super mario bros. 3 - 5/10
this guy fucking sucks at mario. in this video we can see a player so atrociously bad at mario that he almost gets himself killed multiple times a second.
isn't it just the worst when you play a game that is nigh-universally critically acclaimed, from a franchise that people defend to death, that you even vaguely recall playing and somewhat enjoying as a kid, and you just can't get on with it? this is exactly my experience that has happened with the prior mario games that i played, but there's perhaps not one more damning than me just really not liking super mario bros. 3 all that much.
i played the famicom version just to mitigate the save system issue to try to really give this game its best shot possible. wow. i did not remember there being that many autoscrollers. i also didnt remember the autoscrollers being that janky to the point where it feels like it wasnt actually intended to work with any degree of the verticality present in the airships, like at all! and making the airships move across the map if you die in them once was certainly A Choice. a bad one! a really terrible one.
yeah no this game's lows are really damn low dawg. at least mario 1 largely had the courtesy to at least let me control the flow of my platforming as opposed to forcing me into some fucking crawling pace level and making me endure that. call my intolerance of these a skill issue; i call it "poor design". the autoscroller conceptually flies in the face of what i enjoy about a platformer - my own skill expression paying off in an ability to get through the levels quicker, more efficiently, and with less power-ups needed. except, most of the time in mario 3, you need power-ups in order to be fast, in order to make the level design less excruciatingly slow. water stage that's dogshit as per literally every mario game ever? oh, just use the frog suit instead! you know, that thing that controls make swimming into a far more hyper-precise and over-sensitive mess instead of being slow! you wanted to be fast, didn't you? or how about every time that there's some enemy-based platforming challenge on the ground? simply remove it with the fire flower! its not that its poor enemy placement that more or less actively forces you into a sense of item scarcity for no reason, no, its just that you havent Entirely Ignored It thats the problem! that solves it, right? and those band-aid solutions can work in the moment; those frankly fucking tmnt nes-tier jellyfish patterns can be transformed into a walk in the park with the frog suit, just hope that you either have more in reserve or want to keep the thing and deal with the dogshit land controls because they're rare as all get-out for some reason. and the level design, when you do interact with it, usually is just kind of whatever (with scant exceptions, see below), or downright offensive. seriously, again: whoever the fuck made so many autoscrollers ought to be told to pipe the fuck down, and why are there so many goddamn door maze levels??? who the fuck thought that would be fun at all, that bart vs the space mutants-ass bullshit? its shit i would expect from a third-party cut-rate $10,000 budget tie-in game, not a game that had a movie made to advertise it! it's ass!
and also - what gives with all the glitches!? seriously, the amount of honest-to-god bugs i experienced in this game, from randomly phasing through shit, to enemies' hitboxes clipping with my own to where i land on them neatly yet still take damage for no discernible reason, it's baffling how much this game felt like it lacked polish? maybe its something to do with me. my curse or something for being a sonic fan is that i can never enjoy mario haha
let me interject in my own ranting to just say that when this game does have a high moment - a fucking fair rarity, i hasten to add - it is pretty decently fun. not great just yet, but there are a fair few levels that are genuinely pretty alright. i like most of world 4, 5 and 7 due to their more imaginative theming than is usual fare for a mario game, i really like the giant aesthetic and the cloud-based levels, whilst obviously less original, still have a really pretty background, and pretty solid levels, with 7 being almost sort of a mini-greatest hits of the game before world 8, which itself was pretty okay but nothing to really write home about, with the sole exception of the bowser castle, which is quite frankly my favorite stage in these games thus far. in these moments, its clear to see the foundations of a good game taking shape, and nintendo finally starting to find their footing with making these games and making them fairly, based around sufficient challenge without falling into unfairness. the rest of the game flies in the face of that, unfortunately, but the scant few moments of genuinely good platforming are appreciated in the sea of level design that makes me want to buy a flare gun.
the power-ups, too, are pretty good, mostly. the raccoon leaf and tanuki suit paved the way for the far better younger brother, the cape feather, but for what it is in this game, its a pretty fun little thing, although admittedly a bit brainless since you can just run at the start of a level and then fly over everything with little more input needed. at least with the cape feather you need to rock the d-pad. the hammer bros. suit is fun, if far too rare, just a better fire flower really. the frog suit can seriously go fuck itself though.
i wish i could say more good about this game, i really do, especially considering i loved it as a kid on gba, but this is just fucking awful to try to play for me, man, im sorry. what little i like, i love, but unfortunately this game is constituent of far more that i outright loathe. its the start of this series starting to get good but its still got a mighty fucking climb
