Yesterday I treated myself to a little nostalgia and picked up my copy of Super Mario All Stars Wii. Believe it or not, this year is the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. Nintendo has been doing a lot of fun releases this year to celebrate.

Super Mario All Stars originally was released in August of 1993. The game includes four of Mario’s greatest adventures:

Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Bros. : The Lost Levels

All of these games had been updated to the current technology of 16-bit. This meant reskinned Mario as well as more dynamic backgrounds. Some very small changes were made to the gameplay. For instance in Super Mario Bros., when Super Mario jumps into a brick block he continues moving upward as it’s demolished. In the original game Super Mario would bounce back downward. Another big change is a save feature. These four games had not been offered before with the ability to save your progress.

Super Mario Bros. : The Lost Levels has a particularly interesting back story. It is actually Japan’s version of Super Mario Bros. 2. The game remained very similar to Super Mario’s first outing and was more difficult. The game introduced poison mushrooms and wind gusts to give our favorite plumber a run for his money. Nintendo felt American audiences would be turned off by the similarity and difficulty, so it was never released in U.S. Instead, we got an adapted version of Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic (seen below). This game was watered down a bit as to not be too difficult for us simple minded Americans.

The newly released Wii collection of Super Mario Bros. All Stars is exactly the same as the SNES release. Almost to a fault. I was hoping Nintendo would take the time to make this classic compatible with my widescreen tv, but instead I ended up with two black bars on the left and right of the game. Though I can’t complain too much, this collection only set me back $30. Included in the box set is a booklet containing the history of all of Mario’s main titles, as well as a cd with all of the main themes from Mario’s games and some sound effects (to be easily converted to ringtones in my near future).

All in all I’d say this collection was worth the $30 bucks. And from what I hear they are very limited, so I’d get one now before they disappear.