Retro Rewind - Super Mario Bros 2

On my drives to and from work and while doing my walks I have been listening to a lot of gaming podcasts and one of the ones that I really enjoy is NintendoDads.

As the name dictates they pretty much only talk about Nintendo and their games and every month they do a "Retro Rewind" where they all play an Old School Game and then record a podcast about it after the month is over.   In December the Retro Rewind game was Super Mario Bros 2 and I decided to join them in this journey.


I will start by stating that when I was young I really didn't like Super Mario Bros. 2 very much, but I think it was more because of circumstance and not because of the actual game itself.

My first experience with SMB2 was a friend letting me borrow it over the weekend during the school year.  That weekend I was sick and couldn't get out and do much and so I spent the entire weekend doing nothing but playing the game.  As a result, in a 2 day period I beat the game and found it ridiculous that I could beat it in such a short period of time and thus formed a negative opinion about it.  I gave the game back and didn't return to it until a few years later.

So, when the NintendoDads declared this as the game of the month I jumped all over it and downloaded it on my 3ds.

Replaying games from my youth lead me to the realization that I am not the gamer I once was.  As such I ended up abusing the awesome save state feature that the Virtual Console offers me so that I could play through the entire game and beat it.

In total I spent 3 hours and 52 minutes playing through most of the levels and beating the final boss.
There were a few areas where I died a ton and there were some areas I went though without problem.  I was never able to get the hang of the end level mini game to earn extra lives as I remember getting tons of extra lives when I was young.  I don't know if it is just harder in it's emulated state or if I am just bad at the timing, either way it was not that big of a deal.

Overall I had a great time with the game and enjoyed getting back to some old school platforming.  Much like when I was young I only used Peach as my character because her floating ability makes her overpowered. I remembered where a bunch of the hidden things were including one of the warps.

I still feel that this was a good Mario game with a new take on the characters (I know I know, it originally wasn't a Mario game, Mario was just skinned on it) and I feel like it was a great transition to what would eventually be released in Super Mario Bros. 3 which took the series to amazing heights.

This is not a game that I will continue to put any type of time into, SMB3 still has my heart and I am determined one day to beat SMB: Lost Levels.   However, since I am a family man and a parent I generally don't go back to old games that I have beaten a lot of times and instead I focus on games that I have never played before for whatever reason.

For instance, I am currently running through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on the GBA and am absolutely loving it.

January's Retro Rewind is Zelda: A Link to the Past which I will most likely download on my WiiU so that I can put a few hours into.  However, I have never been a big Zelda gamer and only have beat one of the games over the course of my life (and can't remember which one it was, but I think it was on SNES).

I hopefully plan on doing a monthly blog to follow along with the Retro Rewind to help keep me motivated to play (or replay) some old games and just keep gaming in general.

Until then, much thanks to the NintendoDads for having one of my favorite podcasts.