It’s time for a trip into “Edutainment” territory here with some Mario games which I’m quite certain disappointed every single kid in the early 90’s – Mario is Missing and Mario’s Time Machine. Oh how I remember these games. It was fitting by this time in the series James would cover these atrocities to the Mario series.
We waste no time in getting into the games themselves, starting with Mario is Missing on the NES. Interestingly, for a NES game, it opens with a decent re-creation of the Super Mario World style. That ends quickly though when you find out after going into a warp pipe you’re in New York City. A very bland New York City.
The concept is just crazy when you look at it – the idea is to grab items which relate to the location you’re in, with the idea of learning about various locations as you would play. The fact that King Kong is one of these items kind of breaks that logic, however, and the Nerd spends a bit of time focusing on the absurdity of this.
The biggest problem is that it really doesn’t play like a typical Mario game, thus it doesn’t even really have the “fun” factor it could have had. Control is okay, aside from a few issues here and there.
We also get a look at the Super NES version of the game. Besides looking better and having a few elements behave differently from the NES game, it looks to pretty much be the same thing.
We move on to Mario’s Time Machine. This time the idea is gathering objects and bringing them to the time period they belong in. This one does things a bit differently in that it has a re-creation of the original Mario Bros. game in it! Yep, that super classic arcade title, simplified for an educational game! Following that you travel to the time period the object should belong to and, after going through a small level you’re supposed to drop the item off in a particular spot, but the Nerd can’t quite figure it out, and since the game has you replay the level to get the item back, he quickly gives up on it.
Lastly we have Mario’s Time Machine for the SNES. This plays a bit differently in that you pick the item upfront, but then have to pick a location and manually put in a year. Any year! Yep, no list to select from, you have to know exactly what year corresponds to the item. That’s not good, especially for kids.
Instead of the Mario Bros. mini-game you get some strange surfing affair, collecting one type of item but avoiding another, similar looking item. Once you reach the time period you select… well, the Nerd only shows a few clips of what comes afterwards, and it looks like a damned fill in the blank test you would take back in school!
That’s where he reaches his limit, expressing his frustrations with the fact that, while there are plenty of other educational Mario games those were generally on PC, and these two were on the main Nintendo consoles of the time – the NES and SNES, so you would expect them to be decent, but they aren’t.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
All in all a good episode. A short one, but it didn’t need to be long. James keeps the absurdity down, focusing on the games themselves and trying to describe just how disappointing they are. It somewhat captures the feeling, as a kid, of renting these games (or possibly having your parents buy them) only to be disappointed in the end by the fact that they are low-action educational titles.
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