http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptpyWR7O60M
If you could all kindly follow that link before reading this post I’d be very grateful. (You don’t need to listen to all ten hours but I’m pretty certain you’ll want to.) It partly provides a bit of context but mainly it’s because I am lacking in the skills necessary to embed this hypnotic, rhythm into the background of this page. Trust me if I could you’d never be able to leave. This is the soundtrack to the first game I had bought for me and considering it sold nearly 20 million copies that might be true for lots of you. However, as I booted up the cartridge the other day and fell back under its hyperactive, slightly agitated, hypnotic spell, doubt began to creep into my mind. Maybe, one of the foundations that my gaming life is based might not actually be that good.
The game starts, that music begins and all is good with the world. The jumping is present, the head crushing, curb-stomping is featured and you collect coins and mushrooms to give yourself powers. It is all very basic and very standard Mario but also you would expect this for pretty much any platformer. Mario has set the standard so other companies have tried to mimic it. So where do the doubts come in? Well I found that pretty much as soon as I left the first world I started to notice flaws that I had failed to spot as a six year old. Freed from the hypnotic effect of the world’s greatest soundtrack everything seemed a bit mediocre. The controls are a little sloppy with Mario having a frustratingly huge braking distance. This wouldn’t be so bad if some of the platforming from a very early stage ranks amongst the trickiest that Nintendo have ever put forward. The cynic in me might suggest that the massive early difficulty spike helps to bulk out what is a relatively lightweight game but going back to play this as an adult was actually refreshingly challenging. It’s odd that a slightly ragged design choice somehow makes for a pretty fun game and maybe we are lucky that it worked out this way.
The odd choices also extend to the bizarre cast of enemies that populate the game world. Most of the enemies that pop up here are of species which we never see again. Perhaps Mario is contributing to their extinction as he goes around massacring leaping Easter Island heads or angry fire-breathing sphinxes. Thinking about that in this context is actually sort of disconcerting. Maybe these species are desperately clinging to their lands and lives while trying to fight off a fearsome invader. Whatever the cause the result is a game that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the series at all. Mario can’t swim and uses a submarine, the final boss (some strange alien who only appears again in Super Mario Land 2) is fought in a biplane whilst the game turns into a weird scrolling 2D space shooter. To cap it all Mario flies off with the Princess (not Peach for all the judgemental puritans out there) in a jet which just raises more questions such as “Why wouldn’t you use the awesome jet rather than the ancient biplane to battle the final boss?”
Super Mario Land is thankfully more than being the world’s greatest soundtrack even if it ranks as one of the weaker Mario platformers. In the context of the Mario series this feels like a standard early Nintendo ploy of creating generic games and slapping the name of a major brand on the box to see the sales soar. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad but it does seem to stop it being great. It is hard to marry the image presented in this game with the other Mario titles and even the other games in the Super Mario Land series. The unfortunate effect is that the game feels like a Hangover themed Mario holiday in Sarasaland (I literally found that out for the first time whilst researching this). This adventure you’d rather forget comes complete with a total lack of recognition of the events that took place and no acknowledgement that it ever happened. The Mario games aren’t exactly continuity heavy so I wouldn’t say Super Mario Land was a waste of time but don’t be surprised if you don’t get quite what you were expecting.
Rory's Retrospectives 
While the game may not be what I was expecting, the deviations from the standard mario ideas like exploding turtles and cultural locations was rather fun! Sequel was far better of course, but the original deserves a bit of love.