Posted on 06/12/2021 at 03:46 PM
| Filed Under Review
This is one of the GOATs. My favorite 2-D Mario game. It squeezed out every bit of performance the NES could muster. It looked better than quite a few 16-bit games. I liked the compact nature of the levels and the ability to store power-ups and was disappointed that SMW dropped that. I actually felt that Super Mario World, while still a fine game, was a step down from SMB 3 in some important ways. Technically, the NES shouldn't have been able to handle it, because the NES didn't natively have the capability to handle multiple direction scrolling - heck, the smooth scrolling of the original was still mostly a Nintendo trade secret thaf was beyond the capabilities of almost every other game company at the time. Nintendo had to make new programming tools to accommodate diagonal scrolling.
I actually first played it in 1989, sometime before it released, at a McDonald's competition. At that time McDonald's was giving out Mario toys in happy meals. I also saw it in one of those PlayChoice-10 arcade machines Nintendo made at the time, again in 1989 before the game was officially released.
I read somewhere that Nintendo's premise for SMB 3 was that the worlds were the sets of a play, hence the opening with the rising curtain and some of the visual elements.