One of SNES' best platformers (Super Mario World (N64))

Member Name: Murf!

Product:	Super Mario World (N64)
Date:	13/08/01 (639 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Timeless gameplay, relatively non-linear, lots of secrets

Disadvantages: Graphically dated, too easy

The year was 1991, and Nintendo had to pull something special out of their collective corporate hat to convince gamers to buy their new hardware. And they did. SMW is a game that practically every SNES owner has, and for a good reason. Over the course of the 6-odd years that SNES lasted for, few - if any - managed to improve on the simple gameplay of Mario World. I think Yoshi's Island, while hugely innovative and technically far superior, simply cannot compare to SMW purely in terms of gameplay.

What a predictable opening paragraph that was. But anyway, this is vintage Nintendo, which simply is incapable of becoming dated. The structure of the game is fairly non-linear, as after the first introductory world you have a choice in which way you progress through the levels. This is achieved by secret endings to some levels, which is something that adds to Mario World significantly as you do not merely need to get from one end of the level to the other. To manage to find all of SMW's secrets takes exploration and a little puzzle-solving. Obviously the puzzles are not on a par with Zelda, but it is the kind of thing that makes the game different from those platform games where you hold down right and tap jump occasionally.

SMW was released in '91, and frankly it looks it. The colour-scheme is laughably simplistic, the bosses are forgetable, and, and... it really doesn't matter. I'm not saying graphics don't matter, as they do, as they are the main way a game communicates with the player. But here you will forget about the graphics soon enough. Think about it: how many people have ever moaned about the graphics in Tetris? Nobody cares when the game is absorbing enough. I'm not saying I'd complain if the game was re-released in 3D with 32 million colours and a high polygon count, but SMW is simply a game that does not need spectacular graphics as it has nothing to hide deeper down.

And then there's Yoshi. The g
reen dino gives a new dimension to the game, as he has a different set of abilities from Mario. This adds to the variety in the game, as the coders can come up with parts of levels that are designed to be negotiated with one of them specifically. And there are certainly plenty of original ideas in SMW. Some games only change the backgrounds of the levels, with the gameplay remaining the same throughout, and some try to make levels with a new idea each. The latter is a nice approach, but Mario World often introduces several new ideas in a single level. Whereas a game like Donkey Kong Country 3 has obviously had a lot of thought put into it to 'create' originality, SMW seems to have been done by naturally imaginative people, and so it doesn't seem that they are constantly trying to make sure the new ideas are spread evenly: a lesser firm than Nintendo would look at one of Mario World's levels and divide the ideas in it into different levels, but Nintendo have simply come up with enough innovative ideas to make this possible. I think what I'm trying to say is that the game doesn't smell of board meetings if you get me. The game also is fairly long if you complete a decent number of levels, although unsurprisingly it has no challenge whatsoever on all but around 5 levels.

A really subtle touch that took me an age to notice is that most of the games' tunes are variations on the same tune. Different samples and tempos etc disguise this. Just listen closely to the underwater and castle themes for instance... not that the tunes are that special in their own right, unfortunately, due to the usual cutesy upbeat style Nintendo have such a fascination about.

[This review was lifted from my site, http://members.madasafish.com/~kefka/]

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