It’s an honor to be a part of The Well-Red Mage’s Super Mario Multiverse Collaboration. For my contribution, I’ve taken to writing a piece on Super Mario All-Stars.
The early 00’s were an opportune time to get into the retro-gaming business, especially if you were an only child in a rough neighborhood. Some of my best memories involve going to flea markets and mom and pops with my parents, finding (then) obscure titles like Earthworm Jim and Rocket Knight Adventures, and then coming home to find out that these games were indeed as awesome as they looked in the mosh pit of other titles and toys. Of course, because it wasn’t “cool” at that time, I was prone to being made fun of for bringing my Game Gear to school as opposed to a Gameboy Advance. (Little did they know I had both…I just didn’t care to have the latter stolen as St.Louis had and continues to have horrendous crime rates) All the same…I didn’t care. I was having fun, and because gaming had become my sole hobby, it’s not as if I didn’t have the best of both worlds (just less on the then current platforms).
Perhaps one of my most important picks at this time was Super Mario All-Stars for the Super NES back in 2004 (aged 8). It may surprise some of the readers on this page as well as my own that my first experience with the iconic Super Mario Bros. Trilogy wasn’t through the NES originals, but rather this fine collection with updated graphics and some quality-of-life improvements. It was at the height of my Mario obsession during a time where, if I wasn’t playing Super Mario Sunshine or Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, I was watching the Super Show on VHS. I always had an interest in the games that “started it all”, but didn’t have an NES at the time. For me, this was the perfect jumping-on point.
I can actually remember the first game I chose to play out of this set- Super Mario Bros.2. Because I didn’t know much about the whole Doki-Doki Panic situation (I won’t go on- I’m sure I can’t retell that story any better than the next guy/gal), I didn’t have any sort of bitter resentment towards it nor the notion that it was some sort of black sheep. It was a game about throwing the very foods I didn’t care for at giant anthropomorphic rats with flashy sunglasses, and it was fun. Of course, I never did get very far until an older cousin showed me the ropes (and how to “write” vulgar messages in the sand sections of World 2) but I had a blast. Nowadays, I don’t find this one nearly as fun as I did when I was a kid, but I’ll still fire it up from time to time for a run.
I found Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros.3 to be incredibly difficult at first, believe it or not. I’m sure I ran smack-dab into every last goomba on the first stage of the latter, and yet again, it wasn’t until an older cousin showed me the common-knowledge secrets of both that I finally went on to conquer these two. Perhaps the most memorable (and perhaps one that some folks still don’t know about) comes from being shown that the lava in the boat stage of world 8 actually doesn’t hurt Mario. In fact, you can safely bypass this entire section by hopping in and spamming the jump button as the screen scrolls past waves of Rocky Wrenches and cannonballs. My reaction was “you can just swim under it?”…a good couple of years before a certain angry nerd would exclaim, “you can just walk over it?!” in his infamous TMNT NES review. Every time I do a run of Mario 3 (usually warpless if I’ve got the time), I reflect on this memory…and admittedly still use this trick.
To this day, even after having the chance to play the original NES versions back to back, I’ll still have to say that I prefer the SNES collection. As I’m now an adult with considerably limited time working two jobs and moving closer towards an engagement…I sadly don’t always have several hours at a time to do a warpless run of Super Mario Bros.3 in one go. The battery backed save and subtle level design adjustments offered here certainly do help in this situation, although I’ve never found them necessary for Super Mario Bros. And Super Mario Bros.2. While I can always appreciate the look and feel of the 8-bit renditions, Super Mario All-Stars will always be my go-to means of revisiting the classics.
And these days…at least I get to have the last laugh as the same crowd who pointed fingers and said I only played these games because “I was poor” have now joined the retro scene at a time when it costs an arm and a leg to experience many of the classics the way they were meant to. I got my fill and created priceless memories when it could be done on pocket change and allowance money, and while I may not have all of my original systems and cartridges, the memories I created with games like Super Mario All-Stars will always be with me.
Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more:
