Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (2003)

The more I play it, I realize that with hindsight, i don’t believe Mario 3 is a 5 star game. The game certainly deserves to be considered among the greatest of all time for what it accomplished with what it had and the influence it had, but looking at it as any other game reveals some noteworthy flaws.

The lives mechanic is completely obsolete and serves no real purpose in the game. When you get a game over, you don’t lose any progress. I like this way of doing it, but having lives and needing to go through the whole shebang every time is long and annoying, especially on difficult levels where several game overs aren’t uncommon. Since lives are also pretty much useless, I don’t feel compelled to do many of the mini games, ESPECIALLY that rigged slots one. I swear it’s BROKEN toad is ripping ME OFFF!!! The game would be better with no lifes. The game also often rewards the player with lives, but they feel useless because of the reasons stated above.

The game has several levels that are duds. The easiest exemple that comes to mind are the desert themed grid mazes type levels, soooooo boringgg. The transition « level » in between map pipes is cute at first, but also eventually slows down the gameplay and serves no real purpose.

I sometimes wished that the base game had more level exclusive gimmicks and that it had a bigger diversity of music to play during gameplay.

Anyway, i’m halfway through world 8, full review coming soon. Played the rest on my flight to tampa, if anyone knows cool stuff to do in the fort myers area, let me know.

Decided to play through this game's fabled e-reader levels for the first time as they've recently shown up on the Switch, and it turns out they're comfortably the worst official Mario levels I've ever played. A real morass of overlong, slow-paced puzzle levels, auto-scrollers, and offscreen gotcha hazards, with zero sense of momentum or kinesthetic joy.

Still a neat inclusion to the game purely as a historical curio, but fighting 8 hammer bros in a row isn't a great time.

After feeling a tad disappointed by Super Mario Bros. 2, I quickly started up the GBA re-release of the true Super Mario Bros. sequel and walked away a lot happier.

It's pretty astounding how many aspects of Super Mario World are present here... the map, the power-up variety, the sense of depth and color and character. I'd even argue that SMB3 feels larger because of how varied its levels and costumes are.

While it's certainly a bigger leap forward for the series than SMW, I'd argue that it's not quite as solid. Not every level's a gem, and some rely on the sorts of design decisions Takashi Tezuka might discourage today (hidden blocks or leaps of faith, for example). And yet, I'd be lying if I said this didn't feel more quintessentially Mario. I'm happy to have finally seen it through to the end.