NES Replay Bonus Round: Super Mario Bros. 2 (Japan)

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986 (Japan Only)

The story goes like this: After the phenomenal success of Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto and company decided to make a sequel. They created several new levels that upped the difficulty considerably and released it in Japan in August of 1986 as Super Mario Bros. 2.

Super Mario Bros. 2 (sometimes called The Lost Levels) was hard. There were plenty of new challenges, like gusts of wind and difficult jumps. Poison Mushrooms were added to the mix, which looked like regular mushrooms but with a sickly orange color to them. The enemies were more aggressive, like Hammer Brothers that advance on the player and Piranha Plants that come out of their pipes whether or not the player is standing on the pipe.

Mario was already huge by 1986, and the NES was well on its way to being the go-to video game system of the late 80's. Another Mario game in 1986 would have been a huge moneymaker. However, Nintendo of America looked at The Lost Levels and decided against releasing it in the U.S. Instead, they picked a different game developed by Miyamoto's team called Doki Doki Panic and had that one converted into Super Mario Bros. 2 for American audiences (sometimes called Super Mario USA), then released it in 1988.

So, we're going to ask the big question: Did Nintendo of America make the right choice? Should they have released The Lost Levels in the U.S. in 1986, or were they right to wait for Super Mario USA?

The case for The Lost Levels: They’re really good. They cleverly play with Mario conventions. The first real mushroom you can get forces you to use advanced tactics to retrieve it, and the first ‘?’ block you hit has a Poison Mushroom instead. When I played through The Lost Levels from start to finish, I was astounded by the way they forced you to really think about what you were doing before you did it.

For those reasons, some point to the fact that Nintendo of America declined The Lost Levels as a sign that American gamers aren't as "hardcore" as Japanese gamers, but that's not necessarily the case. The gaming markets in Japan and America were completely different in 1986. Japan didn’t experience any market crash, so no one had to be “reintroduced” to video games. Players could easily be thrown into the deep end and left to their own devices.

However, the NES was still in a tenuous position in America. Yes, the NES was selling well, but it was the first console that sold in any quantities in three years. Nintendo was still trying to introduce players to gaming and had to exercise extreme caution.

The Lost Levels looked almost exactly like Super Mario Bros., and the average player wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two. Imagine the average player hearing about how great Super Mario Bros. is, picking up a game that looks exactly like Super Mario Bros. and being soundly humiliated and confused. Would they be willing to try again? It's highly unlikely. Is that what Nintendo wanted? Of course not!

Nowadays we can appreciate the brilliance of The Lost Levels, but American players just weren’t ready for them back then. Super Mario USA was a much better choice for players at the time, and a classic in its own right. However, that’s a story for another day.

NES Replay: Urban Champion

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986

Before the NES, Nintendo made little handheld LCD games called Game & Watch. They were very simple games that would have a player do something really basic. For example, one game had the player walk back and forth while avoiding debris falling from above. Another had the player throwing balls in the air and catching them. Like I said, really basic games.

Even though they were simple games, they were wildly popular. They were so popular that it appears that Nintendo started wondering if they could release them as full-blown NES releases. Obviously, they would have to have better graphics and maybe add a few extra features, but with a few tweaks, an NES port of a Game & Watch game would be just as popular, right?

The problem, though, is that players had different expectations for old-school LCD games (like the Game & Watch series) and NES games. An LCD game was cheap, only costing about $15-20 on average. They were far closer in spirit to arcade games, but stripped way, way down. This was fine, since the games were so cheap.


The expectations for a home game were much, much higher than an LCD game. A cartridge was at least $40 each, if not more. Trying to translate a Game & Watch game into something that could be played on the NES would have been a disaster. Certainly, Nintendo would never attempt something so foolish, right?

Well, they did. Urban Champion was a port of the Game & Watch game called Boxing. Boxing had an alternate title of Punch-Out!!, but bears no resemblance to the game we know as Punch-Out!!

The gameplay is painfully simple. You stand in front of a building. You fight another character who looks exactly like you, but colored a little differently. (This was called palette-swapping, and was fairly common for when you wanted to make another sprite but didn't have the room to make a brand new one.) You throw punches at the other player and try and back them up against the edge of the screen. You can throw a strong punch or a weak punch, and either aim at the head or the body. Win, and you go to the next screen. Then you fight the same guy. Do this three more times and you win. Then you begin again.

If you play Urban Champion for five minutes, you have seen literally everything it has to offer. There will be no more changes to the gameplay. There is no end. To paraphrase 1984, this game is a fist hitting a face forever.

To be fair, fighting games were still in their infancy. No one really had a clear idea as to what a fighting game was supposed to be yet, so this seemed as good of an idea as any. Plus, while Urban Champion's single-player is boring, even modern fighting games are more fun with a second player.

Even with those bits factored in, Urban Champion is a terrible game. The controls are sluggish, which makes throwing a punch feel like you're sending your player an email in which you're explaining the need to form an exploratory committee vis a vis throwing a punch at your opponents torso, if they're not too busy. Your character just moves too slowly in general, since he advances and retreats way too slowly.

Even when Urban Champion tries to do something cool, it falls flat on its face. From time to time, a woman will pop out of a window above you and drop a flowerpot that can stun you. Now, I've tried to line it up so that it hits my opponent instead of me, and I swear that the flowerpot goes through the opposing player no matter how careful I am.

Finally, sometimes you'll hear a siren, and both players scurry back to their sides of the screen and look nonchalant while a police car rides by. After the car passes, they meet in the middle again. It's funny the first time, but then you realize: I was winning the fight. The game basically reset the fight for no good reason. That was the last straw for me.

You would be hard pressed to find anyone who sincerely likes Urban Champion without reservations. It's a terrible game and should be avoided. At least the music is good.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Popeye

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986

I know we keep talking about Donkey Kong, but a lot of Nintendo's early success hinged upon it. For example, Donkey Kong came about by accident. Originally, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make a game about Popeye, and the game was almost complete when they realized that they couldn't get the rights to the characters. Nintendo still had a game to release, though, so they changed the characters around. They swapped Popeye for Jumpman/Mario, Olive Oyl for Pauline, and Bluto for Donkey Kong. The rest, of course, is history.

After the wild success of Donkey Kong, King Features gave Nintendo a shot at a Popeye game in 1982. The inevitable NES port was among the second wave of NES games, and it's only fitting that it was released alongside the game series and characters that it helped inspire.

Popeye subverts your expectations. Popeye cartoons have Popeye beating things up and using his strength frequently. You would expect a Popeye game to be similar, but it's really not. Sure, there's a "punch" button, but you could probably get through the entire game without throwing a punch if you were really good.


Instead, Popeye is about avoiding danger for as long as possible. Olive Oyl stands at the top of the screen, walking back and forth and throwing down kisses, musical notes, or the letters in the word "help." You have to run around and catch them while avoiding Bluto and a few enemies that are running around.

The punch button is only there to fend off a few of the enemies, but you can't go toe to toe with Bluto or he'll pummel you into a pulpy red slush. In order to take him on directly, you need spinach. Periodically, a can of said spinach will appear alongside the level. If you grab it, Popeye can punch Bluto and knock him off the stage for a few brief seconds.

Popeye, therefore, is another fascinating example of Nintendo's early commitment to rethink what a game really needed to be about. While most games would have had Popeye punching his way through enemies, Nintendo took what's widely used as an aggressive move as changed it to a defensive move instead. This was in stark contrast to most early games (and, frankly, most modern ones) that saw aggression as the problem and solution.

Is Popeye a good game, then? Kind of. There are actually a lot of things to do in each level. For example, in the first level you can punch a bag that drops a barrel on Bluto's head if you time it right, and in the second level you can jump on a see-saw and touch Sweet Pea for bonus points. None of these things have any benefit to the actual game, though. They're just "cool things to do" that net you some extra points but don't really matter in the long run.

There are very few enemies onscreen at once in Popeye, and for good reason. The NES could handle 64 sprites onscreen at once, but only eight on any given vertical line at once. If there were more than eight, the ninth would disappear. Developers would try and get around this by making that extra sprite flicker if they were on the same vertical line, but it wasn't an optimal solution.

With that in mind, the kisses/musical notes/letters that Olive Oyl tosses down to the player float down slowly, and there are sometimes five or six onscreen at once. If you add in Bluto, Olive Oyl herself and the can of spinach, that's about eight or nine sprites at once on the screen. They were staggered carefully so they wouldn't end up on the same vertical line, but they really couldn't add a lot more or else they would start losing sprites. That makes Popeye feel a little barren.

The arcade game wasn't much of a looker, but even with that being said, some of the levels in the NES port look pretty bad. You could tell that Nintendo didn't really care about Popeye like they did their other arcade games, and that lack of attention really shows.

The average player will loop through the three levels, come back to the beginning, maybe play through the levels again and put the game down for good. Unlike Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye wasn't compelling enough to sustain a player's interest for a really long time. That's a shame, but Popeye had some interesting ideas that Nintendo would flesh out over the years.

Final Rating:

Sunday Game Tracks: Dr. Cossack Stage 2

Here's a selection from Mega Man 4: Dr. Cossack Stage 2.

NES Replay: Mario Bros.

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986

What made Mario a more enduring character than Pac-Man or Pitfall Harry? How come we’re not playing Pitfall Harry Kart 7 or Super Pac-Man Galaxy today? After all, those original games were just as popular in their day as any Mario game, if not more so.

I would argue that Mario endures because he feels a little more real. Even when he's battling a giant fire-breathing turtle/dragon in a fiery inferno, he still feels like an everyman. How come? Because Mario has a backstory.

In order for a player to identify strongly with a character, we need to know something about them. This sounds like a stupid thing to get hung up on with a video game character, but it’s important. Any bit of information at all will help. Anything at all.

Want some proof? Consider this: Why is Pitfall Harry jumping over scorpions? Why is he climbing on alligator heads? Is he looking for something? What’s his ultimate goal? What about Pac-Man? What’s he doing in the maze? Why is he getting pills? Why is he being chased by ghosts? Their games may have been great, but since their motivations were unclear, the characters themselves weren't important.


The only information that most people have about Mario is that he's an Italian plumber. That down-to-earth description makes Mario into someone that players can identify with and helps Mario succeed as a character where other characters failed. His motivations are almost always simple too: Rescue the princess / girlfriend / person.

Donkey Kong, first released into the arcades in 1980, laid down the idea for Mario but called him Jumpman at first. Donkey Kong Jr., in 1981, famously put Mario as the villain. It wasn't until Mario Bros., first released to the arcades in 1983, that Mario was given his famous job.

So how exactly did Mario become a plumbler? It all started from a gameplay idea. Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi came up with the idea of Mario being able to jump from platform to platform in a level, and that morphed into the idea of hitting enemies from below. From there, they asked why he would be killing enemies in that grim environment, and came up with a story about Mario having to clean out the sewers. And why would Mario have to clean out sewers? Well, he's a plumber! Bang!

A lot of other details about the Mario series came from Mario Bros. When looking for an enemy that could be hurt from below but not above, Miyamoto and Yokoi thought about using turtles. The design of the turtles is awfully similar to Koopa Troopas, and in future revisions, that's what they became.

Also, why are pipes green in Mario's world? The background color in all of Mario Bros.' levels is black. A grey colored pipe wouldn't really stand out against that background, so to make the pipes visible, Miyamoto selected green. In future games, it just sort of stuck.

So we owe an awful lot to Mario Bros. With all that being said, is it a fun game? Not really.

As we know by now, there's a fundamental difference between arcade games and in-home console games. In an arcade game, the point is to survive as long as you can and attain the highest score. On most home games, though, the point is forward progress.

Mario Bros. was built from the ground up for the arcades. Every level's layout is virtually identical. The only thing that changes from level to level are the enemies, and with only five different enemies, it doesn't take long for Mario Bros. to become a grim march to the end.

Other things work to Mario Bros. detriment. When Mario Bros. launched in 1983, Nintendo was apparently still experimenting with different jumping physics. Mario Bros. has less in common with the smooth jumping of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., and a lot more in common with the funky physics of Ice Climbers. Combined with the drudgery of playing through level after level of the same old thing, Mario Bros. is pretty painful.

The good news is that it's found a second life of sorts as a bonus in other games. It was included as an Easter egg in Super Mario Bros. 3, then included in all of the Super Mario Advance games and a few others. It works much better there, as a smaller game that can be played for a few minutes and then discarded.

Maybe Nintendo can go back to it someday and rework it, maybe make it a little more varied or entertaining. Until then, it's more important for what it added to the Mario series as a whole than for how it plays.

Sunday Game Tracks: Another Winter

It's cold outside! It's time for this selection from Seiken Densetsu 3 called Another Winter.

NES Replay: Gumshoe

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1986

One of the reasons that Nintendo has been successful for so long is because they’re not afraid to think outside the box. Take the NES Zapper. Most developers looked at the gun-shaped peripheral and decided that they should make a game that uses it as a gun. It's the most obvious idea.

Nintendo didn't go the obvious route. Oh, sure, Nintendo made some shooting games at first, but it didn’t take long for them to ask the question, “OK, what else can this do? I mean, there were light-gun games before video games existed. Can we do something with the Zapper that you wouldn’t have been able to do before video games?”

The answer could be found, oddly enough, in a minigame buried in Hogan’s Alley. If you’ll recall, there was a minigame called Trick Shot in Hogan's Alley, where you shot at tin cans to make them bounce in the air. The goal was to make those cans land on platforms on the opposite side of the screen.

Trick Shot ended up being a glorified tech demo, since they took that idea and built an entire game around it. The result was Gumshoe.


In Gumshoe, you play a detective who has to find five gems in order to rescue his daughter. He walks to the right automatically, and you shoot him in order to make him jump. If he touches one of the several balloons scattered around the world, he'll get extra bullets. If he falls in a pit or gets hit by an enemy, he loses a life.

Gumshoe is definitely a well-built game. You would think that it would be hard to hit your player while he's moving, but they made a choice that makes it easy: He's almost always going to be on the left side of the screen. That means that you're usually aiming on two axes: X and Y.

See, you'll either be aiming up and down to move your player, or left and right to destroy enemies during the first part. Over time, enemies will come at you from diagonal angles, or from above, but aiming is easy because you're mostly not expected to shoot all over the screen, at least at the outset.

However, Gumshoe is still pretty difficult because enemies come at you fast. The first enemy flies at the player and is almost unavoidable for a novice player. You'll lose your three lives almost as quickly as you get them. That difficulty isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you're teaching an entirely new play dynamic, you need to give the player a bit of time to settle in.

Plus, there's really no difficulty curve to speak of. The same basic enemies you face in the first level are mostly the same enemies you face at the end. There are a few additional ones that will move at you from behind, but mostly you'll be handling the same ones over and over.

The level design is pretty bland. Oh, sure, there's a level progression where you'll go to desert lands, temples, and forests, but no matter where you are the levels are the same. You'll still be jumping from platform to platform, avoiding holes in the ground, and moving left-to-right, no matter what the scenery.

Those flaws are what keep Gumshoe from really succeeding like it could. What was a really, really cool idea ends up being a bit of a slog. That being said, Nintendo was demonstrating that it could find opportunities where other developers only saw the status quo, even if they didn't quite come together.

Final Rating:

Sunday Game Tracks: Dreams of the Shore Near Another World

Here's some game music for your Sunday, taken from Chrono Cross.