Super Mario All-Stars(SNES) |
Super Mario All-Stars was announced in early 1993 for the Super Nintendo, with a release of sometime in May-June 1993. It was a collection of the first three American releases of Super Mario Bros. (1/2/3), and the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 renamed "Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels".
Nintendo's intent with this release was not to make money off "Retro" - retro was not a thing yet in 1993. They wanted to introduce new players, a new generation, to the original games, on new hardware. It's sort of like a "Super Mario Bros. Remastered Edition" of sorts. Updated sound and graphics, some small tweaks and improvements in gameplay. Some new cheats inadvertantly created. You know, the usual stuff for a remake of the originals. But the biggest part of it - was the ability to SAVE YOUR GAME! See, I don't think anyone born after 1989 realizes this, but there was a time that you could not SAVE in Super Mario, or most other games that were not some kind of huge RPG. Originally, Nintendo got around this problem with passcode systems in things like Dragon Quest and the Akumajo Densetsu (Castlevania) series, but once battery backed save came around, oddly Mario did not get this, weird since it was only the biggest gaming franchise since Pac-Man to that point. Some of us, like me, tried to beat the 8-bit originals in one sitting, using warp zones, we would skip most of the content of the game just to try and beat it. Other people, like my cousin Matt, would leave their Nintendo on, on pause, and pray tell thaht it does not start messing up or get bumped. But Super Mario All-Stars meant now I did not need to try and bum-rush an entire Nintendo game in one day - and it came at just the right time - as I would take up the guitar and start focusing on that only a year or so later. Video Games took a paradigm shift in everyone's life at that point, and stopped being the focus of our full attention. Some, like myself, reassigned it to be a relaxational activity - like how one drinks wine and listens to smooth jazz after work while smoking a fine cuban cigar - for me it was a Papa John's pizza, Mountain Dew, and Video Games. But others would abandon it completley, either out of lack of interest, or to prove their "maturity" to others, or both. For me, I just paratially abandoned it, because it was good exercise for my fretboard fingers, and it was relaxation - and later on, I would start to get more skills FIXING Video game consoles and building my own controllers and such (electronics). Point being, I could take my time, save my game, and get back to things that REALLY mattered - like guitar "(and homework, and chores, and buying parts to fix crap, and whatever else). Super Mario All-Stars, however, did not get as much hype as the previous installments, aand kind of marked the start of a change in the game industry as well. See, the same year, the internet started gathering some steam (Though not quite mainstream yet), and a company called id Software would release a First Person Shooter called DOOM - which would send us down the path of the trope of now having sepia-toned FPSes, and melee fighting games being dominant.Reliving The Past Before There was a Thing called "Retro" - My Expriences Part of the reason I got this was because it came free with my Super Nintendo. I had to send in a card to NOA, then wait for them to ship the the game as soon as it went into production. IIRC, it came in sometime about mid July 1993. At the time, I think this was sort of where the "teenager" in me was starting to kick in. By this point, I was listening to rock music on headphones, and for once in my life, due to the new truck, SNES, and finally not being made fun of (having shifting from bullying to my teachers calling me out for "being lazy"), I felt like this was a move forward (oh how wrong I was). Truth was, this would be the beginning of the end, where I would eschew the mainstream, and start following my own drummer even more hardcore than before. But for "now" I felt like I was FINALLY in a (somewhat) normal mainstream household for once. I remember playing this and immediatley it felt like the old 8-bit games, just upgraded with "better" sound and graphics. At the time, I thought it was need to see Mario fleshed out. Actually, I wondered a little why Super Mario World did not look this good - then I saw the copyright and that gave me my answer pretty quick. Some favorite tricks included gathering up a whole bar of P-Wings and sieging Level 8 in Super Mario 3, restarting Mario 1 and building up an insane number of lives to go on a repeat run of Level 8-4 over and over till I beat it. I beat Super Mario Bros. 2 on this - that was the first Mario game I ever beat - when I was around, I think 14. I played this game quite a lot on the SNES. Today, I have it on Wii for the purpose of playing the newer versions of the original releases, but to be honest, I have not revisited it in a long, long time. Maybe that's something I should do on my video channels. Anyway, let's get on with it. |