Super Mario World

OK, I admit, this website is positively grumpy these days. So I've decided to start writing some gumpf about things I like. I'm going to begin with a series of three blog posts reviewing my favourite entries in long-running video game series.

I'll start with Mario. Many consider the original Super Mario Bros on the NES to be the best Mario game. Younger players may consider New Super Mario Bros on the Wii to be the best. Many of my peers consider Mario 3 to be the best. I disagree - my favourite Mario game by far is Super Mario World, the first Mario game for the SNES.

It's very similar to Mario 3 in gameplay style - rather than going from level to level it actually had an ‘overworld' mode which allowed you to choose which path you took through the game - except this time the nonlinearity went into overload. There are so many hidden secrets in this game it's almost impossible to find them all. You can simply go from level to level completing them one after the other and eventually end up at the end, but you don't get anything like the whole game if you do that. I believe the total number of levels in Mario World is 96, but I could be wrong. As I said, I've never actually found them all.

The other major addition to Mario's universe from this game onwards is Yoshi. Yoshi serves as a companion character and if you find him in a level you can ride him to the end. Unlike Mario Wii you can actually take Yoshi between levels, although you can't use him to fight bosses or navigate ghost houses. As the game progresses, you'll find four different Yoshis - the green one we all know and love, a red one that can spit fire, a yellow one that can stomp and create earthquakes, and a blue one that can fly. Yoshi is actually essential for reaching some of the secrets. And sometimes it's emotionally scarring, such as the hidden exit from Cheese Bridge which requires you to dismount Yoshi mid-flight, allowing Mario to access the hidden goal and poor Yoshi to plummet to his death. Interesting piece of trivia: Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of nearly every decent game Nintendo have ever put out, claims that he always wanted Mario to be able to ride a dinosaur, but he had to wait for the SNES's superior hardware to be able to program it without sacrificing speed or gameplay.

As if finding hidden exits to levels in order to progress on a different route wasn't complicated enough, Mario World has ‘switch palaces', which make extra platforms appear in other levels. The first switch palace is near the start and quite easy to find, but the others are hidden quite well, and some hidden sections in early levels aren't accessible until you activate a later switch palace, meaning that you need to revisit levels you thought you'd completed. And for the pro players there's the hidden star world, allowing teleportation to all other zones, and the special zone which adds an extra eight levels to the game. Using the star world it's actually possible to complete the game and beat Bowser in only 12 or so levels, if speedruns are your thing. This game has an outrageous level of depth, and even when you've completed it, you haven't actually. I still play this game some 20 years later.

So for those who like Mario games but haven't played Super Mario World, you could do a lot worse than have a go. You can get it on the Game Boy Advance (as ‘Super Mario Advance 2') or if you have a Wii you can download it from the Wii Shop as a Virtual Console game. Obviously if you're into true retro you can get a SNES on eBay and get the original game, or if you don't mind breaking the law you can probably find a ROM somewhere, there are SNES emulators for pretty much anything these days, including most phones.