Super Mario Bros. 3

"Most important release in history, yadda yadda yadda . . ."

Super Mario Brothers 3 is The Jazz Singer of the video game world. Sure, it may not have been the first game to feature sound, but it had a similar medium altering effect. Super Mario Bros. 3 brought video games into the limelight, got them to be considered as a legitimate entertainment form. Before that they were considered a novelty item, one that would go the way of the pet rock soon enough. The media blitz that followed Super Mario Brothers 3 and the immense sales totals that it racked up shows just how mainstream video games had gotten by 1990. Yes, Mario's a regular old Al Jolson -- he just cannot sing as well.

Super Mario Brothers 3 does not differ from its predecessors in many ways. SMB 3 is basically SMB on a much larger scale. (We don't speak of the turnip escapades in Super Mario Brothers 2. Shhhhh.) You have twice as many stages of Mushroom Kingdom goodness to romp through. These levels have a very zoo-like feel to them (Let's see just how many ecosystems we can cram into a small area!) and are more themed than restaurants in Disney World.

Mario (and lankier brother Luigi, should you be playing cooperatively) trek from habitat to habitat, defeating Bowser's baddies and generally playing the Hollywood stock character hero while using the Silicon Valley stock plot. Beautiful blonde damsel in distress, evil monster takes her, heroes must save her to prevent utter chaos and ruinous changes made to the kingdom's infrastructure -- but you predicted all of that. The only slight alteration to the overused formula is that the brothers are Italian plumbers.

So you head off to rescue Princess Peach, traversing across expansive deserts and through harrowing castles, stomping on walking mushrooms (Goombas) and multihued ducks (Koopas) along the way. While those are Bowser's standard-issue underlings, you occasionally get to fight with a bit more bite, ranging from glorified Venus Flytraps (Piranha Plants) to replicas of English cannons from the 1750s (Bullet Bob).

While dodging and crushing all of these enemies tends to get a bit repetitive, Shigeru Miyamoto had the foresight to include some things to break up the monotony. First and foremost is this gambling theme throughout the game. At the end of each level, you're issued a logo (star, Fire Flower, whatnot). When three are matched up, you win the jackpot of five extra lives. Scattered throughout Super Mario Brothers 3 also are little gaming huts, in which you take your pick of three treasure chests, hoping to win a valuable prize. While this Atlantic City break does keep things different, it just seems wrong to see Mario hawking cards and endorsing games of chance. That's like watching Mickey Mouse pick up a hooker on 7th Avenue; it's just something that you should never see.

Miyamoto also indulges in a bit more traditional method of keeping the gameplay interesting: power-ups. Through these hidden abilities, Mario can shoot fireballs at his foes or simply soar above them to the end of the level. Picking up a Fire Flower is an especially rewarding pickup, since it turns Super Mario Brothers 3 into more of a test of physics, as you need to judge where the fireballs will land and where they will bounce to. It changes the gameplay completely, but it's a welcome alteration of pace.

SMB 3 is the quintessential side-scrolling platformer. Not only does it change level designs frequently and offer enough diversions to ensure that you always remain interested, it looks great. The sprites are fairly large and the character designs express Mario's happy-go-lucky attitude and general naivety about issues. He wears a rather blank stare on his face, quite akin to the one that George W. Bush might have if you were to ask him about European internal affairs.

Keeping with the innocent feel are the brightly colored levels. While each stage may be based off of its own real-life ecosystem, don?t bank on it looking much like its real life equivalent. Levels are loosely based on these habitats and colored in a rather gaudy fashion. Monet may be frowning down from above, but the brightly colored levels work well with the overall theme of Super Mario Bros. 3.

The classic Mario theme also returns to add background music to the journey, slightly retooled and remixed. As you might expect, it's a peppy song, and a song so wildly popular that even the Boston Pops have recorded a version of it. Other songs from the first Super Mario Brothers return as well, as do the classic sound effects and cursor noises. SMB 3 is very much the sequel to the first Super Mario Brothers; luckily Nintendo took the time to clean up the sound quality. Scratchy sound is no longer a problem, as the game sounds almost SNES caliber. All of the audio goes well with the visuals to create a nice atmosphere for Mario to go traipsing around in.

Perhaps the biggest flaw with Super Mario Brothers 3 is the inability to save progress and continue at a later date. This creates an unnecessary pressure to finish SMB 3 in a mad rush before going to sleep or getting bored with it. Nintendo should have put a battery save system in the game; this would not only allow for more flexibility for players, but it would allow for people to savor Super Mario Brothers 3 for longer, to stretch out the masterpiece to enjoy it over a long period of time. Including cooperative play, albeit cooperative play that alternates rather than plays simultaneously, adds replay value to a game that otherwise fails to have much; it's too arduous to play through a game this large without stopping often.

Super Mario Brothers 3's difficulty needed to be curbed to deal with the lack of saving. Nintendo needed to make it possible for someone to beat the game in the afternoon, so levels are not especially challenging. Anyone with any amount of experience within the platform genre shouldn't have much trouble with the levels, and the game provides you with copious amounts of extra lives. The Super Mario Land and Super Mario World series offer much more in the way of challenge and allow saving. The correlation is not a coincidence.

No sober person can deny the impact that Super Mario Brothers 3 has had on the video gaming industry. No game sells more than six million copies without catching some attention and its fair share of mindless imitators. The adventure may seem a bit basic and a tad no-frills by today's standards, but Shigeru Miyamoto created a masterpiece of a game in which you can travel across a kingdom and save the world all before supper hits the table.

PROS
*One of the most engaging adventures in video game history.
*Great graphics and sound for the NES.
*Various power-ups keep things interesting.

CONS
*The story is getting awfully tired.
*No saving progress; you have to play the game straight through.
*There is no simultaneous cooperative play.

SCORE SUMMARY

GAMEPLAY--10
GRAPHICS--9
MUSIC--9
SOUND--9
CONTROL--10
FUN--9
REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM
CHALLENGE--LOW TO MEDIUM

OVERALL--9

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/16/03, Updated 06/16/03