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By Steve Kilpatrick It's Meeee, Mario! If you were to walk up to someone, even a hard-core gamer, and tell them that your hero was an overweight man in his late thirties, early forties, sporting coveralls and a plunger (not to mention the smell of sewage), you might get laughed off the street. Well, for those of you who are constantly presented with this dilemma, fear no more! Thanks to an overweight landlord and the bright (yet twisted) minds at Nintendo of America we can all live out our childhood dream of sewer spelunking! Save The Princess This game is like none I've ever seen. You are Mario, a "big boned" plumber on a quest to save a princess. Along the way you can also recruit help from your more lithe sibling, Luigi, in your fight against the dragon, Bowser, King of the Koopas. The koopas are little turtle/dragon hybrids that want to take over the kingdom of the "fair" Princess Toadstool. Sound far fetched? A Plethora Of Power-Ups Oh, yes, did I mention mushrooms play a huge part in the success or failure of your pied Pizzannos? At the beginning of the game Mario is a tiny version of himself. In order to enlarge him you must first find a row of bricks (or blinking blocks) then jump into them head first until you find one where the shroom comes bouncing out. At this point you have to chase the little shroom until you're able to gobble it up, at which point your character becomes larger. Until you make Mario (or Luigi) "big", you simply bounce off all of the bricks in your way. Once you've made your little plumber bigger, those bricks will shatter, opening paths, revealing secrets and adding 50 points to your score for each one. As if that weren't enough power for a plumber, you can also pick up flowers (much in the same way you picked up mushrooms) that allow you to shoot (of all things) fireballs. There are also other power ups to look out for such as green mushrooms, that give you a "free man", and coins, that not only boost your score, but for each 100 collected you'll get another free man. This game has so much stuff going on you'll have to play it for years just to find everything. Garphically Speaking, The Plumbing Is Solid The graphics are great in this game, especially when you consider that it's one of the earlier titles to come out on the system. There are a few glitches that stop gameplay, but thankfully they usually occur at the same areas of the game, which allows you to learn just when to compensate. It is a straight forward side scrolling game, with plenty of "jump on the enemies head to kill them", opportunities. I wouldn't try it on the spineys though. There's so much good stuff in this game that I think we can over look any of the "crap".... pardon the pun, and let our long suppressed desires to be a water and waste engineer come flowing to the surface (woo boy, these are getting bad). BOTTOM LINE: A "must have" for any NES owner, this is the game that drew me back in after I had to sit through trash like Star Voyager and Taboo. My Score: A+ |
© 2001-2003 Stephen Maiorana (RoyalRanger)
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