My favorite benefit of the two player mode was the way it allowed players with different skill sets to contribute to the common goal. My brothers were better at precise plat high-speed forming, while I was better at more methodical levels like the pirate ships. Unlike Mario 1, where it quickly becomes obvious which player is better and which one is worse, Mario 3 allowed players to complement each other and both contribute in different ways.
Yes, but you can just hand the player one controller to your brother or friend. We never bothered with the 2 player mode, just took turns. 1 player mode - You gotta shit or get a snack, let your friend take a couple stabs at the same level he cant seem to beat. ... no problem. 2 player mode, now hes going back and forth on 2 controllers... while you drop a duece.
On the topic of Mario Vs. Luigi, whichever player gets to rest can also "catch" the active player if they move over the square in which they are found resting. So, not only Mario can engage Luigi during his turn, but Luigi himself can try to "steal" Mario's turn, if Mario, for some reason, wanted to backtrack, or had to pass over Luigi's resting square on the way to a minigame or bonus stage.
Actually, that's probably a really hard thing to measure. The same could be said about Popeye, and that's probably not the first game that did it either.
@Taiga's Tunes Not really what I meant though. OP said that Mario 3 invented the idea that each level should have a gimmick. I was just saying that Popeye the arcade did the same thing a decade earlier.
There's one detail about the 2-player battle game that I really love but have never heard anyone else talk about: *either player* has the option of initiating the battle game, regardless of who happens to be in control of the map at the moment. If it's Mario's turn, but he happens to pass over the spot on the map where Luigi happens to currently be, then Luigi can press the A button on his controller to "catch" Mario as he passes over that space. It's sort of like the hand trap stages in world 8. If you really want to be a jerk, you can play all the stages along the "main" paths of the map that the other player will have to follow behind you, and then just force him into the battle game as he tries to pass you, bullying him into never getting a full turn if you want.
Yes. Understanding the nuances of initiating battle were important, but not always fully appreciated by players who usually played alone. And also caused a lot of fights between my siblings and I.
Nice one! I don't know if anyone besides me did this, but the VS-mode provides another option for unskilled players. When one player loses all his lives during a two player game he is able to continue but all the levels cleared by him become uncleared again and can't be passed by either player until one of the contestants clears it again. When one of us was down to his last life during a two player game, we "played" several round of the VS-battle in order to switch a level cleared by Luigi over to Mario before Luigi lost his last life. I can't remember the specifics but I think the player about to lose, went to a level already cleared by him and left it again. Then the other player could engage the battle by choosing the same field on the map and had to win to take over the level. Once we did this for every level owned by this player, he ran into an enemy to start with a new set of lifes.
The map screen and the generous offering of extra lives also represented the franchise moving away more or less completely from Mario's arcade roots in Donkey Kong (although it still maintained some vestiges such as numerical scoring). The original Super Mario Bros. already allowed players with even a little bit of skill to enjoy far more gameplay than you could usually get for a quarter, but Super Mario Bros. 3 really took advantage of the possibilities available to a console platformer.
Good joke but from one who lived through the Atari 2600 era we know he is referring to the absolute horror of rush games and poor quality control from Atari it was the control of quality from Nintendo that saved the gamer market during the 80s. Examples Pacman and E.T. for the 2600. The pain...
I feel like the best change they made in SMB3, compared to SMB, is that you can change your horizontal velocity mid-air more easily. It makes you feel more in control of the character.
I agree. When I first saw Super Mario World, I thought it looked worse that mario 3 graphically. Like I could tell there were more colors and backgrounds, but I thought mario and the enemies looked goofy compared to Mario 3.
The warp whistle system pretty much took care of that problem. The most you'd have to replay before warping to wherever you left off would be the first several stages in world 1. No big deal.
Oh prior games already *had* save-game features (Legend of Zelda, Metroid in Japan, etc) by the time SMB3 came along. It just was the exception, not the rule.
The UK gaming timeline is almost completely different. We didn't get a crash, rather we had a boom in bedroom coders in the early 80s which made the microcomputers of the time the most popular systems to have. The ZX Spectrum, C64, BBC Micro, and Amstrad CPC were all far bigger than any console here, and this rolled over to the 16-Bit Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. As for Mario, it's hype was almost akin to the first Batman movie, and it deserves all the praise it gets.
Great video. I never thought about the big 2 player mode enhancement, I mean it felt so natural, so logical that you just go with it. My friends and I had a lot of fun stealing cards from each other and waiting for the toad house to be opened by the other player completing a level
One thing to keep in mind is that Super Mario Bros was a launch title for the NES and by the time Super Mario Bros 3 came out, the developers had approximately 3 more years to learn how to work and get more out of the console. It definitely shows.
The application of memory-mapper chips also increased the baseline system capabilities, in ways that are so subtle we actually just take them for granted. The Toad House minigame being a good example: the game needed to adjust the system's horizontal camera position with very precise timing to make 3 rows of the screen scroll independently from one another.
If you loved Space Invaders on the 2600, you owe it to yourself to play the 5200 version. My first console was the 5200 and for games like Pac-Man, Frogger, Centipede, Moon Patrol and Popeye, it was so cool having a system that was this close to the arcade experience at home. Space Invaders for the 5200 was really something special though. To this day it is still the best version of the game ever made. And when you get to the "special" aliens it was really beautiful for the time. What a cool color changing effect that was unmatched in the early 80s. Its a shame about those controllers though, and if you want to build a 5200 library and have good controls you're going to have to put a lot more effort into it than you would setting up most other emulators. But trust me, it's worth looking into. :)
I'd add on to the first one with continues: not just hidden behind a special button combination, but up front and center, asking if you want to continue, putting less emphasis on lives And you keep your acquired power ups, as well as unlocked portions of the map. Still misses what SMW and further had--the ability to go back and revisit levels and even pick up lost powerups or additional lives--something carried on in every Mario platformer to this day.
I never saw The Wizard in my country and thus missed that part of the hype. Still, even young me back in the day understood Mario 3 was something special.
As much as I love this one I think I enjoyed Super Mario Bros 2 better. I can just clearly remember seeing a demo at Toys R Us and playing briefly. There was some magic in the second game for me ;)
You clearly wanted to talk about some aspects of mario 3 that you found interesting things to say about, but the introduction to the video gives the impression you want to convince us why mario 3 was a pivotal moment in gaming history. You explain well how your facets are an improvement to the mario franchise, but they don't get very far in supporting the main point of the introduction. Also, praising mario 3 has been done to death. I think your channel shines when you go into obscure debugging finds that other's do not. Looking forward to more.
6:48 as someone with a younger brother that died 10 seconds into the level leaving me to complete the level, only for him to steal the power ups from the toad houses and other bonus stages, I really hated the "take turns" thing. THOSE WERE MY POWER UPS! YOU DIDN'T EARN THEM! I DID!
You know, your explanation as to how Mario 3 improved on Mario 1 makes me think that a rom hack of Mario 1 can be made. Complete with an over world map (from Super Mario Bros Deluxe or the super obscure BS Super Mario Collection Dai-1-Shuu), an over world inventory sub screen (with mushroom,, fire flower, starman. And maybe even the music box & jugem cloud along with hammer brothers, Toad's house and card games on the map). And throw in the levels from other SMB1 styled games such as Super Mario Bros Special, Japanese SMB2, and VS SMB into the mix. And lastly, an option to play 2 players either simultaneously (there's a rom hack for this already) or alternating after stages like Mario 3 where progress is shared. This would make such as refreshing change for veterans to play SMB1 again and also make it more friendly to newcomers. I think all of that fits nicely with SMB1 while still being SMB1. If I knew how to code, I'd start this immediately as my new passion project for both the NES and SNES.
You also get inventory items and extra lives from the card matching memory game. Yeah, I didn't realize it was adding those to my inventory for many years. ;) Of course, you also get 28 Magic Wing items added to your inventory if you finish the game and start over, so there's that. ;) Adding items with the e-Reader on the GBA version was kinda cheap since they were infinite but it did exist. I would have liked to see something that throttled you, like an in-game item you have to spend every time you swipe an item card... like maybe three hidden gold coins in each level like the ones they added to Super Mario Advance. Also, maybe they shouldn't let you use the same card over and over... like maybe the triple 1-Up card should only work once per level so you might use your single 1-Up card. Of course, they have to fix the game's save function that makes extra lives pointless too. Speaking of extra lives, another way to get extra lives in the original Super Mario Bros is to kick a turtle shell through 8 enemies, like at the beginning of 5-1. Anyway, I've long espoused the unpopular opinion that Super Mario Bros. 3 was more polished than Super Mario World and, thus, SMW seems a little rushed in comparison. People like to point to the lack of a save feature to argue the opposite but they are really just proving my point, since SMB3 was designed to let you jump straight to any world from the first world without a save feature and is better off for it. They told you about one Warp Whistle with a Nintendo Power subscription card included with the game and, of course, knowledge of the other whistles would filter through to most players by the time they started to bemoan playing through earlier world's to reach later ones. It was a genius way to resume at a later world without turning the earlier worlds into a slog. Since most players finished the game by skipping difficult worlds, it ended up keeping them fresh since there was still a lot to explore after you finished the game. Since players rarely just played through everything, there were always some parts of the game that were relatively unexplored for most players and worth re-playing. I really hate that the GBA version let's you swipe e-cards for infinite items... especially infinite lives since they are pointless anyway. I mean, you start with more lives (5), the second enemy on the first screen of the first stage no longer shoots fireballs which sets the tone for the rest of the game (gimped), and getting Game Over doesn't really set you back when you can just reset and resume from a save point with a fresh set of 5 lives whenever you want. I mean, my copy literally came with a 1-Up card and a 3-Up card... as if I couldn't just swipe the 1-Up card more times if I somehow needed more of these pointless lives. If it isn't clear by now: I feel that the ability to save broke the game and made lives pointless while eliminating an aspect that kept much of the game fresh and replayable, since you can just pick a previous world after saving and have less reason to skip any. Having map screen doors pave the way if you progressed enough before getting Game Over is a much better mechanic and even that is ruined by the ability to save anywhere in the GBA version. IIRC, Super Mario All*Stars did this a bit better by saving whether or not you had cleared a door/Mini Fortress on the map without saving the individual levels... so resuming a world was the same as getting Game Over in a world except you would still have your saved item inventory. The original SMB3 is still one of my favorite games of all time. I don't feel that it suffers at all without save since it had the polish to embrace that aspect and turn it into a good thing.
Idk if you mentioned or know this, but if you're playing as, say, Luigi and it's Mario's turn on the map you can spam the A button and trap them in the mini-game as they pass over you.
This is why I love Super Mario Bros 3 so much! Not only did it add enhancements to the Mario franchise, it became a legend within itself, all because Shigeru Miyamoto, and his team at R&D1, promise they were going to make the biggest Mario game that has ever been made, and they succeeded! I love Mario! (No homo)
Brilliant work my friend. Having loved this game since it came out when we were 7 and watched so many takes on the subject, you hit on new aspects and qualities often overlooked. Even by life long fans.
There was multiple revisions of SMB3 released. I know I have 2 that call the 8 worlds at the end by different names in the closing credits. Wonder what other changes there are in the revisions... (Thought for a future ep)?
There is just one flaw in my opinion that is both obvious and serious: That you can't re-play finished levels. (But that was quite standard back in the day, so maybe this is only obvious now.)
It wouldn't surprise me if they made a hack that lets you do it now. It's seriously crazy how advanced the hacking scene has gotten since the original days of simple pallet swaps. For instance, they've got a version of the original SMB where you can play both Mario and Luigi at the same time, as well as one where you play as the Princess to save Mario and she can float like she did in SMB2. They've even added 2 player simultaneous support for more obscure titles like P.O.W., and allow a 2 player Duck Tales where the 2nd player is Darkwing Duck. It's really cool to watch these geniuses change the entire mechanics of a game like that. And that was before the recent leaks where a lot of the source code came out. Now that that happened I think we're going to see even more amazing developments.
Excuse me, the NORTH-AMERICAN CONSOLE GAME crash of 1983; not only did the rest of the world; Europe/Japan for the most part back then, not have a crash, we had a BOOM! And games on computers did okay in the North America as well; the first on-line game services, adventure games, RPGs, strategy games, etc., they were all doing quite well. Legendary studios and developers wore born during that era, man.
Y'know, growing up through the Atari and Commodore eras, I was so utterly sick of Nintendo platformers. I would play literally anything else. I learned to love RPGs because of it, even fishing RPGs. Your video here reminded me that Super Mario 3 was the first platformer that I really, really enjoyed. For all the reasons you listed. No platformer ever sufficed after that until well into the most recent years with dynamic roguelikes which offered random levels in short pacing. ... Anyway. Thanks for this video.
Great video. I'm curious what effect was used at 1:08 to morph the 2 images. At first I thought it was datamoshing mixed with some sort of embossing but I'm not sure.
Man, you were able to cooperate with your sibling? Every 2-player game I ever played devolved into playing maybe three scenes before just doing the minigame over and over for an hour straight.
While The turn based system was a definite improvement over Mario 1, I would argue that its fatal flaw was the ability to "steal" the turn from the other player on the map screen by defeating them at the "battle game" which recreates the very problem the turn based system was supposed to solve. I remember spending a very unhappy afternoon not play Super Mario Bros. 3 when I was a kid because the friend I was playing with would constantly take my turn by beating me at that battle game, which I was not any good at. It placed weaker players at the mercy of better ones in a much more antagonistic way.
That doesn't make any sense - You only do the Battle Scenes when the active player chooses to do so on the world map. You can't have your turn "stolen" unless you initiate the battle mode.
@@Alakadoof that's not true, either player can initiate the battle mode. I was never fast enough on the controller to select the level before my friend would bump us into battle mode.
mario 3 was a somewhat mediocre game with needlessly hard difficulty, 1-2 hits = dead. And somewhat monotonous. The only thing it exceled at was showing the world just how far a game can go by piggybacking entirely on marketing. Similar to apple. Most nes game developers didn't had a fraction of the experienced devs or budget of mario 3.
