4. Super Mario Bros. 3
Mario 3 is weird, because it has a tendency to look a bit like an old PC game in still shots. Something about the artwork and the flatness of color, I think. In motion, it looks quintessentially NES-like, but check out the screenshot in this article. Weird, right? Still, don’t let that distract you from the quintessential truth of this write-up. It was on my mind the entire time I played NSMB Wii.
22 thoughts on “GameSpite Quarterly 2, #4: Super Mario Bros. 3”
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That’s some awfully nice header art, there.
I always found this to be the easiest of the NES Mario games. If you don’t use the warp whistles, by the time you reach World 8 you are packed with so much loot and so many lives that victory is guaranteed. Great game, but… Mario 2 is the best in the original trilogy. There, I said it.
“Mario 3 is weird, because it has a tendency to look a bit like an old PC game in still shots.”
Coincidentally, an obscure game known as “Commander Keen” started off as a PC port of SMB3. Naturally, those guys didn’t get the rights to it.
Luigi sees your slander! SHAME.
The weird pastel color palette used in Mario 3 always drove me a little nuts, even as a teenager – the game threw so much cyan at your eyeballs that it almost looked like a Windows 3.1 port of a “real” Mario game.
It also didn’t help that for some strange reason, Mario 3 background art had a hard time filling up the whole screen sometimes – just look at the left edge of this article’s second screenshot. Graphic quirks like that were surprising, especially in such a top-tier Nintendo game.
The game has blissful gameplay, but it lacked the charm of the first game, for me at least. The bigger blocks, bigger pipes, bigger goombas, the colors… etc… just always felt off.
I like how in that picture at the top of the article, while Mario is exploring the thrill of flying raccoon-dom, Luigi is whisking Princess Peach off to the side. How very dastardly.
Naikaku: I don’t know what Mario 3 looks like on an emulator (I’ve never been one for playing games on a keyboard), but I do remember those graphical quirks from way back when.
Also, try being less of an asshole in the future.
Bill, apparently the force of your righteous indignation deleted any record of whomever you were responding to. Well done.
This isn’t the first time it happened. I’m all Charlie X over here.
I hate to add to the negativity about this game, but I always did think that the color in SMB3 looked a little faded. I overall prefer the much more colorful look of the All-Stars version (with the exception of the cave areas- I like the starry appearance they have in the NES game).
Anyways, this game is amazing and I agree with the article in that the two-player mode is really fun. I never got why the multiplayer was abandoned after Super Mario World and not used in games like Yoshi’s Island and the 3D Marios. Oh well, at least we have NSMBWii now!
It also didn’t help that for some strange reason, Mario 3 background art had a hard time filling up the whole screen sometimes – just look at the left edge of this article’s second screenshot. Graphic quirks like that were surprising, especially in such a top-tier Nintendo game.
I think cutting off the leftmost eight pixels might represent some kind of intentional technological trick (saving on RAM, or processing…something? Heck knows I’m not a programmer). I’ve seen it in other games, at least, so I doubt that it’s just a random quirk.
Yeah, I always figured that the processing power that would’ve been used to create that missing sliver of real estate was used to create the echo effect on the bongos in the music, or to add an extra touch of day-glo color to Lemmy Koopa’s mohawk.
The missing columns of pixels are there for the purpose of mitigating graphical errors on the left and right sides of the screen. It’s pretty much a necessity when doing 4-way scrolling with a status bar, and it has a couple other uses too. For a technical explanation of why this is so, you could (but don’t have to) read this:
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mirroring
But enough with this petty graphical talk, let’s start actually talking about the game now.
You know, I had kind of noticed that SMB3 was one of the only NES games I’d ever known that gracefully handled multidirectional scrolling; most other games either scrolled in only one way (SMB1), did multidirectional but not in gameplay or smoothly (The Legend of Zelda), or set it up so as to allow scrolling either up-down or side-to-side, but only in different circumstances (Metroid). I’d kind of wondered how SMB3 got away with it, and now I know!
I always played this in its All-Stars incarnation, myself. I actually sometimes have to remind myself that it’s really an NES game at its core…
That it doesn’t get too caught up in exploration and manages to focus on quick platforming is why Mario 3 still reigns supreme in my book after all these years. You nailed it with this article chud, though the ending paragraph was a little awkward.
The MMC3 was what enabled Mario 3 to do multidirectional scrolling, not to mention the bottom screen HUD. Though amusingly it wasn’t enough to keep the timer from slowing whenever Mario (or Luigi) would take flight.
Graphically, I’ve always thought Mario’s sprite was a definite downgrade from what they used in Mario 2.
This is the Mario game that I used to hate. Try beating it every time you visit your cousin’s house (and not having the guts to say no), and you’d hate it, too. But now, I have begrudging admiration for the game.
And someone stop me if I’ve said this before, but I think I had an objection to Mario games because I thought it led to overlooking some of the other great games available for the NES, particularly the Mega Man series, which was always my favorite back in those days.
Mario 3 is… a… ummm… okay, it’s a great game. There. I said it.
The best thing about Mario 3 is playing the game in 2-player mode, where each of the levels gets stamped with the initial of the character who cleared it. Then, when that player runs out of lives, all of those levels return from the grave, potentially stonewalling the player who hasn’t continued yet. It was like sprinkling some sort of board game mechanics into the mix, which I always found really compelling. Plus, it gives you a chance to go back and clean out those rare mushroom houses a second time! When I found out that the GBA port of this game did away with this particular quirk, it killed all interest I had in playing the game portably.
My friend used to get so mad at me because I never wanted to use the warp whistles and the game took too long to finish if you played every level. Ah, to be 11 again.
The color palette of Mario 3 looks like sherbet to me.
Perfect reptilian Mario muscle memory.
Yes, yeeees, yes.
Great article, damn that Luigi!
level 1-1 is one of the most elegant game designs ever. In one fell swoop, it teaches you the new mechanics of the game, and how everything you thought you knew about mario is wrong. Yes, there are goombas and koopas and question blocks, but now, goombas can fly, question blocks can be on the ground, and you can carry turtle shells to attack them.
And that first ground block gives you a leaf, which teaches you the new mechanic of the game, flight. It’s a pure tutorial without any hand holding, and absolutely seamless. wish they kept to that philosophy.
It’s a pure tutorial without any hand holding, and absolutely seamless
Nintendo, at it’s best, is the absolute master of that, even today. There are a lot of instances of that throughout Mario Galaxy.