2/5 ★ – cha0sknightmare's review of Super Mario Bros..

I want to preface this by saying It's almost impossible to quantify the sheer impact this game had on the gaming industry, pop culture and the platforming genre, even playing it now at the start of 2025 there is an elegence to the simplicity of it's design.. a template that countless other games would mimic and copy for decades to come. The sad truth though is that (to me at least) tweaks and adjustments from both future Mario games and other platformers over the years have weathered this experience. The 8-bit backgrounds and level themes look lacking and lifeless. The level design now feels bland, plain and repetitive, and the lack of enemy design doesn't help either. There are some hidden secrets to find and some well designed shortcuts though that I can definitely appreciate, these aid with the replaying of the game if you run out of lives. Super Mario Bros has a three level themes, the standard platforming, water levels and Bowser Castle stages (each with a Bower boss fight). Once you've played a few of these, you've essentially played them all... visually and musicially they are always the same and the game rarely adds any new mechanics or gimmicks to make them feel different from one another. The Bowser fights are almost identical... spam him with the fireflower and beat him in a few seconds flat (which feels both cheap and anticlimactic) or avoid his attacks, get behind him and drop him into the lava - novel the first time, but these encounters never really evolve past this. Towards the final stretch of the game comes the addition of some "maze" levels where the map geometry will loop continuously until you find the exact route it wants you to take... you do this against a countdown timer that will snatch one of your precious lives if you time out - I didn't really enjoy these, they feel like a cheap way to extend the play time and to send you back to the start of the game a few extra times while you attempt to muddle your way through, trying to track the exact route. As a throwback experience/history lesson I enjoyed my time with the original Super Mario Bros, but It's a game that I can't see myself returning to all that often. For anyone looking to experience some gaming history, I'd say definitely run this game at least once, I don't think the game is one you will need to save scum, or rely on an emulator with rewind functionality, but a save state at the start of a level or at the start of the next world etc might go a way to alleviating some of the more annoying parts. I look forward to playing some more of these games throughout this year, to see how Nintendo were able to evolve and expand the formula, whilst keeping Mario as a character, IP and his games as evergreen as they are.