What's your favorite Super Mario Bros?

[toptenmaterial]

For the purposes of this poll I am including only the major console games and excluding portable games, NSMB, Lost Levels, Yoshi's Island, imports, hack, etc. Vote and discuss!

[godslabrat]

SMB2 is still my favorite, I just love the style of gameplay. I wish more Doki Doki Panic styles of games had been made.

 

Super Mario World is probably the "best" Mario game ever, in terms of perfecting the formula.

[zzip]

I like Super Mario Bros Wii, don't see it listed here.

[+save2600]

Original SMB still my favorite after all this time but have a soft spot for SMB2 as well. I too love the style of gameplay, artwork, etc. Tough call, but SMB2 is waaaay up there for me.

 

3 and Super Mario World were awesome too at the time, still are of course - just that I prefer the look & atmosphere of and simpler gameplay of 1 and 2 more today. Haven't played Sunshine or the Galaxy games and probably never will.

[Flojomojo]

My faves, in descending order

 

World (SNES)

64 (N64)

3 (NES)

 

The others are great too, of course. I really should give Galaxy another look before Odyssey hits the scene.

[Flojomojo]

I like Super Mario Bros Wii, don't see it listed here.

New Super Mario Bros and Super Mario 3D Land are worthwhile as well.

[BassGuitari]

The original.

[+wongojack]

I actually never really liked the original game even though I was the right age at the time to go bananas for it. I didn't like the secrets aspect and thought they just should have made a game you could sit there and play without looking for warp zones and magic beanstalks. It felt unfair to me instead of impressive.

 

Fast forward and I appreciate the original game, but don't enjoy it very much. I forced myself to play 3 using savestaes to give myself the right to comment on it, and it is a longer version of the original, so not my thing.

 

Galaxy on the other hand was really a great game with lots of opportunity to avoid frustration while still allowing a player to dig deeper if they wanted. I think it is really quite a masterpiece and represents the "alternative" style of games that Nintendo can offer when at their best. The problem of course is that it wasn't particularly innovative since many elements are also present in 64 AND it just isn't what the consumer is looking for, so it will be judged in the future by comparing it to Halo, GTA, Assassin's Creed, and Fallout.

 

Anyway, I think Galaxy is great, so I voted for it. I own Galaxy 2, but haven't played it enough to consider it. I Still have AC, Fallout, and Halo games to play too!

[Black_Tiger]

The more time passes, the more I'm able to focus in on how much I genuinely enjoy games and how much is just nostalgia.

 

From the list, the original Super Mario Bros is now my favorite, followed by SMB3 and the SMW.

 

It's not a good poll to leave out Super Mario Bros 2, yet include 3D games.

[supercoupe91]

SMB3 is the pinnacle for me. I really wish I could enjoy Galaxy as much as everyone else but I find the game very disorienting and it nauseates me.

[Tanooki]

I go between Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros 3 and probably always will as they perfected the format of that franchise.

[Eltigro]

I'm the only one for Mario 64, I guess.

 

I thought it was pretty amazing at the time. Had never played a game in a 3-D world like that. I mean, I had played things like Wolfenstein 3-D, but this was different. I worked at Target at the time, and we had a demo machine. I wasn't allowed to play it wearing my red and khaki, though, because a guest (customer in Target-speak) could complain that "the employees are hogging the demo machine that's meant for guests". So I would drive down the road to the local Toys R Us and play their machine for hours on end.

 

Then my brother-in-law got a Nintendo 64 and I was over at my sister's house all the time. It was Mario 64 at my sister's house that caused me to break my hand. It was the second time you race Koopa the Quick and have to do all those precise long jumps... I kept falling off the ledges and was getting more and more frustrated... I punched the floor and broke my fifth metacarpal. They call that break a "boxer's fracture" because it's usually from someone hitting something. I made up the story that the phone was ringing and I was running for the phone and hit a door. Anyway, I finished the game with 120 stars and two pins sticking out of my hand.

 

I have my own Nintendo 64 now. And the only game I have for it is Mario 64.

[BillyHW]

Really tough call between SMB 3 (NES) and Super Mario World (SNES).

[Stage_1_Boss]

I know it's a reskin, but SMB2 just barely beats out SMB and World as my favorite one. Love playin' as the Princess and Mousers' just a cool guy.

[dj_convoy]

I enjoy World, but to me, it's almost too much of a good thing. 3 was the best and never really surpassed.

 

Still in awe of the near perfection of the original, of course.

[Tanooki]

Well truth be told it really is and isn't a reskin. Ever read up on the fairly recent history about the game discussed by Miyamoto himself? The skinny of it is that SMB2 (SMB USA to them) was already under development just not as a Mario game at first but a blank slate prototype for mechanics. The general designs of pick up and throw, picking a character, having vertical and horizontal shaft style stages and some general concept of stage layouts and characters has been started. Then that company came along and wanted to co-op with Nintendo for an advertising thing for their mascot and Nintendo picked up the bones of SMB2 and made it into Doki Doki Panic. In a way it always was a Mario game, so the bad wrap it got for a good 20 years online for being a fraud isn't entirely justified. In a way Mario got reskinned with Doki Doki Panic, then got its intended original concept fleshed out further into SMB2 we got and later them as SMUSA. That's why in part that sketchy FDS minor visual upgrade got called SMB2 and not perhaps just Super Mario (as the subtitle on the packing goes) for Super Players as like an expansion pack of the original. This was found out around 5 years ago now, and after that time when pressed further Miyamoto admitted that SMB2(USA) is his favorite Mario game which I think many probably found odd, but it did in fact lay the groundwork for quite a few of the later games.

 

https://www.wired.com/2011/04/super-mario-bros-2/

[CGQuarterly]

The first one was the first game I ever owned. To this day I play it more than any other SMB game.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

My favorite Super Mario game is actually Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, but since that wasn't an option in the poll I went with my 2nd favorite; the original Super Mario Bros.

[BillyHW]

My favorite Super Mario game is actually Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, but since that wasn't an option in the poll I went with my 2nd favorite; the original Super Mario Bros.

 

Just curious, but why?

[Eltigro]

 

Just curious, but why?

 

Jin's super big on anything GameBoy, I believe.

[homerhomer]

I played the original in the arcade on a vs. cabinet, so being able to play it at home just made that game the best.

 

And yes Galaxy is really fun too.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

My favorite Super Mario game is actually Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, but since that wasn't an option in the poll I went with my 2nd favorite; the original Super Mario Bros.

Just curious, but why?

I never had a NES or SNES growing growing up, but I did have a Game Boy and Super Mario Land. I loved that game like nobody's business and played through it more times than I can remember. I don't think I played any Super Mario games other than Super Mario Land 1 & 2 until I was 17 or 18, and by that point the home console Super Mario games just seemed weird to me because they weren't at all like Super Mario Land. They were way harder, didn't have any shoot 'em up stages, and instead of facing a different boss at the end of every world it was just Bowser every time.

 

I know most people consider Super Mario Land to be the black sheep of the Super Mario family, but since it was the Mario game I grew up with I've always felt like it was the way Mario was supposed to be and the home console games were the strange ones.

[BillyHW]

I played the original in the arcade on a vs. cabinet, so being able to play it at home just made that game the best.

 

And yes Galaxy is really fun too.

 

Was the arcade cab much harder than the NES? Was it harder to gain extra lives?

[mikey.shake]

Ooh, I love polls like this, because "favorite" is often different than "best". While it's probably not the *best*, Super Mario Bros. 2 is my favorite. I loved it in 1988, and I love it now. The color pallette, the dreamy psychedelic atmosphere, great music, fun levels, distinct playable characters, but also things it innovated for the series like "insides" and "outsides", the ability to backtrack and vertical exploration were new and exciting at the time... It's all great. Yeah, I know the story of DDP, and don't really care. My Famicom copy of "Super Mario USA" agrees with me.

 

I liked it so much that I initially saw SMB3 as a step *backward* when it came out in the US. (I was a kid, and have since seen the error of my ways, but I still like the SMB2 color pallette more.)

 

I was one of those weird kids who thought that those "class of '88 sequels" (SMB2, CV2, Zelda II) were all exciting, forward-thinking games - they just seemed so much bigger and deeper than their predecessors (which is why I still see SMB2J/Lost Levels as more of an "expansion pack" than a "follow-up" in the creative sense). As an adult, I see some of their bigger flaws, but I still think they were bold, innovative stabs. And SMB2 has arguably held up the best of that bunch over the years.

 

So, yeah. SMB is etched on my heart forever, SMB3 is a brilliant expansion of that, and SMW is probably the best refinement of that formula (and I spent countless afternoons exploring it after school). Galaxy/Galaxy 2 blew me away, 64 was groundbreaking, and Sunshine was a cool divergence. And as a kid with a Gameboy but no NES of his own, I put a ton of playtime into Super Mario Land - which is wildly underrated, despite its different "feel". (And the sequel's probably even better.)

 

But all that said, anytime I see this topic brought up, I see Mario holding that turnip against the blue background, and I hear that little snippet that starts the jazzy soundtrack... "Doot, do-doo do-doo... boop!", and I'm off. Super Mario Bros. 2 for me, please.

Edited February 5, 2017 by mikey.shake

[zetastrike]

I've grown to like the original non-Super Mario Bros more than any of the Super games. The arcade gameplay has a lot more shelf life than running through the same levels and finding the same secrets in the same places. It's far less scripted.