Super Mario Land

[rynling]

I've been stressed out lately, so I've been playing through the PS4 release of Journey at least once a night every night for the past week. I've gotten to the point where I can see the nails in the stage setting, so I decided to give it a rest and do something else instead.

I want to play Super Mario World, but that game is really fucking hard (not quite Mega Man hard, but still too hard for me), and I am out of practice. To work up to it, I downloaded Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 onto my 3DS.

Considering the limitations of the early Game Boy technology, Super Mario Land is a brilliant piece of work. Unless you've never encountered a platformer before, the game takes about twenty minutes to play from start to finish. There are a variety of enemies, challenges, and secrets across its twelve levels, and the difficulty is perfectly scaled. The interplay between each level's theme and design is striking in its simplicity. The scenery is cute, and the music is catchy.

Like Kirby's Dream Land (which can also be finished in half an hour), Super Mario Land is the product of a talented team of people putting an enormous amount of effort into a very small game. I love games like this, and I wish they were still high profile releases.

This is probably one of the reasons I love Journey, which is supremely gorgeous but can be completed in less than two hours. Epic games are always good, but a nice unity of effect can go a long way toward a pleasurable gaming experience.

Comments

[lobeliar]

Super Mario Land was one of my First Ever video games, and while I only remember one thing about it (I think one of the first bosses was, like, some sort of lion statue in a temple or a pyramid or something?), I remember playing it several times on the bulky-ass original Game Boy that my sister and I shared.

Journey is good stuff. Gliding over the sands and sneaking through darkness with a stranger guiding me along was a magical experience.

[rynling]

Oh man! We are almost game twins! Super Mario Land 2 was the first game I ever owned.

The boss of the first world in Super Mario Land is indeed a fire-breathing Sphinx that lives in a pyramid. This is all well and good, BUT what I didn't remember about this game is how crazy racist the fourth level is. The theme of that level is "China," and you have to fight these little stereotypes of Chinese people that don't stay dead when you jump on them. When I was little, I thought you were just supposed to be fighting zombies on some sort of "Oriental" stage, but now that I'm more familiar with WWII-era Japanese discourse regarding Manchuria I am like OH NO NINTENDO PLEASE DO NOT.

Journey is such a soothing experience. I tend to play it very late at night, so I usually end up going through the whole thing alone, but on the rare occasions I do encounter another person I try to be a good guide. I first played Journey a week or two after it was released for the PS3, and I had no idea what to expect. I didn't know that the other journeyers were actual other players, and the ones who entered my game were absolute dicks. It took me almost ten hours to play through Journey the first time simply because I didn't have a clue what was going on. Like, another player would trigger something I was looking for, and I would just wander around being all like, "What just happened??"

I think there's a sweet spot in that sort of collaborative play in terms of player familiarity. If it's too soon after the game is released, people don't know how to be nice to each other; while on the other hand, if too much time has passed since the release, no one else is playing. I've noticed the same thing with Tri Force Heroes (interest in which seems to have fizzled out very quickly).

Thankfully, the Tingle Bottle feature in Wind Waker HD is still going strong, with a lot of helpful and creative putting cool and interesting things out into the Miiverse.