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Jeff Dunn: Donkey Kong Jr.

The best Mario game is Super Mario Bros. 3, but any cultured and physically attractive person already knows that, so let’s take this opportunity to spotlight something more interesting instead: Donkey Kong Jr.

I won’t pretend the game is some secret masterpiece. It’s not. It didn’t effectively create an entire genre of gaming (or arguably modern gaming itself) like its predecessor. Its controls aren’t as precise, and its four levels aren’t as distinct. A single loop takes less than 10 minutes to complete.

It is different, though. Think about where Nintendo was around the time that Donkey Kong became a pop-culture phenomenon. Now think about how easy it would have been to simply return with a “Donkey Kong 2” that was a little bit harder and had a couple of new items. Instead, we got Donkey Kong Jr., the rare video game sequel that is more transformative than additive.

Here, Mario is the villain, having imprisoned Donkey Kong in an apparent act of revenge for Donkey Kong kidnapping Mario’s girlfriend (Pauline, not Peach!) in the original game. This remains the only instance of Mario being cast as the bad guy in a Nintendo game, and it’s one of the few true perspective shifts in the Mario canon. (Though I am sure there’s an anti-vaxxer revisionist take out there about how Dr. Mario is a villainous representation of Big Pharma.)

You play as Donkey Kong’s son, Donkey Kong Jr. Fittingly, Junior moves like a bulky baby gorilla, not a nimble little man. He’s wider and slower, so determining exactly where and when to jump over Mario’s attacking birds or electric jolts is fuzzier. This helped the arcade cabinet hoover up quarters—the Fun-O-Rama in York, Maine, thanks me—but as a sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. forces you to change your understanding of its landmark predecessor’s rhythm and timing.

In fact, much of Donkey Kong Jr.’s four stages drop the original platforming altogether and emphasize a whole new set of climbing mechanics. In the original, Mario (or “Jumpman”) primarily jumps and runs in horizontal spaces. In the sequel, Junior spends most of the game maneuvering vertically, avoiding obstacles by going up and down sets of vines and chains at just the right moment. There’s a different risk-reward system to this, too; Junior can climb up vines faster by grabbing two at a time, but his sprite gets wider and thus easier to hit. Using just one vine, meanwhile, lets you slide down quicker. All of this comes to a head in the last stage, where Junior has to move several keys up a group of chains to free his papa while tracking and avoiding a barrage of Mario’s projectiles.

Donkey Kong Jr. was followed a year later by Donkey Kong 3, a game in which an exterminator named Stanley the Bugman repeatedly shoots Donkey Kong in the butt with bug spray. While it feels dated today, Donkey Kong Jr. remains a model video game sequel: rather than simply providing more, it explores a familiar structure, then warps and rearranges the pieces within. —Jeff Dunn, Senior Commerce Editor

Play it on: Switch Online (NES) | Switch (Arcade Archives) | Wii U Virtual Console | 3DS Virtual Console

Lee Hutchinson: Super Mario World

Sometimes our favorite games aren’t just our favorites because of how great they look or how well they play, but because of the things happening in our lives when we played them. That’s why Super Mario World is at the top of my Mario game list.

Oh, sure, it’s an incredible game—and as the pack-in title for the SNES’s North American launch, you’d expect it to be. Nintendo designed a game that would show off the new system’s speed and gorgeous graphical effects, and it absolutely succeeded. If you’re a ’90s kid, you probably have distinct memories of picking your jaw up off the floor the first time you saw SMW, be it at a friend’s house or at the Babbage’s demo kiosk. And unlike so many titles today, it didn’t just look great; it played great.

But Super Mario World will forever remind me of a long weekend in the early 2000s, around the time Ars Line Editor Peter Opaskar was getting married. Our whole friend group banded together our meager funds and bought Peter and his bride a brand new couch for their living room. As high-slacking members of Gen X, our furniture situations at the time were generally a mix of hand-me-downs and found-on-side-of-road kitsch, and we wanted to get him something super nice.

Peter and his wife were out of town the day the couch was set to be delivered, so my other buddy Steve and I drove over to Peter’s place, let ourselves in with the spare key, and set up shop to wait. Peter had come into possession of a used SNES, and one of the games that he acquired with it was Super Mario World. To kill the hours until the delivery van was set to arrive—and to give Peter’s old couch one last chance to shine—we plopped ourselves down in front of his TV and fired up the game.

I’d played SMW before, of course—who hasn’t?—but it had been years since I’d had an entire Saturday afternoon spreading out before me with nothing to do except marathon a two-player game. Alternating as Mario and Green Mario Luigi, we methodically took the game apart. We ferreted out alternate exits, opened secret paths, activated Switch Palaces, braved the Star Road, and dominated the Special World. We emerged utterly victorious (with a lot of help from the Top Secret Area), fully completing the game with all 96 exits found. The only time we stopped was when the delivery guys showed up—we let them in to do their thing, then plopped ourselves down on the new couch and resumed Koopa-stomping.

All in all, it was pretty close to a perfect day, and SMW is pretty close to a perfect game. —Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor

Play it on: Switch Online (SNES) | Wii U Virtual Console | 3DS Virtual Console

Sam Machkovech: Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario World 2

Back when every video game review in the world had a sub-score dedicated to “graphics,” the impending 3D gaming revolution had people losing their minds—and dumping their “dated” systems at resale shops like Funcoland. More polygons meant better graphics, the world seemed to think. But not me; I was still giddily clutching my SNES, thanks largely to Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario World 2.

This 1995 gem arrived at the end of the 16-bit era, when mainstream access to 3D-capable hardware began spiking. Nintendo’s response to these trends came in the form of Star Fox‘s bare-minimum polygons and Donkey Kong Country‘s pre-rendered trickery. Decades later, we now know that Yoshi’s Island had already been in development for years when DKC‘s 3D-rendered style emerged internally—and that this led to the Yoshi team “fighting back.” They moved even more boldly into a “hand-drawn” art approach, one that had never been done to such an extent by Nintendo. (Kirby’s Dream Land 3 would follow on SNES two years later with a similar aesthetic.)

As smitten as I was with the impending launch of Super Mario 64 (a very, very close second on my personal Mario list), Yoshi’s Island unlocked something inside of me: the whimsy that my teenage self was otherwise pushing away. Part of me had grown obsessed with aggressive teenager-y music, comics, and films, but Yoshi’s Island combined a unique and wonderfully executed aesthetic with exploration-friendly mechanics—and it helped me retain a certain wide-eyed wonder.

The game’s squiggly animation world, drawn in apparent marker and crayon strokes, exploded with fantastic rotation and distortion effects thanks to the SuperFX2 chip, a co-processor embedded in the game’s cartridge that got the SNES close to Sega Saturn levels of rendering prowess. Its soundtrack shimmered with MIDI interpretations of instruments like the organ and the banjo, all used to bring some of Koji Kondo’s all-time best melodies to life.

And it established a mild yet engrossing “collect-a-thon” system of flowers, red coins, and health points spread across its levels, which organically nudged players into checking every cranny of the game world by offering greater jump heights, increased egg-throwing reach, and a lack of countdown timers. I remain fond of the level design’s tight relationship with Yoshi’s expanded control suite, especially in the wake of so many overly padded find-all-the-shinies games on the N64 and beyond.

And, hey, you could occasionally turn Yoshi into a helicopter, a train, or a submarine—or give Baby Mario a star and turn him into a wall-running underpants superhero. Transformations are fun. Really, most of Yoshi’s Island remains “fun” when I return to it for adult replays, even if it means putting up with Baby Mario’s occasional screams of panic. —Sam Machkovech, Tech Culture Editor

Play it on: Switch Online (SNES)

Peter Opaskar: (Tuba noises)

My contribution is whichever and however many of these you feel like sharing. —Peter Opaskar, Line Editor

(Peter sent along a number of videos of himself covering various Mario themes on tuba, including some SMB3 level music, the SMB3 map theme, the SMB overworld theme, the SMB underwater theme, and the classic super star invincibility theme. But the one I’m going to embed is, of course, Dr. Mario. Just watch out for Big Pharma.)

Kyle Orland: Super Mario 64

The recent release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars on the Switch has rekindled a debate about Super Mario 64’s legacy. Some see the game as a masterpiece of 3D game design that holds up to this day. Others see it as an embarrassing throwback that has aged poorly in light of advances in the genre.

Put me in the masterpiece camp. Super Mario 64 wasn’t the first game to do third-person action-platforming in 3D, but I’d argue it was the first game to make the concept feel as natural and effortlessly fun as the 2D games that came before it.

A lot of that has to do with the analog stick, which Nintendo introduced to its consoles with Super Mario 64‘s release. Younger readers who have grown up with dual analog sticks as standard on pretty much every console controller won’t really understand the feeling of mastering the possibilities of this new control scheme. While digital joysticks and d-pads were okay for 2D navigation, the finer gradations of an analog stick were necessary to make the 3D worlds of Super Mario 64 a joy to explore.

Super Mario 64 was also the first game in the series to center on goals beyond simply getting to the level’s endpoint. Sure, previous Mario games had hidden exits and Easter eggs for those who wanted to explore and experiment. But Super Mario 64 made that exploration and experimentation the key to finding power stars hidden behind obscure hints. It was a trick that let designers take full advantage of the expansive space offered by the new third dimension, and its influence on the Mario series (and gaming in general) can’t be overstated.

Yes, there are some elements of Super Mario 64 that seem dated these days. There are more exploitable glitches than you’d expect from a flagship Nintendo title (likely owing to the developers’ new struggles with 3D hardware). The camera controls can be imprecise at times (though the angle the game selects automatically usually requires little fiddling). And starting a level over after getting a star is just plain annoying (especially during the ride-a-magic-carpet slog of Rainbow Ride).

But those small flaws are easy to forgive when you consider just what a leap Super Mario 64 was in gaming history. Future games may have smoothed out some of the rough edges, but like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Super Mario 64 gets extra credit because it was the first to show everyone else in the space how to do important things and do them well. —Kyle Orland, Senior Gaming Editor

Play it on: Switch (Super Mario 3D All-Stars) | Switch Online + Expansion Pack (N64) | Wii U Virtual Console