Let’s Play Super Mario World! Speaking of games which showed what the SNES could do, Super Mario World looked gorgeous when it came out in 1991.

Let’s Play Super Mario World:

We, meaning my brother and I, were cultists in the church of Nintendo in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and our devotion was peaking when this system came out. We got the Super Nintendo for that Christmas in 1991, and played it for hours and hours immediately. We even brought it with us to our Grandmother’s house that afternoon for Christmas, despite the protestations of our parents.

So this game is basically Super Mario 3 but prettier and a bit larger. Put side by side, I think Super Mario 3 is the more classic game, but Mario World is obviously still very much a heavy hitter.

The neat thing about Super Mario which I guess I forget about and completely take for granted now is the ability to travel the entire world’s map by the end of the game which really gave it that expansive open ended feel.

Yoshi was another improvement in this game, as you now had your faithful dinosaur friend to ride and (sort of) help you out throughout the game. He didn’t really help that much, except those rare times when you needed him to store a key in his mouth or do that thing where he flies. There were multiple colors and iterations of Yoshi in this game, as well, which all had slightly different abilities which was cool, though like some of the more rare suits in Mario 3, they were hard to come by.

Now that I’m talking about Yoshi, I wonder if this was the first appearance of Yoshi in a game. I know there were the puzzle games featuring his name in the early 90’s for the NES, but they may have come out after they had conceived of the idea of an Italian plumber owning a pet dinosaur. Should check the timeline on that sometime. Anyway.

The best feature in this game or at least my favorite was the addition of the feature. Similar to the leaf in Mario 3, this gave Mario the ability to fly. But unlike in 3 when you had a limit to how much time you could spend in the sky before it gave out, Mario’s cape in this game acted like a parachute or balloon which you could pull up on at just the right time to keep yourself airborne throughout the entirety of the level.

Anyway, yeah this was a great game but pretty low on my hierarchical list of favorite platform based Mario games I’ve played. Mario 64>Mario 3>Mario 2>Mario World>Mario 1… probably how I’d go, at least today.