You don't kick Koopa shells in Super Mario Land -- instead, stomped turtles explode like bombs. The Flowers don't grant you fireballs in Super Mario Land – instead, you throw bouncing, rubber balls. The game starts off looking like traditional Mario, with Goombas and floating blocks and pipes that lead to hidden caches of bonus coins.
But then Mario jumps inside a submarine. And you know something odd's going on.
Super Mario Land was one of the launch titles for the original Game Boy handheld way back in 1989. It offered, on the go, a full-scale side-scrolling platformer for the debut of the portable platform. Though, to get it all to fit, that full scale had to be scaled back a bit.
So every signature Super Mario element got condensed. Really condensed. Nintendo's designers of the late '80s must have had some trouble dealing with the just-releasing Game Boy hardware and its brand-new concept of taking gaming out of living rooms and off of TV screens, and it seems like they over-compensated here in their first attempt. Here, have a look at Mario at his actual pixel size:
Even after grabbing a size-increasing Super Mushroom here in Super Mario Land, that graphic never grows any larger than after you've nabbed a size-decreasing Mini Mushroom in New Super Mario Bros. It wasn't much of an issue back in 1989, as we young Nintendo fans had no basis of comparison -- but today, playing the game again as a 3DS Virtual Console title, eyestrain has to be a concern for some. Mario's just 12 pixels tall on a 400 x 240 display. That's tiny.
That's only when playing in the game's pixel-precise emulation mode, of course, and by default the game will offer a larger, expanded viewpoint that zooms the old Game Boy display by an extra 60 percent or so -- the same option that The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX offered.
Super Mario Land goes one step further with its visual flare beyond that Game Boy Color classic, though, and debuts an extra feature for 3DS VC titles drawn from the original, monochrome Game Boy library -- the classic "shades of green" color palette.
The very first Game Boy system didn't have the most advanced screen technology, you see, so its black-and-white display ended up looking more like pea soup. Holding L and R and then pressing Y activates this most nostalgic of visual re-creations, and for anyone who ever actually played a first-generation Game Boy system it's a fun addition. They even brought back the signature motion-blur effect that made gaming on that old brick even more of a hassle. It's really very well done.
And Mario, while incredibly small in this outing, does manage to show off each of these entertaining visual modes rather well.
The same designers who decided to shrink everything down to a ridiculous degree also threw a lot of oddball gameplay elements into Super Mario Land. The forced-scrolling shooting stages are the most notable inclusion, as two of the game's 12 stages put our hero behind the controls of a missile-equipped attack vehicle and unleash him in Gradius-inspired sequences of dodging, blasting and fighting flying boss characters.
The first time it happens is the mid-point of the game, as Mario heads underwater in the Marine Pop submarine. The last is the game's very last level, as he soars through the clouds in the Sky Pop airplane. The stages are certainly fun, but also feel weird and out of place in a Mario game -- especially since these same ideas have never been revisited in later sequels.
Other one-off oddities include this game's stage-ending bonus rounds (where you can earn extra lives), unique cast of enemies (like robots with flying heads and zombie monks who stomps can't kill) and the fact that Mario's out to rescue not Princess Peach, but Princess Daisy (who debuted in this game and then went on to drop Mario, pick up Luigi as a boyfriend and show up in a lot of sports and kart racing games).
Shigeru Miyamoto was famously hands-off with this project, so all of these inconsistencies represent a different set of designers' interpretation of a direction the Mario franchise could have taken. This came out before Super Mario Bros. 3, you know. So if Nintendo had liked it enough we might have gotten lots more subs and planes and never seen things like the Raccoon Tail and Frog Suit.
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