The Closeout Warrior

If you take everything you know about the Super Mario Bros. series and throw it out the window and then try to make a Super Mario game, you’re either going to end up with something like Super Mario Bros. 2 or Super Mario Land.

Super Mario Land has Mario running to the right in his quest to rescue princess Daisy of Sarasaraland from the evil alien Tatanga. Along the way he’ll have to contend with giant bugs, exploding turtles, giant boulders, those weird stone statues from Easter Island, and lots more stuff. Man, I wish I could make up stuff this… um… offbeat.

Now, I’m not saying that the Mario universe makes more sense than this game, but this game is like something that would happen if you had someone who learned about the Mario universe from the scrawlings on the back of a time-share scam pamphlet that they found stuck between the seats on the bus and then made a game about it.

But that’s OK. A little fanfiction never hurt anybody right? And just because the silly little submarine and airplane that Mario piloted along with the main antagonist, Tatanga, and every other part of this game, except Daisy, haven’t been seen in any other games since doesn’t mean that it’s a complete wash. And good ol’ Daisy. Filling up a spot in whatever sports game that ends up being short a female. She’s a trooper.

But I did have a lot of fun with this game. I liked to pretend that even though this game starred a guy named Mario that it wasn’t actually the same Mario from the other games. Once I did that, I moved through it pretty quickly. The game’s really pretty short, with something like 12 stages total. So if you get passably good at it, you can blow through it in about a half hour.

This is also one of the few Game Boy games that my mom would get into. I’m pleased to report that she was good enough at it to get all the way through it and only had to pass the game to me so I could finish up the last encounter, mostly because Tatanga is a jerk. He just refused to explode when she was playing the game. But that’s OK. Having a parent that would actually play video games with me on occasion was pretty awesome, it’s just too bad that so many parents these days can’t be bothered.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 5:00 pm and is filed under GameBoy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.