Yep, it’s still the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. The limited edition Wii version of Super Mario All-Stars
Let’s start with the extras, the pack-in items that sealed the deal for most fanboys. Both the booklet and the soundtrack CD come in this very nice Super Mario History DVD case, decked out in the easily recognizable (and hard to read) Famicom red and gold.
The booklet is a perfect-bound, 48-page pamphlet containing 25 years of Mario history. The full-color booklet is light on text, but things like Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Koji Kondo’s statements on every game in the Mario series (not counting Yoshi’s Island or the other spin-off games), concept art, and even some small glimpses at early design documents make it feel just a little bit more than the game’s liner notes.
The soundtrack is great. If you’re hoping for orchestral arrangements of classic Mario music, you’re going to be disappointed. If you just want full-length, just-as-coded themes from every game in the main Mario series, this is the disc for you. The NES Mario games’ theme music is in all its 8-bit, chiptune glory, and it’ll take you right back to early Saturday mornings in the late 80′s, glued to the television as you play through Super Mario Bros. (and 2, and 3) again. As a bonus, the second 10 tracks on the disc are all short recordings of the classic Mario sound effects. A few clicks, and you can have coin, 1-up, and pipe sounds as your ringtone.
Then there’s the game. Despite whatever stray hopes gamers might have, it was obvious that this would be a direct port, simple and unchanged from its state when it was first released in 1993. It’s actually pretty funny, since Super Mario All-Stars itself was a remastered, new-graphics-for-the-time compilation of the classic NES Mario games, but let’s not dwell. This is a ROM on a Wii disc, nothing more. Still, at least we can play the great 16-bit remake versions of the NES Mario games!
At least, we can play the great 16-bit remake versions if we can put up with a distinct off-ness of the gameplay. The game lags. It feels like there’s a half-second pause between pressing a button on the controller and seeing Mario move. In a game series that became famous for, among other things, its superlative play control, this is unacceptable. Jumping feels floaty and uncomfortable, especially in Mario 3, where a few pixels and a moment’s pause can mean the difference between picking up a koopa shell and kicking it into a wall and having it bounce back at you. Nintendo botched the simplest task: competently emulate a Super Nintendo game.
Is the game worth the $30? Well, the booklet and soundtrack are great. If it were just $20, even without the horrible port, I’d wholly recommend it. However, considering the game barely even feels like Mario because of the lag, this gets my disappointed condemnation.
On the bright side, I have a Mario coin ringtone now. So I have that going for me, which is nice.
