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.

1993 - Super NES (Nintendo)

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.

1986 in Japan - NES (Nintendo)

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.

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