Super Mario World:: The Pinnacle of 2D Plumber Platforming

March 15th, 2008

super mario world

Theres been plenty of hearty debate over which 2D Mario game rules them all. With the release of Super Mario Galaxy this brought about even more discussion. I was never really interested in these debates despite being a lime long Mario fanboy. But after reading the Super Mario World page in The 100 Best Video Games I thought that they mentioned a few good ideas that I want to expand upon.

The Rules

Okay, a few things need to be made clear. We are only referring to true Mario platformers, so this doesn’t include:

Now, the question at hand is “What is the best 2D Mario platformer?”.

So with these rules in mind, here are the list of possible candidates:

To kick thing off we can cross off New Super Mario Bros. The game just didn’t live up to the other games in the series. The level design wasn’t as clever, the game was overall far too easy and although it introduces those giant mushrooms it lacked the better abilities from the other Mario games such as the cape, frog suit and Yoshi.

Although they are awesome games and generally do get overlooked during these arguments, I’m going to have to disregard the Gameboy Mario games. Their main strength comes from miniaturizing the console titles rather than pushing the series forward. Gunpei Yokoi also headed up these titles, although I liked how his games didn’t feel like conventional mushroom kingdom games, it did make the games feel somewhat out of line with the Mario universe. Plus they introduced Princess Daisy which made things way too confusing. But then again the sequel did introduce Wario. I guess we can overlook this then ^_^

So we are down to the lastthree: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World. Out of these three games SMW is the least innovative. Super Mario Bros started it all, Super Mario Bros 3 took it to an all new level and Super Mario World polished it to perfection.

As the rules state, we are after the BEST game. Therefore Super Mario World must win. Despite how ground breaking the other games were, SMW is the most polished and perfected game in the series. It is bigger, better and more refined than its predecessors. Which ultimately makes it the best 2D Mario platformer in existence.

  • Comment RSS
  • Link Me
Posted in Retro Gaming | Comments (6)
Tags: , , , ,

Five Advantages of Being a PAL Gamer

March 13th, 2008

pal gamers flags

This article was originally titled “The Top 10 Advantages of Being a PAL Gamer” but as you might have guessed I fell short at five.

There is a long tradition in the video game industry with consumers and the PAL encoding system. That is people whom live in PAL territories (that is Europe, Australia, New Zealand among others) more often than not end up drawing the short straw. Unlike our NTSC counterparts it often takes a long time for new technology to reach our shores and even when it does our price is marked up, we have lower distribution numbers and often receive modified/downgraded content. Basically it is the manufacturer’s way of telling us that we are simply not a priority for them.

On the rare occasion though us PAL gamers might be treated to something that trumps our American and Japanese friends. These special treats are rare cases indeed, thinking up even a measly five perks has been a formidable challenge. But the advantages are there, just a little hard to find. ^_^

I’d also like to thank the forum members over at PALGN whom suggested a few ideas and helped with the brainstorming process.

Early/Exclusive Releases

Although it had taken a long time for this trend to set in, occasionally in the industry you will notice that some PAL (especially European and Australian) games are released a few days earlier than their respective American counterpart. Fifteen years ago, excluding European developed games this trend was not existent but in the past 6 years early European releases have taken off and continue to occur quite frequently.

There are a couple of reasons as to why this situation is turning around. Firstly the increase of European game development. Take a flick through the back of any EDGE magazine and you will notice just how many AAA developers are situated in the UK. Then there is the strength of the Playstation brand in PAL territories.

I could fill a whole separate article on the latter point but I will try to be brief here. Basically for years game companies had neglected the PAL markets. When the Playstation was produced, the situation started to slowly change. Sony actually viewed and treated the PAL market for what it was; a solid, viable area for strong game sales. Hence it didn’t take much for Sony to become and still maintain the European market with it’s Playstation brand.

Years later, prior to the release of the Gamecube, Nintendo Europe was noticing slow adoption rates of Nintendo consoles compared to other territories. NOE representatives admitted that the UK markets had been previously neglected by Nintendo (release dates particularly) and in an attempt to turn the tides they changed the way that they viewed Europe and PAL territories. As a result the UK started to see several earlier releases for significant Gamecube and GBA titles, some games even launched first in Europe and then to the rest of the world. In the meantime Phil Harrison (of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) pushed for a greater emphasis on mass market Playstation 2 devices (Eye Toy, Buzz, Singstar etc.). This payed off for Sony and these games were and still are a huge success in the UK and Australia. The success of these titles (as well as Nintendo’s new found interest in Europe) ensured that earlier PAL releases would continue to occur and have done so ever since.

Along with this, PAL territories do occasionally receive PAL exclusive titles and they are listed as well:

pal exclusives and early releases

Read the rest of this entry »

  • Comment RSS
  • Link Me
Posted in Editorial | Comments (7)
Tags: , , , ,

Harvest Moon now on Wii VC:: So Go Buy It!

January 4th, 2008

Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Mario Kart 64 with my friends on a mate’s Wii. And only yesterday we were tossing ideas around about what other retro multiplayer games that we should play that we haven’t already. So we loaded up my friend’s Virtual Console to see what my friend could buy and I also shat myself. Right on the front page was Harvest Moon for the SNES.

I couldn’t believe it, Harvest Moon was one of my favourite SNES games and I hadn’t played it for years (as I traded it (and an almost perfect save slot) with my cousin for Lufia 2). Now after I got home from my mates place I went online to suss this out and it turns out that Harvst Moon is only available for the PAL VC which is extremely strange (and satisfying ^_^).

harvest moon snes virtual console wii

So if you have enough points to pick this one up then do so as you’ll be doing yourself a great service. Harvest Moon goes for a ridiculous price on eBay so you can save yourself a heap of money. And its the best Harvest Moon game ever, all of the follow ups to this game lacked the magic and pure balance that made this series form such a strong niche following.

  • Comment RSS
  • Link Me
Posted in Retro Gaming | Comments (3)
Tags: , , ,
« Older Entries