Posted on September 22, 2011
Super Mario All-Stars: The Lost Levels (Super NES)
I have a boatload of Mario games to play through, so I’ll focus on them for the next couple posts.
Enhanced re-makes and re-releases of classic games seem to be pretty common these days. When Super Mario All-Stars was announced, the idea of a fancy-looking version of three NES classics was quite an exciting concept. Even more awesome was its inclusion of The Lost Levels, the unreleased-in-America edition of Super Mario Bros. 2.
I remember being quite excited to play what was essentially just a more difficult version of the original, and I got that chance on my 10th birthday. I popped it in, chose it from the menu and… I had already played it before.
In the very early 90’s on one of our many trips to Baie Sainte-Anne (I seem to recall them often on this blog), I went with my mother to a small convenience store down the road to rent a game. There were a few cartridges similar to the 31-in-1 game I had played a few times, with the two-piece carts with a blue ribbon sticking out from between them. One of them showed Mario on it with a crew of other characters, and the only thing I could understand from the writing on it was a “2”. We had to rent it… plain and simple.
As I popped it in back at my grandmother’s, it was quite obvious that what I had rented was a scam of some kind. It looked exactly like Super Mario Bros., with the level layouts changed slightly, and a darker “super” mushroom that (after finding out the hard way) was actually poisonous. I was convinced that this was a hack of some kind, and was none too impressed that we’d been duped into renting it. Still, I got a fair amount of enjoyment out of it.
Of course, when All-Stars came around, I learned as I played that very first stage that what I had played that day in Baie Sainte-Anne was 100% legit. Oops!
The fun part about All-Stars is how it embellishes areas we feel we already know (more or less). For this movie, I just wanted to show all the different kinds of backgrounds through the first part of the game, as well as the oddities (like a flag and castle in an underwater level) found in the A to D levels at the end of the game.