2. Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
The debate over whether Super Mario Bros. 3 or its SNES successor represents the pinnacle of 2D Mario platforming may never be settled, but one thing seems certain to me: The plumber’s final NES adventure delivered on the promise of a “world” for Mario to journey through two years before we got the game that’s actually called Super Mario World
It wasn’t just the new map system that did it, though that’s certainly a big part of it. Getting to see King Koopa’s military might represented across the landscape by forts and castles as your quest took you from the bucolic Grass Land (world 1) all the way to the foreboding, Mordor-like Dark Land (world 8) conjured the sense of a true quest against a vast force of evil, while little touches like the ways the hammer bros. moved around between stages brought that map to life–a real, living world.
But the game also represented another massive leap for the series (and for platforming games in general) in its level design, with slopes you could slide down, autoscrolling airships lending a formidable new feel to Bowser’s forces, and gimmicks that still surprise and delight to this day, like Giant Land (world 4), in which enemies and environmental features alike are suddenly many times their normal size.
To top it all off, Mario’s momentum is newly refined—run interrupted for a bit and you attain P-speed, moving faster, leaping farther, and even able to take flight—and he’s got a slew of new power-ups to play with, from the oddball Kuribo’s shoe to the iconic tanooki suit. Super Mario Bros. 3 is just bursting with ingenuity and generosity from top to bottom, and upon release utterly destroyed the existing standards for games of this type with all of its inventiveness and fun, seamlessly weaving dozens of great new ideas into one epic adventure. — Carolyn Petit
