How are all of you fellow Hive Gamers doing? Today, I’m proud to share with you my gameplay of a classic NES game that took me 35 years to beat.
I recently had a lot of fun clearing the first Super Mario Bros. so I naturally moved on to Super Mario Bros 2. Can you guess which game I’ll clear next?
Super Mario Bros 2 was released in 1988, three years after the original. It was actually a completely different Japanese game, but they wanted a sequel to the OG Mario game so they adapted it by swapping out the characters with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach. I remember my next-door neighbor got it right when it came out and his parents were impressed with the graphics, lack of timer, and ability to go in any direction. Being pretty low on the totem pole I only had a few chances to play it, but it felt amazing compared to the original and a little bit weird at the same time. I thought it was awesome how you could jump up through clouds and hills without hitting your head.
I had a lot of fun playing Super Mario Bros. 2 again even though it was extremely frustrating at times. I forgot how hard games were back in the day. The game designers must be laughing in their graves at how much anger these old-school can still cause us. I wish I could’ve played this with the original controller or at least a Bluetooth controller, but I had to do it with the crappy on-screen controls on my phone which was why I died half the time. I could not have cleared this game without cheating. I used both savestates and the rewind time option a few thousand times. There’s no way in hell I would have had the patience to start all over after all three lives were gone like we had to back then.
It was a wise move for Nintendo to make the princess the best character in the game because it surely got a lot more girls interested in gaming. I wonder how many female gamers got sucked into the gaming world by the gateway character that was Princess Peach. Even though we boys knew the princess was the best character we would only secretly play her alone because things were different back then. I remember being called gay or a girl was the worst thing in the 80s and 90s and we guys would even overcompensate our “manhood” just to avoid being thought of as feminine.
Of course, the rewind time cheat came in handy anytime I fell down a pit or got reduced to a small princess, but it was also handy whenever looking for the mushroom in the alternate reality inverse dimension. You could also pull up coins by pulling up the plants, but I wasn’t able to hit the jackpot from the slot machine at the end of the level a single time. What was the trick to getting that? The turbo button was of no use.
Old-school games were notorious for horrible end-screens. I remember a lot of kids being greatly disappointed that Super Mario Bros. 2‘s ending revealed that the whole thing was just a dream, but it makes sense. Maybe Mario was a meh character, but it’s HIS game. Did you know that Nintendo of America didn’t have enough money to pay their rent one month back in the early 80s and their landlord was named Mario so they promised to name their main character after him if he gave them a break?
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I like to share my battles as animated GIFs, but I got utterly smashed by my enemy because of Grum Flameblade‘s blood lust ability where my enemy didn’t lose a single card so a simple screenshot will do. Blood Lust boosts all of the card’s stats each time it kills so once it gets on a roll it can be impossible to stop and that’s what happened to me today. This was a “healed-out” battle where neither summoner nor healer cards work so I went with a bunch of life leech and scavenger cards. This usually works, but not when Grum gets a taste for blood. I really love him and plan on getting him to MAX level soon, but he’s good enough at level 3 for me now. Thanks for reading about my battle today. What do you do when healing is not allowed?
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