Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Super Mario Bros. 2, probably

[quote name="Bananadine"]I played through it. As with the prior game, this was probably the first time I'd been through it without warping. Still, it was pretty easy, and I only needed one try. I sweated a little toward the end, but I was never in serious danger. The slot machine system for extra lives forgives many mistakes, and unlike Super Mario Bros., this game has sufficiently memorable stages for me to have felt familiar with almost all of them after I don't even know how many years of not playing it. In fact I knew it so well that I didn't even feel like I could criticize it. It was fun enough. Toad and the princess are not as good as I remember, and Luigi is not as bad. I also played <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaEsq6-z3l8">King Arthur's World</a> for the SNES (on an emulator). It's some Lemmings-ish thing in which you have a lot of little semi-autonomous knights and engineers and so forth and you have to use them to help your little King Arthur across a map. I saw it mentioned recently and thought it looked fun, so I tried it. It turned out to be more actiony and less puzzly than Lemmings, mainly because you can directly control one set of dudes at a time. It's fun and it holds up well enough, but I got tired of it after the first set of stages. I also played Balance of Power, because I like Chris Crawford and I wanted to find a game by him that I could also like. That one seemed to be his most popular, so it looked promising, but it turned out to be impenetrable. There's some kind of deep model of geopolitics inside it or something, but all you ever see is one of <a href="http://www.gameclassification.com/files/games/Balance-of-Power.png">these maps</a> showing one tiny piece of the current state of the world, and that's not nearly enough to explain what's going on. I badly needed to see several maps at once--to see, for instance, the extent to which each country was on my side AND the likelihood of immediate revolution in each country. But you don't get anything like that; nor are you clearly told what your possible actions mean. Like, do I Help Dissidents or Fund Opposition or Incite Riots? What do those <i>do</i>, on an Apple IIe, and how do they differ? You don't really know unless you study and practice and study and practice. This might be a good game to take to prison. I won it on the Beginner level (which is trivial) and decided that any further success with it wouldn't be worth the effort. Also I played <a href="http://www.squarelogicgame.com/">Everyday Genius: SquareLogic</a>, which is an elegant Sudoku-ish game that seems to use AI to an unusual extent. It's got some cool complicated rules that compound interestingly. I played it for the free hour it gives you and wouldn't have minded playing a bit more. It's a good game. But it was still just Sudoku (ish) and I wouldn't pay the $20 for it.[/quote]