I’m sorry in advance that this isn’t more obscure. Frowny emote.

Super Mario Bros. 3 was the first game that I remember being ridiculously excited for. You can’t blame it on The Wizard, I didn’t watch that shit until years later, and I don’t think it really would have sold me on anything it was advertising at the time. By the time I did get to see it, I had hands-on experience with the Power Glove and knew the damn thing gave you about as much of an advantage in most games as stapling your index fingers to A and B. Actually, I can’t remember where the heck I first caught wind of it, likely Nintendo Power. I was enamored with the game’s strategy guide, and I used to obsess over strategy guides for games I didn’t own… yet as kind of a hint-hint thing.

I imagine most gamers aren’t going to argue that Mario 3 wasn’t awesome, but you don’t get it- I put 3 above World, 64 or Galaxy. Super Mario Bros. 3 is the Apex Mario of my gaming food chain. The entire game just had this sensation of trekking across a whole massive world, sticking to the same basic controls and overall experience, while mixing things up just enough to make things interesting. For example, the first time you reach Desert Land and realize that holy shit- some of these overworlds are going to be more than one screen wide, or when scaling the tower at the ‘end’ of Sky Land actually deposits you in the clouds for the second half of the map. That was amazing back then. With all the little bells and whistles they brought out, it was like a perfect formula for tickling the imagination and thinking to yourself, “Oh man, I’m gonna make my OWN Mario game some day, and there’s going to be a stage where you do (this or that) and it’s gonna be AWESOOOOME.” I can’t help but wonder how many people out there had a moment like that after going through SMB3 and actually followed through to become big or little game designers in their own right.

(Rom hacks don’t count.)

The whole ‘overworld’ addition to the game added so damn much, it’s hard to put into words. So I’m going to try anyway and probably fail miserably. By adding a sort of level select, you were sometimes able skip over stages you really couldn’t stand playing through (AUTO SCROLLLLLLLL) or take a little side track to Toad’s House or a bonus game to stock up for the challenges ahead. You could use scads of found items to open up new ways to get ahead, too, like using the Cloud to skip a trouble stage, Hammers to open blocked paths, or the Music Box to put the roaming Hammer Brothers on the map to sleep if you’re, you know, a pussy. World 1 does a good job introducing you to this new freedom to branch out, and it’s only one screen across. You can bypass the auto-scrolling stage in 1-3 and head straight for the Fortress, which in turn clears your road onto the latter half of the stage. I think the fact that 2 out of 3 Warp Whistles were hidden in the very first world was kind of an incentive to get players exploring the worlds themselves more deeply.

It gets better if you have a second player. Suddenly all those item houses and shortcuts really start adding a layer of strategy to things. Even though Mario and Luigi are on the same side, it’s just about impossible to resist the urge to say, die on purpose and waste your turn so your ‘friend’ has to clear a tough stage, leaving the road ahead clear for you to dash onward and steal some treasure. I can only assume that there’s no Contra-esque life stealing because play testers started knifing each other.

If there are two reasons I can give why I like Mario 3 so much over the rest of the series, they would probably be 1) the array of gimmicky Suits, and 2) World 8. Even if some of the power ups were kind of redundant (Tanuki Suit vs Raccoon Tail) or comparatively useless (about 90% of the game for the Frog Suit), it was fun just having so many options to mess around with, and they even had that handy little inventory bar you could use between stages to use some of your saved-up items.

The final stages of the game were just plain awesome in my book, though. Dark, crazy-hard ‘normal’ stages, the more or less random Hand Traps that used to scare the crap out of me, and the multiple ‘army’ stages wherein you took on a battalion of tanks, small, jet powered airships, and a floating navy all combined to both give a genuinely intimidating series of stages, and also give you the amazingly badass sensation that only defeating a hostile kingdom’s entire standing military with your feet and possibly some flowers can bring. The final battle with Koopa is a suitable conclusion to all of this- no longer able to just hop on Bowser’s head like you could with his brats, you had to trick him into beating himself.

That’s probably why the cutesier Mario comes off over time, the less I really want to take part. The Mario sprite in 3 (on NES) was kind of a step down in detail from SMB2’s version- hell, his eyes didn’t even have whites any more. But it kind of gives him a more I don’t know, modest, calm look. No matter what’s going on, Mario just keeps trudging on, leaving entire Lincoln Log armies shattered in his wake, and not once stopping to go “OKI DOKI!” or shouting “UWAWAWAWA” in pain when his ass gets burnt. That’s my Mario. A cold, unblinking badass. In a frog suit.

With apologies to Charles Martinet.

It’s kind of hard to say if we’ll ever really see another Mario that has a similar je nais se quois to it. Not to sound like a grumpy old man- though I guess I’m starting to get there- but the current Mario is just so soft, round, and squeaky, it’s hard for me to take an interest in the likes of say, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Mario doesn’t yelp with orgasmic glee when he jumps, he goes BOING, god damn it. I had a sinking feeling the first time I heard the high pitched ‘woo woo’ jumping sounds in Super Mario World, that only got sinkier when I saw the Spin Jump. Yoshi’s cool though. Yoshi gets a pass.

I think you get the idea. Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the handful of NES games that I not only say I love to this day, but will still regularly pick up and actually play once in a slow afternoon. I can’t help but think my fixation on the color yellow might have some roots in the cover, too. If you’re following [+/-] (and if you’re not, you’re a terrible, joyless person), you may have noticed and or complained that when Eishi is excited she adopts a goofy, kinda cross-eyed expression. Well, blame the Mario 3 promo art for that one! It’s burnt into my psyche pretty good, so when I think “happy and looking at the viewer,” I think of THAT face.

This is the part where I look at how Mario 3 affected me and my gaming outlook, and after failing to think of anything specific, I think Mario 3 just set a “bar” for me. It said, “Sure, those other games are fun, but how long will they last? Are you going to settle for just beating a stage, or will it make you want to beat that stage repeatedly and try weirder and harder ways to win?” For crying out loud, I remember using P-Wings on stages just to see if I could crouch fly into hard to reach tight spots, let go of Down, then see where the ‘pushing’ effect of the engine would take me, and inadvertently found a whole hidden extra stretch in Bowser’s castle.

Ahhhh… good times.