Super Mario All-Stars: 25th Anniversary Edition
To celebrate Mario’s 25th year of adventuring in the Super Mario Bros. universe, Nintendo have released an all-new game, Super Mario All-Stars: 25th Anniversary Edition. Or… well… it’s not exactly brand new. It’s just a re-release of Super Mario All-Stars, a compilation of early Super Mario Bros. games for the Super Nintendo. But they have thrown in some bonus goodies. The question is, is it enough to justify spending your hard-earned cash on?
The games
It goes without saying that the Super Mario Bros. games are a part of gaming history. That’s actually the reason why this 25th anniversary edition (featuring Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3) was released at all. The gameplay, the graphics, the music, they all contribute to the greatness of the games, and none of that has been lost with the upgrade they got for the Super Nintendo.
Especially the graphics received a major overhaul for the better. While the 8-bit games looked good for their time (Super Mario Bros. 3 in particular), these 16-bit versions offer new possibilities. Everything looks more fancy, and especially the backgrounds, some of them featuring parallax scrolling, are a treat to look at.
The music and sound effects have been updated as well, although this is a little less noticeable. Another positive change is in the Super Mario Bros. multi-player mode, where one player doesn’t have to wait for the other player to finally lose a life; instead, after a player finishes one level, it’s the other player’s turn.
Super Mario All-Stars also made it possible for the games to have a save system. The next time you play, you can resume play from the start of the world you were in when you quit. The Virtual Console versions of these games feature save states, so you can resume playing exactly where you left off. It would have been nice if Nintendo hacked this 25th anniversary edition to offer a similar way of saving – instead, we’re stuck with a rather archaic system.
All in all though, these games still hold up well, and if you’ve never played the SNES versions, now is a good time to take the plunge. The original NES versions of these games are all available on the Virtual Console, totalling 2100 points, which amounts to 21 Euros. For 4 Euros more, you get the bonus goodies. But are they worth it? Find out after I tell you that I award the games with a 9/10 score.
The extras
This special edition comes with two extras (three if you count the box): a booklet about the history of Super Mario, and a soundtrack CD.
The booklet is pretty much the same size as a Wii game manual, so it’s not something to display prominently in your book case. It does feature some interesting concept art, and it features quotes from Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Koji Kondo. One-liner quotes. One per game. That’s not a lot. I’d have preferred some longer interviews. As it is now, the booklet is fun to flip through once or twice, but after that, you’ll probably put it away and never look at it again.
The second bonus feature is a soundtrack CD. Interestingly, it doesn’t come in a jewel case, but in a DVD case, prompting Nintendo to print the following warning on the disc: “CAUTION! Cannot be played on a Wii console. Please use a CD player.” They could have just made a nice CD case to avoid all this confusion, but who am I?
The disc itself features about 25 minutes of audio – 10 themes from 10 different Super Mario games, and 10 sound effects from Super Mario Bros. The audio quality of the music is good, and the sound effects could come in handy when editing a YouTube video, but it’s still not much.
Overall, the extras on offer are a bit meager, even taking the price into consideration. 6/10
Conclusion
So, should you invest in this limited edition? That depends on several factors. If you’re a fanatical collector of Mario stuff, you’ll probably want to get this. The same goes for people who, like me, never got the chance to play Super Mario All-Stars on the Super Nintendo. If you already own that game though, the extras probably aren’t special enough to justify purchasing it.
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