IGN: Super Mario Bros. Deluxe Review

July 21, 1999 - It's been nearly fifteen years since the plumber wandered into the Mushroom Kingdom, and gaming has never been the same since. When the NES was released in 1985, the game that shipped with the system was the instant classic Super Mario Bros. And what better way to kick off the first year of the Game Boy Color's life than with a true Mario game?

The Game Boy Color game Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is a pixel-by-pixel translation of the original NES game, with a ton of added features. And because the original Super Mario Bros. still holds up extremely well after all these years, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is an absolutely fantastic game that borders on perfection ¿ perfection in Game Boy standards, of course.

Features

Pixel-perfect translation of NES Super Mario Bros.
32 levels
New Vs. Mode for two system play
Game Boy Printer support
Battery backed with three game save slots
Infra-red data transfer
Only for Game Boy Color

There are many different modes in the game, but the main game is the 1985 classic Super Mario Bros. 32 levels of platform-hopping gameplay where you must go through the world, jumping on enemies and collecting coins, making your way to the next castle before time runs out. Collect 100 coins and you've earned a secret life. Make sure you jump on...aww, skip it. You've played this game before.

What you haven't played are the new modes injected in the Game Boy Color version. The Vs. Mode requires two Game Boy Colors and a link-cable, but this game is a whole lot of fun. It's a race to the flag pole between Mario and Luigi, and you'll try to screw each other up by hitting triggers that will put blocks up in the way. Very cool use of the original Super Mario Bros. engine, and worth the purchase of another cartridge just for this feature alone.

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe also has a Challenge Mode, where you'll have to find five red coins and a Yoshi egg, as well as beat the level's preset score to finish the level completely. This is pretty darn difficult, hope you have a lot of patience.

When we say pixel-perfect, we mean it. Even though the Game Boy Color screen has less resolution than a standard television, the developers have translated the same pixel count for every object in the game, from Mario to the koopas, turtles, even the question-mark blocks. Granted, this reduces the screen visibility somewhat, but the developers have added user-controlled screen-scrolling to the mix. If you want to see above or below where you're standing, it's all a matter of pushing up or down on the pad.

All 32 levels, from 1-1 to 8-4 are patterned after the levels in the NES classic. Nothing's changed. Well, that's not exactly true ¿ you can now save your game in progress, something you cannot do in the original. It also remembers which levels you've completed, and unlocks secrets based on how many you've finished. So it's not always a good thing to find the warp zones so early in the game.

Secrets? That's right. As you complete certain tasks in the game, you open up little hidden trinkets. Things like a Photo Album where you can print out earned pictures on your Game Boy Printer, or a Toy Box where you can make messages and print them out.

Oh, and just because they could, the developers stuck in a fortune teller (just think "Mario Magic 8 Ball") and a calendar option where you can enter important dates and save them to a cartridge. Do they need to be in there? Of course not. But they're cool additions nontheless.

Closing Comments
Super Mario Bros. remains one of my top 10 favorite games of all-time, even though it's almost a decade and a half old. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is such a perfect translation, it makes me wonder if it's easy to port NES games to the Game Boy Color. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is the Game Boy Color-specific game to own, hands down, and will be the title that, hopefully, will key a revolution of porting NES games to the handheld system. Buy this game. Now.

IGN Ratings for Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (GBC)