Playing Super Mario World in 2024

Hey hey folks, and welcome to my critique of Super Mario World. This is in three connected parts. Part 1 is about my history with the game, being able to play it when it launched in North America. Part 2 is how different it is playing the game all these years later mostly due to the controls, and Part 3 is about the game’s difficulty before we wrap up. As always that is followed by the announcement of the next viewer poll, some additional ideas I had when writing about the game, and talking about the benefits of becoming a patron. Feel free to jump around, watch one part at a time, or the whole thing at once. I hope you enjoy my look back at this platforming classic.

Part 1: My History with Super Mario World

They say you can never go back.

I was lucky enough to get a Super Nintendo close to its US launch date of August 23rd, 1991. Earlier my family had moved from Woodinville Washington to the Gold Coast of Australia. My Dad grew up on the Gold Coast and wanted to move back. Things didn't go well as it wasn’t too long before my Mum took me and my sister back to the US for a time, until my parents worked out their differences and we moved back to Australia permenently.

Shortly after moving back to the US, I was given a Super Nintendo as a present. It came with the adapters, 2 controllers, and Super Mario World. That game was everything to me. I don't have many memories of my childhood, but I do remember hooking the Super Nintendo up to the TV in a friends' basement (as this was before my Mum found us our own place). It was magical. The only downside was having to start the game with 2-players. I was a child going through some turmoil. I wanted this new Mario all to myself man!

I have many fond memories of my time with the Super Nintendo, but playing Super Mario World is the strongest. I can't recall how long it took, but I found every damn secret exit in the game. I don’t know how much was due to the amount of time I played it, how much was swapping knowledge on the school playground, and how much was due to reading issues of Nintendo Power. My Mum made friends with a guy who worked at Nintendo and he would gift me issues of the magazine when him and my Mum would meet up, or maybe I had a subscription. As I said, my childhood memories are fuzzy.

Over the years I'd devote time here and there to Super Mario World. I'd start a new game and play a few worlds, and years later I'd test it out in emulators, but this is the first time I have dedicated myself to finishing the game and uncovering its secrets since I was 9 or 10 years old.

They say you can never go back.

This is true on a couple of levels. The first is I’m no longer a child living in Washington state in the early 90s. I’m now in my early 40s living on the other side of the world. It's said that "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man". This is the simple change. Watch a movie or read a book you enjoyed in childhood, and if it still holds up (which often isn't the case), you will get something completely different from it. The childlike wonder of Dinosaur island, of riding Yoshi, of battling the Koopa Kids, and uncovering the games' multitude of secrets hits different now.

It’s not that the game isn’t still enjoyable. I think it's excellent, and we'll discuss why in more detail later, but it's a different beast. I no longer have months to play a game to distract me from the fact that I don't have my Dad around and my Mum is likely struggling (which looking back probably did hit harder as an adoptee). I didn't have years of playing, thinking about, and making videos about video games under my belt. I was a dumb kid who loved Mario and now I'm a dumb adult who's making a video about that love.

So let's move onto the other level of not being able to go back, the hardware. I no longer have a Super Nintendo console or a CRT television. What I do have is a Super Nintendo emulator running on a laptop through a 27" 1080p monitor, with a shader on it to emulate how the game might have looked back when I first played it. I’m also not playing with a Super Nintendo controller. I’m using an Xbox Series X controller, and even though it has a dpad, 4 face buttons and two bumpers, it is not the same layout or the same feeling, and it is this discrepency in the controls and thus the game feel of playing Super Mario World, that I want to start with.

Part 2: It's Not the Same Game

The way Mario controlled back in his first outing on the NES was with 2 buttons laid out horizontally. The A button jumped, and the B button performed the double duty of acceleration and shooting fireballs. In Mario 2 and 3, new abilities were mapped to the B button, but the essence of Mario's core movement was through this 2-button horizontal setup.

The SNES controller has 4 face buttons; 2 sets of the NES layout stacked on top of each other, however Super Mario World does not use the same layout as the NES games. Jump is instead mapped to B, and accelerate and other abilities such as shooting fireballs (and so much more) is mapped right above it to the Y button, but also to the X button as well. This is important because of what the A button is used for.

The A button is for the new spin jump. Mario can break blocks, pulverise enemies, and there’s a satisfying sound effect to go along with it. Coming from the NES Mario games, of course players are going to assume Mario generally controls the same way, and as a kid, once I saw that cool spin jump with all its utility, why would I ever want to use the regular jump again? It was boring by comparison. And hey, even if it is weird that the alternate button is now above the jump button instead of right next to it, because the X and Y buttons do the same thing, I could choose to accelerate, swing the cape, and make Yoshi eat with the same positioning of my hand. Well… Yoshi complicates matters. If you press spin jump, Mario gets off the back of the dinosaur, so I had to move to the B and Y buttons if I wanted to use Yoshi, but flying solo? It was spin jump all the way baby! That was until I got to Morton's Castle.

In Morton's Castle I learned what those of you already familiar with how Super Mario World controls have been thinking ever since I started my story; that the spin jump just doesn't have the same height to it. There's a climb in the second section of the castle, where platforms are shifting to the left and right, opening up and closing paths for Mario to ascend ever higher until the boss door. I would always keep dying on this one part that I thought impossible to reach, until I was playing with a friend and I think they admonished me for not using the regular jump. That level taught me that the regular jump had its utility, even if it wasn't as cool.

In this playthrough I used the spin jump rarely. It doesn't feel cool to me anymore, and while I still like the sound, I can't handle it going off constantly. It's just like pressing the Y button to make the cape spin. Useful movement to keep Mario safe, but that sound effect in perpetuity? Ugh. It reminds me of when an old college roommate played Ocarina of Time, and rolled everywhere as Young Link. It drove me up the wall.

Now auditory processing issues aside, I wanted to bring up the spin jump story not only as a funny anecdote for what Child Dave thought was cool, but how I might not have been the only one. In thinking about the spin jump, it made me realise that Takeshi Tezuka and his team changed the familiar button layout of the old games to give prominence to this new Mario ability. I wonder if they expected its new utility and cool factor to cause younger players to rely on it I mean the Mario games are made primarily for children. The focus on Dinosaurs and the vibrant colour palette in Super Mario World speak to that, but I've also been thinking that maybe the reason I've not been using the spin jump in this playthrough is because of how the face buttons are arranged on the Xbox controller, and how different it is to holding a Super Nintendo controller in my hand.

I've often thought about how different games feel when playing them on an emulator, as we don't have access to the original controllers by default. I've come across this hurdle in my Atari and NES Project videos, and it's also something that occurs when playing PC ports of console games before Xinput was popularised. A game is tested and fine-tuned with a primary controller and control layout as it’s designed. Sure my Xbox controller has a d-pad, 4 face buttons and 2 bumpers, but they're not in the same part of the controller. They're not the same size, they don't feel the same to press, and the SNES controller didn't have a right analogue stick in the way of the face buttons, or triggers to deal with. It also didn't help that I forgot to assign the diagonals to the d-pad in the emulator, and then it was a while until I realised that I had mixed up two of the directions. Whoops.

The reason I bring up triggers is that it was around the Forest of Illusion that I became frustrated with some of the challenges the game was throwing at me. It didn't help that I found 1ups to be useless since after a reset, the game defaults Mario to 5 lives and no power-ups. It was here when I started using save states in the emulator, and to make things easier, I binded them to the left and right triggers of the Xbox controller. Sometimes during a rough jump, I would accidentally hit the right trigger, loading the last save state and nullifying my progress. Whoops.

I was thinking about my Disco Elysium critique; how I brought up the reasons I was save scumming before dice rolls, and if using save states in an emulator could be seen as a similar transgression. I think it's helping that I'm playing Turbo Overkill as I'm writing this. It's a modern FPS emulating one from the 90s. Until checkpointing became more ubiquitous, I would hit F5 to quicksave my game every minute or two in an FPS, mostly after a tough firefight. There were times when this got me into trouble, but generally having control over your own save can be a godsend. It's just a grey area with Mario because such a benefit was not in the original game.

Which returns me to the Xbox controller and emulation. You can't go back again. My controller feels different, the hardware I'm using is different, I'm at a different point in my life, and I am able to save and load the game whenever I damn well please. Playing Super Mario World in 2024 is *different*, and while I have the memories of playing the game as my 10 year old self, they are clashing with this current playthrough. So finally, let's talk about Super Mario World itself.

Part 3: Is Super Mario World Too Easy?

How did you find out about Top Secret Area?

When I entered the first Ghost House, I was worried I wouldn't remember the secret exit, but no joke, the instant that first room loaded and I saw the sea of spectres swimming above, I knew exactly what I needed to do, take a running jump and fly up the side. I just can't remember how I originally found out about it. It could have been by accident. Once the cape is introduced, there's a desire to fly above the ground of every stage if the game lets you. It's not far fetched to believe I flew up, saw the door or the room above and the rest is history, but it's also plausible that either a friend told me or I found out about it reading Nintendo Power. It's an early enough secret for any old game magazine to spoil. It's just trickier to think that I did it on my own because while any normal level with a secret exit flashes red on the map, the Ghost Houses don't. I guess it's fair to assume they all have secret exits being Ghost Houses, but aside from the first entry to Star Road, I mostly found the main exit of these places and moved onto the next stage.

The reason I bring up Top Secret Area is how powerful a secret it is. Anytime I had trouble getting through a stage, one of my first solutions was to go back to Top Secret Area, load up on Fire Flowers, Capes, and Yoshi, return to the offending level, and see if that could help get me through. The capes' slow glide and ability to swirl away most opposition combined with the extra hit Yoshi allows can render most platforming or enemy challenges obsolete. There's also a chance, that a couple extra hits will allow Little Mario to make it to the end of the level.

The only issue was that after uncovering Donut Secret 1, I made a decision (a quite boneheaded one I might add), that I would play through the main levels until I got to Bowser's Castle before going back and uncovering all the secrets. This meant that every time I wanted to top up my resources at Top Secret Area, I had to trek through every area of Dinosaur Island there and back. If I had uncovered Star Road as I went, it would have been much less of a headache. At least I uncovered most of the Switch Palaces as I went through the game.

Different opinions on the Switch Palaces are discussions about Super Mario World’s difficulty. Despite fans using the assets of Super Mario World to create some of the most fiendish Mario levels in existence through Kaizo romhacks, there's a consensus that Super Mario World is an easy game, and the Switch Palaces adding blocks over pits, and walls that Mario can run up make an easy game even easier. That the player can't turn them off when on is a further sticking point.

I'm now going to talk about the difficulty of Super Mario World and the Switch Palaces in turn. As Mario games go, I don’t think Super Mario World is difficult. There were moments of difficulty certainly. Getting the secret exit on Cheese Bridge and then swimming through Soda Lake is a tough challenge. Finding the right exits in Forest of Illusion, or the crushing maze in Valley of Bowser 2 stick out in my mind, and then there's the special levels once you get through Star Road.

The special levels are worth talking about because I think Star Road and its special levels are the seed of the Kaizo romhack spirit. There's a mix of trying out fun things with the level mechanics (such as the spinjump romp in Star World 1 or that Star World 3 is a single screen puzzle), alongside seeing how far the difficulty can be pushed. Let me complain about a couple challeges I found particularly nasty.

Let's start by just repeating what I wrote in my notes about the level named Tubular. And I quote, "Navigating Balloon Mario around obstacles, while finding new balloon power-ups to keep flight for an extended period of time? Fuck off." The level named Awesome has a lot of dodging punted shells while on ice, and then later on Bullet Bills start firing. Yikes. It's fun if you grab the star, but the game doesn't have many opportunites to get used to the ice physics, which is one reason it can feel like such a brutal challenge. Mondo strikes me as a failed experiment. The water raises and lowers, with enemies that require Mario to have a full range of movement. Without power-ups and Yoshi, I think this one would be near impossible, and that leaves us with Outrageous. It sure is! This is more about a tightly packed grouping of hazerdous enemies and using momeuntum (or a well timed bouncing off an enemy) to make it over the giant pipes. I enjoyed the other special stages for what they were trying to do, although I used the cape to bypass most of the final special stage called Gnarly. When the coins spelled out "You are a super player", I said in response, "Yes I am".

Now back to the Switch Palaces. Whenever I played a new 2-player game of Super Mario World with a friend, I would always go to Yoshi's Island 2 first, hoping that they'd play Yoshi's Island 1, and I could giddily collect some 1ups in the coin bonanza that is the Yellow Switch Palace. Am I the only one that would spin jump onto the switch to freeze Mario in an odd frame of his animation? Anyway, after the Yellow Switch Palace, the other 3 are kind of a disappointment. There's only 1 extra life to collect, and solving the puzzle of how to get it is that much trickier. I also forgot about the Red Switch Palace until I was on my secret exits run late in the game. It really feels like a player should be hitting the switches as they make their way through Dinosaur Island, even though they’re only mandatory for some of the secret levels.

And there's no question the switches make the game easier. They're a way to make jumps trivial or to signpost secret areas. I can sympathise with not wanting the added help, and yet like I said in the last paragraph, turning them on feels like a necessity for clearing the game. Personally I welcomed their addition. When I saw yellow, green, or blue blocks it made me feel my progression through Dinosaur Island, and I'll never balk at any extra assistance. In Super Mario Wonder I kept the extra blocks badge on until I was collecting all the seeds I missed post-Bowser, but yes, at least in that game the choice is up to the player.

Conclusion

Super Mario World is not my favourite 2D Mario game (that would be its sequel Yoshi's Island), but its up there. Part of it is the reason I outlined in the first section; right place, right time, right age. Coming back to it all these years later reminds me of just what a solid entry in the Mario series it is. Not only in launching a more advanced piece of hardware in the Super Nintendo, but taking the experimentation seen in Super Mario Bros 3, stream-lining it, and changing the games' focus from strict platforming aptitude, to exploration of secret exits and the changing of the world map due to the player's actions. Oh how I loved when Bowser's cragged-face rose out of the water after completing the Ghost Ship, and out of all the amusing vignettes that play after Mario defeats a Koopa Kid, my favourite is Ludwig's castle, when it lands on a hill in the distance, and the poor thing dons a bandage that it sports for the rest of the game.

I could go on about little details and memories from my time with Super Mario World (and maybe in the epilogue I'll go through some more of them), but despite issues with the controls, (particularly the lack of programmed leeway for jumping off and landing on precarious platforms, and the exactness needed to throw a shell upwards to hit a block), the game was a lot of fun. The reason I didn't go into these examples earlier is that through tricks like facing backwards to halt momentum, or relying on the cape's float ability, a lot of these issues can be overcome, and I honestly didn't know if any struggles I had in regard to how the game felt to play were due to my choice of controller or not.

This is not the same Super Mario World I played back in 1991. How can it be? I'm not the same person I was 33 years ago, and I'm not using the same controller or the same hardware. They say you can never go back, but that doesn't mean that you can't find a new appreciation and enjoyment for an old favourite here in the present. Given enough years, you might even experience that joy more than once in a lifetime. I still think Super Mario World is a great game here in 2024. I wonder what I'll think of it in 2057. Thanks for watching.