Waaay back in Blizzard’s past you find this game, in the sense that waaay back in humanity’s past you’ll find dinosaur poo. Nobody’s taking away WC1′s historical significance. For its time, it’s really not bad. But don’t go to great pains to find it unless you’re a collector.
You build a base, collect resources, and kill the enemy. I assure you, this was far from being a cliche in 1994. This was the second real-time strategy game on the PC, and the fantasy theme gave WC1 an enormous edge. For a player back in the day it must have felt really unique, like a strategy game and an adventure game had been merged somehow. Unfortunately, there’s little story. There’s just humans and orcs and they’re fighting. Although there are some characters (like Medivh) who would reappear in later games, and fans of Warcraft III’s story should persevere onwards for little easter eggs like these.
The action is fast and fun. This is a bit speedier than the first RTS game (Dune 2), and a lot easier for a modern strategy gamer to digest. I love how visceral and immediate the game’s asthetics are. In Dune 2 you had these tanks that exploded in little cartoony fireballs. In Warcraft, your soldiers splatter blood when they die. Hardcore!
The game’s problems come in two categories: those that can be defended because of its age, and those that cannot. In the first category you have the annoying UI, the lame pathfinding (sending an army to attack usually entails microtasking all the dumbasses who got lost or confused), and the overall lack of substance and variety. In the second category you have the gay-ass controls, which are far worse than Dune 2′s (to move a single unit you have to click THREE DAMN TIMES), the 4 unit selection limit (loads of fun when you’re getting your ass kicked in a huge battle and your men can only retreat four at a time), and the poor game balance. The orcs and humans are mostly the same, except the orcs get a VERY powerful demon unit that the humans have no answer to.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to play this game without thinking about how much better it was done by games released just a year later. This is one of those cases where, other than historical significance, you have to scrabble to find good points. The game is pretty well designed. And the fantasy theme is cool. And there’s a random map mode, albeit one that gets eaten alive by Age of Empire’s random map mode.
It’s old. It’s crappy in places. Play this to see where the Warcraft series began. I think you’ll find that no matter how beautiful a castle is, usually the foundations are pretty damn ugly.
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After the weird, quasi-sequel that was Super Mario Bros 2, Nintendo was 100% back on point with this game, the third installment in the SMB series. All your favorite enemies and powerups are back, there’s no bullshit about throwing things around, and the production quality is unsurpassed. This is what a sequel looks like.
The game takes the core gameplay that made SMB a hit, and turns it into an entire world to explore. The maps are huge and varied, with lots of puzzles, traps, and oddities. Mario has been upgraded to match, with additional powerups that allow him to turn into a fox-like creature and a frog.
The game provides a lot of immersion. Simple things like cutscenes (Mario jumping on a flying ship’s anchor and climbing up the chain) and a world map where you can move from level to level. I especially liked how you can take multiple routes to a target on the world map, although you usually have to complete all levels to get to the final boss.
There are loads of new features, and almost all of them are well implemented. My one reservation is that there are too many minigames. The game is loaded with little games of cards, slots, etc which pop up from time to time. They’re bearable, but they do distract from the gameplay a bit. Not to mention it’s not at all obvious how some of them work, so the game doesn’t have quite the pick up and play quality of the original Mario (for instance, it took me a while to figure out how to equip powerups from the between-level map).
In short, this game is everything a fan of the series could have asked for. Highly recommended.
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From what I gather, this was never meant to be a Mario sequel, but was an unrelated Japanese game appropriated by Nintendo, given a quick facelift, and re-released in the west as Super Mario Bros 2. That’s Nintendo for you. Most of the time they’re competent businessmen, but every now and then they do something completely bizarre for completely inexplicable reasons (for more on this phenomenon, check out the Nintendo-licensed CD-i games).
The game’s dubious pedigree shows in virtually all aspects of its graphics and gameplay. It looks and plays rather different to Super Mario Bros, there are none of the old enemies and other than Mario himself there’s not much familiar about this game. The main problem here is that although it’s very different from Super Mario Bros, it’s not better. Picking up and throwing enemies instead of stomping on them isn’t what I’d think of as a massive improvement. Frankly, for a sequel to one of the company’s greatest games, we were entitled to expect more than this, although Mario 2 is mostly good in its own right.
But enough whining, Mario 2 brings a host of new things to the table. You can enter doors, ride logs falling down waterfalls, and explore the game in all four directions. The developers took a page out of the Gauntlet playbook and allow you to play as multiple characters (Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad), each with different abilities.
The game is harder and gnarlier than ever, with a large of puzzles and challenges. Although there’s a life meter this time around, the game is very miserly about giving you new health. Graphically, I marginally prefer the original Super Mario Bros. This game’s palette looks washed out and pale at times. Still, things like explosions are very well done.
I can’t glowingly recommend this. It’s a fairly solid game, but not a brilliant one, and certainly not a worthy sequel for the original Super Mario Brothers. Get SMB3 for the real deal.
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All you can say about this game is that it was way ahead of the program. Gaming would look very different without Mario.
The game is a simple horizontal side-scroller. Cliches start somewhere, and this one started here. You collect powerups to make Mario bigger and shoot fireballs, explore weird and wacky levels (this game has some really excellent underwater levels) and ultimately fight Bowser and rescue the princess.
Even in the small details, Mario delivers innovation. Like how it gives you the option of skipping ahead through the levels by finding a secret pipe, in a primitive form of saving/reloading. Or maybe an advanced form of saving/reloading, since in most games the save mechanism is a part of the interface, while SMB takes the graceful step of incorporating it into gameplay. The pipes are well hidden, meaning only intelligent players will be able to skip levels.
The game is loaded with puzzles and secrets, some of which are really damn obscure (such as the legendary world -1). Whether you rush through the game or explore every level, Mario played and continues to play excellently.
The only thing I don’t really like is the controls. After you’ve been playing for a while they become second nature, but if you’re new to the game you’ll be slipping and sliding all over the place.
In short, great, amazing, classic, etc game. Fill in your own metaphors. This one rules!
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