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#12.
Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)


This game is the red headed stepchild of the Super Mario Bros games. But you know what? I still love it!

This isn't even really a true Mario title. The real Super Mario Bros 2 was released in Japan. The game had the same graphics, same sound, and very similiar level design to the first Mario game. When it was time to bring the game to the US, apparently the peeps at Nintendo America decided that the game was too similar to the first and decided to make a change. Basically what they did was take a pre-existing game called Doki Doki Panic and swap out all of the characters and items for Mario related characters and items. Weird huh?

Obviously, since they did that, the game is a lot different from other Mario titles. You have your choice of Mario, Luigi, Toad, and the Princess to select from. Each person has their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Mario is decent all around. He is pretty much average in all characters. Luigi's strength is that he jumps really high, but however his crazy-legged jumps can get out of control very fast. He digs relatively slow too. Toad is short and fast. He digs the quickest out of anyone in the game. But he can't jump for shit. The Princess digs slowly and her jumps are only an average height, but she has the ability to glide through the air across long distances in the game. If you want to beat the game quickly and easily, just pick the Princess every time. But what's the fun in that?

This game plays differently from the other Marios in the sense that instead of jumping on your enemies to kill them, you have to throw things at them or pick them up and throw them. Each level has at lease one "potion" in it that you can find by digging up plants. This potion takes you to some kind of alternate dimension where you can get coins and extra life containers. At the end of each level, you can use the coins you earned to play in a slot machine type minigame where you can earn extra lives. I have always been just ok at this, but I had a girlfriend who was so good at the mini game she would get 5 extra lives from pretty much every coin. She would earn so many lives over the course of the game that the numbers would start turning into letters and symbols. Crazy stuff.

This title has a decent variety of hidden secrets and extras. Each time I play through it I seem to find something I didn't know about. And I have played this game more times than I can count. There is the option to warp in the game, but if you do that you miss out on the journey. And in this game, the journey is everything!

This game is very unique to the Mario series. And even though it is just an import of some other game I have never even heard of, it still delivers! I like that it is different, and it is just really fun to play. The first clip is of gameplay from SMB2. The second clip is a comparison of this game, and Doki Doki Panic. Enjoy.