Mario Bros. reconsidered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGAuEjUdbeM
For this week's Video Chronicles feature, I found myself taking a long, hard look at a familiar game — a too-familiar game, I should say — and reevaluating it. I'm old enough to remember playing Mario Bros. in arcades when it was brand new… and I also remember when Super Mario Bros. came along and suddenly made a perfectly entertaining arcade platformer feel like a terrible dinosaur. I've noticed a general sense of dismissal among Nintendo fans when it comes to the original Mario Bros., and the way it's showed up as a bonus add-on in something like a dozen different Mario titles in the past 30 years hasn't really done much to warm players to it. It can be difficult to care about a game when it's treated as a sort of half-baked bonus, you know?
But taken on its own terms, Mario Bros. is still pretty fun. It's a lot more primitive than Super Mario Bros., sure, but its stiff controls and jump physics somehow feel a lot more refined than those in games that Nintendo produced afterwards, e.g. Ice Climber, a similar co-op platformer whose physics were scientifically based on subatomic particles of pure anti-fun. On Famicom, Mario Bros. arrived a good two years before its sequel, but on NES we actually received after. Or at the same time, if you weren't one of the cool kids who picked up an NES at its test launch in 1985. Still, that's pretty rough treatment for a game that deserved a chance to shine on its own merits!
Anyway, find a friend and play some cooperative(-ish) Mario Bros. You might be surprised by how good it is. Unless you're one of the few faithful who never lost sight of its appeal, in which case: Well done, you.
