Mario angry! Mario smash!

Just two weeks until the release of a brand new Super Mario Bros! This isn’t your modern day Mario RPG or 3D adventure game, New Super Mario Bros. will be classic Super Mario in all his two dimensional, side scrolling glory!

Unfortunately I do not own a Nintendo DS, nor do I plan on purchasing one. I work at home and thus mobile gaming is next to useless to me so until I get a Nintendo DS emulator for my Xbox, I’ll have to dig a bit deeper for my 2D platforming goodness.

Lucky for me one of the best platformers ever made has somehow gone under my radar all these years; Miyamoto’s classic Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island for the Super Nintendo. Released in 1995, Yoshi’s Island came at the tail end of the Super Nintendo’s life span and that’s probably why it continues to be left out when most people think of the classic Mario series including 1-3, World, and 64, but this game is just as great, if not greater than any of those legendary titles.

The story takes place before any of the other Mario games. Mario and Luigi are babies and the Yoshis are trying to protect them from the evil Kamek and deliver them back to their parents. The game uses a childlike graphical palette to render its environments; everything looks like it was drawn with crayons and markers. I was really impressed the first time I saw it. It looks amazing for a SNES title thanks to the Super FX chip. The chip helped the SNES render advanced 2D effects like sprite scaling and stretching, larger sprites that can create bosses that take up the whole screen, and multiple foreground and background parallax layers that add extra depth to the 2D/3D world. Sometimes they go overboard with all these bells and whistles and things get too jumbled and confusing, but most of the time they do a great job absorbing you into the world.

Interesting side note: according to Wikipedia the graphic style of Yoshi’s Island was the result of a conflict between Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo. Nintendo wanted the Mario series to move towards the pre-rendered graphic style of Donkey Kong Country, which Miyamoto didn’t care for. Miyamoto responded by altering the graphics to look like crayon and marker which Nintendo then approved.
As expected, the level design and gameplay are superb with creative twists around every corner. Yoshi can eat the enemy and turn them into eggs which follow you around. You can then aim and throw the eggs to take out enemies or hit switches hovering in the air. You can also morph Yoshi into things like a helecopter, tank, submarine, and a mole.

If you’re like me and totally missed this game when it came out, it’s worth experiencing. If you don’t have a working SNES, the ROM is readily available for emulators and the game has also been re-released as Super Mario Advance 3 for the Game Boy Advance.