Super Mario Bros.

I'll be honest, this is my first time playing any Nintendo game other than Pokemon and for most of my gaming life I have given Mario stick for being too soft and childish. Growing up I was mainly only bothered about the gritty, gory adult games. Don't get me wrong, I grew up on kid games like Spyro aswell, but something about Nintendo games just seemed a step too far and didn't appeal to me. But as a huge video game fan and as I have gotten older and learned to appreciate game design, I thought it was only right I gave games like Mario a chance.

I'm so glad that I did, because I couldn't have been more wrong about it.

The story of Super Mario Bros. Is a rather simple albeit extremely famous one. You play as Mario, a dumpy mustache brandishing plumber who sets out to save the Mushroom Kingdom from the Evil King Bowser. Bowser, along with the rest of the Koopa Troopas (a race of magic turtle-like creatures) have taken over the Mushroom Kingdom and turned all of the residents known as Toads into inanimate blocks and bricks, bringing it to ruin. Mario must travel across the Mushroom Kingdom, facing the Koop Troop along the way and save Princess Toadstool (better known to everyone in later entries as Princess Peach) from Bowser. Only she can return The Mushroom Kingdom back to normal.

It's a legendary tale within gaming, although not much else can really be said about the plot. It is as straight forward as reading the synopsis. No twists or turns, and the majority of the lore was contained within the games manual. This was 1985 after all! Just an original fun and friendly story that introduced amazing new characters, story and lore to what would become one of the biggest and most legendary franchises in gaming.

So on to the gameplay. In short Super Mario Bros. Is a 2D Sidescrolling platformer where you run from left to right, jumping over obstacles and on enemies, collecting coins, hitting blocks for power ups that make you bigger and stronger, all to reach the flag pole at the end of the level to proceed to the next one while trying to get the highest score you can all before the timer runs out.

There is a total of 32 levels, broken down in to 8 sets of 4, that get progressively harder. The levels will mainly consist of four different themes to break the gameplay up. These are ground, underground, underwater and castle. Different themes will introduce different threats and challenges, sometimes even altering the style of play completely. Underwater levels for example change the physics entirely, introducing a floaty gravity system reminiscent of flappy bird where you repeatedly press the jump button to swim higher but start to rapidly sink when you stop, keeping the gameplay fresh and challenging. It was very innovative for the time.

Modern gamers be warned however, Super Mario Bros. Might look like an easy child friendly game, but you start with 3 lives and once they're done, so are you. Running out of lives means you start again. Not from the beginning of the level, but the entire game. This might sound harsh by todays standards but this style of gameplay encouraged you to learn and improve, until you were actually good enough to beat the game, rewarding you with a greater sense of achievement. I know we have modern games like Dark Souls but lets be honest, the vast majority of modern games hold your hand with the difficulty settings. You can gain extra lives either by finding 1-up mushrooms or for every one hundred coins you find and you're going to need as many lives as you can get. One wrong move can very easily mean you lose a life. Enemy placement is very clever, just when you think you know when and where to jump, quite often you will find you had been sussed all along and a sneaky Koopa just so happens to be in the right place at the worst time or the jump that gets you past one enemy puts you straight into the path of another. It sometimes feels like the developers knew what you were going to try. That's why trial and error and learning levels and power up locations is key to defeating this game.

You could always use the green warp pipes to short cut your way past some of Super Mario Bros. More difficult areas, but where's the fun in that?

Overall the gameplay is fun and extremely addictive. After booting up the game for the first time and losing my first set of lives embarrassingly quick trying to get to grips with the controls and physics, I was hooked. Everything is just so satisfying. The breaking down of a level and memorising it, the fun and varied enemies, overcoming difficult platforming segments, finding secrets and power up locations effectively making knowledge power. It can be difficult, but it never feels unfair and the difficulty progresses beautifully.

I would say the end of each castle gets old pretty quick and some people will find the unforgiving nature of the game frustrating. I doubt this is a game you're going to pick up without prior experience and just speed through it in an hour or two, and im sure there's many 80's kids that never managed to see the ending, but the point is to learn and persevere and it all feels rewarding enough to justify it.

Another huge appeal to Super Mario Bros. Is the graphics and design. I don't think you could take a screenshot of any point of the entire game and people not know what game it was. It's that well designed and iconic.

From the colourful ground levels with it's famous green warp pipes and sunny purple/blue skies, to the dark and dreary castle levels with it's hard stone walls and fiery lava, it's all so memorable and sets the tone and world of Mario brilliantly. Then there's the characters. Everybody knows Mario. People might not know Bowser and Princess Toadstool/Peach by name but chances are they've seen them somewhere. The enemies are great too like the hobbling little mushroom creatures called Goombas, the Koopa Troopa turtles and the Bullet Bills flying across the screen.

It's a masterclass in design. Everything feels original and appealing. All the design choices made by the developer feel in sync, nothing feels out of place and the visuality of it all feels whole and intact.

The last thing to talk about is the audio and sound. There isn't any voice acting so this comes down to the music score and sound effects.

I'll start with the sound effects. They play a great part in why the gameplay is so fun and addictive. The 'boing' when you jump, the 'dings' when you collect coins and the 'woops' when you jump on a Goomba just makes everything that much more satisfying.

The musical score on the other hand isn't just great, it's phenomenal. Not just the music itself but how it is used. There are four main tunes, one for each level theme to give them a different vibe and atmosphere, and it is DONE TO A TEE. Each song fits perfectly to the level, the underground music is strange and disorienting, the castle music is fast and frantic with a much higher tempo increasing intensity and the underwater level music is a more whimsical and waltzy tone to match the floaty physics and dancey gameplay. But the star of the show here is the ground theme. Im pretty sure everyone knows it as the Mario theme song and is one of the most famous and important pieces of gaming industry music ever created. It's a tune that's imprinted on millions of people world wide and like the rest of the music on Super Mario Bros., it was made using sound chips from retro computers and consoles due to the limited NES hardware. Composed by a man named Koji Kondo, I find it fascinating how a song made from such limited and simple means can mean so much to so many people, but it fits the world perfectly. Genius.

Something else I loved about the use of music was how it doubled in tempo when the time limit drops to a certain point, audibly hurrying you up and increasing the tension and possibly causing you to slip up in a difficult situation. It's another smart design choice that can further challenge you, so you have to learn to keep your cool.

Overall Super Mario Bros. Is one of those perfect packages. Where everything isn't just top tier game design with thought and soul behind it, but just something more. Mario is one of the biggest gaming franchises of all time for a reason, and this is the game that started it. It isn't one hundred percent perfect, no game is, but I think it's as close a game can get to it. I think any true fan of video games and game design should play Super Mario Bros. Just out of respect. It saved the industry, and video games wouldn't be what they are today without it.