Super Mario World is a classic game without a shadow of a doubt, but it’s a classic it’s worth going into blind.
Amongst the items I added during my recent Tokyo retro trip to my growing pile of shame of excellence was a copy of Super Mario World.
Certainly not my first time around with that title, although unlike many it wasn’t a pack-in game with my SNES. I bought the SNES model with Street Fighter II bundled, because, well, it was 1992 after all. It was, in every important aspect, the style at the time.
Sadly, I can’t say with any confidence what happened to my original copy of Super Mario World, however. I can only presume somebody “borrowed” it, and it never came back.
It’s a classic. Possibly THE classic.
Anyway, I was aware that this was the case, and it’s in no way a game that’s hard to find in any of Tokyo’s stores that stock retro titles, although predictably prices can vary a heck of a lot. I paid 800 yen — just a shade over $10 — for my cartridge only copy, and I’m well and content with that, given it’s less than I’d pay for a Virtual Console copy I wouldn’t “own” anyway.
There’s plenty to play on my plate right now, but this week, I tackled Super Mario World for the first time in many years. Probably since I reviewed the excellent Gameboy Advance version, and that of course was more than a few years ago too.
One of the benefits of revisiting a title like Super Mario World is the combined joy of visiting a game that’s both warmly remembered but still capable of actual discovery within it. Way back in the day I naturally grabbed every coin, level, star world and everything else I could out of the game, but my memory of those times was, to put it politely, a little foggy.
Despite the map, Super Mario World is still rather linear, but there’s a whole host of little secrets in there, some of which I could remember, and others that took a lot of trial and error to get right. Secret exits to ghost houses, hidden keys, the whole Star World map, all of it slowly unfolding as I played what is still one of the landmark 2D platform games.
Technically speaking, because it’s a Japanese cartridge, I’ve never played this version of Super Mario World before.
Now, there was an easy way to do this, and a hard way. Not so much in gameplay terms, but in how I approached all of the game’s rather well-mined secrets. In the Internet age, here’s no shortage of guides, written, pictorial and video to Super Mario World.
Rather early on, I decided it might be fun to ignore them all. Every last one.
I wasn’t going to look any of them up, no matter what.
The Internet makes all of this stuff trivially easy to check, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never used a guide to get through a frustrating bit of a current generation console game before. But I wanted to find out what the experience was like if I absolutely ignored their massive availability.
Naturally, I couldn’t go into Super Mario World entirely blind, because as I played certain key exits popped into my head well before I played them, but still, compared to what I could have done, looking up every exit and how to get it online, I had a lot more fun. Not a little bit more, but a lot. While you’ve still got to have the skills, bills for the payment of, in order to progress, knowing what steps to make and when to make them takes a lot of the challenge and joy of discovery out of games, and Super Mario World is no exception.
It also made appreciate both the genius of Super Mario Maker, and how in fact Super Mario World still has that game beaten, even though it provides a building mechanism for most of Super Mario World’s levels.
There’s something simply beautiful in the continuing storyline behind Super Mario World, even through the lens of the Japanese text that the copy I was playing had. Individual Mario Maker levels may have the germ of genius in them, but the combined effort of putting together sliding scales of difficulty across a range of challenges is one that’s rarely met quite so well.
Here the Princess explains macro-economics and its effect on the butter market to Mario.
I still don’t have all 96 worlds unlocked, and I’m totally fine with that. It’s not like the cartridge cares anyway either way, but it means I can return to Super Mario World whenever I like and try to work out how to get certain levels to unlock, uncovering things that aren’t, strictly speaking, new to me, but that are a joy to discover anew.
So that’s what I’d encourage you to do, whether you’re playing something truly retro or the latest AAA smash hit. Eschew the guides, walkthroughs and Let’s Plays as much as is feasible. Sure, they’re easily available, but they’re nowhere near as much fun.
Retro recollections are just random musings on retro subjects, usually whatever I’m playing at the moment.