Slate’s Chris Suellentrop reviews Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. It’s the original Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 whose difficulty and, well, gamer sadism (the mushrooms are poisonous! the warp zones lead you backwards!) led Nintendo to shelve it in the States in favor of the weird sequel we know over here; it’s finally getting its North American debut on Wii.

I’ve been thinking about Super Mario a lot lately, maybe as I continue to try to wrap my head around how fresh and innovative the Scott Pilgrim series’ use of video-game style and structure feels. The other weekend I pointed out to my bemused family just how weird the video games we took in stride in our youth really are. After all, Super Mario Bros. is about an Italian plumber and his brother who battle evil mushrooms and turtles in order to rescue a princess from a dragon/turtle/dinosaur thing, and in the process use stars to become invincible, flowers to breathe fire, and raccoon ears and tails to fly. That’s freaking bizarre, and yet my entire generation treats it all like common sense. These are hardly the most original observations, I know, and I’ve actually never been that much of a gamer so I’m barely equipped to address this stuff at all, but it just seems to me like this is an unbelievably rich vein to mine, at least as fruitful as some of the all-time great weird ideas like “rich orphan dresses up as bat to fight crime” and “invincible alien has ugly stupid backwards-speaking clone.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.