Stomp that poor defenceless killer monster!!!!

First off I’ll make an admission; I’ve never been a big fun of the Mario Bros games. Very occasionally there comes along a platform game that grabs my attention, but none of the Mario Bros games ever have. (Neither did Sonic, btw – Rainbow Islands and The New Zealand Story are the only 2 that immediately spring to mind that I liked.) There reason I’m telling you this is because it will undoubtedly affect my rating for this game – if you’re already a fan, you’ll probably like it a whole lot more than me.

Though this game is for the Game Boy Colour I’ve played it only on the Game Boy Advance, though of course there is no difference to the game play, nor indeed graphics or sound. As such it seems very old-fashioned, though the graphics are cheerful and colourful enough. The music though is really repetitive and gets on my nerves very quickly. Sound effects are pretty basic but okay.

The idea of the game is, of course, that you are Mario and must progress through the levels, collecting (stealing!) gold coins and jumping on poor defenceless little animals. Well okay they kill you if they touch you but otherwise they’re quite defenceless, really. You also need to head butt bricks so that they disintegrate, hopefully revealing more coins or possibly a power-up to make you bigger (and thus tougher to kill), let you fire at the poor little defenceless killer monster animals, and other things such as this. You go left to right across the screen trying to make it across without dying, and at the end of each level you have a flag to jump at, the higher you are when you reach the level end (the rope for pulling up the flag), the more points you get.

The thing that set Mario Bros apart from other early platformers was that you could also access secret levels and areas by climbing down giant pipes that for some reason are stuck across the world. This adds a bit of variety to an otherwise repetitive game. If you do like it enough to keep playing, completing it will take up quite a bit of your life. Some people even like playing the same level over and over until they’ve managed to locate and collect every single gold coin on that level, but personally this would drive me nuts.

This cartridge, which sticks up about half a mile above the top of the GBA :-D, contains the original game from 1985 (wow, was it really that long ago?!?), a challenge game where you can play any level on its own, and a “vs” game that you can play if you link to another Game Boy. (With the link only costing a fiver and having seen a second-hand GBA for just £20 the other day, I might just have to do the 2-player thing one of these days…) Again, fans of the original will love it, and those who had it on the NES / SNES might well feel a lovely surge of nostalgia. Having come into gaming from a different direction to Nintendo however, I don’t really have this feeling of nostalgia.

If you want to stomp on some innocent killer monsters, collect lots of gold coins, and crawl through giant pipes, then I guess there are a lot worse games than Super Mario Bros Deluxe… for me though, it just doesn’t cut the mustard. (One of these days I need to find out exactly what that actually means…)


Final Ratings
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(The aesthetic ratings are given bearing in mind this is a Game Boy Colour, not a Game Boy Advance, game.)

Graphics: - 78% - it’s colourful, it’s cheerful, it’s Mario.

Sound: - 66% - not too bad but someone stop that music!!

Playability: - 90% - extremely easy to pick up…

Longevity: - 70% - … quite a bit of challenge if you want to actually complete the game…

Replay Value: - 40% - for me, this is where it falls down… I just don’t like it enough to play it more than a couple of times.

Value For Money: - 60% - easy to pick up cheaply these days.

Overall Rating: - 55% - it’s not actually a bad game, just not really my sort of game.


See also my review of the Game Boy Advance