Thursday 24 January, 2008

The first Super Mario Brothers had a style of gameplay that is exciting and fun, and Super Mario Brothers 3 took that style and remade it into a world packed with new creative ideas. There are several new mini games add into Super Mario Brothers 3, such as the memory game, the card lineup game and the two player version of the mario brothers arcade game. Although these are good, it is the levels themselves that make this game so good.

The stages are very diverse, some may require a great deal of skill to traverse the platforms while the screen is scrolling quickly, and others are constructed like a maze which you must navigate quickly before the time runs out. The items have been expanded a great deal from the previous mario games, while they still have the mushroom, fireflower and star, they also added items such as the leaf, frog suit, tanooki suit, hammer brother suit and the boot.

Mario's controls significantly improved over the originals everything seems more responsive and he has greater influence over his movement while in the air. Mario can perform a variety of tasks, such as jumping, swimming, running, stomping on enemies, shooting fireballs, climbing, and even flying. Once he has a raccoon tail, you can make Mario run left and right to build up power, as indicated by a flashing P-Meter, then jump to take off into the sky and fly for about 10 seconds. Although flying had been used in videogames before , Mario 3 is one of the first games that I know of to utilize it in a truly innovative way. There are some stages that require you to master flight to complete them. Others reward you with secrets and hidden areas.

Overall this is one of the milestones in the Mario series, and it is one that everyone with an NES should play.

You need to follow the template. Your fist log is excesively short, without any description of gameplay. The second log is an enumeration of the features of the game. Your sort of get into gameplay towards the end of the second log, but never touch on design.

- Ian Rickard (your TA for this assignment)