Welcome to the 66th issue of the GBAtemp Recommends Revival Project! This project is a weekly feature where we share our favourite games and applications with you. The titles we recommend may be "old school" games, a piece of Homebrew, a ROM hack, sleeper hits, an application, etc, but one thing's for certain, we think they are fantastic and deserve your attention!
This is the first of a special four week look at excellent games of the Gameboy/Gameboy Colour and we begin with one extra special GB classic...
Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins
Super Mario Land 2 was the follow up to the massively successful first GB title only this time a lot more effort was put into it. The first was more like a portable version of the first game and while I love it to bits, it clearly didn't have as much love put into it like the regular Mario games had. This game however feels just like a fully fledged Mario title and for me is the best portable Mario title going. Why they didn't re-release this as Super Mario Land 2 DX for the Gameboy Colour, completely bemuses me. There wasn't a proper follow up to this game at all, in fact Super Mario Land 3 was the very first game in the excellent Wario Land series. Speaking of Wario, that great greedy anti-hero made his début in this very game as the games loveable villain.
The story goes a little like this: Just after the events of SML, Mario decides to take a break and go to Strasaland. While he is there Wario puts an evil spell over Mario's World, Mario Land and makes all of it's inhabitants into thinking Wario is awesome and getting them to do his evil bidding...this is why the enemies attack Mario in his own Land...K? Of course there are Goombas and Koopas there too...I guess they are on holiday or Koopa loaned them to Wario...or something. Wario does this so he can take Mario's fancy castle so he can have a palace of his own. In taking the castle, Wario scatters the six Golden Coins that are kept there and Mario needs to go through each of the worlds of this...erm Land to collect a golden coin from each of them, once he has them he can then gain access of his castle again to defeat Wario and rid the kingdom of his magic. For the first time in a Mario platformer, there is no Princess to rescue here. Both Daisy and Peach are safe and well. Why can't they do that for NSMB?
It played pretty much as you'd expect it to however more floaty than before. This actually feels really good and much more responsive than the previous game. As always there are power ups that help Mario along the way. You still get Mushroom that makes your bigger and take an extra hit, a Fire Flower that'll help you shoot fire and because of the limited colour scheme, this looks different in that Mario now has a feather in his cap to indicate that he has this power, it'll also will let you spin jump just like you can in SMW and of course there is also a Starman power up that'll make you invincible. As well as those, you also collect the Magic Correct which will turn you into Bunny Mario which will make you jump higher and also float (just like Peach in SMB2). Unlike SML, you start in a large over-world map but unlike SMB3/SMW you can play any of the six worlds in whatever order you like. Each world has it's own map and their own number of levels and of course after you complete them all you get to fight a boss. Also unlike SML the game now has a battery so you can save your progress. Another interesting gameplay feature in this title that wasn't repeated again was that rather than collecting coins to get lives, you actually spend them in a neat little roulette mini game on the over-world map. This actually makes the game a bit more difficult than in other titles because lives are harder to come by.
Graphically, SML2 was as good as the GB could do and the artwork was extremely good. The character design was very different to other Mario titles and a lot of the enemies were never seen again. The sprites were very bold and made up for the lack of colour, in fact this could be one beautiful title if they remade this again in full colour. The level design was just fantastic and again the different to what had come before and even after in the Mario games. The creatures, while still cutesy just looked different to what creatures did in other Mario games.
The sound is the usual iconic awesomeness that you would expect of the 8-bit Mario titles though some of the sound effects were very different. Jumping and collecting coins sound the same as ever but when Mario dies...it just doesn't sound right having a different theme playing. The music was mostly pretty damn excellent and at times very different to other Mario games. The music was composed by Kazumi Totaka who has also done Links Awakening, Animal Crossing, Yoshi's Story and Luigi's Mansion and like with most of the games this game does feature his famous tune (in video game terms) "Totakas Song" which was first put into the spiritual predecessor of StarFox, X which was also on the GB. In this game you can hear it on the "Game Over" screen after exactly 2mins 30secs.
Overall, perhaps the reason to why Nintendo hasn't revisited this game could be because it doesn't quite feel like a Mario game...but then they did put SMB2 on All-Stars and also re-released that game for the GBA, not like I disagree with that decision (SMB2 is awesome) but still I am a little sore at how much this GB title is ignored now. In my opinion instead of doing NSMB2, they should have done NSML instead and focused on a 2D sprite title that was a little different because lets face it, we're pretty much tired of the same NSMB formula and while 3D Land was a good game, it wasn't quite the Land title many of us wanted it to be.
You can now buy this game on 3DS eShop and that was actually the first time you could buy this outside of the GB. For £3.60 this is a bargain, it'll give you a lot of game for your money and is a pretty damn essential download.
Genre: Platformer
Release Year: 1992
Developer: Nintendo R&D1
Published by: Nintendo
Directed By: Takehiko Hosokawa & Hiroji Kiyotake
Released For: Gameboy / 3DS eShop Virtual Console
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