Review #279: Super Mario Land(Virtual Console)

 It's over already?!

 I'm gonna be pretty blunt here: This is probably the worst Super Mario game I've ever played. Alright, so it's an old game and on a handheld console, fair enough, but this is the same console that gave us the TMNT games, the Wario Land 1 and 2 games... I'm... I'm baffled.

 This is Mario, so you know the deal, rescue the princess. This time around, the game is made up of four different worlds, three stages each, for a 40 minute long game. Probably even less if you've better skills than me. This is also the weirdest Mario game out there, even more than Super Mario Bros 2. There's an Easter Island level, complete with Moai heads, a Chinese level, and Egypt level and even submarine and airplane levels. What the hell, Mario?

 As someone who's played Mario games his entire life, this game's physics, the overall feel of Mario's movement, is very awkward. Movement is very slippery, it's hard to come to gripes with Mario's jump arc and everything just feels off. You can't bounce from enemies, you can kill them, and Mario bounces a little, but timing a Jump when hitting them doesn't produce a higher jump, which threw me off a bit. It's hard to explain, but overall, it feels as if someone tried to copy Super Mario Bros.(NES) movement and jumping physics but couldn't quite get them right. At all. At times, it feels more like an amateur Mario game than an official game. The platforming was so imprecise that I was scared after every single jump I took.

 It's also a bit glitchy, it's not uncommon to see Mario overlap with blocks for a few seconds after jumping, and this one time my fireball got stuck bouncing off the same two angles, and since you can't shoot until it either hits a target or disappears of-screen... I effectively lost use of the Fire Flower power until I got through the obstacles on-screen.

 Look, I don't feel as if I'm being overly unfair with the game, and it's not like I'm looking at it with modern standards in mind, I am comparing it to Super Mario Bros. on the NES after all! Some people clearly have a soft spot for this game, sadly, I'm not one of them.
2.0 out of 10