Another Mario Game... Psh.

Super Mario Bros. is a game created by pandak

Once upon a time, a man by the name of Geoff decided to sit down and create a game creating site known as Sploder. Since then, many games rotating around the popular Mario franchise owned by Nintendo were made. Very few turn out to be good, and most are repetitive and have nothing to do with Mario, let are labelled with his name. Will this one be yet another clone and a boring version of the real thing, or will this blow my opinion of Mario games into the dust?

INTRODUCTION

In case you were too lazy to check the thumbnail, and I am all the time, this is my third review and I'm going to be reviewing Super Mario Bros. by pandak. Pandak is a rather well-known creator and has privated most of the games that have gotten him popular. Is this one feature worthy? Let's find out.

GAMEPLAY

Just a fair warning to anyone reading this review; I won't be saying much good about this game, so if you came here to hear all the wonderful things this game has to offer, then this probably isn't your cup of tea.

Now, my two major gripes in this game are the mechanics of the block-hitting, and the double-jump mechanics. Now, since this game is chock full of graphics, it's hard to see where the top of the character your controlling is. In this game, it's the empty space right behind Mario's head. If you want to break a block, you're going to have to hit the block in front of it, and to hit THAT block, you hit the air in front of THAT. Also, let's say you're on a flat piece of land and there's a pit in front of that. In some cases, you can almost walk across the entire pit. I'm sure this isn't totally pandak's fault, but there's probably a way to fix this.

In addition to that problem, let's continue with the double-jump mayhem I was talking about last paragraph. In PPGs, your character randomly double jumps sometimes if you double tap the UP or W button on your keyboard. You cannot control when this happens, it's random. However, in this game, Pandak forces you to utilize this feature, even though it's random. I hate games based on randomness or luck, and Pandak could have placed some platforms csplode to each other for better results.

One thing this game doesn't take from Mario is the fact that you cannot stomp on Goombas or Koopas. I am perfectly fine with this because this game would be much too easy if you could kill them, though me and many others are surprised that there's a Mario game out there where you can't kill Goombas.

PLACEMENTS

The enemy placements in this game are downright horrible. In the first world there's a koopatroopa that you have to jump over and a Goomba running around on a small ledge right past that. It's either one or the other. I've never played this without hitting one of them, and in most cases the Goomba causes me to fall off. Enemies are placed just like this throughout the game, and it's totally annoying.

Health placement was okay; it was still placed on ledges where you had to double jump to get to. In most cases it was too easy to obtain, but nonetheless the double jumping ruins it.

SCENERY

Sadly, scenery is all this game has that's good. The scenery remains true to its roots to Mario, but strip it down to its basics (and by that I mean take away the graphics) then honestly, this game is nothing. That is all I have to say about the scenery, but all in all it's pretty well done.

RATINGS

GAMEPLAY: 2/5

ENEMY PLACEMENT: 1/5

HEALTH PLACEMENT: 3/5

SCENERY: 4/5

OVERALL: 2.5/5

IN THE END

It turns out that this game is out there mostly for its eye-candy, not for its amazing gameplay or placements. It ends up quite nicely because I never had high expectations. In the end, this game didn't quite deserve it feature, but it does look good.