#5: Super Mario World

Da-Ding!

 The iconic launch game; it came bundled with the system itself. In this day and age you don't even get a game when you buy a new system. Back in 1991 you got a truly amazing game. I guess coming out of the video game crash the console creators figured they really had to give you something to make it worth your while jumping to a new system? Now it feels like they expect you to buy a new console just because it exists.

Gulp!

I remember when we got our SNES back when I was a kid. My parents had gamified chores (yeah, in 1991... My family is way ahead of our time!) by giving us points on a chart for doing all kinds of things. The end goal if we got enough points? A NES! My brother and I were getting close as Christmas was nearing but we didn't quite make it in time... Our final present was the last points we needed! Awesome! Come here, NES!

Wee!

It turned out not to be a NES. It was a SNES. (Which was turned on the whole time, so as soon as the tv was turned on the theme music for this game was running.) By any objective measure this would be a fantastic upgrade. It's a better system. It had a bright future full of awesome games. It had more buttons on the controller, but not too many more. But I was bitter. The prize was clearly defined and now it had changed! I hadn't even heard of this SNES thing. (They got my grandparents to buy it down in Florida.) That lasted all of about three stages into this game. As soon as I got the feather item from one of those glowy cape dudes and got to fly around I was hooked. This was _way_ better than an NES!

I wonder what I do with this key...

Now-a-days I'm not a big platformer fan. I'm rusty and have trouble actually landing my jumps. I remember being better than this, but I may be crazy. Certainly I remember my brother and I running one specific level over and over to earn maximum lives... Would we have had to do that if we were awesome at the game? I doubt it. But I had a lot of fun playing this game again, even for a little while.

As platformers go, Super Mario World is one of the best. It brought in lots of new things (feather, Yoshi, the ability to replay any level, bonus games, storing a power-up in the box up top, POW boxes...) while staying true to the past with mushrooms, flowers, starmen... It had plenty of interesting challenges to do like the star world. It had alternate exits from some levels with keys and such. It was accessible enough that you could plow through it while being hard enough to keep your attention for a long period of time.

Rating: A+