Super Mario Bros.: The Lost LevelsAfter 20 years, I can finally play this lost gaming classic.
Posted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 1:00 PM ET
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels is not quite the gaming equivalent of the missing reel of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. But it's close. For two decades, it has been the stuff of playground legend: the "real" sequel to Super Mario Bros., the classic game that launched a thousand NES's. Wikipedia (which I trust on all video game matters) says the game, released in Japan in 1986, was originally called Sūpā Mario Burazāzu 2. Considered too difficult, too weird, or maybe too Japanese for American gamers—in Steven L. Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games, a Nintendo executive suggests that revered game designer Shigeru Miyamoto might have been "depressed at the time"—Nintendo shelved Miyamoto's game in North America and served our continent's kids a thin gruel alternative. The American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 is an odd duck of a sequel that isn't really reviled but also isn't really remembered at all.
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StumbleUponBut starting a month ago, North American gamers can now play the Lost Levels—or, as I prefer to call it, the Real Super Mario Bros. 2—by downloading it on the Wii's "Virtual Console." My Wii says that it's already the service's second-most popular title, after the original Super Mario Bros. All I had to do was plunk down $6 (600 Wii Points, actually). I would've paid $60. (And yes, gaming obsessives, I know that a version of the Lost Levels made it into 1993's Super Mario All-Stars for the Super Nintendo. But that wasn't the Real Super Mario Bros. 2—that was a colorized Citizen Kane.)
One thing Wikipedia is definitely right about: The Real Super Mario Bros. 2 "is generally considered to be one of the most difficult video games of all time." After lulling you into complacency with the game's superficial similarity to Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto (depressed or not) signals that he intends to torment you. The first row of question-marked boxes you encounter includes that familiar mushroom, Mario's iconic power-up. Except this mushroom is different. It's deadly. As Mario was tossed from the screen, I experienced a combination of shock and puzzlement. That would become a familiar sensation over the next three hours.
Again and again, the game uses your familiarity with Super Mario Bros. to subvert the playing experience. After a few frustrating deaths, I climbed a vine and uncovered a warp zone to Level 3-1. Finally, I was making progress. Shortly thereafter, I descended a pipe, expecting to find a bounty of valuable coins, and instead was shuttled into another warp zone. Therein, my only choice was to return to Level 1 and start the game again.
The game is full of these devilish surprises. Squids float through the air. A green trampoline launches you so high into the air that you disappear for several seconds. A level in the clouds—in the first game an easy run to congratulate you for discovering a hidden area—makes you work to gather even a bare majority of the coins available.
In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it—I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as "a giant puzzle and practical joke" isn't far off.
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Remarks from the Fray
I'm a self-confessed "retrogamer"--a person who plays primarily old NES (and some old PC platform) games on an "emulator" on my laptop. I have my old NES from when I was a kid and have periodically set it up and played the stacks of games I still have (although this is harder and harder to do as the hardware ages). I've been interviewed about my love for nostalgic gaming but I still can't quite explain what's so satisfying about the pixelated, 2D, synth music familiarity of NES games. I have a PS2 and almost can't stand its hyperreality and incredible intensity: I like the cartoonish worlds of Goonies II and yes, even the forgotten Super Mario 2 which I adored as a child (you throw turnips at evil clocks! that is cool!). I'm wondering what others think about the resurgence of popularity for nostalgic games? I confess that playing old NES games is the only reason I would ever consider getting a Wii.
--lolacat
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(11/6)