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Mario Bros. Virtual Console Review - IGN

️Lucas M. Thomas
️Mon May 14 2012

How many times will you buy the same game?

Mario Bros. has been done to death. Since its debut as an arcade title in 1983, it's a game design that has been revisited, rewarmed and reissued more than any other to ever come from Nintendo. Chances are you already own multiple copies of this game. Here's a chance to buy it again.
Years before stumbling into the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario and Luigi are living a normal, non-Super lifestyle. They're employed as plumbers, working in the subterranean sewer system of New York's Brooklyn burg. One day the duo finds the pipes infested – malicious turtles, crabs and insects have overrun their workplace. It's up to the brothers to hop, bop and kick the baddies out, so the Big Apple's underground aqueducts can keep on running smooth.

The gameplay is built to be co-op – Mario Bros. was Nintendo's first simultaneous two-player title. Both brothers appear on a static screen, populated by platforms and a lone, floating POW Block. Enemies enter the playing field from a pair of pipes in the uppermost corners. Controlling one of the two young men, you have to position yourself underneath an enemy and leap up, causing a ripple in the platform above that knocks the offending creature on its back. The attack concludes with a kick – while the baddie is flailing helplessly, you've got to run up and make direct contact to eliminate it from play.

Wait too long, though, and the Shellcreeper (or Sidestepper, or Fighterfly) will recover and continue its assault. The complication comes in dividing your focus between multiple enemies and keeping yourself from getting hit, as later levels can get pretty frantic. Mastery of the game takes teamwork with another player – or, for more fun, Mario Bros. can be played as a competitive battle game.

It was in this light that the game was first recast, as a two-player challenge contained within the later generation NES masterpiece, Super Mario Bros. 3. Then it came back again in Super Mario All-Stars. Then, again, reimagined as Mario Clash as a launch title for Nintendo's ill-fated Virtual Boy system.

After that, Mario Bros. began seeing further reissue through the Super Mario Advance series of Game Boy Advance cartridges – all four of those titles, as well as Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, contain a GBA rendition of the game. It came back again in Animal Crossing. And in e-Card form, for the GBA's e-Reader device.

All told, Mario Bros. has been made available in almost 20 different forms over the past 23 years. And as such, there isn't a lot of motivation to spend 500 points to get it again. This was Luigi's debut game, and the first game to ever have "Mario" in its title. This was an important game historically, leading up to the release of one of the best games of all time, Super Mario Bros. But those nostalgic positives aren't enough to outweigh the negatives, which also include the fact that this release is of the NES port of Mario Bros., not the original arcade version.

Like with Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., Nintendo has provided the 1986 NES cartridge version of this classic for digital distribution, when they should be offering an arcade emulation instead. NES Mario Bros. isn't as compromised as NES Donkey Kong, but it's nonetheless incomplete in comparison to its coin-op source material.

Verdict

There's a boardroom somewhere in Nintendo's headquarters, filled with executives, laughing maniacally. "They're buying it! They're buying it! I can't believe they're buying it again!" The number of Mario Bros. re-releases is unfathomably insane, as you'd have to be for putting up the 500 points to grab this Wii download. When and if the Big N gets it right and provides the original arcade version, Mario Bros. may be worth yet another look. But an emulation of an incomplete port of a game that's available in 20 other ways is not worth five bucks. Mario Bros. has been done to death – so just let it die.