Mario's Time Machine

     Mario is like the Leonardo da Vinci of Nintendoland. His tubby little behind can run faster than Kenyan ringers in a marathon. He drives like Jehu while flinging turtle shells with deadly accuracy. He even fought side by side with dinosaurs and created the first water-powered jet pack. Somewhere behind those glossy, dead-looking blue eyes of his, there's a pixelated brain that will no doubt one day lead to the creation of the Hydrogen Flower and the final demise of the Mushroom Kingdom he fought so hard to protect.

     But it wasn't enough- he wanted to pass his knowledge onto the children. Hopping on Yoshi's back, Mario hopped his way to Nintendo's USA branch headquarters in Redmond, Washington. With a spin jump and the usual annoying little sound effect to accompany it, he dismounted the bulimic velociraptor and walked in. Past the cranky receptionist, and the walls and walls of envelopes addressed to Nintendo Power and covered with greasy crayon etchings, he made his way to the elevator. He reached into the front of his overalls and pulled out the "M" shaped key given to him by the man in the bowtie all those years ago.

"Take this key, Mr. Mario. I have to go away for a while."
"A-where you going, Mr. Howard?"
"...see you on the sea of stars, Mario."

     Mario exited the elevator and approached the desk of Big Boss. "Who goes there?" the back of the chair demanded in a quiet yet gruff voice.

    "It's-a-me, Mario," the plumber replied. "I gotta me an idea. I wanna make-a me a video game." It was times like this he wished that he didn't have the mind of Albert Einstein in the body of a comically-accented plumber. Then maybe he would be respected for his 350 IQ and not his record-breaking long jump and vegetable toss-

     Thick laughter roiled forth from the CEO's throat and he swiveled the chair to look down at the tiny Italian. "You've had plenty of video games, boy. Are you saying that you're ready to be our Megaman?"

     Mario shuddered at the thought of being made to run a gauntlet of Koopa traps to save yet more distressed royalty. "I wanna make-a a game for the bambinos." He caught himself, "The children. Something... educational."

     "That's a great idea. A wonderful, selfless and noble idea!" The CEO turned to the side, profile to plumber. "Which we will have no part of. We are far too occupied with the X-VB project." A red hologram issued forth from the desk.

    "Mama mia, what is that!" Mario exclaimed at the sight of the child with a bizarre visor affixed to his face.

     "It's the next level, old friend." The stench of a cheap cigar wafted about the room like a soap factory on fire. "Total immersion. The X-VB will create a sophisticated illusion of depth that will usher in a new era of interactive gaming." He smirked slightly. "A virtual world, if you will, that will entrance the player so they'd never wnat to leave."

     "Why's it-a so red and black? It kinda hurts-a my eyes."

     "Well, if the Virtual Boy were done in full color it would have exponentially increased resolution, but cost that much more. As it stands, we need kids to be pretty stupid in order to want one." He stood and walked to the window, pulling the blinds open. He stood as a dark shadow in front of the blinding Redmond sun. "Educating children would be like shooting ourselves in the foot."

     *PLURP!

     A fireball thudded against the desk and Mario stormed off to the elevator again. The CEO looked over his shoulder and said to the closing doors-

     "By the way, you might consider learning tennis while you're on this little excursion."

***

     Mario's search eventually took him to the doorstep of a largely unknown third-party developer. There, the plans for the Death Star Virtual Boy sprites ripped from Super Mario World were compressed to 8-bit and paired off with existing 8-bit enemies. The finished effect is best shown on the opening screen, where Mario rides Yoshi up to the Koopa museum (a la the fortress/haunted house/castle stages of Super Mario World) and being greeted by the Bowser sprite from Mario 3. My, he seems spry today, the way he scampers, hops and gads about as only a redheaded anthropomorphic turtle in hysterics can. After he walks back inside, Yoshi trots merrily along after him in one of the more suspect 'kidnappings' of the series. Seems more believable to me that Yoshi is joining forces with his fellow lizards to overthrow and probably eat their oppressors. And shit them out like Easter eggs. He is caged in the next scene, which makes the cut from then back to Mario outside make it look like he stood there for a week or so.

     Bowser's museum is like a half-assed version of his castle's layout, with several doors with statues in between. The statues of Bowser are no big suprise, but he also has statues of invincibility stars and Yoshis and other things that are generally bad for him.

     Basically all you do is pick a door, fight through a short game inspired by the original Mario Bros. game, only with a difficulty level appropriate for the mentally deficient, or people without arms for that matter. You can't die in this game (or in Mario is Missing for that matter.) When an enemy hits Mario, he ducks down for a couple seconds until he's sure it's safe. Mindless task completed, you're rewarded with an artifact. Then you jump into the retrofitted warp pipe and pick a time period, hoping to holy hell that it has anything to do with your chosen item.

    Once there, you play through a crappy imitation of a SMB1 level. You don't realize how much the possibility of dying added to Mario games until you play this. Koopas and Nipper Plants in shades (WHAT?) just make Mario cower a little, and the Hammer Brothers that appear don't even throw their weapons. Your real enemy is a God Damn Bird (see also Karateka and a million platform games.) If you select the wrong place to put your artifact, you get a long-winded error message (in the style of above right) and a little red bird swoops in and carries your item away. You know what that means? You get to go back to Koopa's Museum and do it all over again!

     In the end I do have to give the NES version of Mario's Time Machine a better rating than its SNES adaption, because it didn't have a lame Mode 7 Mushroom-collection sequence between levels.

Mario is Missing!

In the time honored tradition of edutainment, MiM is actually more dull than its sibling. Literally. This one stars Luigi, on a world tour to find the whereabouts of his older more successful sibling. He does this by ambling about towns that are laid out in a manner that is both haphazard yet boring. Luigi talks to people with the start button, which actually is kind of inconvenient since people seem to be running as fast and far away from you as possible.

...or maybe I could crush you beneath a giant shoe, if that weren't politically incorrect or whatever.

This one borrows a lot more than MTM. The opening mini-level is pretty much a direct ripoff of the fortress sequences of Super Mario World, downsized to NES graphics. The useless world map looks like a mix between Mario 3 and World.

Enemies are few and far between, and are dispatched with a simple hop on the head. Then you get whatever the koopa had stolen, which were usually on a Carmen San Diego scale (a stone from the great wall of China, so on.) You return them to help desks and then... I don't know what. You find Mario eventually, presumably in the lair of the assiest-looking rendition of Koopa ever.

Oh Luigi, you'll get your break sooner or later.