"Super Mario Land", the original entry in the "Mario Land" saga (which paved way for the more popular, and arguably much more fun "Wario Land" series) was one of Mario's first major adventures on Nintendo's hand-held "Gameboy" system. The game is very true to the nature of earlier titles, and at times, it almost feels like a slightly modified port of the original "Super Mario Bros." for the NES. You play as Mario (of course) who must save Princess Daisy (a different princess than "Peach" Toadstool, Daisy was later sort-of ret-conned into being Luigi's love interest after she was used in the live-action film) from various dastardly enemies.
The presentation is halfway decent. Characters are a bit too blocky, especially considering that only a few short years later, "Super Mario Land 2" presented a vastly improved style almost on par with "Super Mario World" for the Super Nintendo. Backgrounds are nice and fairly detailed though, and enemies are halfway decent looking. The music is nice and catchy, but there are no familiar Mario tunes! It was really irritating that none of the iconic themes were used, and in fact, some of the music is actually a digital cover of classical "Can-can" kind of music.
There isn't much story (Mario must save the princess, that's the whole story), but Mario has never been about the story, so I can forgive this.
I suppose there are two main reasons for the lower score, though, and they are very irritating during gameplay. The first reason is that the controls feel quite loose, and it's hard to get the platforming down good- I constantly find myself overshooting or undershooting jumps, or missing my targets by mere millimeters. It is especially frustrating when there are enemies around, as you will often try to jump on top of them (which kills them), only to accidentally jump in front of them and get killed by them instantly. It also doesn't help that the hit- detection is very glitch-y. You will often get killed by an enemy before they even touch you, or will die if you don't hit them perfectly, 100% dead-on- the other games in the series are nowhere near this nit- picky about it, here you will die a lot of times for almost no reason. More than once, I've landed on top of an enemy perfectly, and it kills me. I've also accidentally run into an enemy head-on, which should have killed me, yet it killed the enemy. Awful hit detection.
The other problem with the game is the bizarre difficulty. Level-to- level, the difficulty will ramp up or completely go away. It's a very uneven game. Also, the game does a lot of unfair things, like re- spawning you right in front of a pit when you die (which I guarantee will cause a lot of gamers to scream- they immediately come back to life only to fall down a pit because they weren't expecting it to be right there), or throwing a TON of fast-moving enemies at you when you don't have anywhere to go to avoid them. Be prepared for a lot of frustration!
This is a very average Mario game. Which, to be honest, means it's a very weak Mario game. (As they are generally near-perfect platform games) I gotta give this a disappointing but playable 6 out of 10. Don't expect much from this one.
