For all the criticism Sunshine gets for being rushed and unpolished, I didn't find myself frustrated by that game nearly as often. That shouldn't be the remedy for this kind of level design.Īt this point playing SMB3, it puts the 'frustration' criticism of Mario Sunshine into a different context for me. I also don't really see the point of beating the game using warps to skip entire worlds or the cloud or p-wing to skip entire levels when the levels themselves are supposed to be the content of the game that you are playing for fun. Compared to Nintendo's modern philosophy on 2D Mario levels, I don't think these would pass Nintendo's own Mario Maker tutorial for good level design that tell you not to be cruel to the player.

I won't deny the original NES games and SMB3 in particular were probably very innovative games in their time, but I don't think they have aged as well for people who didn't play them in a time where it was expected that you would play the game endlessly until you had the layouts and enemy spawns memorized and knew where all the warps were. I can't even imagine trying to play through this whole game all in one go.įor context I grew up on the Sega Genesis, so my first real Mario game was Super Mario 64, but I wasn't unfamiliar with the 2D mario games at the time having played a little bit of Super Mario Land and Super Mario World on friends' and relatives' consoles, and having since owned and played games in the New Super Mario Bros and Mario Maker series. The All Stars version thankfully added the save feature but even on World 7 the checkpoint doesn't come until after beating ~5-6 levels in a row. The difficulty curve is punishing in these later worlds. I just need to vent about how it's going right now. I will power through to the end and then move on to World and then Yoshi's Island. Wondering what to play next, I decided to go back to SMB3 on my Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World cart on the Super NT and hopefully finish it from my current progress.

I just finished collecting all 120 shines in Super Mario Sunshine for the first time on 3D All Stars.

And before you ask I'm not even going to try the Lost Levels.

Buy super mario sunshine 64