How do you feel about Super Mario Bros. on the NES today?

[sexually_inactive]

I find that while you can still have a good time playing it, it's a game you play mainly for its nostalgic and historical value. If you take those out the equation, it's a good but not great early NES game. The gameplay is on the simplistic side and the visuals are pretty basic.

The game got ported to the Game Boy Color which added some extras like an overworld map, saving and challenge modes but the lower screen resolution makes it inferior to the NES original.

It also got ported to the SNES as part of the Super Mario All-Stars compilation but the game suffers from a physics glitch and the quality of the updated graphics and audio is only good enough, not great.

I don't think this will actually happen but if a homebrewer were to add all the extras from the Game Boy Color port to the SNES port, apply the brick fix patch and give each world a distinct theme with unique graphics and audio of Donkey Kong Country 3 quality, the game would be much more fun to return to.

 

[DinohScene]

Still better than whatever free-to-play-extraction-shooter-battle-royale slop they can come up with these days.

 

[K3Nv4]

Still better than whatever free-to-play-extraction-shooter-battle-royale slop they can come up with these days.

This is why we live in a world where sub $20 indie games are better than some $100 AAA titles.

 

[SDA]

Aside from the debate that this game is good or not, it's historically important because it helped the gaming industry rise back up after the 1983 crash.

Basically if Super Mario Bros. never existed, video games themselves wouldn't exist either.

 

[VmprHntrD]

I think your post op is a hot take at best.
I've known people with zero nostalgic feelings about it, not even born at the time, who play it for what it is and find that it's still fantastic, one of the best basic designed platformers still around. Your post reeks of just being jaded, probably burnt from decades of knowing the game inside and out, so much so you have nitpicks most people could not care less about or would even notice and that speaks some to the attitude at play there.

The game maybe visually aureally basic, but sometimes basic and less can be far far more than just adding a lot of eye and ear candy and and over blown set of tools to play a stage just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

At it's roots it's a challenge, a beefy one, for those who have never played it before. The game explains the mechanics very well on 1-1, but also once more in that first water stage you get learning to swim, and that basically is it. It doesn't need hand holding, doesn't need blah blah blah kill me stop talking tutorials either. The experience is the tutorial, the mistakes are yours to make and learn from, a lost art in games largely. The game also lacks even what #2 (SMUSA) and #3 added, bouncy repetition of kills and physics, the game is just more grounded, trickier, you can't just go bounding off one kill to the next or float around stuff, you have to stick it.

I've thrown kids into the fire with this one with nothing but the game, a controller, and explaining the buttons and manual bits that matter. They get worked, even in the first world pretty well, first stage even based on age too. But those who didn't get fussy and went at it, got hooked, and despite being slaughtered by stuff we'd call dumb shit, it's not to them, it's new, and they'll get determined to dig more. THAT is a sign of a damn good game no matter how many years are under it. It's the same reason that one single boring ass maze that's Pac-Man still endures even longer even with new players.

 

[DaFixer]

Still a fun game game to play, but I prefer SMB 3 on the nes.

 

[TVL]

It doesn't look good (surprise surprise), I don't think it looked great in 1989. Still plays amazing. I have a kid that loves those games so I've been playing all the NES/Famicom Mario's for the last couple of months.

Some of the greatest games ever made.