Super Mario Land

 

Well, best adventure might be overselling it

Seems I've stumbled from a Zelda-retrospective to my Game Boy collection instead. Let's get on with it. Super Mario Land was one of the first games for the Game Boy. It stars Mario ditching the hunt for a kidnapped Princess Peach/Toadstool by Bowser/King Koopa and instead focus on the hunt for the kidnapped Princess Daisy by the space alien Tatanga... and I thought the original games were weird. It's not much to say than that. You run and jump for 12 levels and try to stop Tatanga. The difference being that you don't have the fire flower, but the Super Ball... which ain't that super. It works well in areas with ceiling and floor, but other wise it's horrible. The thing is that Mario throws it down on the ground and then it bounces upwards. So in areas with both ceiling and floor it ricochets all over the place. More often then not you throw it to early and the ball flies over the intended target and you get hit and loses the ability. And we are not talking about trying to hit enemies above you with this mechanic. 

Whatever happened to Mario's plane?

Other mechanics is that they introduced Shoot-em-up stages, once in a submarine and another in a plane. Really fun segments. A bit strange for a Mario-game, but it is rather fun shooting down Tatanga in his space ship with your own plane. And then you rescue Daisy who was relegated to Luigis potential girlfriend and just a side-character in party games. Only played this game at my cousins and didn't get this game until the 3DS virtual console release. But... I read some of the comics in the swedish version of Nintendo Powers, the Nintendo Magazine. And as in the game, the most awesome one is using his plane. And decks it out with  military equipment like machine guns and missiles and blast the aliens of a tropical island. 

Highway through the Danger Zone!!! (Yeah I stole that joke from Linkara's review, but I would probably made the same joke if I've ever seen Top Gun or associated the song with planes other than references in reviews that went over my head. Catchy song though!)

Really, the comics made the game more awesome than it really is to play it. The graphics are not really that good and it's frankly hard to see that it is specifically Mario instead of some clump of pixels. Music is catchy, but maybe not as memorable as the main games. And why the Egyptian sound? Fun to play maybe once and afterwards I only find it funny to play the arcade sequences.