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Review: Super Mario Advance

© Gregor Simeonov

The Game

For all you of unaware, Super Mario Advance is a conversion of the classic Mario 2 game that appeared on the Nintendo system some time ago. This is a game you'll learn to love or hate, since it handles completely differently from the other Mario games in the series. In the Mario Advance version, you choose from four main characters; Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad, which all have their strengths and weaknesses in the areas of speed, jumping ability and strength. The reason why strength is a key factor in this game because it's Mario 2, which does not consist of characters jumping on top of their enemy for the "kill", but rather picking either them, or various things found in the ground up and throwing it at them. This can at times prove very challenging if you're a newbie to this system, but you get the hang of it. The game is divided into seven worlds, three levels per world, except for the final world, which has only two. The terrain differs between the worlds, as do the monsters you encounter. You'll encounter snakes and cactuses in the dessert worlds, birds in the cloudy worlds and so on. At the end of the first two starting levels of each world, you will encounter a Birdo at the end, which is sort of a mini-boss. The last level of each world will always be the most difficult one Not only will you encounter a Birdo, but you will fight a boss as well.

The Story

Oh no! Mario is having a dream where he is lost in a fairy land, where he must defeat the evil Wart to free such and such, very unoriginal. At least we're not confronted wit another princess-saving Mario game, so this story does the job.

Graphics

Expect brilliant, colourful, two dimensional graphics that revive the golden age of side-scrollers in Mario Advance. All the character sprites are well animated, as are all the enemies. Thanks to the GBA, you will not encounter pixelated enemies anymore, so give grace to that. Overall, you don't need anything too advanced to run these kinds of graphics, just colour.

Sound

All the original sounds of Mario and other characters are included in this game; the jump sound, the turtle shell hitting enemies and so on. Unfortunately, each character yells out comments at every corner during the game. For example, when you pick up a 1up, Mario will go "Wow thanks, just what I needed", and when Peach dies she goes "Oh noooo!". These comments tend to get really annoying, especially with Toad's high-pitched yelp he makes every time he jumps, but you can't blame the developers for trying.

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