Super Mario 64 has a rare level design style that stands out from most other games, including other Mario games. It’s 1 that, unfortunately, is looked down ’pon for that difference. The general gaming community, who have a tendency toward philistinism stronger than in other media ( which probably contributes to the reluctance o’ many still to respecting video games as an art ), find Super Mario 64’s level design weird & off-putting.

For instance, Reverse Design’s long, pretentious guide that attempts to narrow Super Mario World’s level design into pseudomathematical graphs, completely ignoring such criteria as creativity or immersion ( or speed vs. padding, which ’splains why they talk favorable ’bout “Donut Plains 2”, which is unplayably awful ) in favor o’ sterile sequences o’ challenges, bashes Super Mario 64, claiming it “has not aged very well” ( which is strange, since the original question is whether the “lessons” they teach for a game that came out half a decade before it apply to it — I would say, to the contrary, that it’s Reverse Design’s view o’ level design that is ol’ & Super Mario 64’s which was ’head o’ its time ), while complaining ’bout its “big, open and awkwardly-shaped levels”, which are “irregular” & “confusing” ( p. 206 ) to players ’cause they essentially make players actually think & explore ( as they’re s’posed to do ), while praising Super Mario Galaxy for constructing levels from sequences o’ “discrete challenges”, for just slapping together indistinct, generic “challenges” together in a string & calling them “levels”, with barely a concept o’ environment.

That Reverse Design claims Super Mario Galaxy’s lists o’ challenges are mo’ coherent than Super Mario 64’s is bizarre. Neither being big, nor open, nor “awkwardly-shaped” or “irregular” ( kind o’ like how real environments are ) imply “incoherence”. “Cool, Cool Mountain” has many paths & directions you can take ( ’gain, like real, living environments, ’cause going in only 1 straight direction was a relic from when games were stuck in 2D, not a conscious design choice of ol’ developers; it’s only games like Super Mario Galaxy, designed with an ignorance o’ this progression, that lead one into believing this rewriting o’ history ), but everything still sticks to the snowy theme. Meanwhile, Super Mario Galaxy has levels like “Gusty Garden Galaxy” wherein the 3rd star is just on a random floating ? Block that could be in any level & has nothing to do with the garden galaxies¹, — in fact, is as far ’way from the garden theme the level sets up as it could be — but this is “coherent” ’cause the player doesn’t have to think ’bout where they’re going².

Super Mario 64’s levels definitely still comprise challenges, which do evolve, as challenges in all games do. But what sets Super Mario 64 apart from much o’ its brethren — including from Super Mario Sunshine & Super Mario Galaxy, whose level designs fall back to the simplistic level o’ early 2D games ( & not e’en with the coherency or speed that made those early 2D games good ) — is its ability to balance these evolving challenges with open, free worlds. Super Mario 64 doesn’t just have a sum o’ artificial challenges but breathing environments — & this is what separates truly great level design from the kind o’ amateur artificial spike rooms that so many modern hack indie platformers have, whose genericism had unfortunately begun to creep a tiny bit into official Nintendo platformers in the 2000s, like Super Mario Galaxy or the Donkey Kong Country Returns games.

To be fair, Super Mario 64, due to time & system limitations, could oft fall into pedestrian platforming & padding; howe’er, when you consider the games people praise in comparison, it’s clear that “not as creative” is not a common criticism gainst Super Mario 64. The truth is, no 3D Mario game has reached the heights that they could in terms o’ level design, specially by today’s standards; Super Mario 64 a’least has the ’scuse o’ being from primitive times, when the competition was Crash Bandicoot, whose ’scuse for level design truly shows the depths Super Mario 64 could’ve fallen in. But if you sift through the sand & crust like an archeologist, you can find interesting ideas & design philosophies that will be subsequently lost in the coming dark age o’ Mario the same way the works o’ Aristotle was lost to medieval Europe.

15. Jolly Roger Bay

It’s probably a surprise to see this @ the bottom ’stead o’ “Dire Dire Docks”. Both are, indeed, weak levels, made weaker by their similarity; but thinking ’bout it, “Jolly Roger Bay” just barely edges “Dire, Dire Docks” out. I think since “Dire Dire Docks” comes after “Jolly Roger Bay”, people view “Dire Dire Docks” as a ripoff o’ “Jolly Roger Bay”; but looking @ them equally ( as equal ripoffs o’ each other ), if I had to decide which 1 to keep & which to get rid o’, I would cut out “Jolly Roger Bay”.

While “Dire Dire Docks” arguably repeats the “swim through whirlpools” gimmick with its “Through the Jet Stream” & “The Manta Ray’s Reward”, “Jolly Roger Bay” repeats 2 gimmicks: both the treasure chest “puzzle” & the challenge o’ waiting for an eel to ’scape in the 1st star, “Plunder in the Sunken Ship” ( & since this is the 1st star for most people, it only dampens the power o’ the other 2 stars, which come right after the 1st star to boot ). I s’pose they do differentiate the treasure “puzzles” by having the 1st require a simple platforming section up a slope afterward… if you don’t realize you can just swim o’er the slope before the water drains — which, to be fair, is a clever way to reward quick-thinking players. The 2nd treasure “puzzle”, “Treasure in the Ocean Cave”, takes place out o’ water & its chests don’t release bubbles when you open them, so it’s harder to heal if you didn’t wait to collect the coins scattered round the area. But then, the bubbles have such terrible hitboxes that getting them is a crapshoot, anyway, & this is traded for the 2nd treasure not slowly draining your health from being underwater, giving you mo’ time; & since swimming into the chests & hopping their hitboxes works can take some time, this is likely a greater danger. Thanks to this, the 2nd implementation o’ the treasure “puzzles” is much easier than the 1st, which makes no sense.

This is keeping in mind that these challenges were ne’er all that good in the 1st place. The treasure chest “puzzle” just involves already knowing the order to open treasure chests or just trying & getting electrocuted till you finally find the right sequence, wasting time. The 1st star’s use o’ the eel is stupid: while “Can the Eel Come Out to Play” is weak ’nough by making you wait for the eel to come out, it a’least makes the eel ’ventually come out & challenges you to time touching its tail, which is a clever idea, just implemented poorly, thanks to terrible hit detection that makes you get hit & lose nearly half your health simply by coming near the eel while making you swim straight through the star without knocking it off the eel’s tail. But for the 1st star, the eel doesn’t e’er come out while you’re there so the developers didn’t have to program making it move. It just stays there till you go ’way & come back, which the player wouldn’t expect. Indeed, e’en veteran players may not know this, since the game doesn’t hint anything ’bout it, & they may expect that the eel will come out based on their experience with “Can the Eel Come Out to Play” & end up waiting there till they drown in bewilderment @ what they would probably take to be a glitch o’ the eel just sitting there doing nothing for minutes & minutes.

“Dire Dire Docks”’s implementation o’ other star ideas is better, too. Its use o’ timing jumps on moving poles to collect red coins is mo’ focused than how “Jolly Roger Bay”’s “Red Coins on the Ship Afloat” scatters them all o’er the level, including making this the only use o’ the eponymous risen pirate ship. Meanwhile, “Dire Dire Docks” dedicates a star to its submarine while its up in a way that connects to “Bowser in the Fire Sea” in a far mo’ memorable way than “Jolly Roger Bay” uses its pirate ship. That said, I do like the red coins being hidden inside clams. If they had made the other red coin hiding places mo’ interesting — maybe put some o’ the red coins in niches in the ship ’stead o’ just floating in plain sight & put some o’ the forgettable red coin placements in mo’ interesting places, it could’ve beaten “Dire, Dire Dock”’s repetitive placements. But then, “Jolly Roger Bay” just doesn’t have ’nough memorable landmarks for red coins. Part o’ me thinks it would’ve been better if every red coin were hidden in a clam, with the clams scattered all o’er the level; howe’er, I think “Jolly Roger Bay” would need to be bigger for that to work. I’m not sure if that clams work outside o’ water, but I think they would’ve worked just as well if they could, which would’ve a’least allowed a clam to go in the cave.

Comparing “Jolly Roger Bay” & “Dire, Dire Docks”’s “Through the Jet Stream” ( these levels are so similar they have a star with the same name ) is trickier. “Jolly Roger Bay” just requires you ( casual players a’least — speedrunners don’t follow the rules o’ mere mortals, so we don’t base our qualifications on their obscure experiences ) to grab a metal cap & slowly walk down to the jet stream to grab the star, which requires no skill & is just a lock & key puzzle that demands you get some other thing 1st, something you’ll likely get after 1st playing this level — a borderline fetch quest. “Dire, Dire Dock”’s also requires the metal cap, but also requires swimming through 5 rings in a row, Superman 64 style, before the star appears. While one might be tempted to consider this extra complexity to a “puzzle” perhaps underbaked an improvement, the problem is that this added puzzle isn’t clever, either, & its difficulty only comes from bad controls & the janky way the rings’ hitboxes are programmed so that you oft “miss” a ring you clearly went through. That this puzzle is reused in ’nother star on that level hurts it, too — tho I’ll speak mo’ ’bout that when we get to “Dire, Dire Docks” itself. I’d say that less is mo’, & that a painless halfbaked puzzle is better than a tedious one, since a’least you can get it o’er with & forget it existed. ’Course, that being the case, it’s clear that both stars are blah @ best.

“Blast to the Stone Pillar” not only doesn’t fit this level’s theme very well, it’s done better in “Whomp’s Fortress”, which makes its cannon mo’ than a 1-time gimmick. I s’pose a cannon could fit in with the pirate theme they half-heartedly implemented; ¿but then why isn’t the cannon on the ship like in “Rainbow Ride”? Then we could’ve also gotten more out o’ the underutilized floating ship.

The DS remake’s extra star, “Switch Star of the Bay”, 1 o’ the dozenth iteration o’ the switch star mechanic wherein the player must hit a switch & then race to the area in which it makes the star appear before the timer runs out, has e’en less to do with this level’s theme, which is per habit for the DS remake’s switch stars. They just threw the switch & star in the cave & added a cage round the star so you’d have to come back & complete this mission once you’ve unlocked Luigi. I guess they figured they were adding variety to this level by using the invisibility cap; but since the invisibility cap is used in many other levels, it actually hurts variety by making this level mo’ like others.

If there is anything “Jolly Roger Bay” may have that’s better than “Dire Dire Docks”, it may be aesthetics. One could argue a pirate theme, e’en if not implemented very well ( you’d think a pirate level would have enemies that aren’t just fish, clams, & Goombas ), with its subtle touches o’ seaweed & beach sand & its sandy cove, is mo’ interesting than “Dire Dire Docks”’s ( also not strongly implemented ) mix o’ water & mechanics; but I feel they’re close, & it truly depends on taste. The green fogginess o’ the level also makes it look a bit better than “Dire Dire Docks”’s relentless gray.

“Jolly Roger Bay” has difficulty balance problems as well. “Jolly Roger Bay” & “Dire, Dire Docks” are so similar that they don’t e’en differ much in difficulty, despite the latter being far later in the game. In fact, thanks to the eel & star’s wonky hit detection & the fact that the eel does so much damage to you on impact, added to the health being drained from being underwater, “Can the Eel Come Out to Play” is harder than any star in either & harder than any star in the 1st floor area ’cept for maybe the wing cap stage’s & “Bowser in the World”’s, which are bonus stars. “Jolly Roger Bay” also, for some reason, has only 104 coins, which, added to the significance o’ the change that the sunken ship rising after the 1st star causes, makes it much easier to end up getting screwed out o’ 100 coins after already collecting a significant ’mount, which the developers for some reason kept doing in early-game levels.³

On the other hand, “Jolly Roger Bay” is also probably the smallest main course in the game, which means you won’t have too much exploring to do for coins. But it also makes the level feel barren & boring, & the sluggishness o’ Mario’s swimming makes it feel just as long as the larger levels — it’s just that you spend mo’ time mashing the A button & staring @ empty water than running round doing interesting movement.

In short, there is almost nothing in “Jolly Roger Bay” that isn’t redundant — & that’s the worst offense any work o’ art can commit. That these redundant tasks were ne’er that fun in the 1st place is only worse. I s’pose one could argue that all this repetition creates something o’ a shared theme ’mong these levels; but themes only work if you do something interesting with them. “Cool, Cool Mountain” vs. “Tall Tall Mountain” have themes shared ’mong them, including both having slides; but “Tall Tall Mountain”’s slide is significantly mo’ advanced in its challenge in interesting ways, looks totally different to the point that you would have to pay attention to notice the similarities ’tween these levels, & twists other similarities ( both are mountains, but “Cool, Cool Mountain” has you go downward, “Tall Tall Mountain” has you go upward ). These 2 levels’ repetitions add barely anything to make them worth repeating.

While the English versions o’ Super Mario 64 have “Jolly Roger Bay”’s portrait show a pirate ship, the original Japanese version just shows a bunch o’ bubbles. I’d presume they were short on time when they 1st released the Japanese version & later while working on the English versions decided to take the time to make the portrait less boring. Surprisingly, they didn’t keep the pirate ship portrait in the DS version, leaving it as just bubbles ’gain not only in the Japanese release, but also the English releases as well.

14. Dire Dire Docks

’Course, the unfortunate fact o’ repetition is it brings all iterations down. It doesn’t matter which is the copy o’ which: 2 copies just morph into the feeling o’ playing a level that’s been stretched too long.

E’en if “Jolly Roger Bay” didn’t exist, “Dire Dire Docks” would probably be near the bottom. I praised some o’ its star implementations, but only in comparison to “Jolly Roger Bay’s”. While the moving poles are mo’ interesting than finding red coins on the ship ( tho not mo’ interesting than finding them in clams ), you’re still forced to wait on moving poles, & it’s not as if pole mechanics aren’t in many other levels — tho, to be fair, since these move, these are the most dynamic, & since this is a mechanical level, they fit better here than, say, inside a volcano or… whate’er “Bowser in the Fire Sea” is s’posed to be.

“Collect the Caps…” is a great idea, expecting you to mix the invisible & metal cap where otherwise caps are ne’er combined, that isn’t truly implemented well, since you don’t actually need the metal cap to get inside the cage. Still, given that it a’least tricks the vast majority o’ players into thinking one should get both caps, — ¿& isn’t what the vast majority o’ players will do mo’ important that what one could potentiall do? — this is still stronger than every other star in this level, e’en if only on an aesthetic level. When your competition is all weak, it’s easier for the weak to win.

Worse, the DS remake, due to limiting each powerup to a specific character, makes it impossible to mix powerups, turning it into a basic invisibility-cap star.

’Nother star that only wins by aesthetics ’lone is the 1st star, “Board Bowser’s Sub”, which is notable as the only star necessary to beat the game ( barring glitches ), as you need to collect this specific star to unlock “Bowser in the Fire Sea”, & thus the last 3rd o’ the game. It is purely that quirk & how memorable it is that the sub disappears after beating “Bowser in the Fire Sea” that makes this star notable in any way. That “Jolly Roger Bay” did something similar with its sunken ship — tho in a less interesting way — makes this worse. Otherwise, it’s just a slow swim & a simple climb ’cross cork blocks with no penalty for failing this simple platforming, despite much earlier levels having far higher stakes. Imagine playing through “Shifting Sand Land” & “Lethal Lava Land” & then unlocking “Bowser in the Fire Sea” by swimming for several minutes & then jumping ’cross a short bridge — nothing but a letdown.

& then we have “Through the Jet Stream” & “The Manta Ray’s Reward”. I mentioned under “Jolly Roger Bay” how the Superman 64 mechanic o’ swimming through rings is repeated twice & badly implemented, tho not in complete detail. The rings have buggy hitboxes that cause you to oft “miss” them when you clearly go through them due to a physics bug that causes the Manta Ray & ( less oft ) the jet stream to produce rings ’hind you while in front o’ you, which is hard to see, since the rings are sprites, not true polygons, which was a prevalent trick employed to hide the N64’s weak handling o’ 3D — an unfortunate case wherein Super Mario 64’s terrible graphics outright harm its gameplay. So these are akin to a Donkey Kong Country 3’s “Rocket Run”: gimmicks that are interesting, but badly implemented so that they’re not fun. ’Cept in “Rocket Run”’s defense, ’twas a 1-time gimmick, while this gimmick is repeated, sapping it o’ what might’ve been its only strength, its freshness, ’specially since the developers didn’t e’en bother to spread the use o’ these gimmicks so that you might forget you’d already done it after a while — ¡the stars come right after each other! So these stars are mo’ like a Donkey Kong 64 “Beaver Bother” — & nobody wants to bother with that.

1 major pain with “Dire Dire Docks” is that you have to swim through the long tunnel to the 2nd area for half the stars. It’s just wasting time for cinematics, an unfortunately common trope during the N64 era. It’s also a bizarre trope, since N64 games ne’er looked good, e’en in their own time ( the Donkey Kong Country games on the Super Nintendo look better than all o’ them ). “Dire, Dire Docks” isn’t e’en a nice-looking level, being mostly blue water & gray walls. ¿Why would I e’er want to linger on looking @ that?

The quick o’ it is: “Dire, Dire Docks” has interesting ideas that aren’t implemented well, while “Jolly Roger Bay” has fewer interesting ideas that are generally implemented worse. Still, the 2 are close, & my frustration with “Dire, Dire Docks” & its dumbass Superman 64 rings almost made me want to slip it below “Jolly Roger Bay”.

“Dire Dire Docks”’s level entrance isn’t a portrait but a weird wall o’ what I guess is s’posed to be gravity-defying blue water, which starts out in the way o’ the entranceway to “Bowser in the Fire Sea”, only to move & allow you access to “Bowser in the Fire Sea” after collecting “Board Bowser’s Sub”. Tho part o’ me wants to complain ’bout forcing the player to collect a certain star to beat the game, when they don’t require any other star, it’s a simple, easy ’nough star that I can’t complain much. ’Sides, I like the exciting twist that ’hind the star door, which the 1st star door has already established per pattern hide Bowser levels, hides ’nother main level, too. I just wished they’d picked a mo’ interesting level to guard ’hind it.

13. Rainbow Ride

This is the level I most wanted to like due to its creative twist on the sky theme, but is ruined by that constant foe o’ mine: autoscrollers. “Rainbow Ride” is 1 o’ the worst autoscrollers thanks to its dearth o’ impediments: you’ll spend ’bout 8% o’ the time dodging static blocks you have to be asleep ( which is likely, considering how boring this level is ) to be unable to get round, 2% o’ the time dodging legitimately tricky dynamic objects, like the Amp & firespitter round the big house in the sky, & 90% o’ the time just standing round hoping we don’t fall asleep just as Mario likely has. There is 1 section that is ’bout a minute or 2 long that has just a single coin floating in otherwise empty air.

That this is the final main level o’ the game makes this all the mo’ depressing — tho, thanks to this game’s open-ended hub, it’s just as likely the player plays the far superior “Tick Tock Clock” or any other level after this, & the last level the player actually plays is “Bowser in the Sky”, which is also, thankfully, much better than this.

Worse, “Rainbow Ride” is a linear level, so it falls into a problem most other levels were free from: repetition. That’s right: not only do you have to wait in boredom on moving magic carpets, you have to do it for 4 whole stars. ( not including the coin star, which we could defend as a sort o’ challenge where you have to do just ’bout everything in 1 life — ’sides, this level has so many coins that you don’t actually have to go to either the airship or the big house to get 100 coins ). Unlike other levels, like “Lethal Lava Land” or “Wet-Dry World”, which offer ways to abbreviate much o’ the level on some stars, there is no way to avoid the long carpet rides for each o’ these stars, with the exception o’ the 1st ride, which you can bypass by taking a detour round the area with the triangles. Thus, this is 1 o’ the few times Super Mario 64’s mission system feels like repeating the same thing multiple times. O, ¿& the aforementioned long wait doing nothing with the single coin? That’s before the fork ’tween the airship & the big house, so you have to go through that nonsense 3 times @ minimum.

’Cause “Rainbow Ride” is so linear, it falls into ’nother problem that Super Mario 64 usually avoided, but is common in Donkey Kong 64: splitting stars into clearly-separated hub areas — so separate that they may as well be separate levels. The red coin star has the stone maze, which is only used for red coins & finding the cannon Bob-omb; the big house & the long trip after the carpet fork that leads to it is only used for “The Big House in the Sky”; the back area with the swinging platforms are only used for “Tricky Triangles!” & “Swingin’ in the Breeze”; & the airship & the path to it is only used for “Cruiser Crossing the Rainbow” & “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. & unlike “Hazy Maze Cave”, the level doesn’t branch back into other paths as a way to hide its linear nature. Quite to opposite: unlike every other level, ’cept the explicitly linear Bowser levels ( which don’t have multiple missions, so they have a good ’scuse ), most o’ these paths, like the big house & the airship, lead to explicit ends that are awkward to go back from ( which is probably why the developers made it so that you could get 100 coins without going down either o’ those paths ).

“Rainbow Ride” is a level that seemed to be made either before the developers decided to make the game exploration-based with multiple missions & had them awkwardly forced in afterward.

Out o’ the stars that require taking the carpet ride, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, where you have to use the cannon on the airship to shoot thru a rainbow ring to get to a small floating platform with a star, would be the most interesting if it didn’t feel too much like a copy o’ “Cruiser Crossing the Rainbow”. Other than the detour puzzle @ the start o’ finding the Bob-omb who opens the cannon & the short shoot thru the rainbow ring, the bulk o’ the star is just getting to the airship ’gain. A’least they made this the last star so it’s as far from the 1st star as possible. Still, I think this should’ve been the 1st star & “Cruiser Crossing the Rainbow” should’ve been removed.

Surprisingly, “Rainbow Ride”’s red-coin star, “Coins Amassed in a Maze”, is 1 o’ its stronger stars. For once I’m glad a level doesn’t scatter its red coins all o’er, since this level’s aforementioned linear branches would make going back & getting coins on a different branch a pain. Tho this star isolates its red coins in 1 area, it does a good job o’ a’least spreading them round that area, while keeping some coherence to a star type whose other iterations usually show a perplexing lack o’ coherency ( while also not having much variety ). My only qualm is, one does have to wonder what relevance it has to a sky level. Then ’gain, it does have a castlelike flavor to it, & the level in general seems to have a castlelike theme to it, what with the “big house in the sky”. If the developers had strengthened the castlelike elements in the level so that ’twas an outright sky/castle hybrid theme, it’d strengthen both this star & the level theme as a whole — & would fit great, since this is the last regular level o’ the game.

The strongest star in this level is definitely “Tricky Triangles!”, not only ’cause it lets you skip all slow carpet rides, but also ’cause timing jumps on the flattened triangles before they pop up can actually be a tricky challenge. The only problem is that this star doesn’t fit the level theme @ all. It feels like it belongs mo’ in “Tick Tock Clock”. The same could be said for “Swingin’ in the Breeze”, tho that star’s far less fresh, being the same basic jumps involving dodging firespitters as you’ve done many times before in “Bowser in the Lava Sea” ( & doesn’t involve breezes much @ all ).

’Stead o’ a portrait, “Rainbow Ride” uses a boxy hole up in a side area o’ the 4th floor. This would’ve been unique if they didn’t reuse it for the “Wing Mario O’er the Rainbow” bonus level right across from the clock room. This always confused me as a kid: while that bonus level has a shiny glow coming out o’ its hole, ”Rainbow Ride”’s doesn’t; as a kid I always assumed “Rainbow Ride” was the mo’ “special” level & always mistook it for the level with the glow, so I’d oft go in the wrong entrance & get stuck either collecting that star, exiting course & warping all the way back to the beginning o’ the castle, or letting myself fall off the level & be cornfielded back to the waterfall outside the castle.

12. Lethal Lava Land

Coming so closely before the mo’ interesting “Bowser in the Lava Sea” doesn’t make this level look good. Like the Bowser levels, “Lethal Lava Land” e’en feels a bit mo’ linear than most levels, tho with outright branching paths, & later on a way to open up the whole level for exploration anywhere you want with a shell that appears next to the start that allows you to move directly on lava, which is a useful way to abbreviate the level for later missions — an important element for a level you have to do many missions in that helps this level feel less repetitious as, say, ’nother linear level with branching paths, “Rainbow Ride”.

Like many o’ the weaker levels in this game, this level is rife with repetition. The 1st star has you travel from the southernmost side o’ the level to the northernmost & defeat a giant Bully. The 2nd star… has you go 1 moving platform farther, defeat 3 regular Bullies, & then defeat yet ’nother Big Bully. Honestly, I don’t think e’en “Dire Dire Docks” & “Jolly Roger Bay” have stars as blatantly copy-paste as this. The developers didn’t e’en bother putting the 2nd star ’way from the 1st star or spread them apart in the main sequence ( though thanks to Super Mario 64 being less anal ’bout their mission sequence as Super Mario Sunshine & Super Mario Galaxy, the player can choose to spread them out if they want ).

Then the 3rd star has arguably the weakest red-coin challenge. All 8 red coins are floating o’er a small sliding puzzle that plays itself. The star sets up the pieces magically moving out from under you, causing you to fall into the lava below as a challenge, but this challenge is nullified e’en for players who couldn’t time jumps on sliding pieces @ all by the unlikelihood that the piece you happen to be on @ any moment happens to be the 1 that slides ’way & the fact that the red coins heal you. There is something to be said ’bout a star that is easy to get in terms o’ raw challenge, but requires exploration, like the red coins in the maze in “Rainbow Ride”, or an authentic challenge, like getting all the red coins in the Bowser levels; this star has neither quality: it is the 3D equivalent o’ a Super Mario Bros. level with a straight flat ground for 1 screen & the flagpole right there, & nothing ’tween it & the star but a bunch o’ Goombas sandwiching Mushroom power-ups.

It reminds me o’ the infamous “Luigi’s Purple Coins” star from Super Mario Galaxy… ’cept that star actually required raw platforming talent, so that star was compelling.

“Red-Hot Log Rolling” & “Hot-Foot-It into the Volcano” are definitely the strongest stars in the level, but they’re still just OK. “Red-Hot Log Rolling” requires the player to spin on a rolling cylinder to make it move toward where they need to go, a mechanic only used ’gain in “Tall, Tall Mountain”. But this challenge is ruined by the fact that e’en a non-expert player could figure out that they could just long-jump ’stead o’ rolling the log, making the log pointless. I s’pose one could argue that it offers a mo’ “training-wheels” version o’ this mechanic, while the “Tall, Tall Mountain” ( which is farther ’way, & thus harder to long jump from ) is the evolved form; but the “Tall, Tall Mountain” version is already evolved in that it’s in the middle o’ a long trek, while this is @ the end o’ a very short path to the star. When your mechanic is the focus o’ your mission, that is the worst time to nullify that mechanic as a form o’ “training wheels”, ’less this is a very early-game level, which this is not — it’s midgame.

“Hot-Foot-It into the Volcano” is just a straight curve round & up the inside o’ the volcano in the center o’ the level, with basic jumps ’long platforms floating o’er lava. ’Gain, the fact that we have a level with much better linear platforming so close after this level hurts this star.

“Elevator Tour in the Volcano”⁴ has you return to the volcano to ride a checkered platform that doesn’t look like it belongs in a volcano @ all as it slowly moves up. I think there is maybe 1 firespitter you have to dodge to reach a pole, & then you do mo’ hopping o’er platforms, just like the previous star. So this is basically an e’en mo’ boring version o’ the average “Rainbow Ride” star without the better visuals. It sucks.

11. Big Boo’s Haunt

This is ’nother level I wanted to love, since I love spooky levels & love levels that focus on exploring. But while this level, thankfully, does not involve autoscrolling, it does involve repetition: many o’ the stars just revolve round killing a lot o’ Boos. Thanks to every Boo for some reason giving you a whole 5 coins each, the coin star is redundant as well.

The most interesting star is probably “Eye to Eye in the Secret Room”, which challenges you to grab the invisible cap & race up to the top room & into the Boo painting to fight a giant Mr. I. The weakest part is the boss itself, which is, well, a giant Mr. I. It’s not any mo’ dangerous & you still defeat it by the same means, spinning round it till it gets confused, ’cept requiring maybe a few mo’ revolutions. Still, it’s a clever enemy type in itself; just 1 you fight many mo’ times. If anything, I’d say it would’ve been better to keep the boss but get rid o’ the regular Mr. Is, since none o’ the other Mr. Is in this game — specially the ones in other levels, where they don’t e’en fit, do much but offer an easy 5 coins.

“Big Boo’s Balcony” is probably the 2nd best, but the Big Boo fight is weakened by you having to already fight Big Boo @ the end o’ the 1st 2 stars. This star could’ve worked just as well with just the challenge o’ climbing to the top o’ the roof, which is 95% o’ the star’s challenge, anyway.

“Secret of the Haunted Books” promises an interesting, fresh theme revolving round a haunted library — fresh, but still fitting with the o’erall haunted theme — but delivers weak gameplay with it. You run through a short straight hallway ( well, it curves in the middle, but it doesn’t branch ), dodging books that fly @ you from the shelves, which just requires jumping o’er their spawn points. E’en if you do get hit, they only do 1 damage & you have 6 HP, ¿so who cares?

@ the end is that o’erused puzzle in this game: hit the things in a certain order & get hurt if you don’t already know the pattern. It’s basically just the treasure chest puzzle used 3 times ’mong the 2 water levels, but with books. There’s only 3 books, too, so a sane person can only mess up up to 2 times, which is not ’nough to kill the player. Then ’gain, if this were actually challenging, it would be frustratingly unfair.

You can skip the whole thing by employing moderately hard jumps from a balcony from ’nother door, which is faster, but harder than just running through a hall & punching 3 books. Actually involving platforming, it’s funner than the intended route, but it also just falls into a generic jump challenge, which is still weak. You know a star is bad when it’s worse than a generic jumping challenge.

It says something that the red coins star, which players see in every level, is 1 o’ the strongest in this level. “Seek the 8 Red Coins” takes advantage o’ the many hiding places the mansion’s many rooms offers. Thankfully, the developers were wise ’nough to keep them all in the main mansion & didn’t throw any outside or in the weird shed thing out front. The mansion’s rooms offer plenty ’nough variety for the red coins, while keeping them all to the main mansion’s main rooms balances this with a strong sense o’ coherence, giving it the best o’ both. In fact, I would outright say that “Big Boo’s Haunt” has the best red-coin challenge o’ the game.

“Go on a Ghost Hunt” by itself is a strong star to start the level. It, too, challenges you to explore the level, but for ghosts to defeat & only on the 1st floor. After defeating them all, you fight Big Boo, which creates a set o’ stairs so you can climb up to the 2nd floor, where the star appears ( & thankfully it only appears after you defeat the Big Boo, as you can easily just triple jump up to the 2nd floor, anyway ). This complements the red coin challenge in an interesting way: since red coins are scattered through the bottom floor, you will inevitably see a few o’ them as you pass by. So if you remember where you saw them, you can mo’ quickly pass through & grab them & spend most o’ your time exploring the newly opened 2nd floor.

The red coin star would’ve been perfect as the 2nd star, as it follows right after the 1st star. But ’stead the 2nd star, “Ride Big Boo’s Merry-Go-Round”, challenges you to take a detour down into the weird shed into an underground sewerlike passage ( tho those who fell in a hole in the mansion during the 1st star would’ve accidentally stumbled ’pon this area & had to tediously climb all the way back ). There are no platforming challenges throughout this long path — nothing but a long elevator ride downward. The only use for this whole area is the main room where there is a spinning carousel where, if you have the right star selected ( ¿why the developers decided to enforce star order here, I have no idea ), Boos will appear & you have to defeat them all ’gain, but this time without any platforming or exploration to break up the monotony, like in the 1st star — though I s’pose there are firespitters that are brainlessly easy to dodge. After you defeat all the Boos, you get to fight Big Boo yet ’gain to collect the star. Like with “Jolly Roger Bay”, this star not only is not interesting by itself, it hurts the 1st star, which would’ve been great if it didn’t feel repetitive after this star.

The DS remake tries to add a li’l mo’ action in this underground area with “Switch Star in the Basement”, yet ’nother switch star. The only notable thing ’bout it is that they force you to use Wario by putting a black brick, only breakable by Wario, o’er the switch.

Rather than use yet ’nother portrait for this level’s entrance, the developers made this entrance a small cage you need to touch to make Mario magically shrink inside, with the implication that the level is inside the cage. @ the back o’ the stairway ’tween the 1st floor & basement is a courtyard that @ 1st appears empty & pointless; but after you collect 15 stars it suddenly becomes infested by Boos, who hold items that you can collect if you defeat them & can see if you stare @ them, turning them transparent, where their item reveals itself. While most Boos just have a useless coin, 1 holds the cage that leads to this level.

Admittedly, it is a bit o’ a bother to keep killing the boo to unleash the cage — which is why the developers in the DS remake made it so that the cage stays there after you leave the stage after every star. Also, it probably would’ve made mo’ sense to have a miniature mansion ’stead o’ a cage, but I have an inkling that that would’ve required better graphical tech or experience than this new 3D game could handle yet.

10. Bob-omb Battlefield

I commonly complain ’bout games starting with bland-looking “grasslands”⁵. Super Mario 64 tries to spice theirs up with a bit o’ a war-torn battlefield theme, but they fail to truly add much “military” to the level — just a bunch o’ Bob-ombs & cannons, which are both found in nearly every level already. Compare this to, say, World 8-3 o’ the original Super Mario Bros. with its castle walls in the background. In fact, the level that comes right after this 1, which also has a bit o’ a grassland theme to it, does a better job o’ matching that than this. This level just looks like a bland grassland that could be found in any game.

While not surprising that the developers would want to start with a level with a rather straight path ( though with forks & e’en a dead end @ places to help players dip their toes into exploration ), it is surprising that the developers make the 1st star a mo’ challenge-based star that ends with a boss. Then ’gain, this came after a period when Mario games were mo’ challenging action games. Ironically, people from newer generations who come to this game fresh would probably find free-form exploration less frustrating than dodging the giant Chain Chomp & water cannons & trying to battle Big Bob-omb.

Indeed, while the eponymous Big Bob-omg in “Big Bob-omb on the Summit” makes a great warm-up to a skill you’ll need when fighting Bowser, his janky hitbox makes him harder than he should be. It’s shocking how common it is to grab him when right ’hind him only to grab through him as if he were a ghost & get grabbed by him. Trying to reach his back can also be surprisingly tricky with how fast he rotates on his last hit, tho clever players may realize they can jump o’er him for a shortcut.

The DS remake changes this boss fight by necessity, since they, oddly, make you start as Yoshi, who can’t grab. In that version you just lick up the Bob-ombs Big Bob-omb throws & spit them back @ him, which is very easy. They then make you rematch Big Bob-omb the traditional way for a later star, “Big Bob-omb’s Revenge”, using someone other than Yoshi ( or Yoshi wearing a cap ).

Luckily, Super Mario 64 offers alternatives from the very start: less than halfway through the path to Big Bob-omb’s summit one runs into a Chain Chomp ties to a wooden peg in front o’ a gate guarding a conspicuous star, a star I always make sure to get 1st, ’cause getting stars in the developer-decided order in Super Mario 64 is like player Cuphead on simple mode — it’s almost missing the whole point o’ the game.

“Bob-omb Battlefield” is the most notable instance o’ a level you’ll have to come back to later, thanks to a’least 1 star requiring the wing cap ( & the coin star requiring it if one wants to keep one’s sanity ). Since Super Mario 64 levels kick you out after every star, anyway, it’s not as annoying as in the Rareware 3D platformers.

I like this game’s use o’ the wing-cap in this level, as it offers a safe-from-death, but not free, way to make the player practice flying with it, & it fits the cannon theme o’ the level. It’s also fitting that the 1st level would put so much focus on a power-up so important to the game that Mario has it on the box art.

“Shoot to the Island in the Sky” feels thrown-in & redundant, tho, since you have to shoot to the island to get a red coin & to get “Mario Wings to the Sky”. The developers who worked on the DS remake seemed to agree, since they removed it to make room for the 2 new stars they added.

Demonstrating this level theme’s dearth o’ specific qualities, we have a race with Koopa the Quick, a challenge that could exist in most other levels, too. In fact, I’m surprised the developers didn’t put him in mo’ levels ( the developers o’ Super Mario Odyssey must’ve felt that way, too, since they put a Koopa race in every level in that game ). It basically challenges the player to do what they did in the 1st star ( & unlike “Behind Chain Chomp’s Gate” you have to do the 1st star before this 1, since Koopa the Quick won’t appear ’less you specifically select his star, which requires collecting the 1st star ), but within a very lenient time limit, which is a fair ’nough challenge, & a good way to challenge players to hone their ability to not just explore pathways, but also learn them so they can travel through them mo’ quickly later.

“Find the 8 Red Coins” has that particularly bad mix o’ having coin placements that are arbitrary, but also repetitive & uninspired. 2 are right next to each other round where the star spawns & ’nother’s on a random rock near the beginning o’ the level. ’Nother’s hiding in plain sight on the floating island, essentially just requiring the player to shoot to it for the 3rd time.

The best placements are @ the top o’ the otherwise pointless moving platforms, in the secret gated fort under the bridge, & on the Chain Chomp’s peg, which is the only 1 that adds an actual threat to collecting it. ( Some may consider this latter choice hypocritical after complaining ’bout the island red coin; but this is different for 3 reasons: 1. the Chain Chomp star comes after the red coin star in natural order; 2. while the Chain Chomp red coin adds a quick threat to your health getting it, getting it is fast & doesn’t require tedious cannon work, like the island one; 3. this red coin actually enhances the Chain Chomp star as it adds ’nother indicator that the peg is important ). The red coin on the slope isn’t a lazy placement, just annoying: you either have to know some obscure speedrun technique to get up it fast or you need to slowly walk up it, since jumping, for some reason, makes Mario slide down with no way to get back up till he reaches the bottom, or go round to the top & slide down from there. Neither are compelling challenges; just tedious. If “Bob-omb Battlefield” had mo’ interesting landmarks, there might’ve been mo’ interesting pockets to hide the red coins in.

I have mixed opinions on the 100-coin star o’ this level. I like that the level gives you plenty o’ coins crowded in large areas, making it an easy warm-up for the 1st level. Having the extra wooden pegs is good, too, since the player is likely to play round with them, being in a safer place than the Chain Chomp 1, & realize they can ground pound them, & then remember the Chain Chomp peg & put 2 & 2 together…

Howe’er, I don’t like how the level makes it seem manageable to get 100 coins before getting the wing cap, only to have a lot o’ coins in the sky. I think it’s technically possible to get 100 coins without the cap, but it’s much mo’ tedious, & nothing’s worse than being stuck ’tween the rock o’ abandoning a 100-coin star with 80+ coins ’cause you don’t have the wing cap yet & the hard place o’ tediously shooting yourself @ the coin rings hoping to scrounge as many as you can without being able to fly.

If collecting 8 red coins in uninspired places, 5 secrets in rings, & 100 coins wasn’t ’nough, the developers o’ the DS remake picked the worst level to add 1 o’ their many iterations o’ “collect 5 silver stars” star, generically-named “5 Silver Stars!”. In their defense, they did make Chain Chomp roam round with a silver star @ the end o’ their chain, which is something new & actually challenging. They should’ve just made the new star “Grab Chain Chomp’s Chain” & should’ve just had a real star on its chain: that would’ve been unique, cut out the fluff, & would’ve been easier to implement, since they clearly already implemented the Chain Chomp roaming round & dragging something with it.

9. Hazy Maze Cave

“Hazy Maze Cave” is a well-constructed o’erall level environment tarnished by not-so-great star challenges.

“Haze Maze Cave” is the perfect balance ’tween Super Mario 64’s 2 major level types: linear & open. It has branching lines, like “Rainbow Ride” & “Lethal Lava Land”, but with branches connecting together in mo’ than 1 place, offering many opportunities to loop back into paths missed, which is convenient for collecting the 100-coin star — ’specially for a level notorious for having few coins & being tricky to get them all in⁶. In short, “Haze Maze Cave” is, well, a maze.

& to “Hazy Maze Cave”’s credit, it does come up with quite a few mechanics that feel different but also feel tied to the cavernous level theme: rolling rocks, underground mines polluted with toxic gas that slowly saps Mario’s health ’way, & elevators, adding a bit o’ a mechanical edge to this level. Howe’er most o’ the challenges revolving round these mechanics are either half-executed or executed with minor problems.

3 stars revolve round a small lake after a slow-falling elevator, 2 o’ which require maneuvering a slow-moving, awkward-to-control Dorrie, which are fine ’nough — in fact, the way the developers hid the metal cap in a section within ’nother level using a mechanic one might s’pose had done its job for the 1st star is a clever twist on the pattern they had set up with cap levels. & to be fair, we should technically subtract 1 from the previous 2 #s, since the metal cap stage using Dorrie technically isn’t a “Hazy Maze Cave” level but 1 o’ the “Castle Secret Stars”.

The 1st star, “Swimming Beast in the Cavern”, is the other star that requires using Dorrie, just to reach the mountain in the middle o’ the lake with a star hanging round in the open.

The 3rd star, “Metal-Head Mario Can Move!” ( “Metal-Head Wario Can Move” in the DS remake ) doesn’t require Dorrie @ all, but requires the player to get the metal cap, race to the switch, & then employ some basic long jumps to get the star. The main challenge o’ the “race”, unfortunately, is that Metal Mario moves slowly in water, which is boring & feels mo’ frustrating than a race where you can actually move quickly.

Probably the most interesting star is “Navigating the Toxic Maze”, which says exactly what it requires: hurry & find the exit in the sprawling maze before the toxic gas causes Mario to suffocate to death ( strangely, leaving the gas doesn’t make Mario reheal oxygen like reaching the surface o’ water does ). Like “Lethal Lava Land”’s red-coin star, there are coins, including a blue coin switch, to help reheal lost health; howe’er, unlike that star, which is fast & easy, so the coins only dampen an already easy challenge, this much larger, trickier section can still threaten you, e’en with the coins.

“A-Maze-Ing Emergency Exit” threatens to weaken “Navigating the Toxic Maze”, tho, by forcing the player to do the same thing, but find ’nother exit that isn’t necessarily harder to find than the other. Howe’er, if you want to avoid that, the developers were nice ’nough to provide an easily-telegraphed way to skip the maze & reach the section the maze leads to from the rolling-rocks room. This star’s net-climbing section near the end is also unfair due to wonky hitboxes that make it easy for Mario to just climb off the edge & fall right into a bottomless pit, e’en if it looks like he should still be grabbing the net.

“Watch for Rolling Rocks” is a solid challenge that fits the level theme, but isn’t spectacular. Also, the rolling rocks are a bit random. Then ’gain, it takes 3 to kill you, which is probably the most you need to pass & there’s a coin trail halfway through the short danger field, so it’s mo’ a case o’ very bad luck if you manage to be killed by them. The name is weird in that you’ll probably pass these rocks a few times, — the door ’hind them leads to the 2 maze stars you’ll likely have done before this star — which is probably why the developers didn’t make them a major challenge to bypass. The true trick to this star is realizing there’s a star round the rolling rocks in the 1st place, requiring wall jumps to reach a high-up place you’d need to use the 1st-person camera to find. Howe’er, the name is good in that it hints to you where the star is without giving ’way the puzzle.

This is 1 o’ the few stars that may be better in the DS remake, where you have to grab a Super Mushroom with Wario & break the rolling rocks to make the star appear. While this takes ’way the challenge o’ exploring the area to find the star, it replaces that with a mo’ interesting puzzle that mo’ closely fits the rolling rocks.

Those who were excited by my description o’ “Hazy Maze Cave’s” branching paths connecting together in many places & the opportunities this offers for red-coin hunting ( probably no one, since I’m 1 o’ the few people who actually enjoys exploring & not just holding right & pressing A when the game tells me to ) will be disappointed to learn that “Hazy Maze Cave’s” red coins are all in 1 room, &, as the star name “Elevate for 8 Red Coins” warns, all are gotten by riding slow moving platforms.

The DS remake decides to add to this already well-used room by adding yet ’nother switch star with “Underground Switch Star”, which also requires Wario to break a black brick ’bove the switch, making it virtually a copy o’ “Big Boo’s Haunt” “Switch Star in the Basement”.

Hazy Maze Cave’s entrance isn’t a portrait, but a large hole full o’ some shiny black liquid. It’s unique & fits this level’s cavernous theme better than, say, “Shifting Sand Land” or “Snowman Land”’s weird entrances.

8. Snowman Land

“Snowman Land” suffers a similar problem as “Dire Dire Docks” & “Jolly Roger Bay” in that it feels a bit redundant as yet ’nother snow level after “Cool, Cool Mountain”. Howe’er, “Snowman Land”’s similarities to “Cool, Cool Mountain” are mostly just aesthetics, while none o’ its stars are, gameplay-wise, similar @ all to “Cool, Cool Mountain’s”. While “Cool, Cool Mountain” focuses its gameplay more on its mountainous quality, with just 2 stars focusing on ice or snow, with snow & winter acting mainly as aesthetic flourishes, such as the chimney you enter to reach the slide, “Snowman Land” focuses all its gameplay on its icy state, whether it’s dodging the icy breath o’ the giant snowman, avoiding ice so cold it hurts you on touch or water that’s cold ’nough to make you lose health e’en when your face is o’er the surface, or exploring an ice sculpture and igloo.

The 1st star, “Snowman’s Big Head”, where you have to climb the snowman & then use the walking penguin’s fat to block the snowman’s icy breath, is the most creative & interesting challenge. The only other place you see this sort o’ challenge is partway through “Tall, Tall Mountain”, ’cept that verison, which just made you wait till the cloud stopped blowing, was much weaker.

Like many other stars in this game, if you’re not up to this challenge, there are alternate ways to reach the star. For example, if you find the cannon Bob-omb hidden deep in the igloo ’hind an ice wall requiring an invisible cap, you can use the cannon near the start o’ the level to shoot straight up @ the star or a convenient tree right next to it.

“In the Deep Freeze” is the 2nd most interesting star, requiring you to navigate a 3D maze o’ ice blocks, which are clear, & thus hard to distinguish from empty space. The DS remake replaces this clever challenge with a braindead challenge, “Yoshi’s Ice Sculpture”, that just asks if you can use Yoshi’s half-assedly thrown-in fire-breathing power to break an ice block with the star, which you already did in the DS version o’ “Cool, Cool Mountain”.

“Into the Igloo” challenges you to find the igloo hidden in the side o’ the Snowman mountain using the shell & inside to navigate a maze, find the invisible cap, & navigate back through the maze under a time limit to reach the star locked in ice. The way the invisible cap is hidden ’hind an ice wall that has a space @ the top allowing you to jump up & climb o’er it is particularly clever.

Not content to ruining just 1 star, the DS remake completely redesigned the igloo so that there is no maze, but just flat bridges o’er icy-cold water, so that you just have to jump straight to the power-up box, grab the invisibility flower as Luigi, & then jump back to the start o’ the area, where there’s a grate you can fall through. Since you have to be Luigi, you have godlike jumping powers, making this frivolous star e’en mo’ a joke. I’m mixed on replacing the ice walls with a grate: while the grate is mo’ explicit in that invisible character can go thru it, whereas invisible characters being able to move thru ice walls isn’t intuitive, grates break the icy theme o’ the level.

“Chill with the Bully” & “Shell Shreddin’ for Red Coins” begs for comparison with “Lethal Lava Land” a few levels earlier. “Shell Shreddin’ for Red Coins”, whose name asks you to ride a shell to pick up red coins, reveals a much mo’ interesting red coin challenge “Lethal Lava Land” could’ve employed than just having them all sitting round on a small sliding puzzle. Howe’er, this level, with just a small icy pond under the platform on which you fight the giant Bully, only requires the shell for getting 2 coins right next to each other on said pond, with the rest scattered in seemingly arbitrary places, & not spread well — in addition to this twin pair, there are also 2 red coins right next to each other on the slope after where you find the shell.

The developers for the DS remake apparently also found this star weak, as they replaced it with “Red Coins in the House”, using that ghetto slang straight from Rogueport ( it’s an igloo, not a house, you dumbshits ), a star challenging you to collect red coins floating o’er icy bridges o’er freezing cold water… which, thinking ’bout it, is not unlike “Lethal Lava Land”’s lame red coin mission: the red coins are just there for the taking, & the water pits aren’t e’en a true challenge, since they only slowly sap your health if you fall in them & can just jump right out & grab 1 o’ the abundant coins to heal yourself instantly afterward. The original version a’least requires some exploration.

’Cept, psyche, the interns they threw into working on “Snowman’s Land” for the DS remake were dropped on their heads as children & decided to add “Snowman’s Silver Star”, a silver star star that puts the silver stars… in pretty much the same places as the red coins were in the original’s “Shell Shreddin’ for Red Coins”. I would actually praise replacing 8 red coins, many o’ which are just duplicated next to each other, with 5 silver stars all in unique places if it mattered… but they just moved the red coins somewhere else, none o’ which are in interesting places, & completely destroyed the actually interesting original’s igloo layout in the process. ¿What the fuck were they thinking?

“Chill with the Bully” is yet ’nother “defeat big Bully” mission after you already did 2 in “Lethal Lava Land”. That level a’least had most o’ the level lead up to their missions; this is right after the start. I guess the icy physics does offer some evolution o’ challenge.

“Whirl from the Freezing Pond” is a pointless star that challenges you to do something you have to do to get half the red coins, anyway: get o’er the wall. It would’ve been nice if they could’ve managed to squeeze in an icy section that requires you to ride the shell thru to reach a star, which would’ve made this star mo’ fleshed-out & less redundant & would’ve given the shell mo’ action. But considering how time-strained this game was, I can’t be surprised to see a filler star every once & a while. A’least “Whirl from the Freezing Pond” is short & easy to get o’er with, which is better than, say, “Cruiser Crossing the Rainbow” from “Rainbow Ride”.

The painting itself is a clever idea: it’s just a wall in a mirror room whose mirror shows “Cool, Cool Mountain”’s painting. This is cleverer than “Shifting Sand Land”’s, which is just a wall without any hint that it acts as a painting. But like “Shifting Sand Land”, it’s odd that they chose this for “Snowman’s Land”, as this level doesn’t have much to do with mirrors. It makes me almost wish they gave this level a mo’ exotic mirror-based theme rather than make it ’nother snow level.

7. Whomp’s Fortress

Making thematically similar level come right after “Bob-omb Battlefield” was a bad idea. This level is also harder than a lot o’ the levels that are later in sequence, like “Jolly Roger Bay” or “Big Boo’s Haunt”, with many places where it’s easy to fall off into a bottomless pit.

That said, “Whomp’s Fortress” is a much mo’ interesting level than “Bob-omb Battlefield”. 1st, its fortress theme stands out mo’ than “Bob-omb Battlefield’s” negligible military theme. While that level just threw a bunch o’ bombs & cannons round a generic grassy mountain in a game that already had many mo’, greater mountains, “Whomp’s Fortress” mixes fenced-off floral fields with a stone & brick structures, & e’en included a li’l shallow lake. Indeed, while “Bob-omb Battlefield” might be 1 o’ the least impressive levels visually in a game that already wasn’t going to win any awards for visuals in its time ( honestly, most Super Nintendo games still looked better ), “Whomp’s Fortress” is 1 o’ the better-looking levels in the game with its small flourishes.

1 problem I have with this level is that it also has a lot o’ cannon-based puzzles, making it e’en mo’ similar to “Bob-omb Battlefield”. Arguably, both levels fit the cannon theme all right, tho “Bob-omb Battlefield” fits it a bit better. Howe’er, “Whomp’s Fortress”’s puzzles are better. To be fair, the only cannon-based star in “Bob-omb Battlefield” that doesn’t also make heavy use o’ the wing cap, the island star, I & the developers o’ the DS remake have already established shouldn’t exist.

If fighting a boss for the 1st star in the 1st level wasn’t ’nough, the 2nd level requires it, too, with “Chip Off Whomp’s Block”. Oddly, tho, the Whomp King is far easier than Big Bob-omb. He also makes clever use o’ 3D positioning, but not as clever as Big Bob-omb. Also, they messed up programming the Whomp King’s hitbox, as you can easily just jump through the Whomp King’s stomach as he falls onto you, sapping any threat had.

“To the Top of the Fortress” challenges you to do the same thing as the 1st star, but also climb a tower @ the top ’stead o’ defeating a giant Whomp. I’m not sure why they put this right after the 1st star. Luckily, “Whomp’s Fortress” lets you do all o’ the other stars in any order, so you can save this for last to give yourself a palate-cleanser if desired. The kind o’ diagonal jumps needed to spiral up the tower’s moving blocks are harder than they appear, but not as hard as the version o’ this puzzle blatantly ripped off in Donkey Kong 64’s final main level, ’cause that game’s controls are 500 times worse than this game’s.

“Shoot into the Wild Blue” is a star that’s hard to evaluate, being someone who has know this game since so young that I can’t e’en remember a time I didn’t know its prominent elements. This star name is vague & almost urges players to be suicidally stupid & shoot themselves into the sky, where they will meet only death in a bottomless pit magical ’nough to still show your drop-shadow. The game actually expects you to shoot yourself up @ a brick structure to the side o’ the fortress. In the game’s defense, it’s a prominent structure that you’d have to be oblivious to not notice & be curious ’bout & the cannon, being in a corner o’ the level, only gives you a few places to shoot yourself that aren’t a gaping bottomless pit. ’Course, Super Mario 64 being Super Mario 64, you can easily triple jump up to the structure, which means 1st-time players may be mo’ likely to find the star while exploring after giving up on this star’s puzzle.

“Red Coins on the Floating Isle” is 1 o’ the better scattered red coin placements, with placements that feel similar to how the developers o’ Super Mario World placed dragon coins, rather than the thoughtless placements in “Bob-omb Battlefield”. The only red coin placement I don’t like is the red coin ’hind the piranha plant ’bove the 1st ramp, which is right next to a red coin on a thin passage. I could think o’ much better places to put it, like past the collapsible bridge, which is otherwise useless. I do find the 2 red coins up on the floating islands fine, since a’least they are on different platforms with some challenge to going from 1 to the other, not just right next to each other on flat ground with only a few dreaded Goombas to get in your way. This star’s name is interesting: the “floating isles” probably refers to the spinning tiny platforms up in the air, but most o’ the red coins are scattered throughout the whole level. But, wait, it’s called “on the Floating Isle”, singular. Well, that’s ’cause the whole level is a floating island. I don’t know if that’s intentional, but it doesn’t matter: unintentional clever design is still clever design.

“Fall onto the Caged Island” is a great example o’ what I love most ’bout Super Mario 64: the way most o’ its challenges have many ways you can go @ them, as opposed to a lot o’ modern “pixel-perfect” platformer level design where you’re s’posed to play the level exactly as the developer demands like a robotic slave, which is perfect design for a recreational work o’ art & doesn’t make those games feel like chores @ all. As the title suggests, you’re s’posed to grab an owl & release your grasp when you’re o’er the hole. This, ’course, requires finding the owl, which you can only make appear after climbing up the top o’ a seemingly arbitrary tree @ the beginning o’ the level. Luckily, this star has far mo’ interesting ways to collect it, such as performing a running jump off the top o’ the tower in the 2nd star, shooting yourself into it with precise aim from the cannon, or, if you’re particularly adventurous, doing a double jump off 1 o’ the spinning isles & wall kicking off the cage wall & grabbing onto the cage.

Oddly ’nough, the last star, “Blast Away the Wall” is the easiest star to get. But you can’t say it doesn’t fit the level theme: it mixes the cannon with the focus on the fortress structure. One could consider this star a bonus o’ sorts: your reward for completing all the other stars is a breather star; & if you already know the game well, you can get an advantage by doing this easy star before the game tells you exists. You can do this star @ any point, but ’less you have outside knowledge, you’d need the game to tell you to “Blast Away the Wall” to realize that shooting yourself straight into a wall would do anything but give Mario e’en mo’ brain damage than his incessant infantile exclamations every time he jumps hint that he already has.

This level’s 100-coin star is actually easier than the 1st level’s, without any power-up unlocks needed. In fact, I would oft get the 100-coin star 1st. Piranha Plants & Whomps throw money @ you, & unlike “Bob-omb Battlefield”, this level has a blue coin switch. The DS remake, which expands the garden to surround the back o’ the fortress ( I’m guessing to make it less likely to fall off the back end & die, which is quite easy to do ) & fills it with Piranha Plants who give you a blue coin each, makes it e’en mo’ trivial.

’Course, the DS remake couldn’t add a new garden area without polluting it with ’nother switch star: “Switch Star of the Fortress”. Actually, since this involves a new area that isn’t used for anything else beyond collecting coins, I don’t mind this star. If I were tasked with pruning the excess switch stars, I would keep this 1.

6. Tall, Tall Mountain

“Tall Tall Mountain” stands out ’mong its surrounding levels not by how odd it is but by how normal it is. Sandwiched ’tween an urban-water level with a rising & falling water gimmick & a level where everything is super large or super small, this is just an almost-linear ( tho with a few branches & some other shortcuts to keep it from getting too monotonous ) level climbing up a mountain — in a game full o’ mountains. But while it does comprise mechanics mostly found earlier in the game, it does not so much regurgitate them without doing much interesting with them as, say, “Dire, Dire Docks”, so much as ramp them up in difficulty; & indeed, this level is a notable difficulty spike, with every star being something o’ a formidable challenge, coming after the tame “Snowman’s Land” & “Wet-Dry World”.

The weakest stars are probably the 1st 2. The 1st star, “Scale the Mountain”, as its name indicates, is the all-too-common “get to the top from the bottom” star. It’s weird that this game likes making these the 1st star, as this is usually 1 o’ the most challenging tasks. Howe’er, “Tall Tall Mountain”’s other stars are challenging ’nough that that’s not as certain as, say, the 1st star o’ “Bob-omb Battlefield”.

Unfortunately, like “Whomp’s Fortress”, “Tall Tall Mountain” requires you to get to the top ’gain for the 2nd star, “Mystery of the Monkey Cage”, but this time grab a monkey so they can break open a cage for you. Other than a few extra steps after reaching the top, it’s virtually identical. I guess catching the monkey challenges skills you’ve likely honed trying to catch Mips in the basement. But the game is inconsistent & unintuitive with this requirement: grabbing any other monkey makes them steal your cap, which is a punishment ( which is weird, since you have to go out o’ your way to do it; the monkey won’t try to take your cap if you don’t do anything to it ). So the game teaches you not to grab the monkeys, only for it to turn round & tell you to grab this monkey to get the star. I do remember finding this star disorienting as a kid for that very reason, since I was always ’fraid o’ losing my cap.

“Breathtaking View from Bridge” ( or the mo’ grammatically-correct “Breathtaking View from the Bridge” in the DS remake ) comes dangerously close to copying the 1st 2 stars, too, but not as conspicuously as the 2nd star. You come close to the top, but have to hit a switch & cross thin cork blocks to reach the star hidden ’hind the waterfall. You have plenty o’ time to cross, so the ticking time limit is mo’ a psychological challenge than anything authentic. Anyway, you can rather easily long jump or tripe jump to the waterfall, ignoring the switch completely. Honestly, I feel the developers mainly liked the aesthetics o’ having a star ’hind the waterfall mo’ than having any interesting challenge to go with this.

The DS remake forces you to use Wario to break a black brick block, which I guess adds some challenge to it, since Wario is hopeless when it comes to platforming in that game. But then they nerf the level’s difficulty by eliminating the whole timed bridge & just adding a regular bridge right under it, so that the entire challenge is just “get to the top o’ the level, but with Wario”.

But the other stars are quite good. I like the red-coin placements — tho like in many other red-coin stars, “Scary ‘Shrooms, Red Coins” isn’t entirely accurate: only 4 o’ the red coins are on the “scary shrooms”, while the other 4 are scattered round the viney maze. Still, both offer fun platforming challenges while giving a variety o’ scenery. The mushroom platforms feel like a throwback to the mushroom platforms in classic Super Mario Bros.

“Mysterious Mountainside” is basically “Slip Slidin’ Away” from a level with a strikingly similar name as this, “Cool, Cool Mountain”, but much mo’ challenging. While “Cool, Cool Mountain”’s slide could get narrow @ places, ’twas a linear path with no tricks; this slide twists @ points, challenging you to grind up gainst the wall @ certain parts to avoid falling off the narrow edge, & has a sharp corner @ a fork near the middle, where, if you don’t take it, you get to see Mario slowly slide toward a giant skull signally for him to start saying his prayers. Finally, this slide ends with a large jump that can be surprisingly easy to screw up.

Unlike “Cool, Cool Mountain”’s slide, which simply takes you to the bottom & allows you to play the rest o’ the level, “Tall, Tall Mountain”’s places you into a small alcove that’s hard to get out o’ & impossible to get out o’ on the DS remake. In the N64 version you can get up into the alcove without taking the slide @ all with well-timed jumps. The DS remake attempts to prevent this with a grated wall, but stupidly makes the grated wall passable with Invisible Luigi, who is also the character with the best jumping to be able to easily get through there.

“Blast to the Lonely Mushroom” is a much harder — & mo’ dangerous, since failure ensures death — version o’ the cannon challenges scattered ’mong “Bob-omb Battlefield”, “Whomp’s Fortress”, & “Jolly Roger Bay”. ’Course, you can also just long jump from many places on the mountain or jump off a flying Shy Guy to spin o’er to it.

In fact, I’m quite certain that’s the only way I’ve e’er gotten this star before; when I insisted on trying the cannon route while playing through this level recently, I was surprised to realize I had no idea where the cannon or cannon Bob-omb were & was surprised by how weird their placements were.

This level is 1 o’ the rare instances where its new star in the DS remake, “5 Secrets of the Mountain”, isn’t just “collect 5 silver stars” or “hit a switch & race to a certain spot”, but implements a slightly harder version o’ the challenge o’ flying through the center o’ 5 coin rings found in “Bob-omb Battlefield”. Unfortunately, unlike the other stars in this level, this star doesn’t do much to ramp the challenge up, making it feel like just a repeat. & honestly, secrets & silver stars are basically the same thing — to the point that I’m surprised the developers didn’t just replace the middle coin in the rings on both stars with silver stars like they did to the coins in “Pyramid Puzzle” from “Shifting Sand Land”.

The coin star in this level can be annoying thanks to 1 mo’ similarity to “Cool, Cool Mountain”: you need to take the slide to get 100 coins. But unlike “Cool, Cool Mountain” it’s much harder in many places to jump & collect the star after it appears on the slide, & it’s much harder to return to the main level after leaving the slide ( & impossible in the DS version ). Also, I found that every time I collect the 100-coin star on the slide, Mario falls on his belly, which makes collecting the “Mysterious Mountainside” star afterward mo’ annoying.

5. Shifting Sand Land

“Shifting Sand Land” has nothing but great star ideas, e’en if a few o’ them are implemented rather poorly. For a desert level, which oft fall into looking like bland, colorless, barren wastelands, “Shifting Sand Land” has quite a bit o’ variety & detail, such as the tiny oasis in the northwest corner. I particularly like the Sonic-like red & gold checkered blocks that make up the 4 pillars & the Eyerok boss chamber.

Outside “Shifting Sand Land” has an odd design. Tho it has a clearly-defined path, spiraling from the southwest to the southeast, up through the north into northwest through the toy-block bridge, the game doesn’t require one to go through there — & indeed, I don’t know anyone who does go through this long tedious path. But the level is not quite as open as most levels, as e’en tho one can bypass the main path, there are still hazards that one must traverse, either through well-timed jumps or using the wing cap or shell on top o’ the stone structure in the southeast section. “Shifting Sand Land” offers what many levels offer, but to the greatest extent: slow, easy paths & fast, challenging paths, which is what makes Super Mario 64 still popular with both casual players & speedrunners.

“Shifting Sand Land” starts with its strongest star, “In the Talons of the Big Bird”, which requires you to climb up 1 o’ the 4 pillars surrounding the pyramid that Klepto the Condor is approaching & jump @ it when it nears you so it drops its star. While many levels start with stars that define their levels but are long & harder than most other stars, “Shifting Sand Land” finds a balance with a star that’s relatively quick & simple, but still level-defining. That this star still involves platform challenge & a li’l puzzle-solving, while also fitting the level theme & having a li’l story to it strengthens it.

“Shining Atop the Pyramid” has the weakest concept o’ all the stars, being just a star in an alcove atop the pyramid, but it works well in execution. I would save this breather star for a bit later, tho — probably switch it with the long 3rd star.

Speaking o’ the 3rd star, “Inside the Ancient Pyramid” is the closest approximation to a “get to the end” star, challenging you to make it inside the pyramid & then while inside climb all the way to the top, going round the perimeter spiraling up — the kind o’ inverse-mountain ( with space in the center o’ the thin perimeter, rather than a mountain with space round it ) formation also seen inside the volcano o’ “Lethal Lava Land” & in “Tick Tock Clock”. I can appreciate the attempt @ creative a balance o’ linear challenge platforming without sacrificing open-ended by still allowing extra paths; howe’er, the challenges this pyramid spreads ’long its path, tho they look nice in all their details, are rarely mind-blowing & are oft slow. Contrast that with the main volcano star in “Lethal Lava Land”, which tho less intricate & interesting had mo’ challenge to it. & yet, I think I’d still prefer this level’s pyramid, since that level’s greater challenge wasn’t much to write ’bout, either.

My only real problem with the inside o’ the pyramid is that the sand is annoying: it makes it hard to jump & get back off the sand, which isn’t a challenge so much as a waste o’ time caused by deliberately gimping my controls.

“Free Flying for 8 Red Coins” is a middle-quality red-coin star: not as bad as “Lethal Lava Land’s”, but not as good as “Big Boo’s Haunt”’s or “Tick Tock Clock”’s. Also, like many other red-coin stars, it has a bit o’ a misnomer: only half the coins are in the air, while the rest are scattered in notable places. Having flight be a notable part o’ this star is strange to me: deserts usually don’t make me think o’ sky mechanics. We already saw what happens when a dumbass romhacker fell into that thinking.⁷ Furthermo’, this game already has ’nough coin-collecting with the wing cap in “Bob-omb Battlefield” & 2 o’ the castle secret courses. In fact, ¿why not make “Bob-omb Battlefield”, which had many lazy red-coin placements, challenge you to grab red coins in the sky? Meanwhile, I think this level has mo’ notable places to hide red coins, like in ’nother hiding place in the pyramid. This is also a case where it would’ve been great if the developers could’ve let you go back out o’ the pyramid.

“Stand Tall on the Four Pillars” is a fine idea with a slightly flawed implementation. Opening the secret entrance to the pyramid requires going onto all 4 pillars surrounding the pyramid. Howe’er, I’ve found that the game’s detection o’ such is wonky, oft requiring multiple trips back to pillars. As is typical o’ Super Mario 64, tho, you can reach the opening this secret entrance leads to through other means, tho it can be annoying. Interestingly, on the flip side, the secret entrance leads to the top o’ the pyramid, where, if one times their jump right, they can bypass almost all o’ climbing the pyramid for “Inside the Ancient Pyramid”.

This opening leads to a boss that is a pair o’ hands with a single eye on each palm: an interesting design, but a simple case o’ timing punches when they ram into you that is much simpler & much less a creative use o’ 3D space than Big Bob-omb or the Whomp King. The vast majority o’ the time, this boss is a free victory; but on very rare occasions the hit detection on their eyes don’t work & I’ve punched their eye multiple times futilely only for it to succeed @ shoving me clear off the stage. Luckily, due to the level creating a checkpoint ’pon entering the pyramid, you don’t have to redo the pillar nonsense in the case o’ this unlikely scenario.

“Pyramid Puzzle” requires you to get to the top o’ the pyramid & then jump down platforms to a sand aqueduct, collecting all the coins to find all the 5 secrets needed to make the star appear @ the end o’ the sand aqueduct. This either requires you to enter the pyramid from the top doing the 4-pillars puzzle ’gain or climb the pyramid from the bottom & basically do the “Inside the Ancient Pyramid” star ’gain. ’Cause the camera was ne’er designed to look downward, trying to jump down the rather small platforms feels like a crapshoot. The only weak star in this level, which makes it unfortunate that they saved it as its final taste in regular sequence.

The developers o’ the DS remake, in their obsession with silver stars, replaced the secret coins with silver stars. Actually, this is an improvement, since having a few random coins act as secrets makes less sense. & since they only replaced an original star with that 1, they were also able to create a switch star, “Tox Box Switch Star”, ’cause we need yet ’nother switch star. Since this is in an underutilized area, & since maneuvering the maze with the “toy boxes” in the way within a time limit is an interesting challenge, I’m fine with this iteration. It’s far from the 1st switch star I’d cull ( that would be the “Big Boo’s Haunt” 1 ).

“Shifting Sand Land”’s entrance isn’t a painting, but just a wall @ a dead end that you can jump into. Unfortunately, since I was born knowing this game, I have no idea how obscure this was. I’ve heard some complain ’bout it. Yes, it’s a dead end: but that’s not suspicious by itself, since it’s not e’en the only dead end, & anyone playing would most likely assume a dead end’s there to add to the challenge o’ grabbing MIPS the rabbit. Then ’gain, maybe the idea is that the player might accidentally dive into the “wall” while trying to dive @ MIPS & be pleasantly surprised.

I’m mo’ confused by why they’d do this for a desert level. I guess maybe they were thinking o’ mirages… ’cept it’s the opposite o’ a mirage: something’s truly there, e’en if it doesn’t look it. Maybe the graphic artists just didn’t feel like drawing a desert portrait.

4. Tiny-Huge Island

“Tiny-Huge Island” plays with the tiny-huge theme in many ways: while tiny you enter an enlarged garden & fight giant plants; dodge giant fish that threaten to eat you; race the giant Koopa, Koopa the Quick ( who, in an amusing twist on 2 general Super Mario 64 mechanics, becomes a regular small Koopa enemy in the tiny version, who you can kill for 5 coins ); enter a 2 holes in the mountain to collect red coins & battle a giant Wiggler. Meanwhile, while large you… roam round the island finding secrets in random places ( or in the DS remake, hit Klepto the Condor ). Clearly the developers had mo’ ideas for Huge Island than for Tiny Island, & I can understand why: a larger level can be full o’ crevices to hide things, while a tiny level feels unwieldy to move on, — like an adult trying to “explore” a LEGO island, only to stumble o’er everything & probably stub their toes on something — not helped by the wasplike tiny Goombas that shove you round & require perfect timing to jump on.

The perspective tricks the game plays with the 2 paintings that let you choose whether to start the level in Tiny or Huge Island wherein they look the same size & distance from the center, but reveal themselves to be a tiny painting nearby & a huge painting far ’way is brilliant.

The challenges themselves, tho all fitting the theme well, are nothing amazing, but nothing terribly-done, execution-wise. Fighting the giant piranha plants in “Pluck the Piranha Flower” & e’en fighting the Wiggler in “Make Wiggler Squirm” are just basic combat. It’s strange that such a late-game boss would require just jumping on it a few times, while the 1st boss o’ the 1st star is much trickier to deal with.

Meanwhile, we have not only the obligatory red-coin collection star, “Wiggler’s Red Coins”, but also a star gotten by collecting 5 “secrets” in 5 openings on Tiny Island, “Five Itty Bitty Secrets”. The former’s red coins are all in a cave entered through a tiny hole on Huge Island & requires quite a bit o’ platforming prowess. It’s sort o’ like the “Tall, Tall Mountain” red-coin challenge, but mo’ focused & aesthetically less impressive.

While the developers try to spice up the secret-collection star by making you do it on Tiny Island & they do a rather good job indicating the secrets with holes you should be familiar with when collecting other stars but without being too obvious, I could understand one being wary ’bout ’nothing “collect x # o’ McGuffins” in a game already ’bout collecting McGuffins as pushing it.

The developers o’ the DS remake seemed to agree with this concern, as they nix it to make 1 mo’ use o’ the otherwise single-use Klepto the Condor in a star called… “Klepto the Condor”. I guess it kind o’ fits the theme. I like the inclusion, but wish they had it as the new star for this level, rather than insist on having yet ’nother “hit a switch & race to some random spot” star, “Switch Star on the Island”, which is made worse by being in a small cave, rather than challenging you to run o’er most o’ the level.

Then ’gain, we already have a much better race star that does just that with “Rematch with Koopa the Quick”, a much better iteration than the “Bob-omb Battlefield”. After a long period after the start o’ not seeing him, it’s a pleasing call-back to see him ’gain in a late-game stage, & since he’s a huge Koopa, it fits well with the theme.

But you can’t truly describe playing “Tiny-Huge Island” by just its star-concluding challenges as, say, games with much less creative level design, like Super Mario Galaxy. A large part o’ “Tiny-Huge Island” is figuring out how to get round. This is far on the wide-open scale o’ level design; but unlike most other levels like that, which make it easy to go in whate’er direction you want, going in “Tiny-Huge Island”’s many directions isn’t so simple. While Tiny Island is easy to traverse, since Mario is big ’nough to jump o’er the whole mountain, every is so small that you can’t do anything with much o’ anything. Meanwhile, Huge Island makes everything so big that it’s that much harder to get round. Tho you need to be tiny to fight the piranha plants ’cross the water from the start, you can’t reach the high cliff while small, forcing you to get there while huge & enter 1 o’ the warp pipes to turn tiny. The only other direction open when entering the level tiny goes through a large lake, where you are threatened by an instant-kill fish, where you can go all the way down the lake to go ’long the side o’ the mountain, or take a fork @ the beach & figure out how to climb the now-steep mountain using a Koopa shell.

“Tiny-Huge Island”’s greatest weakness is its bland grassland appearance, which is a bit too similar to “Bob-omb Battlefield”’s, which was already generic, e’en for a grassland. Super Mario Bros. 3’s “Big Island” was similar, but Super Mario Bros. 3 had a much mo’ memorable & iconic aesthetic to it with all the wooden blocks, colored rounded-edge blocks with screws in them, & music blocks, so it was much less boring to look @. “Tiny-Huge Island” doesn’t e’en have any mushroom platforms; it’s just, well, grass & mountains in a game where almost every level has a mountain in it.

3. Cool, Cool Mountain

While not having the most refreshing level theme, having both a commonplace video game level theme & also sharing that theme with ’nother level, in terms o’ general challenge construction & theme cohesion almost every star in this level is excellent & memorable.

The o’erall level environment is also great. Tho it revolves round a mountain, as too many levels in this game do, “Cool, Cool Mountain”’s is 1 o’ the mo’ memorable & the 1 that most emphasizes its mountainous qualities. In fact, other than slippery physics affecting the platforming for “Wall Kicks Will Work” / “Mario’s Super Wall Kick” & all the aesthetic elements that make the level feel ’live, like penguins, the wintry house with a chimney you can enter, & the snowman hopping on the bridges, this level focuses on mountain movement mo’ than snow, which helps it stand out a bit from “Snowman Land”.

1 thing “Cool, Cool Mountain” does that no other level does is have you start @ the top & make the main path end @ the bottom. This this level’s mountain is slippery & much mo’ complex than, say, the mountain in “Bob-omb Battlefield” & closer mo’ toward the kind o’ mountain in, say, “Tall, Tall Mountain”, this was a necessary adjustment to keep this level’s difficulty fitting its early sequential position, while also having the perk o’ making it stand out from “Tall, Tall Mountain”. As I mentioned in that level’s review, “Tall, Tall Mountain” in many ways feels like a ramping-up o’ difficulty o’ much o’ what this level sets up.

’Nother perk o’ this level’s downward direction is that it offers many mo’ ways to reach the bottom: you can slide all the way down & take the bridge & go down the slopes to the bottom, you can take the secret warp @ the broken bridge near the start, or you can just jump straight down to the bottom. Similarly, this level offers many ways back up, including a li’l ski lift, the aforementioned slopes littered with snowball-throwing snowmen, & a secret warp on a broken bridge near the bottom. This level has a particularly good mix o’ having something o’ a straight path, while also having many branching off points, like the section with the fire ’bove the middle bridge or the cliffside you’re s’posed to shoot to with the cannon ( tho there are alternate ways to reach it, such as making clever use o’ the spinning glide ability you gain when you jump on a Spindrift ) that leads to the slopes & icy bridge o’ “Wall Kicks Will Work”, the 1st star that requires using the wall-jump mechanic.

Their choice for the 1st star o’ this level, “Slip Slidin’ Away” takes place inside a subroom hidden in a chimney, which the star name doesn’t hint to @ all, while all o’ the previous levels are obvious ’bout where their 1st, as well as most other stars, are. This coupled with the numerous places where you can fall off the level & into a bottomless pit makes this level the point when the game starts taking off the training wheels, in terms o’ both raw difficulty & the need to learn how to explore without the game holding your hand & telling you exactly what to do. & yet, the star heavily telegraphs what you should do, anyway, for the chimney is highlighted by a line o’ yellow coins that stand out gainst the white snow right @ the beginning o’ the level, & which are virtually impossible to get without falling into the chimney. Unfortunately, I can’t remember my 1st experience playing this level; — & if I had to guess ’twas probably watching someone else who already knew the level playing it — but I wouldn’t be surprised if a high % o’ players started this level by jumping into that chimney simply from how noticeable its coins are & the natural urge to collect them.

The other thing the player may notice near the start o’ the level is the baby penguin waddling round. In fact, the player may be mo’ likely to investigate it before the chimney with its coins, since its moving. Trying to interact with it will quickly reveal that one can pick it up, but not what else to do with it. One may either explore the rest o’ the level with it & ’ventually reach the bottom, where they will find the giant penguin & put 2 & 2 together or take the slide down & collect the 1st star, where they will also find the giant penguin, & will put the pieces together e’en mo’ when they see the next star name, “Li’l Penguin Lost”.

Many familiar with this game know that there is ’nother baby closer to the mother who will elicit an angry response from the mother if you try to give it to her¹⁰. But I would not be surprised if there are many who aren’t, & I know, despite it being closer to the mother, I definitely don’t recognize it as much as the real baby near the beginning. Once you see that 1st baby it gets locked into your mind, while that other baby gets thrown @ the end as “that other baby that’s not the 1 @ the start”.

The 3rd star, “Big Penguin Race”, would probably be confusing to new players, as the logical assumption would be that it refers to the giant mother penguin @ the bottom o’ the level, to whom the player has just returned the baby. In fact, since one has already ridden the slide down to the bottom &, from appearances, have explored everything that subarea has, the player is unlikely to return. Only as a last resort after exploring everything else or the tenuous connection o’ “race” & the slide might clue to someone that the slide has changed since they 1st rode it. I feel this is a bit unfair & that perhaps the star name should’ve clued the player in mo’ that it is on the slide: “Big Penguin Race Down the Slide”.

Other than that, it’s a useful evolution to the 1st star’s challenge, forcing the player to not only make it to the bottom without falling into a pit, but also do so quickly & without taking any shortcuts. It’s also a way to use a feature o’ penguins, their proclivity for sliding on their bellies, in a way that affects challenges, rather than just a particular paint o’er what might work for any animals, such as the baby & mother penguins, which could have been bears & would’ve still made sense.

“Frosty Slide for 8 Red Coins” is this level’s weakest star, which demonstrates how good this level is, ’cause it’s not too bad a star in itself. The red coin placements aren’t the most inspired, but they’re not as lazy as, say, “Bob-omb Battlefield”’s or “Lethal Lava Land”’s. None o’ “Cool, Cool Mountain”’s are right next to each other a’least. Honestly, the only good location is the 1 near the corner round the edge, which challenges the player to make precise movements on slippery ground to avoid falling off the level, & in the DS remake, the 1 encased in ice to use Yoshi’s mostly pointless firebreath ability ( but I’d rather have it usurp 1 o’ “Cool, Cool Mountain”’s unimpressive red-coin positions than a well-crafted star, as in “Snowman’s Land” ). If anything, the star placement just after a broken bridge requiring a precise long jump is mo’ interesting than any o’ the coin placements.

“Snowman’s Lost His Head” is a twist on the penguin race: you need to race ’head o’ the rolling head, but you can’t take a shortcut, not ’cause it’s “cheating”, which the snowman wouldn’t care ’bout, but ’cause you’re s’posed to be leading it. The path is shorter & wider, with safe ground ’neath; but you have to stand in a certain place @ the end to lead the head to the body — simply beating the head to the body won’t suffice.

“Switch Star of Cool, Cool Mountain”, the DS remake’s extra star, is actually a good use o’ their o’erused timed switch star. Unlike most levels, where the switch star is just thrown in some forgettable place, this star is under the ice ’neath the mother penguin, which Wario needs to ground pound to break: a unique interaction that makes use o’ the underused Wario & fits the ice theme. Wario needs to take the ski-lift up to the switch, which is easy, & then race down, which is much mo’ challenging.

While “Cool, Cool Mountain” ramps up the difficulty from the 3 preceding levels ( & the level after it, actually ) a bit, its 100-coin star eases things by putting mo’ than half the coins you need on the slide.

2. Wet-Dry World

“Wet-Dry World” is similar to “Tiny-Huge Island” in that it revolves round a creative new gimmick to spice up exploring a level whose main star challenges are otherwise hit-&-miss. The difference is that “Wet-Dry World”’s challenges are a bit fresher & mo’ creative than “Tiny-Huge Island”’s & its aesthetics are much better.

“Wet-Dry World” mixes a water & urban/electric theme in a way I don’t think I’ve seen in any other game ’cept Sonic 3’s “Hydrocity Zone”. That the skybox is not a generic city, but a particular Italian-style city makes it e’en mo’ refreshing & helps add a bit o’ color to a level that otherwise is mostly gray blocks.

The way “Wet-Dry World” implements its gimmick allowing you to choose how high or low the water is, from nearly flooding the whole area to being all gone, based on both how high you enter the painting & touching the weird rainbow diamonds scattered round the level, is much mo’ creative than “Tiny-Huge Island”’s. Like that level, some stars in this level require the water to be @ certain levels, such as “Secrets in the Shallows & Sky” ( “5 Secrets in the Shallows & Sky” in the DS remake ) & “Express Elevator‐‐Hurry Up!”⁸ requiring the level to be dry & other stars require going back & forth, such as the downtown stars requiring you to raise the water to the top to reach downtown & then lower it to completely dry to get all the red coins or hit the invisible cap block to reach the gated-off star⁹.

For other stars, tho, like “Shocking Arrow Lifts!” & “Top o’ the Town”, the obligatory “get to the top o’ the level” star, you can get the star @ most water heights, but it’s much easier with the water higher up. ’Course, getting the water higher up requires either timing your jump so that you enter @ the very top, which can be harder than you might think, or climbing to the top o’ the level to set it higher, which negates the whole advantage.

In short, “Wet-Dry World” is a level that gives the player a lot o’ leeway, but forces them to trade platforming challenges for brainwork to figure out these bypasses.

Like “Tiny-Huge Island”, “Wet-Dry World” has both a red-coin collection star, “Go to Town for Red Coins” ( “Go to Town for the Red Coins” in the DS remake ), & a 5-secrets star, “Secrets in the Shallows & Sky” ( “5 Secrets in the Shallows & Sky” in the DS remake ); & like that level, the red coins are isolated in a 2nd area to make them less repetitive. The DS remake also adds a star challenging you to collect 5 silver stars in the main area, which is very redundant. I guess the developers o’ the remake didn’t want to use a timed switch star as they did in “Tiny-Huge Island” ’cause this level already has a timed star using the invisible cap for “Quick Race Through Downtown!” & it would’ve killed the developers to come up with an actually original idea. While “Tiny-Huge Island”’s secrets are found in openings, “Wet-Dry World”’s are found by shoving metal blocks. I think “Tiny-Huge Island”’s is a bit mo’ logical & works better, as it involves level pieces you encounter normally in other stars, whereas the metal blocks in “Wet-Dry World” are otherwise irrelevant pieces. Still, I’m glad “Wet-Dry World” did something to make their secret star different from “Tiny-Huge Island”’s while still having some pattern to them.

Howe’er, I think “Wet-Dry World”’s red-coin star is better, & is 1 o’ the better 1s in the game. The red coins are call placed in downtown, a place full o’ buildings begging for exploration, giving the coins a coherence, but there’s more o’ an exploration element to having to find the red coins, ’specially those hiding in cork/brick boxes, while still keeping the platforming challenges, while “Tiny-Huge Island”’s are just in plain sight.

“Quick Race Through Downtown!” is probably “Wet-Dry World”’s weakest star, tho it’s not terrible. Downtown is constructed in a way that makes it easy to get lost in, but the path from the invisible cap box to the gated-off area is still not very complex. Once your inside the gated area, you just need to do some simple jumps up platforms with li’l punishment if you fall. It would’ve been nice if they could’ve gated off the star box @ the top so you had to climb the platforms before the cap ran out, too.

“Express Elevator‐‐Hurry Up!” with its dumbass bootleg em dash is middling, trading platforming challenges with a “puzzle” that is mainly just going back & forth, doing it multiple times if you miss a step. You have to climb up to the top o’ the level to lower the elevator so you can ride it back up ’gain, a clever way to force the player to climb the level without using the water level as a crutch. I would’ve preferred it make you wall jump up the cage to get the star rather than just jump on the elevator & stand there for a couple seconds doing nothing. Furthermo’, in the original N64 version you have to make sure you break the cork block in front o’ the cage before climbing up or you’ll have to do it all o’er ’gain to reach the elevator. Someone must’ve been annoyed by that, as the developers removed the block in the DS remake. It doesn’t add any challenge other than a gotcha trap, so I can’t say I miss its exclusion.

“Wet-Dry World” is a “breather level”, ’specially compared to the level that comes after it sequentially, “Tall, Tall Mountain”, which is a noticeable difficulty spike. Howe’er, all the clever quirks this level throws @ you keeps that easiness from being boring & forgettable.

1. Tick Tock Clock

“Tick Tock Clock” is a common target o’ criticism by scribblers o’ “Worst Mario Levels” listicles not for any lack o’ creativity or intuition o’ design but simply ’cause it’s a hard level near the end o’ the game — where hard levels belong — & for some reason people who consider themselves serious critics consider it logical to rank anything they can’t beat ( or e’en just have to put effort into beating ) as terrible without putting any effort into distinguishing valid & invalid difficulty¹¹.

“Tick Tock Clock” may be the apex o’ challenge-based level design in a game that, mo’ than probably any other Mario game¹², traded challenge-based level design for mo’ explorative environmental level design. Only the Bowser levels compete with it in that regard; but while those levels match these traditional challenge-based designs with traditional linear designs, “Tick Tock Clock” manages to stay challenge-based while allowing mo’ directional freedom, which is necessary to maintain the multiple star mechanic¹³.

“Tick Tock Clock” also has a refreshingly rare level theme for a game that too oft stuck to traditional grassland, water, lava, desert, & snow themes with its clock tower theme. Best o’ all, every 1 o’ “Tick Tock Clock”’s well-crafted challenge employs many mechanics that all snugly fit this theme: conveyor belts, wire cages, moving hands you can ride, rotating triangle platforms, moving pendulums you must dodge… weird platforms that push out & in, which with their wired textures look like the belong to the tower, but I don’t know what they would be used for in an actual clock, & rotating knobs which act as platforms.

This is also 1 o’ the nicer looking levels, whose simpler, mechanical textures are less harmed by the N64’s notorious texture blurring that they for some reason considered a feature¹⁴, ’specially in the original N64 version with its colorful celedon fog totally not used to hide the N64’s poor draw distance.

“Tick Tock Clock” also has a clever, unique gimmick in the form o’ letting you control how fast the clock’s setpieces move ( or if they move @ all ) by jumping into the clock face entrance while the second hand is @ a certain point. While almost all stars require the clock to be moving ( without extremely tricky maneuvering a’least ) & 1 star heavily encourages stopping the clock, none o’ the stars care how fast the clock moves. Perhaps that’s for the best, as the game doesn’t spell-out all the speeds the clock runs @ & how to get each, so it may be a frustrating case o’ trial-&-error trying to get a certain moving speed. ’Sides, the freedom o’ different speeds creates a great risk/reward trade for those who want the level to be easier vs. those who want it faster. ¿Have I mentioned that this game is remarkably popular with both casual players & speedrunners?

This level is 1 o’ the few times the DS remake improved it mo’ than ruined it by adding extra mechanics that make each star’s challenge stand out mo’. While the N64 version’s “Roll into the Cage” just involves jump into a li’l alcove that leads to a cage, the DS remake’s renamed “Luigi in the Cage” challenges you to get the invisible cap as Luigi to move through the cage bars into the cage, emphasizing the cage as something mo’ than just a solid wall. It’s also a nice detail, encouraging you to dip your toes into “Tick Tock Clock”’s platforming with the character with the best jumping skills, while challenging you to use the character with the worst jumping abilities in late-level star “Timed Jumps on Moving Bars”. The DS remake adds a timed switch to “The Pit and the Pendulums” so you have to wave round the swinging pendulums quickly. Since this star is actually in an interesting, meaningful location ( it was there before the switch, after all ), this is 1 o’ the few good timed switch stars the DS remake added.

Hell, the DS remake implementing their other o’erused new star idea, collecting 5 silver stars, doesn’t e’en feel that bad in this level, since the red coins are kept to a small area o’ the level, so exploring the rest o’ the level for other McGuffins doesn’t feel as redundant as this star in most levels.

The only way the DS remake made this level worse — other than removing the celedon fog, which makes the level look brown & less spooky & colorful — is by removing the rotating triangle platforms, presumably just to make the level easier — as if Luigi’s godlike backflip float didn’t do that ’nough.

The most notorious star in in this level is the innocuously-named “Stomp on the Thwomp”, this level’s obligatory “get to the top” star, commonly considered the hardest star in the game for that very reason. I only wish ’twas the 2nd-to-last star, rather than being near the middle, seemingly arbitrarily. I’d be curious to know what the thought process was to most o’ these levels’ star placements.

I do like that “Stop Time for Red Coins”, the breather star, is @ the end. ’Course, it’s only a breather if you follow the star’s advice & stop time. You can collect all 8 red coins while the platforms are flipping round, & you may want to if you want to double dip into the 100-coin star.

There’s very li’l negative I can say ’bout this level. Literally the worst thing in this level are a few invisible walls that only exist in the original N64 version due to accidental bugs — not e’en a deliberate design decision — & that bloody “Slider” song that plays everywhere. Meanwhile, it has all the ingredients o’ a great Super Mario 64 levels: a refreshing level theme, a creative gimmick, a balance o’ explorative, believable environment & well-crafted challenges, & a variety o’ mechanics that all cohere to the level’s theme. Game critics should spend less time bitching ’bout how they suck @ this level & mo’ time studying how to make a level this well-constructed.

“Tick Tock Clock” is not only the best level in Super Mario 64, it’s also probably its most iconic, helped by its level theme being the most stand-out. Notably, whene’er Super Mario 64 gets referenced in other games it’s usually “Tick Tock Clock”, as in Mario Kart DS or Mario Party 3, with maybe only “Rainbow Ride” ( the only other stand-out level theme ) as the competitor, being its representation in Super Smash Bros.

Honorable Mentions: Bonus Levels

I didn’t want to rank these, since they’re too different from main levels to be comparable — like comparing bananas to coconuts — but I still wanted to talk ’bout it ’cause I’m Scott McCloud & I can’t stop talking.

The Secret Aquarium

( Laughs ). ¿Why’d I include this? This is baby’s 1st level: a cube with red coins in the most obvious places. Some might defend this as a tutorial to swimming; but it’s not as if “Jolly Roger Bay”’s water is full o’ sharks or there’s a time limit looming o’er the player: they can practice all they want in that level.

If this level succeeds @ anything, it’s as a demonstration to an all-too-common pitfall that can come if one falls into the delusion that making good easy levels is easy: easy levels should ne’er be boring or thoughtless, but should find ways to intrigue players without threatening them with punishment for doing things “wrong”.

O well, a’least the level looks nice by Super Mario 64 standards — specially the windows tinted with different colors.

Tower of the Wing Cap

One may make fun o’ this as a tutorial level, since it’s harder than “Bob-omb Battlefield”’s wing-cap challenges; but there are 2 aspects that make this defensible: 1, falling doesn’t actually make you lose a life, it just kicks you out o’ the level, & mercifully, right back @ the entrance, rather than way out @ the waterfall, like in a certain level; 2, it’s a bonus stage, so it’s allowed to be harder, e’en this early in the game.

These stages also fall apart in the DS remake, which simply has 1 switch & 1 color o’ switch blocks, but differs which power-up you get with each character. This is an interesting idea implemented badly, thanks to the developers being too lazy to adjust the many parts o’ this game that clearly relies on there being different switches. I already complained ’bout how “Collect the Caps” was butchered thanks to this change making the original puzzle impossible, but I think these levels get it worse.

¿How much has this stage been broken by this change? ¿You know how you start this stage, as well as every other cap stage, with that cap’s power-up — in this case, the wing cap, already flying o’er empty air? Well, ¿what happens when you enter with someone other than Mario? They can’t have wing caps, after all — that would break the whole idea o’ segregating power-ups by character. The outcome is obvious: all other characters don’t get any wing cap & just fall straight down & get kicked right out.

Since there is only 1 switch in the DS remake, none o’ the other cap stages have switches… the whole reason these stages exist in the 1st place.

Peach’s Secret Slide

Like the wing-cap stage, this stage would be a great introduction to slides without the risk o’ death for falling in a pit, with the secret ( but still intuitive ) extra star for getting a good time on the conspicuous timer they give you ( ¿what player wouldn’t see that timer & think, “Clearly the developers want me to get the best time I can”? ) as a great dessert. Howe’er, like the aquarium stage, this is ruined by the fact that you’ve already likely tried the slide in “Cool, Cool Mountain”, which also has ’nother star based on winning a race — tho this could also act as a hint toward the secret slide’s 2nd star.

Sunshine Isles ( DS Remake only )

Cool Super Mario Sunshine call-back, I guess. Too bad they decided to weaken it with yet ’nother “collect 5 silver stars” challenge & made the level’s design so threadbare I have li’l to say ’bout it.

Goomboss Swamp ( DS Remake only )

I actually don’t know what this level is called. The Mario Wiki calls it “Goomboss Battle”, which is a nonsensical name for a level that I refuse to dignify.

This is unquestionably the coolest new level that the DS remake offers, & the only 1 other than maybe “The Battle Fort” with a unique theme, a woodsy swamp. I like it so much that I wished the developers took less time making pointless levels like “Sunshine Isles” & adding silver star & switch star challenges everywhere & ’stead developed this level into a main level.

The layout is particularly interesting: an open maze, like “Lethal Lava Land”, but far mo’ complex & twisted together. Its vertical focus & the level’s o’erall focus on Mario ( since it’s where you rescue him ) also makes it the only level where Mario’s vore power-up isn’t completely dumb. I e’en like the switch star, which challenges you to be able to do Mario’s wall jumps quickly, which fits with this level’s vertical & Mario-focused theme & makes greater use o’ wall jumps, which are surprisingly not required much in Super Mario 64.

I don’t like how the you need to have unlocked all characters to collect all the red coins, tho, since it makes it likely you’ll go for them beforeso & only later realize you’re screwed.

The Battle Fort ( DS Remake only )

I think this was just a multiplayer level they threw in to pad the remake’s star count, using yet ’nother “collect 5 silver stars” star. It’s surprisingly challenging for its position, specially being near probably the easiest main level in the game, “Big Boo’s Haunt”. But it’s a small level with a small, simple task, & players can avoid most o’ the dangers by going round them.

Big Boo’s Battle ( DS Remake only )

& then when it came to the levels in which you rescue Luigi & Wario the developers got lazy & just reused assets. This “level” could easily just be a section in “Big Boo’s Haunt”. It’s also the weakest rescue levels, since it’s main challenge is a trial-&-error maze where you have to go through the right door or you’ll be warped back to the start. That’s way too much cornfielding, e’en for a fructose-syrup-blooded American.

The mirror mechanic o’ the boss is far mo’ interesting that just ’bout any other boss in this game, tho, & the race to the boo portrait while invisible is probably the best use o’ the invisibility cap. It’s a shame that with such good challenges the level layout itself is nothing worth writing ’bout.

’Cause the level is so small & has nothing to it, the red coins are in arbitrary places, ’cept 1 @ the end that’s under a black brick just so the game can hackily require you to have Wario to get the star. If you didn’t magically guess that you needed Wario before collecting the 1st 7, have fun collecting them all ’gain.

Vanish Cap Under the Moat

I’m surprised this is the 1st time I’ve realized that this level does nothing with the invisible cap ’cept expect you to go inside a cage @ the end to get the red coin star. Otherwise it’s just trying to aim @ red coins on your way down a steep slope using a camera that clearly wasn’t crafted for downward movement, dodging easily dodgeable fire-spitters & Amps & jumping on rotating platforms.

I think this level should also be a great example o’ how claims that later Mario games have so much mo’ “mature” level design is bullshit¹⁵, ’cause I swear I’ve seen a level just like this in Super Mario 3D World with the same trite challenge o’ collecting red coins on rotating platforms, something that works just as well in 2D & I’d already done in 2D in many games before this that it bewilders me that the developers would think I’d want to do it yet ’gain in a different genre, much less that developers continued doing this shit up into the 2010s.

The DS remake adds a side section with the 1000th iteration o’ their switch star, which you can float to as Mario ( or someone wearing his cap ) with Mario’s vore power-up, his alternate power-up to the wing cap which he has in certain stages. This is Galaxy-grade level design, with a section so irrelevant it could be in any level &, in fact, by the use o’ a completely different power-up than the 1 on which the stage was built to focus, goes completely gainst the level theme.

Cavern of the Metal Cap

See, now this sucks as a bonus, ’cause it’s stupidly easy — tho perhaps that’s a good thing, since this deep in the basement, if you do find yourself falling into a coma & letting yourself get swept into the waterfall, you will receive a fate worse than death: being warped all the way outside, like Johnny Bravo to the cornfield in that “The Good Life” parody. So the waterfall “threat” isn’t dangerous — it’s just stupid.

Like many red coin stars in this game, half the red coins actually involve this level’s metal cap theme & the rest are in random places. & since this is a tiny, simple, linear level, there aren’t any interesting places to put them, so they’re in just ’bout the only places you could put them without being completely idiotic. It says something ’bout this stage that getting to it from “Hazy Maze Cave” is far mo’ interesting than the level itself.

If you loved becoming vore Mario in the invisible cap stage in the DS remake, this level also fulfills your fetish by placing a star way up ’bove where the switch used to be & letting you slowly float up. That’s it. I guess since this was a much simpler, easier level than the invisible-cap stage it deserved a simpler, easier implementation o’ vore Mario. Actually, it didn’t deserve yet ’nother implementation o’ vore Mario ’cause it’s a dumb mechanic that doesn’t add anything & slops all o’er the “every character gets their own power-up from the switch blocks” by arbitrarily giving Mario 2 different power-ups. I guess they decided that horizontal flying was useless in this stage, & many o’ the other stages that give Mario balloon powers ’stead; but invisible Luigi is useless in this stage, too, & fire-breathing Yoshi is useless just ’bout everywhere, & I don’t see the developers giving them vore power-ups anywhere.

Chief Chilly Challenge ( DS Remake only )

Adding a 3rd ice level pushes it. & yet, I must credit the developers with coming up with some fresh ideas like the moving block formations & the use o’ wind, including the unique need to use Wario’s metal cap to cross a thin passageway without being blown off.

Red coin placements also seem to create a variety without feeling arbitrary. I don’t know how I feel ’bout the 1 on an island high up in the air requiring vore Mario, which is clearly just ’nother way to force the player to have all 3 players to get the red coin star. Then ’gain, ¿is it e’en possible for the player to unlock Wario without already having Mario & Luigi ’cept for using an obscure wall-clip glitch?

The boss is just yet ’nother bully enemy, but you need to knock them into the freezing water 3 times & they make the huge arena slightly smaller after each hit. Definitely the weakest o’ the new bosses.

“Chief Chilly Challenge” has the most interesting entrance o’ the 3 character-unlock levels, being hidden ’hind the mirror in the room where the “Snowman’s Land” entrance is, which requires you to grab a power flower with Luigi so you become invisible & can move through the mirror.

Wing Mario Over the Rainbow

I want to bash this level ’cause I always hated it as a kid, since it’s so unforgiving. But I have to admit, it is a well-crafted evolution on the challenge the wing-cap stage introduces near the beginning o’ the game — & it is a bonus stage, so one has no right to complain. & let’s face it: compared to collecting 100 purple coins o’er platforms that break or rotate within a time limit, like in Super Mario Galaxy¹⁶, flying round for just 8 red coins is tame.

The way the developers constructed what I can only call a web o’ cloud platforms connected by rainbows maintains coherence to the level, while still subtly creating puzzles for the player. They start in the middle & can only go down from there, with a lower-middle & bottom platform holding cannons & the cannon-opening Bob-omb @ the bottom. To get up from the bottom you need to use the bottom cannon & to get up into the higher-up areas, you need to use the middle platform. Getting from platform to platform pretty much requires the wing cap ’cept in certain circumstances with excellent aiming, & the wing cap only lasts so long; & while most platforms have a switch block, the middle cannon platform doesn’t, which means you can’t take fore’er to decide where you want to aim your shot. Then the developers added variety by adding vines sticking out o’ the topmost cloud with a red coin on it.

Truly what makes this level most annoying is that, like with the metal-cap stage, falling off doesn’t kill you, which would allow you an easy way to jump back into the level & try ’gain, but cornfields you à la Johnny Bravo all the way back outside & makes you go all the way back inside & back up to the top floor to try ’gain.

Also, some o’ the cloud platforms are transparent & aren’t platforms @ all, but just make you fall thru them. If I can’t stand on them, they should just be empty air, like everything else that I can’t step on — that’s kind o’ what empty air is for. If I see a transparent cloud, I’m just going to think that it’s a decoration to make it look different, not that that means this cloud is not a platform, but… has no reason to exist other than to trick me into thinking it’s a platform, since it doesn’t make any mo’ sense for me to be able to stand on opaque clouds.

Bowser in the Dark World

1 o’ the reasons I wanted to talk ’bout these side stages is I wanted to talk ’bout the Bowser levels &, mo’ importantly, qualify some o’ the complaints I had ’bout the o’erly linear main stages in this game or in the Super Mario Galaxy games. One might get the erroneous idea that I hate linear levels by principle, which is false: what I hate are linear levels twisted into something they don’t fit. The Bowser stages in this game or, say, the average stage in Super Mario 3D Land or World work ’cause they’re built to be linear levels. Part o’ that is that they have 1 goal, with some extra goals you can accomplish while you’re going after the main goal, so, if you’re good, you don’t have to redo shit. But in “Rainbow Ride”, e’en if you ne’er die, you have to redo shit ’cause you have to get 7 stars. In short, a corollary to my point that the multiple-goal system works perfectly for open-oriented explorative levels is that it only works for these type o’ levels & just falls apart into something terrible for linear levels. “Rainbow Ride”, as well as most levels in Super Mario Galaxy, should’ve been split into multiple levels, since that’s what they essentially are.

These Bowser levels also prove that not only does Galaxy “fail” @ open-oriented explorative level design ( it actually doesn’t e’en try, being a collectathon that’s embarrassed to be a collectathon ), it’s worse @ linear level design than Super Mario 64. One could make the point that Nintendo’s developers “finally” came to their senses when Super Mario 3D Land came round & they stopped pretending their levels had multiple missions & were not just different levels awkwardly squeezed into 1, but which magically changes on different missions, but just had different levels that worked better for linear design; but Super Mario 64 proves that the developers already knew how to do this way back in their 1st collectathon. Despite critics’ complaints ’bout Super Mario 64 being “backward” ’cause its level design is just too unfocused, these Bowser stages prove that Super Mario 64 was able to make levels that were linearly-focused & involved evolving challenges just as much as Galaxy — better, e’en, since unlike Galaxy, these don’t shoehorn in multiple stars, but just 1 secret star you can get on your way to the main goal.

These Bowser levels go the Yoshi’s Island route o’ difficulty by making just getting to the end much easier than going to the trouble o’ getting all the red coins — tho this is dampened much mo’ than Yoshi’s Island, which made you collect many mo’ collectables & made just getting to the end hardly a challenge @ all. For instance, the 1st flamethrower is only truly a threat if you insist on hitting the switch & going out onto the switch-generated cork bridges to collect their red coins — & e’en then only if you didn’t unlock the metal cap ( which is likely if you hate backtracking, since it’s impossible to do before simply beating this level ). Similarly, most o’ the area surrounding the weight platforms near the end can be ignored if you’re not after red coins.

Tho this level is linear in terms o’ getting to the main goal, there is 1 branch to get a red coin midway thru, which involves probably the 1st real challenge o’ crossing a thin beam with this game’s terrible controls. That is, if you’re as incompetent as I have been for most o’ my life & didn’t realize, as I only did recently, that you can mo’ easily long jump from & to the platform before the sliding platforms.

I know the Bowser battle is iconic & is a clever use o’ 3D… but it’s rather badly implemented. For 1, Bowser’s tail has a terrible hitbox. Half the time I dive for it Mario just goes straight thru it right into Bowser’s colon. But the worst problem is just that it’s repetitive, with 2 mo’ iterations that don’t add much to the challenge.

“Bowser in the Dark World” actually looks rather nice for a Super Mario 64 level, particularly the crystal passageway whose shape is crystal-like, constantly widening & thinning.

The entrance to “Bowser in the Dark World” is memorable for leading to a seemingly innocent Peach portrait, only for that portrait to transform into Bowser halfway through the hall, & then for the floor under Mario to open, causing him to fall into a trap entrance. It’s a fun surprise since it gives the player what they came for, anyway, rather than screwing them for not being a fortune teller.

Bowser in the Fire Sea

1 genuine complaint one could give to Super Mario 64’s level design is its bad difficulty curve, which is only made-up for by the freedom it gives you to skip levels & the fact that this difficulty curve problem usually only leads to levels way too easy for their placement, like “Big Boo’s Haunt”, which is probably the easiest level in the game, being the 5th stage — which requires mo’ stars to unlock than the 1st Bowser level & the 2nd area — or “Wet-Dry World”, which is easy ’nough to be a 1st-area level, being in the 3rd area. The only exception is “Cool, Cool Mountain”, which is a bit hard for how early you will likely stumble into it.

But Bowser stages, which are mandatory to gain progress, are an exception to the 1st point, but not the 2nd. While players may find the 1st Bowser stage quite challenging after the easy-going levels in the 1st area, they will be surprised to find the 2nd Bowser stage… is actually easier than the 1st Bowser stage.

The key problem is that this level replaces the bottomless pits all round the 1st Bowser stage with lava, which hurts you, but doesn’t kill you instantly. To dampen this e’en mo’, this level has a whopping 2 spinning hearts that can infinitely heal you ( in fact, due to a quirk o’ how they work, they can also let you temporarily bounce in lava without getting hurt, which is a great way to skip the generic platforming ’tween the 1st heart & the pole ’bove it ).

The red coins aren’t too hard to get, either. There’s certainly nothing close to as difficult as the 2 red coins @ the beginning o’ “Bowser in the Dark World”, with the tight time limit for the 1st & the flamethrower threatening to shove you off the stage for the 2nd. The hardest red coins to get in this level are the 1 in front o’ a flamethrower o’er platforms with lava rising & falling round it, which is on the way to the main goal, anyway, & some side area with zigzagging thin walkways — nothing you didn’t face in the 1st Bowser level. Indeed, most o’ the red coins are simply on the way, & get as easy as jumping into a nonthreatening corner o’ a box. The 3rd most “threatening” red coin is 1 that simply makes you let an elevator rise without you & jump down to get it, forcing you to climb back up ’gain ( which is lame padding, by the way ).

“Bowser in the Fire Sea” also has the stupidest Bowser fight e’er, involving a Bowser who has apparently magically developed teleportation powers, which you have no control o’er & just wastes your time.

Bowser in the Sky

This level is the most visually-appealing this game e’er gets, bringing in rare pinks & purples, with a variety o’ bright colors & patterns on its various platforms — a reprieve from this game’s flood o’ basic greens, blues, & browns that look like they could all come from a 16-crayon box.

This also has Super Mario 64’s linear level design @ its cleverest, with plenty o’ platforming puzzles involving moveable blocks, Whomps in tricky positions, & plenty o’ rotating platforms — all while offering many mo’ challenging ways to bypass parts to speed things up. For instance, this level has a horizontal elevator section reminiscent o’ “Rainbow Ride”; but whereas that level has you go down large gaps full o’ nothing so that you have no choice but to stand & wait, this level’s version has so many blocks that you’re s’posed to “dodge” that a clever player could realize that they could just jump from block to block & skip the slow elevator.

Possibly 1 o’ the most insulting design choices the developers o’ the DS remake implemented ( ’sides maybe having controls so asinine I can make my character walk in figure-8s by just holding a single direction on the crosspad ) is only allowing Mario to beat the final level. This whole remake makes a point o’ opening the game up to multiple characters & has you start as Yoshi, who needs to save Mario’s ass in the 1st place, ¿but the game denies you the right to beat the game with any o’ the others? & all ’cause Bowser just arbitrarily decides so, which just breaks logic on its head. These doors requiring a certain # o’ stars is s’posed to be, you know, gainst Bowser’s control ’cause if Bowser did have control o’er them he would’ve just made them impossible to open & made it impossible to beat him. If Bowser can just randomly say, “Nope, you can’t pass this part ’less you’re Mario”, ¿why can’t he just say, “Nope, you can’t pass this part”, period?

But I can’t talk ’bout “Bowser in the Sky” without reminding everyone o’ its memorable entrance — or rather, the way it prevented you from entering if you haven’t gotten 70 stars: not by refusing to open the door, but by making the staircase past the door go on fore’er while creepy Shepard tone music plays.

I’ve read complaints that the DS remake ruins it, thanks to the touchscreen map, which reveals that Mario just keeps warping back a meter or so. ¿Why didn’t they just make it so the map doesn’t show during this section?

& finally, perhaps the best level in the whole game…

Peach’s Castle

While 3D Mario fans disagree on what the best 3D Mario game is, e’en those who prefer later Mario 3D games usually admit that Peach’s Castle was the best hub world. While Super Mario Sunshine made a valiant attempt with “Isle Delfino”, which is, to be fair, a strong contender, Super Mario Galaxy abysmally failed with its space station full o’ pod rooms, which both lacked variety & coherency @ the same time; & after that Super Mario Galaxy 2 & Super Mario Odyssey just didn’t e’en bother to try.

Like the o’erworld in the 1st Zelda game, 1 o’ the things that makes “Peach’s Castle” strong is that it’s surprisingly small, certainly by today’s standards. But they still managed to pack it with numerous secrets & bonuses: rabbits for you to catch for stars, a secret underwater tunnel that leads to a secret lower door outside in which you can drain the moat, light coming from a high window that warps you to a secret stage, as well as many other secret bonus level entrances. & as my many level analyses showed, many levels had their own quirkly level entrances. & it did this all without getting in the way o’ the player getting from level to level. Contrast that with many modern games with huge worlds with nothing to do in them but hold forward.

Bramble Scramble

“Bramble Scramble” is 1 o’ those levels like “Tick-Tock Clock”, “Rusty Bucket Bay”, “Grunty Industries”, & the F.L.U.D.D.-less challenges in Super Mario Sunshine that some people hate on simply ’cause it’s hard, not due to genuine design flaws that make difficulty unfair or tedious.

“Bramble Scramble” is lucky in that it gets the least criticism ’mong this list, probably thanks to its aesthetics. Anyone reading this is probably already familiar with Donkey Kong Country 2’s famous bramble theme¹ — an uncommon level theme — & the serene symphony music that contrasts with these areas’ reputation for difficulty. This juxtaposition hadn’t been done much @ that time, — the closest I can think o’ is the Lost Levels title screen music in Super Mario All-Stars — probably due to Donkey Kong Country 2’s particular era o’ gaming & its relationship to difficulty. During the NES & early SNES era, video games in general were just difficult with not much focus on certain games being hard & others easy. As for its particular relationship to difficulty, the Donkey Kong Country series had a steep difficulty curve, making it easier to emphasize hard levels. Unlike Lost Levels, where every level is hard, or Kirby games, where everything is easy, Donkey Kong Country 2 could have easily made the easy levels have “Stickerbrush Symfony”; the choice to not do so is conspicuous.

But a good level isn’t just aesthetics ( message to those who call Tropical Freeze’s “Grassland Groove” — or truly just any level from that game — the greatest level in the whole series ). After all, the 1st bramble level, “Bramble Blast”, is not mentioned in this article title. Anyone who has played it will know why: it’s something o’ a slog that requires you to shoot yourself from barrel cannon to barrel cannon mo’ than 30 times. It’s not a terrible level; but the fact that this is, essentially, a gimmick already well-worn in the 1st game & the fact that this level sticks a bit too closely to its gimmick, like a Donkey Kong Country 3 level, knocks it quite a bit down from “great stage” level. Similarly, “Animal Antics” isn’t nearly as bad as people say ( in fact, its wind section is far better than “Gusty Glade” or “Windy Well”’s; a’least “Animal Antic”’s wind follows a consistent pattern so that if you know it, it’s impossible for the game to suddenly zip you by surprise ); but take ’way the wind & it’s just a generic, half-implemented “Bramble Scramble”. & that’s just 1 part o’ the level. ¿Does anyone remember any o’ the other sections o’ that level nearly as well? No, ’cause mo’ than half o’ that level is just Rambi & Enguarde charging through everything & Squitter being able to just skip everything ’cause he can basically fly.

In contrast, “Bramble Scramble” avoids the polar extremes o’ “Bramble Blast” & “Animal Antics”: it’s much better @ creating variety by interweaving breaks in the main Squawks theme o’ the level with on-ground sections, but still feels like a cohesive level. Succeeding @ both o’ these seemingly opposite ideals is done by having 2 themes: the general bramble theme, which fills the whole level, & the mo’ specific squawks theme, which gets breaks. & peppered throughout are e’en smaller themes, like dealing with Krooks on land, on rope, & on Squawks, or Zinger formations.

In particular, “Bramble Scramble” holds 2 sets o’ Zingers flying in place, crowding space so that the player has to weave ’tween them. The 2nd set packs the Zingers in mo’ tightly with less space ’tween them, but with yellow Zingers that the player can destroy if they can balance shooting with fluttering through tight space. It also has 3 sets o’ Zingers spinning in circles, the 1st o’ which mainly has yellow Zingers you can shoot down ( since the space before it is wide-open, shooting these Zingers is much easier than the packed-together Zingers mentioned before ), the 2nd all invincible red Zingers that force you to fly a half-circle through the space round them, & the 3rd the same, but forcing you to go in a full circle thanks to 1 red Zinger flying in space, blocking 1 direction.

Neither o’ these are unique to this level, ’course; but “Bramble Scramble” uses them just ’nough that they don’t feel thrown in arbitrarily & don’t feel like they don’t belong, but also don’t feel too repetitive.

Something not so oft brought up is the shape o’ bramble levels. Most levels in the Donkey Kong Country series are linear left-to-right paths. In fact, the 1st Donkey Kong Country & Returns only have linear levels, while Tropical Freeze only has maybe 1 or 2. “Bramble Scramble” is notable in that it zigzags all o’er the place, but is technically linear. This apparently tricks quite a few players, as I still regularly read commentators call this level a “maze”, despite the dearth o’ meaningful branching paths: 2 o’ the 3 branching paths are just bonuses that merge with the main path right @ the beginning, no different from half the bonuses in every other level. There is an interesting branch wherein you can choose to either maneuver a particularly tight bramble tunnel or dodge a Kannon’s downward cannon balls; but these, too, only merge with the main path less than a screen afterward.

Despite all the zigzagging in this level’s map, it does a remarkably good job o’ filling in the rectangular map’s space, with only empty space in the top left corner, while still hiding that the map is a rectangular ( by necessity, thanks to how level data is held & the rectangular shape o’ the screen ) & without conspicuously adding padding or having sections that feel awkwardly short. I can say from my own experience trying to do this with a level I’m working on for Boskeopolis Land that this is not easy to do.

While Donkey Kong Country games are known for their gimmicks, Donkey Kong Country 2 could create some excellent setpieces using just the basic mechanics, too. For instance, I always found “Bramble Scramble”’s beginning quite memorable. For 1, the right path is to go left ’stead o’ right for once, with the right just leading to bonus — a harmless trick on the player that still rewards the player a li’l for their trouble ( a lamer game would’ve just wasted the player’s time, giving them nothing, or outright killed them ). Past the small hole in the wooden floor under you with a bramble path ’neath, basically telling you that touching the brambles hurts you, you have a jump that’s rather precise for this early in the game, requiring you to go quite far to make it o’er the short bramble wall, but not so far that you smack into the Zinger just ’bove & to the left o’ the wall, forcing you to weave ’tween them.

The only weak point ’bout this level is its hero coin placement ’hind a bramble wall that you can magically move through safely, with only a wooden platform & a banana on the other side as a hint. The logical assumption would be that you can reach that area from ’nother side in the maze & that this is just a sneak peak, not that terrain that the game up to that point had consistently treated as solid & deadly is suddenly as secure as air. But they couldn’t e’en leave it @ that: you have to go through 2 ghost bramble walls, the 2nd o’ which makes the puzzle mo’ obvious by having a banana inside a bramble wall, which looks janky & rom-hackish.

Finally, I like the subtle subtext o’ the darker palette this has from “Bramble Blast” from the previous world, as if trying to warn you that this would be much harder than a cute li’l barrel maze. Embarrassingly ’nough, I only just realized that this level was probably s’posed to take place @ night, — or a’least twilight — since it’s in the nighttime “Krazy Kremland”.

Screech’s Sprint

While “Screech’s Sprint” also balances its gimmick with mo’ traditional platforming, it does it in the opposite way, focusing the 1st “half” ( in truth, the section before the midway point is mo’ 1/4th the size o’ the level — but then, flying is faster than monkey movement, so it doesn’t feel that much smaller ) on traditional platforming, while the 2nd half is all dedicated to racing through the bramble maze gainst the eponymous Screech.

Howe’er, like “Bramble Scramble”, “Screech’s Sprint”’s traditional platforming isn’t boring. In fact, it requires some o’ the cleverest, trickiest maneuvering in the game to pummel into your mind that this is the final level. Right after the 1st jump you’re faced with a Cat-O-9-Tails in an alcove too small to jump, forcing you to rush back into the open space without letting the Cat-O-9-Tails grab you ( where it will definitely throw you into brambles ) so you can get space to go round it. After that we have what I think is probably the only time a Donkey Kong Country game requires you to roll off a platform & jump in midair to simply beat a level. Then you have to jump rather high up to avoid hitting a bramble wall, but not too high so you don’t bonk your head on the ceiling dipping down, & you have to not go too far forward so that you bonk a Klinger hanging on the 2nd rope on the row o’ ropes. After this, you have to jump ’tween a bramble wall & Zinger, jump o’er ’nother high wall, zip past 5 Zingers going up & down in a horizontal line, dodge 2 Cat-O-9-Tails without smacking into the low-hanging bramble walls, & finally, after a simple climb past a bunch o’ Mini-Neckies, make a couple tricky jumps ’cross the small wooden planks floating in the sea o’ brambles, including ’nother jump that requires rolling & jumping while in midair if you’re Diddy.

Other than maybe the rope climb past the Mini-Neckies ( which is a clever breather if you realize you can just rush forward & the Mini-Neckies will ne’er be able to touch you before you pass them, but already done in “Bramble Scramble” ), every 1 o’ these mini challenges is a clever twist on challenges you’ve experienced since “Topsail Trouble” that test your platforming aim without being unfair.

The bonus is well constructed, too: you have to pay attention to your surroundings & notice the wooden plank platform near the top o’ the screen as you go through the last land section & throw your partner ( which means getting through the whole 1st half o’ this level without getting hit, as the only DK barrel before the midway point o’ no return is @ the start o’ the level ) up @ the plank with precise aim to avoid throwing your partner into brambles, & then you have to jump ’cross wooden plank platforms while holding a canon ball weighing you down. The bonus itself is the ultimate challenge to using Dixie’s helicopter twirl to weave through thin passages ’tween bramble walls.

& all this great level design is just the build up to the main attraction, the ultimate squawks challenge. Yes, e’en mo’ than “Animal Antics”. While Squawks sections are notorious, they can all be rendered much easier with 1 simple trick: move carefully. What makes squawks hard to control for those not used to him is his traction ( very similar to novice’s negative reaction to Luigi’s controls in Lost Levels ). But with slower, mo’ careful movement, the slowdown delay is reduced, making Squawks easier to control. This applies to “Animal Antics”’s wind section, too. People oft get screwed by the wind ’cause they just rush through the level, leaving them vulnerable to sudden wind changes throwing them in its direction. Howe’er, if the player doesn’t crank down the arrow button in any direction, wind changes won’t be so extreme, making it easier to adjust to them.

“Screech’s Sprint” doesn’t allow these mitigations, howe’er, ’cause you can’t go slowly — you’re in a race. So you have no choice but to sharpen your flying aim.

Much like the rest o’ the level, the ensuing maze is full o’ clever twists. For instance, the designers threw in a few risk/reward sections with narrower shortcuts, including 1 right after the midway point, that is harder to squeeze through, but will give you mo’ distance in front o’ Screech ( or get you closer to him if you’ve fallen ’hind ).

In contrast, you have the devious placement o’ the hero coin, which requires you to go through a detour, losing you time in the race. ’Course, Donkey Kong Country 2 is nice ’nough to allow you to keep the hero coin once you grab it, whether you die or not, so you can just grab it, die, & then focus fully on the race hereafter. Still, there’s always that urge to challenge oneself to grab the hero coin & still beat the race in 1 try.

Round this point, in the middle o’ the race, the designers introduce an actual mini maze with dead-ends with banana coins. These would be unfair if the designers weren’t merciful ’nough to put trails o’ bananas leading you through the correct passageways. Howe’er, some “wrong turns” are, in fact, shortcuts; so while it’s easy to avoid dead-ends to beat the level by following designated paths, the level still offers rewards to those who risk unmarked paths.

The last 3rd o’ the maze begins throwing in “Bramble Scramble” Zinger challenges, culminating in 1 area full o’ Zingers flying in place with thin space ’tween them — but now the player has to weave through them while still racing forward.

In terms o’ aesthetics, “Screech’s Sprint” is the best-looking bramble level, & probably the best-looking level in the game, applying an autumnal brown-orange to the brambles & making the sky purple. Autumn, being associated so well with endings, works well for this end-game stage.

Glimmer’s Galleon

View an interactive map courtesy o’ DKC Atlas

Today’s 1st lame stage is an easy 1: all I need to say is that this is a water level that’s dark & hard to see, 2 o’ the most widely-reviled video game gimmicks. I could also add that the original version o’ this game made it so that Glimmer, the fish following you & giving you the thin light by which to see, flashes the screen full white for a brief moment every time you turn round, which Nintendo had removed in later releases, presumably out o’ fear for causing people seizures. I could also add that this level is a maze; but I generally like mazes, so long as the controls I’m using to navigate the maze are enjoyable & I can actually see the maze.

Other bad marks ’bout this level:

This level is repetitive & is basically just a long winding path avoiding the same Lockjaws, Flotsams, Shuris you already saw quite ’nough o’ in “Lockjaws Locker” & Puftups, who you’ll see plenty o’ times in “Arctic Abyss” & the Enguarde section o’ “Animal Antics”.

You don’t e’en get the respite from Donkey Kong Country swimming controls most water levels offer, Enguarde, thanks to useless Glimmer getting in the way.

For Diddy’s Kong Quest this is a particularly weak level ’cause it’s the only level that takes place entirely underwater. 1 o’ the many decisions the developers o’ Diddy’s Kong Quest made that made that game stand out ’mong all the others as having the best level design is that most o’ what you could call its “water levels” break up the water navigation with on-ground sections, & oft add twists to the water sections that many players still remember. ¿Who doesn’t remember bumping seals to make them spray water into the boiling red water to make it blue & cool ’nough to swim through & then hurrying through it before it turned hot ’gain in “Lava Lagoon” or racing ’head o’ the rising water with a piranha fish that bites you as soon as it can reach you in “Slime Climb”? But I wouldn’t be surprised if many players forgot this level.

Being a maze level, you can imagine that this level’s bonuses are just hidden in certain hard-to-find crevices that would not be hard to find if your vision was good. The 1st bonus is right ’bove the start, which is particularly cliché. The hero coin’s location is just 2 layers o’ hidden areas obscured by unmarked magical move-throughable solid material — the weakest element o’ this game’s level design that is on the same level o’ “puzzle” design as the kind o’ levels 10-year-ol’ I made in Lunar Magic.

This level’s bonuses are both the same: swim through a maze till you find the bonus coin. The only difference is that the 2nd bonus has bananas that mislead you — which is particular pernicious, as the DKC series has always upheld that following banana trails is always the best idea. For this level to break this sacred vow to add the slightest bit o’ challenge to yet ’nother maze is just sad.

The 1 thing ’bout this level that almost made it good is that its ending area being similar to the beginning o’ “Rattle Battle” would make the connection ’tween this & the next level feel seamless… if “Rattle Battle” were the next level. Unfortunately, the developers for some reason put “Krockhead Klamber” ’tween these levels.

Windy Well

View an interactive map courtesy o’ DKC Atlas

The bonus level “Animal Antics” is infamous for its Squawks section’s wind, making the already tricky challenge o’ navigating bramble mazes with Squawks e’en harder. But that wind mechanic was consistent: it pushed the same amount for the same duration before switching, going back & forth.

“Windy Well”, for some reason, ’scapes public ire, despite its windy mechanic being far jankier; & it’s not e’en a bonus level, but a level you must get through to beat the game. Rather than pushing you left or right for a specific duration, this wind slowly pushes you upward, sometimes up & down — but only @ certain points, & the game doesn’t do a good job o’ being clear where exactly these places are. Thus, it’s easy to enter a wind section only to pass just the edge o’ it or to just miss the bottom hitbox o’ it & plummet straight down to your death.

On the other end o’ the spectrum, there is a section near the middle wherein you’re s’posed to glide under Zingers while falling back down from wind up-pour… if you stupidly jump after reaching that platform. Otherwise, you can just run right under them. I’m actually not sure if this was intentional or not; but it’s not clever, since it relies on discovering a quirk to a counterintuitive mechanic rather than applying any logic. ¿Why would the wind only affect you @ all if you jump? It’s not e’en just being in the air: you reach the air a li’l when going up onto the platform in the 1st place & you can throw your partner up into the air all you want & they won’t be affected by the air. ( Note: one may think that the 1-up balloon on this platform may incite players to jump to get it, forcing them to go through the challenge normally; but you can just throw your partner up @ the balloon & still skip the challenge. So there’s truly no reason to do it. )

But truly, for a game that usually knew how to pace its elements, this level is too long & repetitive. It ne’er evolves much past dodging Zingers & Krook hooks, & there’s li’l variation. Sometimes the Zingers move in odd patterns; but you still find yourself dodging stationary Zingers e’en up to the end o’ the level — in fact, floating up through holes in a pattern o’ stationary Zingers is the last challenge o’ the level after the 2nd time you dodge Krook hooks. The level is just a bunch o’ challenges thrown together without any logical organization in terms o’ theme or difficulty evolution.

This repetition leads to ’nother problem with this level: it falls into the Donkey Kong Country 3 gimmick syndrome o’ focusing every element o’ this level on this 1 gimmick without any break to switch it up @ all. That this isn’t e’en a particularly inspired or interesting gimmick in the 1st place makes this baffling. “Gusty Glade”, ( which, don’t get me wrong, is also a shitty level with cheap wind that abruptly changes when you get near a platform’s edge, throwing you right off the edge without warning ) which you play in the preceding world, has wind, too, but it’s far less janky & has far mo’ variations: with Rattly & without, hopping on enemies, blasting up in barrels, & using hooks, none o’ which is used mo’ than 2 setpieces, & these are still broken up with regular platforming. Then ’gain, “Gusty Glade” is also not nearly so long, so it ends before it gets too tiresome. It pisses me off still; but “Windy Well” kind o’ pisses me off & bored me — & boring me is a far greater crime than pissing me off, as a’least the latter inspires some emotion in me. “Animal Antics”’s wind section, which actually is competently-designed & people who complain ’bout it are just bad @ it, has less variation, but is much smaller, & is only a portion o’ a larger level.

This obsession with its gimmick leads finding “Windy Well”’s bonuses to be uninspired: the 1st bonus is just falling in a hole that seems like it might make you fall & die, but has wind that keeps you from falling & allows you to float under the platform that continues the level to find a bonus barrel. Then, later, the level does something similar for a hero coin, but e’en mo’ obtuse: you have to jump, but not too high, or you’ll get hit by a Zinger, which is likely. I think you’re s’posed to roll off the edge & then jump, but e’en that will 90% o’ the time either still not give you ’nough speed & distance to clear the Zingers or make you miss the invisible wind hitbox & fall to your death. I was only e’er able to do it without getting hit with Diddy, e’en after many tries with Dixie. In truth, whene’er I did this on the many 102% runs I’ve done, I’d always just tank a hit to get this. Some may say this is me whining ’cause I suck, but I want to remind you that the hitbox is completely invisible, so it’s not strategic aiming; it’s guesswork — guesswork so anal that I’m still not e’en sure if it’s possible with 1 o’ the characters. If they were going to be so vague ’bout how the wind works, they ought to a’least give the player some leeway.

The bonus challenges themselves run into the opposite problem, having li’l to do with the level gimmick & just being generic challenges. The 1st bonus just has you use the wind mechanic to rise up to a hook, which isn’t a challenge, just pointless padding, & then challenges you to hop on a bunch o’ Flitters, which you’ve already done many times. The 2nd bonus is e’en worse: it has nothing to do with the gimmick or the level’s theme & is just a bramble room with Squawks challenging you to grab a bunch o’ stars. Much earlier levels had much mo’ interesting twists on this, such as Bramble Scramble’s bonus challenging you to hit bees in the way o’ stars. Why an end-game level would have a much simpler & easier version o’ a bonus from midgame is a mystery.

The only good thing I can say ’bout this level, other than its music, is the 1st challenge, which has nothing to do with the gimmick, challenging you to hop ’mong 2 short platforms with Click-Clacks on them, a particularly tricky variation o’ a challenge players will have done many times before.

E’en the palette for this level isn’t nearly as nice as “Kannon’s Klaim” & “Squawk’s Shaft”. This level’s black walls with green crystals feels far mo’ generic that you’d expect it to be the 1st palette for the mine-shaft theme, while “Kannon’s Klaim”’s brown walls & purple crystals & ’specially “Squawk’s Shaft”’s red walls & golden crystals are far mo’ colorful & exotic. Usually this game uses the mo’ exotic palettes for later levels, such as the bramble levels saving the autumnal sunset palette with purple sky & brownish gold brambles for the last regular level o’ the game or the swamp levels starting with typical green, but using the far mo’ exotic purple palette for their last level.

I’ve already bashed this level in the big post I made comparing Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World 3 years ago & reminded you all how much I hate slow autoscrollers when criticizing Super Mario Bros. 3’s worst level 2 years ago, so this post was inevitable; & replaying through Super Mario World¹ to get level ideas to steal² & the recent “Great Stages” post after a 2-year hiatus was the perfect spur.

But before I write ’bout “Donut Plains 2”, it’ll help if I whet your appetite with the level that comes before it, “Donut Plains 1”. You remember ( since you haven’t lived in a fallout shelter for the past 3 decades & ’course have played Super Mario World ) that this was the iconic level that introduces the cape feather, as well as the cape-wielding Super Koopas you cadge them from, the baseball-throwing Chucks, & fire spewing Lotus Plants. The Baseball Chucks are, in particular, a great way to practice your cape swing by blocking his baseballs, as is the iconic bonus room halfway through the level that allows you to collect ’bout 600 coins flying through them in the air.

It is gainst this iconic level that “Donut Plains 2” truly brings on the letdown.

“Donut Plains 2” may be the slowest autoscroller I’ve e’er played. I swear that half o’ the time is spent with my shoving Yoshi’s face into the right edge o’ the screen in the desperate hope it might get me to the end mo’ quickly.

¿& what does this level do with this mechanic used in already far too many levels? Well, if you’re playing while in a coma you may stupidly let yourself get squished by the slow-moving yellow dirt. The last moving yellow dirt e’en stays on screen so long that if you go onto it after it 1st shows up, it will ’ventually crush you. The puzzle is to wait round in the perfectly safe ground before it till it reaches the top & then falls back down ’gain. This is the climax o’ this level, the best iteration o’ this lame mechanic they could muster.

Actually, that’s not e’en the end o’ the level: the level ends with a pipe & 2 random Spike Tops seen nowhere else in the level. I think the only way they could’ve introduced this enemy in a weaker way would be if they didn’t include the pipe & show this enemy’s main mechanic. They should’ve waited till “Vanilla Dome 1”. Yes, this level is so bad it makes good… well, much better than this level a’least, levels worse.

The most interesting iteration o’ the moving yellow dirt is the 2nd-to-last instance, when it comes in from the top & may, very rarely, block your jumps ’bove the Buzzy Beetles. Too bad, since the screen & dirt are going @ a snail’s pace, you’re forced to wait & pay attention to every detail so that you could see it coming before it came e’en close to getting in your way. This level is the equivalent o’ playing a game in super slomo — it saps e’en the slightest o’ challenge so that it almost feels like cheating & makes it agonizingly boring.

Imagine this level didn’t have autoscrolling³. ¿What would it lose? You wouldn’t have to wait in front o’ a wall slowly moving up & then back down. That would be a heartbreaking loss. ’Stead, you could run through as quickly as you could, weaving ’tween moving dirt. This level, like many autoscrollers, would be better if it weren’t an autoscroller @ all.

This is no surprise; autoscrollers, when useful, have 2 functions: they either force you to hurry & act quickly or they challenge you to dodge hard-to-dodge dangers within constricted space. Obviously this level, as well as just ’bout every autoscroller in just ’bove every Mario game ’cept for that fast airship in Super Mario Bros. 3 ( the only good autoscroller in that game ), fails that criteria, since this level is slow. But it fails the latter, too, since none o’ the dangers in this level are hard to dodge. ’Sides, one must be very creative with the layout o’ the onslaught o’ dangers one preys on the player to avoid monotony — the “elevator level”, e’en mo’ reviled from classic platformers than water levels. I’ve ne’er seen a platformer do slow autoscrollers well; only shmups succeed @ them.

“¿Are you truly going to bash an early-game level in a level made for kids for being easy?”. No, I’m going to bash it for having nothing to do. This isn’t the 1st level — there are a’least 7 levels before it, all o’ which are much mo’ interesting. “Donut Plains 1” is earlier, but it has all kinds o’ things thrown into it. The flying tutorial room is certainly easier, — you literally can’t die, save for time-up — but it feels much freer. “Donut Plains 2” is as easy as having an o’erly-protective mother: while great early-game levels throughout Mario games are easy ’cause they’re free & rarely punish you for just doing whate’er you want, this level is easy ’cause it doesn’t let you do anything but stand round in mother-level-designer’s strong grip.

’Sides, this level isn’t free: it’s just challenging ’nough to force you to pay attention to its tedium, like the platformer equivalent o’ Desert Bus. As I replayed this level multiple times to capture the screenshots you’re seeing, I was surprised by how easy ’twas to die simply ’cause I glazed off or was too far on the right edge & let a bat smack me or e’en maybe the level crush me once.

The 2nd worst part o’ this level is that not only do you have to suffer through it once, you have to suffer through it a 2nd time for the 2nd exit. Luckily, if you have foresight, you can take the secret exit route in the middle both times, which also includes a shortcut to the end. But letting me skip most o’ the level does not make a level better, but is itself a symptom o’ a bad level. I wouldn’t want to skip a fun level.

Furthermo’, the secret exit is as arbitrary & slapdash as the rest o’ this level. It’s just a random pipe in the middle o’ the level ’mong many. I s’pose that adds the challenge o’ testing every pipe before the screen zips by them. Also, you can actually get crushed gainst the pipe if you manage to mess up going into it before the dirt rises too high, which is possible, since Super Mario World has quite janky pipe entrance physics; but this is rare.

The room this pipe leads to has a wide empty space with just a football-kicking Chuck — ’cause caves are always the most fitting place for football players⁴.

After that irrelevancy, we have a combination o’ 2 o’ the most o’erused puzzles in Super Mario World: an item ( a Koopa shell ) locked ’hind turn blocks you need to be big to break with a spin jump & a turn block you need to throw the shell @ to create a vine. ’Course, if you have a cape or Yoshi, you can just fly or Yoshi jump into the hole with the key & keyhole, anyway.

¿So what is the outright worst part o’ this level? It’s basically just a weaker version o’ ’nother level. “Valley of Bowser 2” — which is tedious, too, mind you — does everything this level does, but better in every way, ’cept maybe that it’s longer & has e’en mo’ padding. & most o’ it isn’t e’en hardly harder than “Donut Plains 2”, so “Donut Plains 2” doesn’t e’en work as a warm-up to “Valley of Bowser 2”. While “Donut Plains 2” is just a bunch o’ virtually-identical towers o’ yellow dirt going up & down, “Valley of Bowser 2” has a moving maze o’ yellow dirt you must maneuver while avoiding being crushed gainst the brown dirt. It sounds much harder; but thanks to the slowness o’ the autoscrolling, it’s easy to avoid if you’re paying a bit o’ attention. It is genuinely easier than a’least 95% o’ the levels in “Donut Plains” & after.

After that maze there are a series o’ short races to get out o’ passageways before the rising yellow dirt crushes you. Howe’er, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that the edge o’ the yellow dirt in the 1st passageway sticks out past the right edge o’ the brown dirt & that, if you were to wait on it, you’d be able to reach the ceiling o’ the 1st passageway & go ’bove it to the left to reach the key & keyhole. This is a far cleverer secret exit than “Donut Plains 2”’s & is actually relevant to the gimmick.

“Donut Plains 2”’s aesthetics do it no favors: it’s 1 entry in an o’erused & bland theme that does not fit with the world it’s in. Super Mario Bros. 3’s advantage to having mo’ exotic ( for the time ) themes was that its themes generally stuck to their worlds & none felt o’erused. Super Mario World, meanwhile, has world themes so generic that they spill out into other worlds. Thus, we get the absurdity o’ a game with a cave world ( 2, technically, since “Valley of Bowser” is quite cavelike already ) full o’ cave levels, & yet also has cave levels throughout other worlds, as if 2 cave worlds wasn’t ’nough caves for us⁵. ( “Plains”, which is e’en mo’ generic — the most generic theme possible, in fact, falls into this e’en harder ).

“Donut Plains 2” is a particularly ugly level in a game that, quite frankly, is quite ugly as a whole. 1 o’ the major downsides to implementing moving dirt is that it takes up the main background layer, so that all we get are sparse… shapes that only use 4 colors & don’t look anything like anything that would be on a cave wall but ’stead looks like something the laziest modern artist would make who doesn’t know any better ( & I like modern art, so if you fail to impress me with it, you know it sucks ). The sickly yellow dirt that looks like it may have some radiation poisoning from underground nuclear tests clash particularly with the lifeless gray o’ the rest o’ the dirt. It made me realize how wrong complementary colors that are super desaturated ( ’cause Super Mario World, despite revolving round a fantasy world, is desaturated to hell like it’s a 16-bit Call of Duty ) look.

“Donut Plains 2” is a particular problem in context. Coming just after the release o’ the 1st Sonic the Hedgehog game, Super Mario World was a particular target for the not-entirely-fair stereotype that Mario games are slow & bland⁶. But “Donut Plains 2” fits this stereotype perfectly: it is slow & bland.

What stands out most is that, despite this game taking place in the Mushroom Kingdom & having plenty o’ mushrooms in ?-blocks, the terrain is rarely composed o’ mushrooms, but more oft those contradictory blocks that are a mix o’ natural cracked rock & unnatural perfect square shape ( or grass, if playing Super Mario All-Stars ). Having much mo’ red & yellow & a li’l less brown & green certainly makes the level feel mo’ colorful than most other daytime levels, ’specially in All-Stars with the mushroom platforms in the background.

But graphics aside, this level’s arrangement o’ elements seem mo’ modern than most other levels in this game. Other than the green hill levels ( World 1-3 probably being the most well-known example ), most o’ this game’s levels are flat land with a few walls & holes here & there. But e’en most o’ those levels are just a horizontal line o’ hills going from left to right, with slight variances in height, such as the other level with prominent weight pulleys, World 6-3, or merely use multilayered hills to create proto-Sonic alternate routes, like World 1-3, 5-3 ( which is just a clone o’ 1-3 ), & 3-3. But World 4-3 uses multilayered mushroom towers not as a means for alternate routes, but as a challenge itself. Just after the 2nd mushroom, you see a mushroom tower @ just the right height to stymie you. It grants alternate routes, but unlike the other levels, the alternate routes aren’t arbitrary, but have different challenges: if you go below the mushroom tower, you have to jump low ’nough not to bonk your head on it, but high ’nough to make it to the next platform under it; to go ’bove the tower, you must run & jump high ’nough to reach it.

& in this level, the red Koopa is, for once, a greater hindrance than the green Koopas, as you have to time jumps so that you don’t run into them during their patrol back & forth o’er the mushroom. Thanks to the timing & placement o’ the red Koopas on the 2nd mushroom, the jump to it will leave li’l space & time to jump o’er them before they reach you ( which is very tricky to pull off in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, thanks to its much smaller screen, allowing e’en less reaction time ).

& then there’s the weight pulleys, an early version o’ a “level gimmick” that makes this level feel like a proto Super Mario World level, which used just ’bout every type o’ moving blocks or platform you could think o’. Their key strength is how much control they give you. The most obvious way is that they let you move them up & down all o’er; but the subtle version o’ this strength is how they don’t force you to slow down, a problem with many level gimmicks in games. If you know what you’re doing & have the maneuverability to do so, you can pass pulleys onto the rest o’ the level without stopping.

I also like the way the mushroom block is positioned on the edge o’ a mushroom platform with a thin platform just below. It’s the 1st time the game truly threatens you with destroying your mushroom before you can get it. Compare this with 4-1’s 1st mushroom position: it has a much larger plot o’ land to move before falling into a pit, & the Spinys offer a greater obstacle than gravity. The lower mushroom platform softens the challenge, which fits this level’s placement difficulty just after the middle o’ the game.

The ending is 1 o’ the few without the iconic staircase, replaced by a platform moving up & down. This does not make reaching the flagpole harder in the slightest, but it does make reaching the top o’ the flagpole a bit harder, & makes doing so while getting 6 fireworks much harder, which those gaming for the score medal in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe’s challenge mode will know all too well.

’Mong the pulley levels, this is the weakest ending, with 3-3’s pulley @ the end with the end closer to the flagpole lower down the best. A platform moving up & down doesn’t have much to do with this level, which only has 2 other vertical floating platforms, thrown in the middle so that they’re easy to forget ’bout. 6-3 focuses much mo’ on these types o’ platforms & ends with a series o’ vertical platforms leading to a hill seen in almost every other world’s 3rd level, just wintry white. I think 4-3 should’ve had a series o’ mushroom hills leading to the flagpole while 6-3 should’ve ended with a vertically rising & falling platform, but with a gap ’tween the platform & the flagpole to add some actual challenge ( since we’re moving 2 worlds later, after all ).

Honorable Mentions

In fact, 6-3 is a strong competitor to 4-3 — perhaps e’en better, looking @ it with fresher eyes. Its wintry white & gray blocks o’er a black background is arguably rarer than 4-3’s red mushrooms, since they also appear in the warp zone in 4-2 ( though you can’t see both in the same playthrough ), though you do see this same palette in every castle level, just with a different tileset.

Sadly, this level loses this special color scheme in the Super Mario All-Stars, whose Super Mario Bros. remake otherwise had superior graphics & music — though inferior gameplay, thanks to errors the programmers made with the brick-breaking physics, ’less you use the brick-fix rom hack. Why they didn’t make snowy graphics for the hill tileset like they did for evening levels that weren’t e’en wintry-looking in the original, like 3-1, I have no idea. Super Mario Bros. seems to be a game destined to be plagued by imperfect remakes.

It also arguably has a mix o’ mo’ exotic elements, replacing common red Koopas with a few red springs & Bullet Bills. Howe’er, the red Koopas allow for mo’ fine-tuned jumping challenges, while the Bullet Bills just come in @ random places, which can make certain circumstances outright unfair, rather than clever. The use o’ the spring is well done: the 1st is just for bonus coins & a higher vantage point, which you can still reach with careful jumping without it, while the 2nd is, save for some particular expert maneuvering, mandatory to reach the next platform high ’bove. They don’t do much else with this element, which, quite frankly, is only meaningful as a challenge in how janky timing jumps off it can be.

6-3’s mushroom block is e’en better than 4-3’s, & fits its moving platforms theme well. It is positioned just under a horizontally moving platform, upping the challenge from 4-3’s mushroom by making it much easier to make the mushroom fall into the pit without a safety platform below to give an extra chance.

Like 4-3, you can race through the whole level without stopping if you know what you’re doing. Like Sonic games later on, if you keep to the top the level goes smoothly, but if you let yourself fall to the bottom, you can run into tricky jumps, such as those wherein the weight pulleys are so high that they’re hard or impossible to reach, but are still low ’nough to threaten to bonk you as you try to jump under them & interrupt your jump.

I’m also quite partial to 6-2, though it’s definitely a 3rd to 4-3 & 6-3. It’s a rather long long full o’ tricky arrangements o’ pipes with Piranha Plants — usually only emphasized in underground levels. This makes this probably the greenest level in the game.

Piranha Plants are the most common enemy in the game ( yes, they are mo’ common than Goombas ), making this level feel less fresh than the 4-3 & 6-3 with their rarer weight pulleys, & Piranha Plants, who are slow & easily-telegraph their moves are not nearly as tricky. Worse, if you don’t have a fire flower, they can easily delay you, ’specially in this level.

Still, this is definitely the most interesting Piranha Plant level, which calls to mind the clever arrangements found in Lost Levels levels like 5-1, 7-1, A-1, & C-1.

I also like the nighttime twist on the coin heaven, with a slightly trickier arrangement o’ cloud blocks, making it harder to collect all coins — though this coin heaven appears in 3-1 1st.

I also like the way the ending staircase adds both a hopping Paratroopa & a Piranha Plant.

You can’t completely break an artwork from the media it’s made in any mo’ than you can completely break the abstraction o’ anything from its concrete basis. Artwork literally can’t exist without a medium.

A corollary o’ this is that if you change a work’s medium, then you change the work itself. This is why adaptations are so controversial. For instance, ¿why is The Shining movie with Jack Nicholson that’s inaccurate to King’s original book popularly viewed as superior to the mo’ faithful miniseries? ’Cause movies are different from books: what makes good literature doesn’t necessarily make good film, & reverse.

This applies equally to video games. The problem is, many game developers still haven’t figured this out yet, probably ’cause it’s still a young medium & new media oft stumbled while trying to ape older media as it tries to figure out how to be its own thing. Much o’ video game storytelling is still done through cutscenes &, e’en worse, dialogue boxes, which are just inferior versions o’ movies & literature, respectively.

Cutscenes aren’t nearly as bad. Theoretically, it’s possible nowadays to make cutscenes that are just as good as real movies if one uses live action or pre-rendered footage. However, in reality, the economics o’ game development has ne’er led to the existence o’ video game cutscenes that look as good as a Pixar film or have the acting & directing quality o’, say, The Godfather¹. &, ’course, video games are much pricier than movies, so if the video game doesn’t offer useful gameplay, — if the game’s claim to quality is based entirely on its story — then buyers are still ripping themselves off. Video games don’t just compete with each other; they must also compete with movies & literature, which are just as hungry for time & money. ¿Why waste my scarce money & scarcer time on a game whose claim to fame is cutscenes cluttered in chunky polygons & trite writing when I could better serve my time on earth watching Breaking Bad? ¿Why read the 1000th medieval RPG with hokey, inaccurate “ye olde English” when I could just read Shakespeare & get the authentic thing, which sounds 1000 times better?

But I would rather focus on dialogue boxes, since they’re worse, & worse in ways many have probably not noticed, but as someone who reads literature a’least round 2 hours per day, I have noticed quite blaringly.

The easiest thing would be to point out that many games highly acclaimed for their story don’t compare much with highly acclaimed literature. People who praise the story o’ games like Ocarina of Time or the average Final Fantasy game would probably be shocked if they were to learn that, if these games’ stories were put in book form, they would be laughed out o’ any serious fantasy or science fiction guild. ( You’d think anyone who has watched The Game of Thrones, based on the Song of Ice & Fire series would realize this, since the stark difference in nuance, character, & world-building ’tween that series & the average Zelda or Final Fantasy game is glaring ).

This is likely ’cause, unlike music or art assets, the average game’s written not by professional writers, but whoever they have standing round — usually the narcissistic director ( I’m looking @ you, Other M ) — based on the delusion that anyone can write well. This is on the level o’ logic that any guy with the generic title “game designer” you have lying round can compose Beatles-quality music. Interestingly, 1 o’ the few video games I consider to have literature-level quality writing, Mother 3, was written by an actual published writer.

But e’en if the words written are good, dialogue boxes are still an absolutely terrible way to tell story. It’s striking to me, ’cause e’en I hadn’t noticed it consciously till recently: I’ve always had this inexplicable preference for reading books o’er reading in video games, but couldn’t quite tell why till recently.

The answer is that dialogue boxes suck. They’re tiny windows wherein you can only read a few lines o’ text @ a time, whose movement speed is oft highly constricted, & wherein trying to go back & read text that’s already gone by is either a pain or impossible.

Contrast this with books: what I like ’bout books is that they give you complete control o’er the speed & flow o’ story progression. This is why I still prefer reading to watching TV or movies or e’en watching tutorial videos online. Not only that, but I can read in whatever sequence I want. Most people think o’ reading as just a purely linear, uninterrupted path. This is why so much contemporary literature is terrible — ’cause people don’t know how to read well anymo’. No, the true way to read is to go back & reread sections for clarification or just to comprehend other layers o’ the writing ( which are nonexistent in most modern literature, since, as we’ve established, they’re incompetent ). Just imagine trying to read, for example, a Shakespearean play & understand the plot, the references, the meter, the rhyme, the imagery, the tone, the theme, the use o’ consonants & vowels, & all that when you can only read a few lines @ a time & can only read them once.

This is what makes the medium an important aspect o’ a work’s quality: different mediums are inherently better & worse @ different things than other media. Literature is inherently superior @ giving textual info than video games or movies. E’en if one wanted dynamic, interactive textual content, web pages using JavaScript could do a better job than cumbersome text boxes, if people had the creativity to realize this untapped potential². This is not to say that video games are inherently inferior to literature. Something that literature absolutely cannot do is offer the kind o’ interactive physics or level design that a classic Mario game has. In fact, “level design” is impossible in literature. Understanding this, it should be no wonder why I have mo’ artistic respect for Mario games that use the medium o’ video games for its strengths gainst the average RPG or Zelda game that just throw together generic puzzles, level design, & the most basic movement you could program just to service bootleg Tolkien told through those gimped dialogue boxes.

Unfortunately, many self-described video game critics still don’t respect video games as a medium for what it does best. ¿How oft do these critics praise games based on shoddy story & hardly talk ’bout level design, control, physics, the general coherence o’ gameplay mechanics, &, least o’ all, the quality o’ the game’s programming beyond noticing flagrant bugs? This is probably ’cause the average game critic is probably a failed creative writer — & it’s here where the ol’ acorn, “A li’l knowledge is mo’ dangerous than no knowledge” returns too true.

This is troublesome, as it’s a bad influence on video games. When you consider how li’l attention the hardworking, brilliant programmers who were able to squeeze games like Super Mario Bros. 3 onto such primitive technology as the NES compared to some jackoff who scribbled out some tripe ’bout a goody-goody hero fighting gainst a grrrr evil villain in a couple minutes & puked it onto Unity, I can’t be surprised game developers nowadays just hack their games together in some bloated engine & demand their customers have o’erpowered computers on a certain operating system with a certain brand o’ controller to run their bloated code with every shortcut taken. Gamers can’t complain ’bout getting shit if they can’t tell what shit is. That video games are, @ their core, code, makes this sentiment ridiculous — but it is true. Just as how ridiculous it is that so much modern literature tries to ape film in the vain hopes o’ getting a movie adaptation, ignoring that tiny li’l problem that literature sucks @ being film just as much as video games suck @ being literature.

This may have been the 1st game I owned, as opposed to the 1st game I played, a family-owned game, ( Super Mario World ), ‘long with Pokémon Silver with my new Game Boy Color back when I turned 9.

@ the time I was surprised & somewhat disappointed. I think I remembered my older brother saying ’twas like Super Mario All-Stars, a game we had but somehow lost, but it turned out to just be a remake o’ the 1st Super Mario Bros. — what a philistine younger me considered to be the weakest o’ the ol’ Mario games, since it’s much mo’ limited in powerups, didn’t have any kind o’ map screen like Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World had ( Super Mario Bros. Deluxe does, but it’s just for aesthetics & showing score requirements for Challenge Mode levels ), didn’t have spin jumps, didn’t let you revisit beaten levels, & didn’t e’en let you go backward in levels. So, basically, young me wasn’t thrilled ’cause ’twas hard & I sucked @ video games & I preferred the hand-holding o’ Super Mario World &, to a lesser extent, Super Mario Bros. 3.

I did warm up to it though, leaving me with the nostalgia I have now. I also somehow not only beat the classic mode, but also Lost Levels — or as they called it, “Super Mario Bros. for Super Players”. Granted, this game let you save & resume from game o’er on every level, so ’twas much easier than the NES / Famicom originals.

This was also the 1st time I saw the original NES version’s graphics, or graphics very similar. I remember how, um, less impressed I was with how Bowser looked in the originals. If Bowser sounded funny ’cause he had a cold in Super Mario Sunshine, he must’ve looked funny in the original Super Mario Bros. ’cause his face got in a car accident.

Now I’ve somehow gotten better @ this game to the point that I can 100% it & e’en beat classic mode without getting game o’er.

Indeed, the mo’ I play it, the mo’ impressed I am @ how well this classic game holds up, e’en if it didn’t have Deluxe‘s trinkets & doodads — proof that truly good games stay good for eternity. Sure, levels are mo’ oft just flat land with a bunch o’ enemies than later Mario games; but we could already see cleverness in the enemy designs, such as the Koopas that could be both a weapon & a risk if you stomped them. In particular, the way later levels combined enemies created an interesting kind o’ difficulty impossible to realize with enemies ‘lone: hopping Koopas become much harder to maneuver round when you have to time your jumps or dodges with randomly-generated Bullet Bills.

& then you have Hammer Bros., which are unquestionably the hardest enemies, but are interesting if you get to understand how they work. I remember years ago when I 1st learned how to rather consistently get past them in 8-4 by counting to 6 or 7 & then running toward them — which is right when they should start jumping. The only trick here is if the hammers they throw are in a bad position, which may force you to hop ‘tween some ‘fore running past them. ‘Nother, riskier, strategy is to stay near in front o’ them so that their hammers go o’er your head, making sure to keep distance so that they don’t move to close & kill you with their touch poison that all video game enemies seem to have.

Mo’ importantly, the original Super Mario Bros. has 1 strength that none o’ its children have: it’s consistently fast-paced. You almost ne’er have to stop throughout the entire level, & times when you might are caused by an enemy being in an unfortunate place ( usually in the underwater levels, which have some o’ the worst physics & where every enemy moves randomly ). Contrast that with e’en Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World, great exploration games that are, unfortunately, infected with far too many tedious autoscrollers ( fun fact: 1 is too many autoscrollers ). Honestly, Super Mario Bros. is probably the only good action / challenge platformer Mario game ‘cause o’ this. ( Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, the Super Mario Land & the Wario Land don’t games count: they’re exploration games that focused on puzzle solving & collecting & are baby-easy. Super Mario 64 had the distinction o’ being both fast & an exploration game that was baby-easy, so it’s e’en better ). This is probably why Nintendo’s attempt to flirt with challenging gameplay ‘gain in the New Super Mario Bros. & Super Mario Galaxy games was so awful: it just gave you the slowness o’ Super Mario World, but made you go through it multiple times if you happened to die. Well, that & ‘cause New Super Mario Bros.’s idea o’ “challenge” is making me beat a ghost house ‘gain whenever I want to save — something much harder games like Super Meat Boy didn’t devolve into ‘cause that game was actually designed by people who gave a shit.

Though Lost Levels has questionable level design decisions, I like how e’en in its 8-3 they put clever ways to help get past Hammer Bros. in the form o’ bricks camouflaging gainst brick walls that you can stand on to get clearer height o’er the ground-bound Hammer Bros. ( only to later force you to get through 2 Hammer Bros. without any helpful blocks ).

People oft pump up 8-4 as the ultimate challenge ’cause it’s the last level, but it actually might be 1 o’ the easiest world 8 levels, ‘cept for maybe 8-1. Other than maybe figuring out the maze through trial & error, — a much simpler & easier maze than any o’ the earlier castle mazes, too — it doesn’t truly get hard till the Hammer Bro & Bowser @ the end. Then ‘gain, none o’ the castle levels are as hard as most o’ the noncastle levels.

8-3 has an interesting dynamic to its difficulty: it’s oft considered the next contender for hardest level, & it’s certainly harder than 8-4, but it offers plenty o’ powerups — but only if you take the time to find them in the many bricks surrounded by Hammer Bros. This leaves players with 2 possible strategies: take the harder route o’ fighting off Hammer Bros. to earn a powerup to make later parts easier or rush through & skip the powerups. If you weather the 1st 2 pairs o’ Hammer Bros., you can get a fire flower, making the rest o’ the Hammer Bros. trivial — & thus the rest o’ the level. These 2 pairs are easier than the later ones, since they have brick floors you can bump them under, while the others are on the ground, their hammers right in your face & their heads constantly guarded by hammers. Thus, the powerups make the level much easier: when I discovered them, which was surprisingly late, I found the level became much easier. In general, Super Mario Bros. is great @ rewarding taking the time to explore by making things easier while using the natural reward that is the thrill o’ going quickly to seduce mo’ skilled players to go mo’ quickly. Only the Donkey Kong Country games seem to do as well ( & e’en then, only maybe 75% o’ the time ) @ giving players both exploration & speed by giving players a lot o’ control o’er how quickly they want to move.

If anything, it’s the water levels that are the worst. Water levels are always infamous in video games, but I can’t think o’ any that are worse than the original Super Mario Bros.‘s. Everything feels out o’ control: Mario’s movements feel inconsistent, ‘specially when falling ( the fact that pits awkwardly change how fast Mario plummets doesn’t help ). & all the enemies move randomly & can’t be killed ‘less you have a fire flower. E’en Hammer Bros. can be killed by hopping on them or hitting them from below.

You know, ¿why did they decide that landing on top o’ an enemy in air should kill an enemy, but not underwater, & why does every platformer just copy this arbitrary rule? The fact that water levels oft cripple your abilities & make you move slowly is surely why water levels are so despised, e’en though water has the potential to make you mo’ mobile by letting you move freely vertically, too. I’d like to see a platformer make you mo’ powerful & have freer movement underwater so people actually prefer water levels — that would be a nice surprise for once.

Super Mario Bros.‘s reputation as a hard game always confused me. I don’t mean the view that it’s a hard game in general, or comparing it to later Mario games, which are certainly easier; but people act as if e’en for its time ’twas hard, which is certainly not true. For an NES game, Super Mario Bros. is strikingly easy. I can beat it without getting game o’er, whereas I can’t beat a single Mega Man, Castlevania, or Ninja Gaiden game. Compared to 95% o’ its contemporaries, Super Mario Bros. was a baby-easy game, as was every Mario game compared to its contemporaries. It’s only nowadays that adult gamers with the selfishness o’ young adults expect that Mario games, meant for all ages, should be made specially for 30-year-ol’s with decades o’ experience playing games.

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe was a particularly good remake in that it didn’t just “improve” its graphics by making them mo’ technologically advanced but with less heart ( looks @ 3DS Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga ), but mainly adds to gameplay. You don’t just get the classic Super Mario Bros., but also, as mentioned earlier, Lost Levels, as well as a photo album, a minigame where you race a Boo through levels with switch blocks¹, a challenge mode, & a bunch o’ random trinkets, such as a fortune-telling game & a bunch o’ weird pictures you can print if you’re 1 o’ the probably 5% people who actually had the Game Boy Printer @ the time. Indeed, I was so impressed by Super Mario Bros. Deluxe‘s extras that I was disappointed by the later Super Mario Advance remakes, which didn’t have nearly as much.

That’s not to say that Deluxe didn’t screw some things up. 1 flaw they couldn’t help but have due to the hardware is the smaller screen, which made it harder to see what’s round you, & thus harder in general. This is worsened by the fact that this is a straight remake, & thus the levels were made for the larger screen. To make up for this, the game lets you scroll the screen a li’l bit ‘hind you, as opposed to the original NES game, which didn’t let you scroll back @ all.

Though I wouldn’t necessarily call it an unquestionable downgrade, the physics are slightly different from the original NES game’s — though not as off as the All-Stars version’s. I’d read a long time ago that Nintendo lost the original source code years ago, so they’ve been reprogramming the game in approximations each remake ( or emulating the original ); thus it’s not too surprising that they couldn’t get things perfect each time. Still, in some ways I think Deluxe‘s controls feel better, though that may be just ’cause I’m used to them. They feel tighter: Mario & Luigi don’t feel like they go flying when you jump forward & you have greater control o’er your movement in air, making it easier to back up while in the air if you jump forward. Block collision also feels less janky: trying to fit big Mario or Luigi into a 2-block hole is surprisingly challenging in the original Super Mario Bros., making hitting the beanstalk block in World 4-2 much trickier to hit than in Deluxe.

On the other hand, sprite hit detection feels better in the original than in Deluxe. Both have somewhat glitchy hit detection, but Deluxe more oft screws you o’er with it. Sometimes when landing on an enemy I would get forced into them & hurt. Springs are much mo’ consistent in the original, making random deaths far less common, & mushrooms don’t kill your jump if you jump into them, unlike in Deluxe. & the upside o’ Mario & Luigi going flying forward faster when jumping is that you can move mo’ quickly while speeding through levels, making Deluxe feel slightly slower.

But these are nitpicks that most players probably won’t e’en notice.

Super Mario Bros. for Super Players

1 flaw that they could help was the fact that the included port o’ Lost Levels is god awful — the worst there e’er was. Many critics bring up that it only has the 1st 8 worlds, no world 9 or A-D ( though partially-finished versions o’ these levels are hidden in the cartridge, so they probably planned to make them but ran out o’ time ). They might e’en bring up that the graphics are regular Super Mario Bros.‘s, ‘cept the Poison Mushroom, which is some weird new graphic with colors used nowhere else in this game, or that Luigi’s physics are just like Mario’s.

What they’re less likely to bring up, but which is the absolute worst, is that there’s no Koopa hopping. See, while people claim Lost Levels just just a “Mission Pack Sequel” to Super Mario Bros., it did actually have some difference in terms o’ physics — foremost that ’twas the 1st to allow Mario & Luigi to hop off enemies, rather than bump ineffectively & fall like in the original ( indeed, landing on an enemy kills your momentum ). Deluxe keeps the original’s lack o’ enemy hops e’en in Lost Levels, e’en though Lost Levels‘ levels were built based on it. This makes some parts way mo’ ridiculous than any part o’ the Famicom or All-Stars Lost Levels had — it feels like you have to do some kaizo trickery to get through them.

For instance, in 8-2 there’s a brick you have to hit to make a beanstalk come out which you need to climb to beat the level; but it’s positioned in a way where you’re s’posed to jump on a convenient Paratroopa under it. But you can’t in Deluxe, ’cause the programmers fucked up. @ 1st, the only way I figured out how to beat this was to be small @ this point & run & jump under it @ a certain point — if you’re big, your face will bump the brick & you’ll fall into a pit. Now, the trickier part is that you need to be big to break bricks & reach a pipe earlier to get here. I only happened to luckily stumble on the fact that I can break the bricks & then have a Buzzy Beetle fall on me so I become small after breaking the bricks to beat this level. Later I found a simpler, but trickier way to do it by running & jumping onto the Paratroopa when it’s just near the block @ a certain spot so you can squeeze ‘tween the 2 & bump the block, while hopefully getting ‘nough air to reach the other side. I had to be big to do this, as every time I did this I got hurt by getting pressed into the Koopa in a strange way as I bumped gainst the brick.

You vs. Boo

I have a lot o’ nostalgia for the “You vs. Boo” race, but I have mixed views ’bout actually playing them. It’s sometimes an addicting challenge to see how much you can beat your earlier times & see if you can unlock a better boo to race gainst, sometimes infuriatingly cheap. & they’re all trial-&-error gameplay, as you need to know ‘head o’ time what state a switch block will be when you get to it to act ‘head & minimize delays.

The levels with timed blocks are all right, as they’re a’least consistent. The only exception is the last level, which is long, full o’ spike traps, & has a cheap part @ the beginning where you have to know ‘head o’ time how it’s setup to avoid stopping or getting hit, as you have to hit 2 switches before you e’en see a spike pit that requires them to be hit.

The levels with the auto-switching blocks are some o’ the worst, however — which ironically includes the 1st level, which is maybe the 2nd hardest level after the last. This is ’cause Boo is a cheap asshole, who, in addition to being able to fly through everything, can switch blocks whenever they want, which can fuck you o’er gainst your control. For instance, the 1st level has a few places where there is a wall o’ switch blocks past a switch block. If the boo hits the switch right after you pass it, you have no choice but to go back & hit the switch ‘gain, slowing you down so much that you’ve probably already lost the race. Thus, it feels like e’en if you play well, you still need to be lucky to do well. Add to that an e’en worse camera than in classic mode: @ the start o’ the 1st race level, Mario or Luigi reach the right side o’ the camera before it gets the idea that maybe it should move ‘long with them, perfect for making me run into a pipe @ the start dozens o’ times.

It’s not like you accomplish much in this minigame. The best you can get for beating races is unlock newer colors o’ boos, which are harder to beat. You start with the standard white boo, then unlock a lime boo, a pink boo, & then the elusive Black Boo with a neon yellow outline, who apparently moves as quickly as your fastest time. It’s cool to unlock, & e’en beat the Black Boo, in a level; but a pain in the ass. They don’t e’en give you a photo or something for doing so, either. Finding Black Boo is surely mo’ worthy o’ celebration than finding a 1-up Mushroom in a hidden block.

The Photo Album

The Photo Album is sort o’ like an early version o’ an achievements system, while also acting as a way to try to get people to buy the Game Boy Camera by offering a way to print the photos. The 1st page o’ photos were big medal award photos you got for major accomplishments: the Mario Award for beating classic mode, the Bowser Award for beating the star levels o’ classic mode, the Peach Award for getting all the medals in all levels in Challenge Mode, the Toad Award for getting a million points total in high scores in Challenge Mode, & the Yoshi Award for beating Lost Levels. I always found it bullshit that Luigi doesn’t get an Award, e’en though Lost Levels is heavily associated with him. ¡That dumb horse Yoshi isn’t e’en in Lost Levels! ¡What the fuck?

You also get photos for minor accomplishments, such as finding a beanstalk, getting fireworks, or playing multiplayer with somebody & using that weird infrared link thing the Game Boy Color had, the latter 2 o’ which are impossible to get in the Virtual Console version. Great job, Nintendo. Some are redundant: you get a small photo for beating classic mode, in addition to the big Mario Award photo; you also get a small photo for getting the red coin, score, & Yoshi egg medals in all levels, each.

In fact, this game has a major glitch wherein if you get the last o’ 2 types o’ medals @ the same time, you get fucked out o’ a small photo. Back when this game 1st came out, Nintendo went far ‘nough to offer you the chance to send in your cartridge so they can just hack the lost photo into your save — a particular primitive form o’ patching out a bug. This bug still exists in the Virtual Console version; but now Nintendo just tells you to suck a dick if you ask them to fix it.

You also get a photo for each enemy type you kill & 1 for each castle’s Bowser when you kill them with fire — so long as they’re on screen when they die. For a long time I thought this game had a glitch where sometimes killing Bowser didn’t give me their photo, till I realized ‘twas ‘cause I was a spineless wuss who hid far ‘hind & fireballed Bowser to death from offscreen. You have to see Bowser turn into his “true form” to get the photo.

Challenge Mode

But the most compelling mode is Challenge Mode, which challenges you to collect 3 medals in every level. ( You can only try levels you’ve beaten in classic mode, in any order you want ). There are no lives or game o’er, but you can’t get a medal ‘less you beat the level you’re trying. The 3 medals are the red coin medal, which you get for collecting 5 coins hidden in the level; the score medal, which you get for matching or beating a chosen score when you beat the level; & the Yoshi egg medal, which you get for finding a Yoshi egg hidden in an invisible block somewhere in the level.

‘Nother challenge Challenge Mode offers is a total score counter @ the bottom, which holds the sum o’ high scores you have in all the levels. Get 1.2 million or mo’ points — which is mo’ than all the high scores needed to get the score medal in all levels combined, so you can’t just get all the score medals to get it — & you get a Toad Award photo in your album.

Depending on the level, either the red coin or Yoshi egg medal are the easiest to get. The Yoshi egg medal is only challenging in terms o’ finding it, which could be hidden anywhere. However, when you find a’least 1, — which is made easy by the fact that the manual that came with the game revealed where it is in the 1st level — you unlock a roulette that shows you the screen o’ a random level where it’s hidden. I have clearly played this game too much, as on a recent playthrough I have yet to need this roulette. ¿Who needs math knowledge when you can memorize where all the Yoshi eggs in a video game are? The red coins are ne’er in hidden blocks, but are sometimes hidden in ?-blocks or bricks. Worse, some are hidden in multi-coin blocks & make you get a’least 10 coins in those blocks to make it pop out. If you hit a multi-coin block, but not ‘nough times, you’re permanently screwed out o’ that coin & have to restart the level.

But the true challenge is getting the score medal on each level. The scores they ask for can seem ridiculous for early players — indeed, Nintendo must’ve found them ridiculous, as Nintendo lowered many o’ the levels’ required scores in the Japanese version ( for some reason, this game was released in the West 1st ). You have to play near optimally: maximize the enemies you kill for max points ( hint: kick every Koopa you find ), triple-hop Goombas for exponential points, get all the powerups & the Yoshi egg, waste as li’l time as possible, & make damn sure you hit the top o’ the flagpole & get 6 fireworks ( hint: start running from the leftmost edge o’ the top o’ the stairs when the timer ends @ a 9 ). If this isn’t ‘nough, you can try kicking a Koopa shell gainst a wall & jumping on it & kicking it ‘gain as it comes back repeatedly for all your excess time to maybe get some extra points. Bopping a Koopa & kicking it gives you 500 points, so this can be a nice way to rack up points, but requires consistent timing.

I do truly enjoy the score medals in this game, though. It forces you to analyze levels critically for ways to optimize points. ¿Are those coins worth the time it’d take to grab them? Coins & game seconds are both worth 100 points, so if it takes mo’ than a game second per coin, the answer is no.

Though, thanks to them not having a flagpole to worry ‘bout, & usually not having many opportunities for gaining points, being so linear, castle levels are e’en easier than normal levels for getting the medals than they are in classic mode.

There’s a glitch that only David Wonn in his amazing glitch website e’er mentions, wherein you can rack up quite a lot o’ points in challenge mode. Usually, if you try the Koopa-hopping trick on the staircase, you’ll rack up point gains up to 8,000 points before the enemy dies. However, the programmers messed up & saved the # o’ points you get so that if you stop after getting 4,000 points & then let the shelled enemy go to the bottom & do the hop & kick them gainst a wall repeatedly trick I wrote ‘bout earlier, ‘stead o’ getting 400 points per kick, you get 5,000 points per kick ( that is, so long as you jump on the shelled enemy as you kick it; otherwise, it seems to just give 400 still ).

However, if you can pull this trick off well, you’re better than I am. It just so happens that every staircase with a falling shelled enemy has li’l room near it to kick the enemy’s shell & bop them ‘gain without getting hit or permanently losing the shell. Wonn lists 7-1 as the easiest level to do this in, which is pure bullshit, as that level gives you a 3-block space in which to kick the Buzzy Beetle, 1 block o’ which has an invisible block ‘bove it to block your jump. The easiest is 1 he doesn’t list, 5-2; & e’en that only gives you 5 or 6 blocks o’ space, & if you miss once, you lose the Koopa shell.

Wonn also claims you can get o’er 5 million points with this trick, but I don’t see how, ‘less he found many levels that can use this trick. Using save states with this trick in 7-1, I was able to rack up ‘bout 200,000 points with very li’l extra time left on the clock when beating the level. That is, indeed, a lot; but you’d need to be able to do that in almost every level to get mo’ than 5 million points total.

I should point out that Super Mario Bros. Deluxe‘s score & red coin challenges were the main inspiration for the gem & time challenges for my game, Boskeopolis Land.

Vs.

This is just “Boo vs. You” but ‘tween 2 players linked together with a link cord.

Records

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe saves your high scores for Classic mode, for the regular or * levels. As mentioned, getting mo’ than 100,000 points beats Boo’s score & unlocked “Boo vs. You” & getting mo’ than 300,000 points beats Luigi’s high score & unlocks “Super Mario Bros. for Super Players”, or “Lost Levels”.

If you’re playing on the original Game Boy Color, you could use that stupid infrared square @ the top o’ the system to trade scores. Why they made this require that dumb thing ‘stead o’ just the regular link cord, which does work for playing a Vs. game, is beyond my comprehension, other than that Nintendo wanted to ruin this game’s longterm playability for the sake o’ advertising a gimmick nobody cared ’bout.

Toy Room

This is where Nintendo threw a bunch o’ random shit they made when they were procrastinating adding worlds 9-D to “Super Mario Bros. for Super Players”. It sort o’ reminds me o’ a primitive version o’ WarioWare Twisted‘s souvenirs.

Calendar

A rudimentary calendar that let’s you mark days with messages & an icon.

Why they added this to this game o’ all things, & not any later Mario remakes, I’m not sure; but my theory is that it’s related to abandoned plans Nintendo seemed to have for making a “gaming smartphone”, which would have this game built-in.

Fortune Telling

Pick a card out o’ 5 & get a random fortune-cookie message with a label telling you how lucky you are & a picture o’ a character that corresponds to that luckiness.

• Extremely Unlucky: Bowser
• Unlucky: Koopa Shell
• Lucky: Luigi
• Very Lucky: Mario
• Extremely Lucky: Peach

This otherwise pointless minigame does have 1 significance to the general game: if you find Peach’s “Extremely Lucky” fortune, a “10up” message pops up. From then on any new save you make for Classic Mode or “Super Mario Bros. for Super Players” will start you with 10 lives ‘stead o’ 5.

I don’t know how the “algorithm” for determining what fortune message you get relates to the luckiness level you get, if they relate @ all, but oft I’d find messages I’d get don’t sound as lucky as they claim to be.

With as many times as this game lets you make your own messages for things, it’d be nice if you could make your own fortunes.

I present to you the best o’ the fortunes I received:

Yoshi Is Here!

This is the aforementioned roulette that shows the general vicinity o’ a Yoshi egg in a level for Challenge Mode.

Mystery Room

This is a table that fills with Toads & ‘ventually Peach as you rescue them in Classic Mode. For each 1 o’ them you get weird pictures you can make messages for & print if you had a Game Boy Printer. These images range from blown-up grayscale pixel-art o’ Super Mario Bros. sprites to Nintendo logo banners to pixelated versions o’ official art for this game, to weird splash images you can set to replace the title screen splash image.

I’ve already written most o’ what I have to say ‘bout the 1st generation games in my rambling post on the Pokémon main game series in general, so this post will be brief.

What I want to highlight is that part o’ this game that most pertains to the Game Boy Color: its peculiar color palettes. Though Game Boy Color games are capable o’ handling multiple palettes @ the same time, Pokémon Yellow uses the same palette system that the Super Game Boy versions o’ Red & Blue did: only 1 monochrome palette @ a time for the o’erworld, but which changes in different places, usually to reflect the place you’re in. Wild routes are green, while towns each have their own palette, usually similar to the town name — Viridian town is a green like viridian, Celedon City is a greenish-gray like celedon, Cerulean City is cerulean, & so on. Other than Pallet, which isn’t a color, but just a different spelling for the word “palette”, Vermilion City is the only exception for variety’s sake, as vermilion is actually just a synonym for cinnabar, which is the name o’ ‘nother town which has that color as its palette.

As a kid ( who didn’t realize the Super Game Boy versions o’ Red & Blue had this feature, too, not having a Super Game Boy ), this stood out to me, artistically, for reasons I didn’t know then, & now can only guess is ‘cause seeing a single hue @ a time makes each stand out mo’ on their own, than diluted in a mix ‘mong others.

I bring this up, ‘course, ‘cause this palette system o’ having a different monochrome palette for each place heavily inspired the palette system in Boskeopolis Land, where each level map & different sections o’ the o’erworld have a single monochrome palette.

Wario Land II was 1 o’ the launch titles for the Game Boy Color & 1 o’ the few games rereleased to take advantage o’ the Game Boy Color’s better palette, the original being a monochrome Game Boy game. ’Cause o’ that I think o’ it mo’ as a Game Boy Color game — that’s the version I always played, a’least.

Wario Land 3 came out a few years later, specifically for the Game Boy Color. It’s a bit weirder & less grounded in the Wario universe, but I think it has a mo’ creative gameplay gimmick & cleverer level design, & consider it my favorite game o’ all time.

It’s hard to write ’bout the 2 games without comparing each other. They have almost the same physics, controls, & movement, similar graphics ( Wario’s sprites are almost the same ), almost the same status effects, & invulnerability. I would bet money they share the same game engine.

Physics, Abilities, & Controls

I should describe said physics & effects. They’re quite different from what’s in most 2-D platformers. As mentioned, Wario’s invincible: challenge is not done through killing Wario & making you restart the level from a checkpoint, but through much cleverer use o’ level & enemy design. Enemy’s don’t hurt Wario, but effect him in various ways. Usually they just knock him back, which can cause him to fall off platforms, making you climb back up. But other enemies give Wario various status effects that can help or hinder him in different contexts:

Springy: makes Wario hop upward constantly, allowing him to reach greater heights, & forcing him upward. Caused by being bopped with hammers.

Puffy: makes Wario float upward. Like “springy”, it makes Wario go upward till he hits a ceiling, whether you want it or not. Caused by being stung.

Flat: allows Wario to cross gaps while crouching in short corridors & allows him to reach far, tight corridors; but also makes his jumps short & keeps him from picking up enemies or entering doors. Cured by water. Caused by being flattened.

Fire: causes Wario to run round for a while, then bursts into flames, & then stops, turns to ashes, & returns to normal. Useful for breaking fire blocks, but can also cause Wario to fall off platforms. Cured sooner through water.

Zombie: causes Wario to fall through thin platforms if he lands on them from the air. In Wario Land 3 he can jump a short bit, but not in Wario Land II. Cured by light or water. Caused by, well, zombies.

Fat: Wario’s jump is limited & he can’t climb ladders or enter doors — but he can break strong blocks by landing on them & can cause downward elevators to go down in Wario Land II. Cured by moving round a lot ( exercising ); caused by eating cake or apples.

Wario also has various other abilities, like the ability to roll & jump into thin passageways blocked by cracked blocks or the ability to pick up & throw enemies. This is part o’ the weirdness o’ Wario Land’s physics: if Wario touches an enemy & doesn’t get hurt, he bumps into them, which can feel weird @ 1st. If they’re stunned, he picks them up & can throw them, which can be useful for breaking throw blocks or moving enemies to certain places. He can also jump off enemies & get greater height by holding Up while doing so ( in Wario Land 3, you need the winged boot treasure to do so ).

Game Design

I sometimes think o’ Wario Land II as the best-made prototype in the world. It created the basic physics, controls, & everything else I listed ’bove; but I always felt Wario Land 3 married them to gameplay that perfectly fit it. It had this clever hybrid o’ classic Mario & Metroidvania, with a bit o’ Super Mario 64 built-in: each level has 4 different-colored pairs o’ keys & chests — gray, red, green, & blue. However, you don’t just grab all o’ them @ once. Each key & chest pair could be thought o’ as a “goal” o’ the level, with 4 goals per level, & most o’ them are blocked off @ 1st. In order to be able to access later chests ( as well as later levels ), you have to collect earlier chests to collect items, which can unlock new levels, change already-unlocked levels, or give Wario new abilities.

Though what most would call Wario Land 3’s story ( see below ) is dumb, what I consider it’s true story is much mo’ interesting — the 1 told through gameplay. That story is the treasures you collect & how they change the game. I don’t know why, but there’s something immensely pleasing ’bout permanently changing levels, ’specially when it’s done o’er a long period. There’s something enjoyable ’bout seeing those 5-ton blocks blocking those passageways for so long, making one wonder what’s ’hind there, only to finally, near the end, get the red & blue chemicals that cause it to sink into the dirt, or to see that green key up on that unreachable cliff @ the end o’ the 1st level, only to come back with a higher jump ability to be able to jump up & reach it.

While Wario Land 3 does have a lot mo’ treasures that just change things without you doing anything, as opposed to, say, Super Metroid, which has you taking a mo’ active role in using your collectibles, what I think Wario Land 3 has that’s better is that its treasures have mo’ memorable character to them. Super Metroid’s were mostly just abstract things like “super bombs” or “screw attack”, that you don’t truly think ’bout as real things, whereas Wario Land 3 was full o’ exotic items like axes, octopus food, garlic, snake eyes, crayons, & a book & scepter. Sure, some o’ the treasures didn’t make sense: ¿why did 2 map halves cause a tornado to move ’way from “The Volcano’s Base”?

Wario Land II, meanwhile, has a much less ambitious gameplay gimmick: it’s just mostly straight levels challenging you to get to the end, with a few levels having simple alternate goals, such as attacking an alarm clock or anchor or defeating a boss or doing nothing @ the start o’ a level for long ’nough, & a few levels with a 2nd exit, leading to branching story paths. It did have fun-looking treasures like pipes, gems, wine bottles, computers, &, er… racist shrunken black faces… but, uh… those treasures were just found by playing the same minigame found in some door placed somewhere in the level. A lot o’ the time, that door doesn’t e’en seem to be in the most hidden place; sometimes it just feels like they just put it in the middle o’ some random room, as if trying to throw off players who expect that such a normal door could ne’er be the minigame. Also, the treasures do nothing but contribute to 100%.

Wario Land II’s story makes mo’ sense, but isn’t any mo’ entertaining. In fact, Wario Land 3’s cutscenes are mo’ interesting in that they ’splain how the world changes, whereas Wario Land II’s are just repetitive demonstrations o’ Syrup & her henchmen stealing Wario’s stuff, Wario chasing them, & Wario returning home after beating them, as if we couldn’t use our imagination to figure out such things could happen ( granted, the same could apply to 3 ).

Wario Land II is a great game with levels that feel like fun romps; it’s just that Wario Land 3’s level design feels like masterwork in comparison. Like I said, Wario Land II feels like a great prototype: it created the dynamic & created a simple game with a simple gimmick to test it out, while Wario Land 3 perfected it.

The 1 gameplay element I think Wario Land II did better than Wario Land 3 was the use o’ money. Wario Land 3’s worst flaw is that, for a game centered round a greedy treasure-collector, money doesn’t play a big part. Yeah, he still collects treasures; but coins themselves are quite rare, max out @ a measely 999, & are only used for the minigolf game. Wario Land II only uses its coins for its minigames ( though these are mo’ common, so they’re needed mo’ ), but its levels are filled with coins, & you can have far mo’ than 999 coins in total ( though that is the per-level max — if you’re lucky ’nough to get ’nough ). E’en if the coins weren’t used for anything, exploring levels & breaking walls for hidden caches o’ coins is fun, & the 1 thing Wario Land II’s otherwise less deep levels have that Wario Land 3’s don’t.

Level Design

But other than that, I’d say Wario Land 3’s level design is definitely superior. Like I said, Wario Land II’s are mostly simple romps. The most complex its levels become is becoming windy mazes. The way Wario Land 3 meshes together its 4 goals is clever & intriguing. 1 detail I love is how treasures have themes surrounding the level change that allowed you to get that treasure. For instance, just recently playing it I noticed that the room for the green key in “The Big Bridge” forces you to throw an enemy to break a wall… which is fitting, since the treasure that unlocks this treasure is the glove that lets you throw enemies. But since I don’t go down there for the green key till I know I can get the green chest, I hadn’t realized that till now.

The key-&-chest dynamic also allows for mo’ interesting paths through levels, as it’s not just a straight way from point A to B, but a path from A to B & then to C, which may be closer to A. In fact, in many levels, the gray chest is @ the start. In “Beneath the Waves” & “Castle of Illusions”, the chests are all in subrooms o’ this big hub room, all accessible from the start, while it’s the keys that are locked ’hind various things. Some treasures, like the blue treasure in “The Volcano’s Base”, are mean & give you easy access to both the chest & the key… but getting the key forces you to fall down a hole, forcing you to go through a bunch o’ challenges to get back out so you can get back to the chest.

1 interesting note is that this common pattern in Wario Land 3 was probably the inspiration for Wario Land 4 basing all its levels’ designs on getting something later & then returning back to the start. I would also add that there’s an e’en weaker hint to this in Wario Land II in the form o’ Secret Chapter 2, Story 4’s exit, which is right ’bove the start, but blocked off. You have to go all the way round through the whole level to reach the top, where you can actually reach the exit. So you can see a gradual evolution o’ this idea from Wario Land II to Wario Land 4.

Bosses are also less predictable. Wario Land II always has its bosses @ the end o’ every chapter, & most o’ them are simple. Wario Land 3 strews them round much less orderly, making them much more o’ a surprise. Also, while most o’ them are simple, you do get weirder 1s, like Wolfenboss, who forces you to hit it by ricocheting Goombas off walls, & Doll Boy, who forces you to knock a glowing barrel out o’ 3 to gradually force him to the ground.

The only problem with Wario Land 3’s bosses is that in most playthroughs they’re all crammed ’fore the halfway point & that there’s difficulty balance problems: Wolfenboss, the 3rd boss & usually the 15th treasure, is the hardest boss & possibly the hardest part o’ the game, while the 1st boss, Doll Boy, is the 2nd hardest. E’en the final boss is a joke compared to them. They have random, hard to dodge projectiles while all o’ the final boss’s attacks can be dodged by just high jumping o’er all o’ them

Minigames

Wario Land 3 has 1 minigame: wherein you must time button presses on a counter on a meter so that the enemy lands in the hole within a certain # o’ turns. You only need to beat this minigame to collect 12 treasures, thankfully.

Wario Land II, meanwhile, has 2 minigames for all 50 levels: a simple memory game wherein you get a short ’mount o’ time to see all the panels before they flip o’er & you need to remember where a certain enemy’s head was to get the level treasure, & a “guess the #” game wherein you bet mo’ money for every panel that flips o’er, revealing more o’ the #, which nets you a piece o’ some map. The 1st is found in some door found within the level somewhere, which can easily be missed, while the 2nd is always given to you @ the end o’ a level ( ’less you already beat it, ’course ). The 2nd game can be somewhat interesting in the way it challenges you to balance ’tween wasting too much money & guessing too early & being mo’ likely to get it wrong. Then ’gain, if one has ’nough money, one can trivialize the 2nd game by just revealing all the panels. The 1st game, however, gets ol’ quickly.

Wario Land II technically doesn’t require you to beat any minigames to simply beat the game — only for 100%. However, if merely beating Wario Land II is your goal, well, you’ve got an easy goal, ’cause if you know what you’re doing, you can beat Wario Land II in just 5 levels. E’en if you’re playing normally, it takes just 25 levels.

As much as I don’t like the minigolf game in Wario Land 3, it’s much better than the minigames in Wario Land II, mostly due to not being as repetitive, but also simply ’cause it’s more o’ an actual game than some simple-minded thing e’en I could make in JavaScript. The minigolf game requires some strategy, aiming, & timing to get the Para-Goom in the right place, which becomes mo’ challenging in arenas with mo’ dangers; the memory game simply requires quick eyes & good pattern recognition. The #-guessing game does have some mo’ in-depth strategy, but not as much. You do have to balance your willingness to risk having to beat the level ’gain vs. paying mo’ money to better ensure you know what # it is. ( This ’specially comes into play with levels with multiple exits: you want to guess early on these levels, since you’ll have to beat them ’gain, anyway ).

Character Design

Wario Land II did do other things better than Wario Land 3; but these are o’ less importance. For instance, Wario Land II had better, mo’ memorable, mo’ iconic character design. “Mysterious Figure” who turns out to be evil clown who tricked Wario into doing his biding may be so stupid it’s funny, but he’ll ne’er compare to Cap’n Syrup. In general, Wario Land 3’s enemy designers seemed stranger than Wario Land II’s. Those cyan Spearheads always looked freakier & felt… wronger than the bandanaed Pirate Gooms. & while Wario Land II has simple bees in a forest sting Wario to make him puffy, Wario Land 3 has whatever those “Pneumo” things are s’posed to be. It makes sense, since Wario Land 3 is s’posed to be a strange, fantasy world — & I’ve read some people say they prefer its weirdness. E’en the small touches kinda get me: for instance, I always thought it made mo’ sense that Wario became fat from eating a cake from a cook in a chef’s hat in Wario Land II than eating an apple from… some weird monster or some mole thing in a hole in Wario Land 3.

Level Themes

Wario Land II also had a mo’ interesting variety o’ level themes. Wario Land 3 stays a bit too close to grasslands, caves, & water areas. It has 3 whole volcano levels, 2 o’ which have similar names. Other common themes like ice, castle, & cloud get 1 level each, there are 2 town levels, a bridge level, which is somewhat refreshing, & 1 truly strange level that’s in some alien void. Meanwhile, Wario Land II has an entire town chapter, an entire factory chapter, & has train levels strewn ’bout them, a ruins chapter, a haunted-mansion chapter, plenty o’ castle levels, & pirate ship levels.

Actually, I’ve noticed that the themes the 1st 3 Wario Land games ( we’ll ignore the Virtual Boy version, since only 5 people in the world played that game ) have a similar level o’ creativity to the 1st 3 Donkey Kong Country games, with the 2nd game having the most creative level themes, while the 1st had the least… Though the 1st Wario Land did have a few train levels & beach levels, so it’s quite competitive with Wario Land 3, while the 1st Donkey Kong Country is unquestionably the blandest ( it had 2 cave worlds, 1 o’ which was the last world ), so maybe that’s unfair to the 1st Wario Land.

Graphics

Wario Land II’s graphics were a bit mixed. In general, I thought Wario Land II was mo’ colorful. I definitely prefer how Wario looks in II: he wears yellow & has a slightly bluish-purple tint to his outline & o’eralls. For some reason I can’t fathom, they changed him to wearing white with black o’eralls in Wario Land 3. In general, Wario Land II is mo’ likely to use pastels like pink & purple, which I prefer, whereas Wario Land 3 mostly sticks to earthy browns, greens, cyans, & reds.

That said, a lot o’ the time Wario Land II’s graphics feel less detailed than Wario Land 3’s. It’s common for the ground & walls to have only a small rocky pattern @ the edge only to quickly fade into solid black for most o’ its body. Wario Land II also seems to have much mo’ cutoff & in general, jankier textures & backgrounds. I’m dearly glad that Wario Land II cut down on the cave levels, ’cause while Wario Land 3 has quite a lot, they a’least look quite decent ( I do like the teal tint on some o’ them ), while Wario Land II’s look hideous. In general, I’m glad that Wario Land II has less natural levels than Wario Land 3, ’cause Wario Land II’s generally look much worse than its mo’ residential areas.

Music

Wario Land 3 definitely has better music. The only songs anyone cares ’bout from II are “Underwater Tunnels” & the credits theme, “The Journey Home” ( though I don’t think “Upon the Rooftop”, “Stop that Train”, & “Escape from the Factory” are so bad, & the “Minigame” song is quite catchy — & “Return the Hen to her Nest” feels like it should be the iconic Wario song ). But then you get a lot o’ bizarre cacophony like “Through the Thorny Maze”. The rest are just forgettable.

Wario Land 3’s music isn’t much better, but it’s a li’l. It has the greatest credits theme o’ all time, & a much catchier title screen song. I’m also quite fond o’ “Tidal Coast / Sea Turtle Rocks / Beneath the Waves”, “The Peaceful Village / A Town in Chaos ( Day )”, & the final boss music; & “Above the Clouds ( Night )” is gorgeous. “Forest of Fear” & “The Peaceful Village / A Town in Chaos ( Night )” nicely fit their levels’ atmospheres. “Desert Ruins / Tower of Revival” is also quite catchy for a desert theme. The only songs I’d truly say are bad are, say, “Colossal Hole / Cave of Flames”, which sounds too slow, as if it’s stuttering, & “The Volcano’s Base / The Castle of Illusions ( Day )” & “The West / East Crater”, which can get grating.

Bonus: The Best & the Worst Levels, Exits, & Treasures

The 5 Best Wario Land II Levels

Evidence that Wario Land II had inferior level design to Wario Land 3 was that ’twas harder to decide which levels were best & worst since its levels were far less memorable than 3’s. ( To be fair, ’twas easier to find good levels than bad, since II rarely has levels that were memorably annoying, mostly just forgettable levels ). I will give Wario Land II 1 thing: given the limitations o’ its simple “find a secret treasure door, get to the end, & maybe find a secret exit in a few levels” gameplay, it squeezed out a few clever levels. This further backs my point that Wario Land II is the best prototype.

5. Mansion-4

It’s clever the way this level lures you into a feeling o’ fake safety till the switch, & then makes the way back challenge you to remember the level & adjust based on subtle changes the switch made, including added enemies.

With you starting right under the goal & the middle point acting as a switch that opens up the goal, but also significantly changes the level on the way back, we see a big predecessor to Wario Land 4’s “folded” level design.

The downside is that the “lights on, lights out” gimmick is used a lot in this game already; but this is definitely the best use.

4. Ruins-3

This level’s main gimmick, the challenge o’ maneuvering Rolling Wario, is so simple, & yet so rare. While it’s done a few times in slight ways in other levels, this is the only level that truly focuses on it.

I also love how the level gives you the goal right @ the beginning. But the developers know you don’t want to just beat the level, but to get the treasure, which requires you to delve deep into the level.

3. Town-3

This is a level that’s just fun to explore, that feels big, e’en when, looking @ the full map, it seems as if it’s actually smaller than most levels. Contra the delusion o’ some games ( cough as I mutter, “Banjo-Tooie” ), small levels can actually be better for exploration if done right, as you’re not bored brainless by tedious long tracks o’ holding 1 direction for minutes.

Adding to the nonlinear aspect o’ this level, there’s 2 ways to get to the treasure door from 2 different ways, & the easier way is deceptive: it’s hole you’d naturally not want to fall in, e’en though it’s a hole so small you’d have to intentionally fall in, which should make savvy players wonder why designers would put that there…

2. Cellar-2

While this game feels short on gimmicks that stand out, & most gimmicks that do are o’erused, like “lights on, lights off”, platforms that move up & down depending on whether you’re fat or not, & the owl, this level’s gimmick — falling rocks that randomly alternate ’tween small rocks you can pick up & throw & big rocks that turn you flat — is a clever mix o’ 2 seemingly completely separate mechanics that you’d ne’er expect someone to come up with.

1. Cellar-3

It seems odd to include this since it’s such a straightforward level, but it’s the best straightforward level in this game. The cleverness o’ its design is subtle, particularly the arrangement o’ the rising & falling blades & how you’re s’posed to dodge them: sometimes you need to move while they’re up, sometimes down.

The treasure door is well-hidden, too: rather than being in 1 o’ the highlighted holes, as in the other train level, it’s in 1 o’ the holes you’re usually inclined to jump o’er.

Being a train level also adds points, ’cause train levels are rare to be refreshing. This is also the nicest looking train level, & the 1 that twists things mo’ than the other.

Close But No Cigar

Town-4

The clever way this level uses conveyor belts almost made this beat Mansion-4, but this level lost points for requiring you to break through a bunch o’ seemingly solid blocks to find the secret exit.

Cellar-4

This also made clever use o’ the “lights on, lights off” gimmick, but not as much as Mansion-4.

The 5 Worst Wario Land II Levels

5. Syrup-4

I was mixed ’bout putting this here. It’s the 2nd-to-last level ( for the main storyline ), but is just a long trudge through a maze o’ block-breaking to the end. Doesn’t seem particularly clever & feels repetitive; & for that in the 2nd-to-last level makes it particularly a letdown.

On the other side, 1 could see this is an interesting bonus, a breather, just ’fore the end. Maybe if said breather were a bit less repetitive & fun that’d work better.

4. Mansion-3

What I love most ’bout this level is that most o’ the rooms have li’l importance to beating the level ’cept for the 1st & last rooms. & then the treasure door is just standing right in the middle o’ the middle room, not e’en bothering to hide.

The gimmick o’ this level is that you can only enter 1 or 2 doors in the hub @ a time. When you enter & exit a door, a different door ( or doors ) opens while the last open door closes. You can enter the door with the goal in it @ 1st, labeled “V”, but you need to hit a switch to reach it, so you have to enter & exit a bunch o’ other rooms till you reach the last room, labeled “I”, with the switch, hit it, exit, & then go back to room “V”, which conveniently opens afterward.

The only “challenge” in this level is collecting money. But doing that’s annoying, since you can only get quite a bit o’ the money after hitting the switch, forcing you to go through all the rooms a 2nd time.

The fact that none o’ the rooms have much interesting only hurts this level mo’.

3. Final

This is the kind o’ level the average amateur rom hacker makes: it’s not hard, it’s just there to waste your time & annoy you. Since it’s s’posed to be a “time attack”, I guess that’s the point. But after losing a lot o’ time ’cause some enemy with finicky physics bumped the wrong way, ¿why would you care ’bout getting a good time in a bad level? That this is the “reward” for 100% makes it mo’ a letdown. A’least Wario Land 3’s time attack was for levels that were actually good ( ¿Why not just create a time attack mode for all II’s levels, like in 3? ) Hell, e’en the extra golf courses were a better reward, since e’en those were less annoying.

If its time-wasting challenges were fair, it would be fine; but they’re all based on this game’s finicky physics. For instance, you have to get an enemy through thin corridors without accidentally bumping them ‘hind you, & then you need to go ‘cross platforms by hopping on Para-Gooms from the side, but not be too far on the side, or else Wario will magically pick them up from ‘bove.

O, & the end is ’nother Giant Spear Man. ¿Why did they use this miniboss so much? I guess in this case they a’least made it a bit mo’ challenging, whereas the others were all ’bout the same.

The only reason this level isn’t lower down is ’cause it a’least has interesting aesthetics & is a’least memorable.

2. Ruins 2

I thought ’bout putting this lower on the list due to the interesting way the level loops vertically. But that’s not that interesting to make up for how repetitive this level is. You basically just break through branching paths o’ same-looking vertical passages till you find the seemingly randomly-placed treasure door & boss door ( yet ‘nother Giant Spear Man ).

Its only other puzzles are the simplest examples o’ swimming & owl puzzles ( ¿why is there an owl down in underground ruins? ). The swimming puzzle is literally just swimming round 5 bends to dodge 5 bubbles, copy-&-paste.

A’least the final level was somewhat creative in its badness.

1. Cellar-5

This level’s greatest sin is just having nothing notable ’bout it. It’s a string o’ various simple puzzles revolving round simple, obvious use o’ status effects, none o’ which haven’t been seen elsewhere, & then a boss door just ’bove the boss-failure door. Worse, most o’ the so-called puzzles are just for coins, & are not challenging, merely time-consuming.

The most “interesting” part is the room in the middle, which is yet ’nother room full o’ dirt where you just break through blocks to create a maze path. So it’s an uglier, less creative version o’ the 5th worst level.

The 10 Best Wario Land 3 Treasures

10. E2 The Frigid Sea, Blue

’Twas a hard fight ’tween this & the red treasure. Both are the 2 only times in which Wario’s “Snowman” status effect is used.

The blue treasure is all in a door @ the end o’ the level, reachable either by going through the waterfall @ day ( when it’s melted ) or swimming through the current ’neath. From there, the blue chest is right @ the start with the blue key just below, blocked by snowball blocks. In order to get it, you need to go all the way to the right, dodging all the falling snowballs, & then get hit by a snowball @ the end to roll through the block.

The red chest is past throw blocks @ the start o’ the level & requires using Snowman Wario to break through blocks to reach a 2nd room, & then get to the end o’ that room while dodging falling snow & using the slope @ the end to reach the red chest.

However, the red key is in a completely different room in the middle o’ the level, also blocked by throw blocks. Inside is just a series o’ small platforms leading up to the red key, with birds to knock you down.

I prefer the blue treasure ’cause it’s mo’ focused & refined, & I like the way you can either use daylight ( you need to collect a treasure to unlock daylight in the East ) or stronger flippers to go through currents to get it. Technically, the red treasure also has something like that: you can get the treasure as soon as you get the small gloves, but it’s harder, since there’s only 1 li’l rock quite far from the throw block areas. If you do it with the big gloves you can just use the plentiful Brrr Bears.

I was mixed on whether the bird red-key room is good or bad. On 1 hand, there’s something to the challenge o’ slippery platforms & birds; on the other hand, slipperiness isn’t that interesting, & it’s rather irrelevant to the chest part.

9. E6 The East Crater, Green

This could also be compared to ’nother treasure, “W6 The West Crater, Blue”. Both use streams that make Wario float upward ’less he’s fat or a vampire.

However, the choice wasn’t hard: though W6’s has an interesting puzzle where you have to time falls into holes to avoid bumping an item you’re holding so you can throw it @ something ’cross the room, I found to alternately intentionally use Vampire Wario to reach the bottom & then try to avoid vampire-causing bats as normal Wario by weaving through them to the chest in E6 to be better. Plus, E6 doesn’t require that pointless minigolf game, & as I’ll show you later, there’s a treasure that does the “bring carryable round streams” part better.

8. E2 The Frigid Sea, Green

This is the only treasure to use a mechanic wherein you can freeze & unfreeze water by hitting a switch. @ the beginning, the water is, well, water, so you can reach the chest, but not the key. You need to hit the switch so you can reach the key, & then hit it ’gain to get the chest.

( Or you could clip through the wall to reach the key while the water’s unfrozen, allowing you to skip hitting the switch @ all. )

The platforming that leads to the switch is somewhat interesting, too: you want to avoid the holes to make it to the switch, but the only way to get back is to fall in a hole. The room ’tween the key & chest room & the switch room when going for the key is also… odd. ¿Why’s that Doughnuteer there? ¿Just to minorly slow you down if you’re incompetent ’nough to accidentally get hit by it?

7. N2 The Peaceful Village, Green

The coolest thing ’bout this treasure is that it can be reached in 2 different ways, the straightforward way through a door only open @ night & a long way through a secret passage that is required if you’re doing this @ day.

The main gimmick o’ this treasure, once you reach its room, is that you need to turn invisible @ the bottom o’ the room, & then climb up the top without getting hit by electricity, get the key from a room with hopping fish, & then get a chest a li’l after. This gimmick’s been done much better in a treasure I’ll write ’bout farther into the list.

6. W4 A Town in Chaos, Blue

This also uses streams that move you upward, but the challenge o’ trying to take the enemy with you so you can throw him @ blocks blocking you from reaching the key without being able to actually carry him while on the streams is much mo’ refined than in W6. It’s actually quite technical & precise, trying to aim the enemy so that he goes where you want to go & trying to pick it up ( which requires bumping it to stun it ) without knocking it off.

5. W3 The Pool of Rain, Gray

This is the only treasure that uses a mechanic wherein you ground pound wooden poles, lowering that pole while raising others. Trying to do this quickly, for time attacks or speedruns, is quite difficult. There’s a trick to get through the 1st section quickly by charge attacking @ the enemy on the cliff so that you bounce up to it, but it can be finicky to pull off.

4. E5 The Warped Void, Red

This & the green treasure are the only treasures to use a specific warp mush mechanic wherein you warp to a room & dodge warp mush to reach a key or chest.

However, while the green treasure has an extra challenge o’ breaking throw blocks by carrying items, & hopping as a big enemy quakes the ground to avoid breaking the throwable, reaching the chest in the warp room is trivial. In the red treasure, however, both the key & the chest are in the warp room & you have to weave round to reach both.

3. E7 Forest of Fear, Green

Strangely, while Wario Land II has a few places with platforms that only enemies can stand on, but you can’t, this is the only treasure that uses it ( the red treasure goes here, but doesn’t need the enemy or the line it walks on ). Rather than timing jumps on the enemy on the line, like you’d usually do in II, you race to the end, avoiding birds, so you’re there to stun & pick it up @ the end.

Afterward you have to weave ’tween garlic as Vampire Wario to reach the top, & then dodge bats as normal Wario to throw an enemy @ throw blocks guarding a green key, & then weave through bats guarding the chest.

2. E6 The East Crater, Blue

As it turns out, in most playthroughs this is the last treasure you get. & what I love ’bout it is that despite that they save a unique gimmick for this: throwing a barrel upward o’er a wall so you can catch it after the wall.

1. N3 The Vast Plain, Blue

This is the much better implementation o’ invisible Wario — which is fitting, since the gray treasure o’ this level is the 1st time you become invisible.

While getting the blue key is just getting to the end while still invisible, the way to get to the chest room while not invisible is clever. The only way to lose invisibility here is to turn into a zombie & turn back to normal by fire. But turning into a zombie makes you fall through any thin platforms, which are all the platforms from the start to the end, & the left side o’ the chest door is blocked from visible Wario. To get to the door while normal, you have to get hit by the zombie while on the eye block o’ the wall that keeps you from passing while visible, since it’s the only non-thin platform. Then you have to move till you’re o’er the fire & then jump & fall through.

The chest room itself pulls a clever twist on the gimmick not seen in any other part o’ this game: this time the level scenery is invisible.

Close But No Cigar

S6 Above the Clouds, Blue

It truly saddened me to cross this 1 off, since it has such beautiful aesthetics, & the moon area is rather creative. But having to jump back down just to get the key & then climb all the way back up seriously loses this points.

S6 Above the Clouds, Green

This 1 was probably e’en closer due to the mechanic o’ you intentionally becoming a zombie to plow through birds. However, I don’t think that mechanic adds ’nough to make it better than the others, & the pointless minigolf requirement ( a dickish 1, since the golf game is way back @ the beginning o’ the level & you won’t know this treasure requires it till you reach its room ) loses it a lot o’ points.

E2 The Frigid Sea, Blue

As mentioned in my #10 choice.

N5 The Tidal Coast, Blue

This has a somewhat creative mechanic in dodging the big octopusses that push you backward if they ram into you. Technically they’re also in “Beneath the Waves”, but those 1s are easy to ignore.

The chest room is also clever, challenging you to jump out o’ the water while dodging fattening apples that’ll send you sinking back down.

However, this isn’t developed much; it would’ve been nice had this gimmick been developed in ’nother treasure. & while dodging the octopusses is unique, in theory, it’s basically just “dodge things while underwater”, which is far from unique, & the octopusses are still quite easy to dodge & don’t do much if you can’t dodge them, either.

The 10 Worst Wario Land 3 Treasures

10. W5 Beneath the Waves, Gray

There’s not much to this treasure: you go up to a room & use trial-&-error to high-jump off an enemy to get the key. Then you go into the treasure hub in the middle o’ the room, go ’cross a few gliders, & then roll into the place with the gray chest. Neither o’ these gimmicks are new here, & they just don’t feel developed much.

It’s not bad; but we’re talking ’bout the 10 “least good” Wario Land 3 treasures; there simply aren’t 10 truly bad treasures.

9. W2 The Volcano’s Base, Blue

’Gain, not a bad treasure, just not particularly good.

Actually, I kind o’ like the way this treasure puts the chest in an easy-to-get place, but forces you to go down into a pit to get the key, & then struggle to get back out. Too bad the challenges in that pit are already all o’er this game: swimming downward avoiding bubbles & flying upward as Vampire Wario, avoiding water drops. It also would’ve been funnier if Wario got the key while falling in, rather than randomly in the middle o’ the 1st room in the pit — ’specially when it’s gotten in virtually the same way as ’nother treasure.

Also, ¿do we need e’en mo’ water areas in a volcano level, too?

8. N4 Bank of the Wild River, Red

Go to the end o’ the level, break through a wall, go into a door to collect a key, go back out & swim back to the start, break a wall near the start, & inside the revealed door is a chest. Worse, making you go to the end to get a key & then swim back to get the chest is very similar to the gray chest, ’cept in caves rather than out in the open.

Much like with the other complaint: ¿does a river level need cave areas, too, when there’s plenty o’ cave levels already?

7. S1 The Grasslands, Red

This loses a lot o’ points for 1 triffle li’l annoyance: breaking a wall you need to break to continue in the cave room forces you to fall off if you don’t know some obscure trick o’ turning round as you charge attack. You then have to go all the way back round to continue breaking the wall. ¿Why’d they do it like that? It’s not mo’ challenging: it just wastes time.

Otherwise, everything else is just thrown in: yet ‘nother minigolf game, the red key’s just on some random series o’ platforms somewhere else, & to get to the cave room, you simply climb yet ‘nother beanstalk dodging yet ‘nother set o’ weird lasers.

6. W4 A Town in Chaos, Red

This may be the only treasure I add partly ‘cause o’ being bad @ video games. The main annoyance o’ this treasure is the final boss, one who’s so easy you have to try to lose to him, but so hard that it takes fore’er to get him in the tiny space ‘tween the goalie & the net. But I have to admit I’ve seen speedrunners do it consistently… Then ‘gain, they can also do 1-block wall jumps in “Bank of the Wild River”. Bopping the turtle to keep him down isn’t much use, as in the time it takes you to bop the rabbit & tackle him toward the net, the turtle will already pop back out.

The detour to get the red key is also annoying, as you have to go all the way into the room that leads to the boss to hit a switch, go back outside all the way to ‘nother room just to get the key, & then go all the way back.

5. W2 The Volcano’s Base, Red & Green

Ugh. ‘Twas just too hard to decide which was the weakest; but the fact that they both exist hurt both o’ them mutually. They’re just too similar: you have to climb up the ladder, dodging those freaky lasers, & then ride a slow moving platform. Moving platforms, ‘course, are the most cliché & banal type o’ autoscrolling level design. Why any game designer thinks they’re fun in any way, I don’t know. They, as well as autoscrollers in general, are like random encounters in RPGS: as far as I know, nobody truly likes them, they just tolerate them ‘cause they’re a tradition. Which is precisely why the particularly best o’ a genre should innovate them out.

Red loses points by making you go all round the top & bottom to get the key, & then go ‘long the top yet ‘gain for the chest. Green loses points for simply adding a minigolf game & nothing else. Green is less tedious, but mo’ boring & empty. Pick your poison.

4. W4 A Town in Chaos, Green

It pains me to put this here, ‘cause the initial challenge to get into the main room is clever: grab a Brrr Bear so that it can spew an ice ball @ you from the other side o’ the fence & push you past the frog in the way. I still remember puzzling o’er how to get into that tantalizing room when I was young.

Unfortunately, everything in that room is terrible: a series o’ rooms with switches with simplistic puzzles you’ve seen a million times already just to get up & become fat so you can break through donut blocks to get the green key, & go all the way back up. E’en better: it’s very easy to mess up breaking the donut blocks so that you have to go up a 3rd time.

3. Sea Turtle Rock, Red

Trying to dodge electric balls while fat is interesting, ‘specially since it’s only used here, but it’s not developed in any way. & then you get ‘nother pointless minigolf game, the chest not being far after the key, & the room itself being just randomly in god-knows-where. There’s also no coherence to this treasure: ¿why electric balls in the middle o’ a cave?

2. N5 The Tidal Coast, Red

This feels like a copy o’ the blue treasure in “The Volcano’s Base”, which was already a not-very-good treasure by itself. While “The Tidal Coast” is a’least a water level, the actual game design o’ this treasure is worse: it doesn’t have the clever trick o’ netting you the key early & challenging you to get out so you can reach the treasure that was, before getting the key, a piewalk to get. This time the red key is just halfway to the chest, the most simplistic o’ A-B-C paths. & while the Volcano’s Base treasure spiced it up a li’l with puzzles where you had to 1st avoid becoming a vampire, & then avoid losing your vampire ability, this treasure has, after the 20th “dodge bubbles” puzzle, just a simple puzzle wherein you throw an enemy through blocks — what must be the 50th.

1. S4 The Steep Canyon, Blue

This is the only treasure in the entire game to put the key just before the chest. Other treasures come close to that, like the red treasure in “Sea Turtle Rock”; but e’en that introduces you to the chest before making you beat the minigolf game to get the key; this treasure literally just has it right before the chest.

This treasure also has a minigolf game, hidden under a stupid secretly-hidden block that infested Wario Land II to no good ( Town 4 level design, basically ). The fire mechanic not only doesn’t fit this treasure where nothing fits together, it also weakens ‘nother level, “S3 Tower of Revival”, by taking a gimmick that otherwise would’ve been only in that level, making that level mo’ special if it had been ( plus, you already have to do this kind o’ puzzle in all 4 o’ that level’s treasures, so by now you’d be tired o’ this puzzle ).

Still not awful, but nothing in Wario Land 3 is. It’s just absent o’ anything particularly good.

The Game Boy Color came out 20 years ago & I have nothing better to write ’bout.

Games we’ll be looking @ ( hopefully ):

• Wario Land II & Wario Land 3
• Pokémon Special Pikachu Version ( Yellow )
• Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
• Pac-Man: Special Color Edition
• Pokémon Gold & Silver Version
• Game & Watch Gallery 2 & 3
• Pokémon Pinball
• Pokémon Training Card Game
• Donkey Kong Country
• Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite!

Next year, Game Boy hits its 30th birthday in April; & thus that’ll be when we start our tribute for the regular Game Boy:

Games we’ll look @:

• The Super Mario Land games
• Wario Land ( Seriously: it’s not a Super Mario Land game )
• Donkey Kong
• Dr. Mario
• Kirby’s Dream Land I & II
• The Donkey Kong Land series