Underwater

GRAPHICS SOUND CONTROL FRUSTRATION FUN FACTOR OVERALL

Famicom 2 Player Adventure/Platformer Mr. Miyamoto is today's video game genius. Few will disagree with that statement and anyone that has the nerve to obviously never owned a single Nintendo system. He has brought us the Italian fat man in Donkey Kong and the arcade hit Mario Bros. Finally in his third installment, Miyamoto brings everyone's favorite plumber to his own side scrolling adventure game that is nothing short of being the Picasso of modern video games. This title is really the reason why many of us ever got interested in Nintendo from the start. It was the first game I ever played in my life at the age of 4(?). After playing my cousin's newest toy, I realized this was something different from anything I have ever done before and as soon as we left his house, my parents bought me my own. At the time my uncle was a professional plumber (a hard, nasty job, indeed) and after playing SMB he even decided to pick one up for himself as well. Which goes to show that there was no age gap needed to apply to have fun playing the Nes. SMB invented something so different that literally hundreds of clones have followed and IMO never surpassed SMB's greatness. Everything from finishing another castle only to find out that the Princess is in another castle to the secret warp pipes, made SMB something that made it near impossible to match at that time and still today. ......Fairly detailed, for its time, graphics are a little repetitive, but nothing that makes the game less enjoyable. The levels are laid out very nicely and the first two stages have gone down as the most popular/most known of any game ever made. Music and sound are really fantastic, too. The SMB theme song is renown internationally and perhaps the most well-known of any game song. This is what the Nes is all about...revolutionary. ......Controls are excellent, as well. Holding down 'B' to run and jump farther with 'A' becomes second nature. Challenge is high, considering you try to beat the game using any warp pipes, and may take you some time to beat in one seating since the cart did not feature a built-in battery. ......BOTTOM LINE: I thought it would be unfair to give SMB a definite rating so I decided to leave it unscored. It's easy to say that anyone that has ever owned or played an NES has played or seen SMB. The best word to describe it, is classic. {The Famicom and US NES versions are 100% the same} . -Mike