Why Super Mario Land is slightly more fun than a scientific calculator
Super Mario Land (1990)
Super Mario Land (1990)
When I revisited Super Mario Land not long back, the graphics were so bad I thought I was playing a calculator, never mind a Game Boy. It reminded me of when we all had to buy scientific calculators in school in order to keep up with some of the ridiculous mathematics that was coming our way.
Things likes xs, ys, and many other letters came into the mix. I had to ask, what was wrong with numbers? Then there was sins, tans and coses... we were getting hit by those guys daily, and even our shiny new calculators couldn’t deal with whatever on earth an asymptote was.
But was it any wonder? I didn’t have the right equipment. See, I used to be seething with envy at our school colleagues in the US, who had access to Texas Instruments calculators. I’m led to believe that those machine are the Rolls-Royces of computation and arithmetic. We really were deprived schoolchildren.
You could even do programming on those Texas boys. I believe you can even get games like Pokémon Emerald on there, and I can’t see much maths homework getting done after that. But the most I could do on my calculator was using the inbuilt hexadecimal code to type out ‘FEED.ME.BEEF’. Our maths teacher always used to lament, “you won’t always have a calculator with you in life”. Wrong about that one, wasn’t he?
He also caught wind of the fact that I wasn’t doing my maths homework properly, preferring to get the answers directly from the back of the book instead of working it all out for myself. I thought, why waste time double-jobbing? Someone else has already done the work for me.
But after having caught me, he went on to frequently tell the class, “Don't do a Burkey on it”, in reference to getting the answers from the back. So that’s right, peasants, I have an entire mathematical method named after me. I might even attract the attention of that Danica McKellar now. And all I had to do was skip the dogwork.
And so what? Who needs to learn how to do everything? When you get to the working world, cutting through to the right answer is what it's all about. All you need to do is reach the answers and conclusions that some other eggheads have already worked out. The “executive summary”, they call it.
Collegiate pencil-neck academics would call it plagiarism. Well, if you ask me, college actually unprepared you for the working world. You can do pretty much any desk job once you know how to properly Google something. Google will even do sums for you. So what do I need a physical calculator for?
To play Super Mario Land on it, that’s what. And getting back to that game, this really is another Mario title from the bizarro world - I like to call this one Super Mario Twilight Zone. And I simply cannot believe its calculator-like presentation, with those teeny-tiny sprites.
If you’re playing on an original brick Game Boy, forget it. I don’t know how we made anything out. It’s just black and green blobs moving around, reminiscent of cells under a microscope, impossible to make out. The game looks and plays like it was designed on the back of a cigarette packet.
And it’s a proper treat-size game as well: you can easily beat it in 40 minutes, just so long as you’re skilled enough to bag some extra lives at the end of each level. It’s not too difficult, but you’ll be quite unused to a Mario game that plays like this and therefore you’ll die a fair bit. Anyway, there are only 12 levels here, four worlds of three. And even wilder than that, two of them are horizontal shooters.
But by the end of it all, nothing ends up surprising you in this game. It’s just madman stuff happening morning, noon and night. Defeated Koopas explode for some reason. Your fireballs take one bounce off the floor and then just soar on upwards into space. Your enemies include humanoid kung-fu fighters and realistic spiders.
The last boss is a return to the horizontal shooter, against some alien non-entity called Tatanga. The Can-Can starts playing when you pick up a Star. There’s loads of bonus levels down in the pipes, but heaven knows when you’ll get an actual Mushroom from a block. And most crazily of all, there’s no Princess Peach to rescue - this time, like the 1993 film, it’s Daisy who gets the nod.
It’s funny; this game sold zillions, but I actually don’t think very many people beat Super Mario Land back in the day, nor did they read the manual. This meant many people had no idea who Daisy was. It was probably the reason why she felt the need to introduce herself every 10 seconds in Mario Kart: Double Dash.
But here’s the thing - when me and the lads have one of our long, Jameson-fuelled debates about who’s the best girl out of Peach, Daisy and Rosalina, the boys tend to be surprised when I pick Daisy.
They all go for Rosalina, and I can see why. She seems to be 10-foot tall, and has what would have been called an emo fringe at the time. I think she’s immortal as well. All great plus-points. So why Daisy?
Well, the Game and Watch graphics of Super Mario Land won’t have conveyed this, but Princess Daisy is a minx. By which I mean, she has that wild streak, a bit of a manic glint in her eye.
I always say that there are some girls who, it’s dangerous to be left alone in a room with them because they’ll just start taking their clothes off and cackling at you, while you start coming over all Catholic and going, “Gosh… golly, you can’t… that’s…”
She’d then jump on top of you, not even to rump you straight away but to wrestle with you first, and you don’t know what to do or where to look. You’re getting emasculated completely here, going beetroot red, but she’s well into it.
Anyway, that’s what I imagine Daisy to be. I think I’ve only ever encountered her in Mario Kart, maybe a Mario Tennis game or other, so I’m probably making wildly sexist assumptions here. But I defy you to tell me that I’m wrong. She’d just be crazy fun and nutty, like a box of doped-up red pandas.
It’s why I can’t get on board with this whole thing of setting her up as a love interest for Luigi. I suspect poor, meek Luigi would be easy prey for someone as extraverted and carefree as Daisy. Still, if she plays her cards right, she could get her hands on a brand-new mansion. It’s just a pity that the man in green won’t ever have the testicular fortitude to give Daisy what she needs.
Going back to Mario’s adventures in LCD if I may, it’s another set of jumping physics for you to get used to. But they’re not exactly award-winning, if I’m honest. Mario can jump in place, and then move off to either side. But when you wanna try a diagonal jump onto a moving platform, forget it - it’s anyone’s guess if you’ll make it or not.
By the latter stages of the game you’ll be jumping on moving platforms that are about a bee’s dick in length and width, so the control scheme begins to matter quite greatly. But actually it doesn’t matter at all, when you’re put into a submarine and you’re turbo-firing rocks out of your way.
But I do like this game, you know, even if you get less than an hour’s juice out of it. I won’t fall in love with it or hold its hand or take walks among the flowers with it. It’s not Yoshi’s Island or Mario Galaxy, if I can put it that way. And it’s not a black widow-y minx that’ll tear your head off then give you a consolation shag afterwards.
No, I think Super Mario Land is like a feral cat - a delight whenever you see it again, but then it starts doing very odd things and all you can do is shake your head and steer well clear. Or rather, it’s like my old scientific calculator from school - almost dead, forgotten, grey and archaic. But you’ll get that same short-lived burst of giddy excitement when you type in the numbers ‘5318008’ and flip it upside-down.
5 April 2024