Hi there folks, Ether here. Last year Polly ran a series of five articles called Genesis Did It Better, talking about things that the Genesis did better than the SNES. Well since this is SNES week, here's my article discussing the things that SNES did better than Genesis.
Mario.
I could end this right there really, but that wouldn't make for much of an article, so let's look through the history of Mario games on the SNES, and then on the Genesis.
First up, we have Super Mario World. Pretty much everyone has heard of this one, you know why? Because it came with the console! Man weren't those the days, when you shelled out a bunch of money on a brand new console, and it actually came with a game you could play on it, so that you wouldn't be left with a grey piece of plastic sitting in your livingroom that couldn't do anything unless you fed it
ANOTHER 50 dollars. What a scam. And pack-in games aren't what they used to be. NES came with Mario, SNES with Super Mario World, X-Box 360 comes with... Kung Fu Panda? What the hell is that? Well, at least it comes with a game, since other consoles either come with nothing, or some dumb demo disc slash tech demo. Hey, remember that Playstation 1 (or as we called it back then, PSX, I have no idea why...) demo disc with the 3-D T-Rex? Wasn't that the best? I remember spending hours rotating it around, and making it do things like bite at the screen. Good times!
What was I talking about again?
Oh yeah, Super Mario World! Right. This game was a significant improvement over Mario 3 as it contained improvements like, better graphics, a much prettier map screen, multiple paths and exits per level, secret stages based off of the Ninja Turtles, and of course, an extensive level editor that led to the creation of many great mods, such as Kazlo Mario World, which is pretty much my favorite game ever. Oh and it had rotating sprites, pretty much the first game to ever do that! Remember when Morton zoomed towards the screen when you killed him, that was awesome!
Ok but enough about Super Mario World, we've got a lot more games to cover. There is a little known sequel to Super Mario World called Yoshi's Island. Yeah, brilliant move there Nintendo. Let's make a sequel to the best freakin game ever, and not actually call it Super Mario World 2! Anyways Yoshi's Island is pretty weird because you don't even play as Mario, but as Yoshi, and everyone hates him. And then you go around throwing eggs at enemies, I mean, who thought of that? Were they on drugs or something? I bet they saw that anti-drug commercial where the girl breaks an egg, then goes psycho and smashes her whole kitchen. The Nintendo executives saw that and thought "Wow that girl is cute!" but after they thought "Let's make a game about smashing eggs!" And that's how Yoshi's Island came to be.
This line is filler because the image on the right is a little bit too tall.
After that they had no more ideas left, so they decided to just rerelease all the NES mario games on one cart, which it turned out, was THE BEST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Mario All Stars contains Super Mario 1, Super Mario 3, and Super Mario 2 twice for some reason, I guess that's why its called 2. The graphics are also improved a lot over those fuckin horrible NES ones which is greatly appreciated. Later on, some carts would have Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario World packaged together! That's like, four games on one cart! It also goes to show that no one likes Yoshi's Island because Nintendo totally forgot to even include it.
Besides those games, there are a lot of other Mario spinoffs on the console that aren't considered part of the main series cannon. There's Mario Painter, where you play as a painter instead of a plumber, Mario Car where everyone drives around, and Mario RPG where you get a grenade launcher. I think so at least, I've never played it, I heard it sucks.
But wait, there's more! Thanks to this wonderful addon, the gameboy, you can also play miniature snes games! And for some reason there are a ton of these. I looked em up on gamefaqs, theres like, four Mario games here too! Mario Land, Mario Land 2, Mario Land 3, and Mario Land II. So with all these added in, there are an absolute ton of Mario games playable on the SNES!
And then on top of all these, there's Kirby! Kirby games are pretty much exactly like Mario games, or so I'm told. For the big SNES you have Kirby Dream Land, Kirby Dream Course, and Kirby Super-Stars. Kirby Super-Stars is especially important because it's the Kirby version of Super Mario All-Stars, a collection of NES Kirby games, but for SNES and with not shitty graphics. So that contains five games, and a bunch of minigames which are horrible despite what people will tell you, pressing 1 button at a specific moment isn't fun.
Still not done yet! There are also many Kirby games playable on the gameboy, Kirby Land, Kirby Land 2, Kirby's Nightmare, and finally, Kirby & the Amazing Mirror.
Phew! That's a lot of games! And all of them (I don't know how many we're up to, probably like 50) are playable on your SNES! So now that we're done with the Nintendo side of things, let's check out the Sega side.
Number of Mario and Kirby games on Genesis: None.
None! At all! Can you believe that? In fact I checked, and there weren't any Mario games on Master System either! I expected at least there would be a few that just never came to America, but nope! There aren't even any Mario games on Saturn or Dreamcast. With crap like this it's no wonder that Sega went out of business.
So with a score of 50 to 0, I declare SNES the better system when it comes to playing Mario games.
Hi there folks, Ether here. Last year Polly ran a series of five articles called Genesis Did It Better, talking about things that the Genesis did better than the SNES. Well since this is SNES week, here's my article discussing the things that SNES did better than Genesis.
ANOTHER 50 dollars. What a scam. And pack-in games aren't what they used to be. NES came with Mario, SNES with Super Mario World, X-Box 360 comes with... Kung Fu Panda? What the hell is that? Well, at least it comes with a game, since other consoles either come with nothing, or some dumb demo disc slash tech demo. Hey, remember that Playstation 1 (or as we called it back then, PSX, I have no idea why...) demo disc with the 3-D T-Rex? Wasn't that the best? I remember spending hours rotating it around, and making it do things like bite at the screen. Good times!
Ok but enough about Super Mario World, we've got a lot more games to cover. There is a little known sequel to Super Mario World called Yoshi's Island. Yeah, brilliant move there Nintendo. Let's make a sequel to the best freakin game ever, and not actually call it Super Mario World 2! Anyways Yoshi's Island is pretty weird because you don't even play as Mario, but as Yoshi, and everyone hates him. And then you go around throwing eggs at enemies, I mean, who thought of that? Were they on drugs or something? I bet they saw that anti-drug commercial where the girl breaks an egg, then goes psycho and smashes her whole kitchen. The Nintendo executives saw that and thought "Wow that girl is cute!" but after they thought "Let's make a game about smashing eggs!" And that's how Yoshi's Island came to be.
After that they had no more ideas left, so they decided to just rerelease all the NES mario games on one cart, which it turned out, was THE BEST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Mario All Stars contains Super Mario 1, Super Mario 3, and Super Mario 2 twice for some reason, I guess that's why its called 2. The graphics are also improved a lot over those fuckin horrible NES ones which is greatly appreciated. Later on, some carts would have Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario World packaged together! That's like, four games on one cart! It also goes to show that no one likes Yoshi's Island because Nintendo totally forgot to even include it.
But wait, there's more! Thanks to this wonderful addon, the gameboy, you can also play miniature snes games! And for some reason there are a ton of these. I looked em up on gamefaqs, theres like, four Mario games here too! Mario Land, Mario Land 2, Mario Land 3, and Mario Land II. So with all these added in, there are an absolute ton of Mario games playable on the SNES!
Still not done yet! There are also many Kirby games playable on the gameboy, Kirby Land, Kirby Land 2, Kirby's Nightmare, and finally, Kirby & the Amazing Mirror.