Super Mario Bros. Deluxe

North American box.

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is compilation video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Color on 1999-05-01 which includes Super Mario Bros. and the first 8 worlds of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, both from the Mario series. It also includes an 8-level Vs. Game which features new mechanics and can be played with an opponent via the link cable or against a steadily-moving Boo Buddy and a Challenge Mode where to try to find five red coins in the levels of the original Super Mario Bros. and other objects. Finally, there are a bunch of unlockable graphics to view or print on the Game Boy Printer, and a couple other minor features.

Personal

I never owned a Game Boy Color and didn't even know this game existed until the 2010s when I started playing through the system's back catalog and saw this game featuring prominently on people's lists of favorites. When I first played it, I just assumed it was just another reproduction of Super Mario Bros., but with a smaller display window, so I passed on it. However, after seeing it over and over again, I thought there had to be something else to it, so I decided to try and explore it more thoroughly. That was when I found that it included The Lost Levels, Challenge Mode, and the Vs. Game. As a personal challenge for myself, I set about beating all the first Mario levels limited by the game's tiny display window, then the 8 Vs. Game levels. I started playing The Lost Levels, but, after learning they weren't complete, stopped. This unlocked a lot of the game's pictures, which gave me a bit more respect for it, but still see it as little more than a compilation title.

Status

I don't own this game, but I've beaten all 36 levels of the original Super Mario Bros. and all 8 vs game levels against Boo.

Review

5	6	4	5	9

Best Version: Game Boy Color

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The game gives you pretty nice bang for your buck. You get a portable version of Super Mario Bros. with save feature, the first half of The Lost Levels, and a couple new challenges as well.
• There are several graphical perks to the game including a new over world screen which adds cohesion to the game, animated water and lava, and cute animated stage endings. I also like the larger graphics you can unlock as you progress through the game.
• The red coin and high score challenges add much needed new content to an otherwise tired game.

Bad

• The limited screen size prevents you from seeing a decent portion of the screen compared to the original games. This makes the entire game quite a bit harder, and a little frustrating when you know there is a pit below you, but you can't see it. The programmers compensated for this by slowing down the Bullet Bills and flying Cheep Cheeps, but there are still several areas where death becomes more frequent. This also makes the red coin challenge a lot harder.
• Worlds 9-D of The Lost Levels are in the game ROM, and mostly complete, but the developers still excluded them from the game for some reason.
• Some of the colors, palette swaps, and animation speeds are different from the original. It's nothing too bad, but I noticed.
• The toys aren't that great. A calendar and printable Nintendo logos don't do much for me.
• The Yoshi egg challenge is terrible. You either have to jump in the air all over every level until you find the hidden block, which is painfully tedious, or you use a walk-through to give the location away, which makes the challenge trivial.

Ugly

• Ultimately, this is little more than dressed up shovelware. Even with the graphic advancements, the remakes of Mario 1 and 2 are inferior to play, the challenge mode isn't very enjoyable, and there aren't enough unique levels in the vs. game. I don't understand why people rank this game so highly, unless they're applying the same rank that they gave the NES title, but this game was released 14 years later, so I expect more.

Media

Box Art

All regions use this art. Mario and Luigi are competing in a foot race while Toad and Peach spectate. They're all flanked by various enemies from the game. In reality, Luigi is just green Mario in this game, as the special jump physics pioneered in The Lost Levels are not implemented. The art and layout are good, and I like how the colorful logo fits the the branding of the Game Boy Color.

• 

  All regions.

Documentation

• 

  North American manual.

Videos

• youtube.com/watch?v=rqzqUIqe71s - Longplay (normal and hard mode, Lost Levels, all challenge modes, all vs games).

Links