the kitchen humming the tunes from Super Mario World to myself as I expertly defrost ready meals in the microwave, stopping mid off-key note only when my flat mates return from having actual lives. The songs are catchy, the sound effects are comfortingly familiar and the Game Over music induces many a face-controller with its sombre tones.
  • the worlds – compared to later incarnations in the Mario series there’s not actually that much variety between the worlds, but they’re all colourful, filled to the brim with traps and goofy looking enemies and secret passages and they are simply gorgeous to look at and walk through. Time hasn’t aged this game’s aesthetics at all. Well, technically it has, but it looks perfect as it is.


    • Gameplay.

  • Mario’s power ups – throwing fireballs. Flying. It’s everyone’s dream to do these things, and Mario does both. Sadly not at the same time, but I suspect the console would have imploded from sheer awesome if that had happened. Also it would probably have been something of a game breaker, both strength wise and from the lack of available button combinations that would have been required. Anywho, a girl can dream.
  • the controls – okay this seems a bit of a trite thing to point out, as praising a game for having good controls is like praising a meal for being edible – controls should be good as a basic requirement. However, it’s worth noting that Super Mario World is not slippery. I have never, ever died through a controller cock up with this game, which sadly isn’t true for pretty much every other game I’ve played (yeah, yeah, bad workman blames his tools, but it’s true). You feel perfectly in control, 100% of the time, everything responds fantastically and consistently. I’ve never hit a button and shouted “I didn’t tell you to do that!” afterwards, which I have had to do frequently for Lara, the Prince of Persia, Sora, Samus, Chel, James, Isaac and so on. Mario listens to me and I like a man who’s a good listener.
  • yoshi – er, well. Yoshi. Says it all, really.

    • Okay, I should probably put my mad fangasming aside and make this a balanced reflection by mentioning something bad about the game. Um. It never makes me breakfast. There, that’ll do it.

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