Super Mario Bros 3 Review

     Super Mario Bros 3 for the NES is a fantastic game and easily one of the best games in the platformer genre. As Super Mario Bros established with great success the side-scrolling platformer on consoles, Super Mario Bros 3 perfected the formula.

It looks great despite being only an 8-bit game with seamless animation and fluidity. The controls are great, even though I was playing on the Nintendo Switch using a Switch Pro controller so that might have made a difference.  But I remember playing this game on the original hardware and I recall that Mario controlled very well on the NES controller as well. 

    Going back to the graphics, the sprites and backgrounds all have amazing detail for being rendered in 8-bit. It's amazing,  I think in some respects it might look better than some Super NES games.

    The soundtrack is also great with catchy and fun, as well as sometimes ominous and spooky music. 

     The gameplay is fun with mostly balanced difficulty.  But there are tricky parts too. In particular,  world 6 stage 5 is unfairly hard in my opinion as it requires a very high level of skill in flying while holding a loop shell and throwing it to break bricks. Its very hard and even with rewind feature I couldn't do it. Fortunately,  it is an optional stage and I skipped it. Besides that there was 1 or 2 incidences of slowdown likely due to too many sprites on screen at once.

     As for family-friendliness, it is perfect for everyone with no offensive content unless you consider Mario jumping on enemies violence.

     Overall,  this is one of the best games ever made. Its S+ Tier, 10 out of 10.



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