RetroMo: Mario's Handheld History
Did you know that Mario starred in eight Game Boy and GBC games? Rediscover your roots inside...
...Continued From Page 2
Super Mario Land 2
3 years after the successful launch of the Game Boy the big N finally released a sequel to the odd (but successful)
Super Mario Land. Again it was up to Yokoi and co. at Nintendo Internal R&D Team 1 to create a game for the platform they knew inside out. The technical advances in the second
Mario Land title over the first allowing for larger, better animated characters with far more detail. This led to the play area scrolling vertically as well as horizontally to give Mario a bit more headroom.
The story of
Super Mario Land 2 is that during the events of the initial Mario Land's adventure, while Mario was away from his homeland, some madman going by the name of Wario, jealous of Mario's popularity and power, took control of Mario Land, even going so far as to move into Mario's home castle. The castle doors were only opened by six golden coins, which old man Wario then redistributed into the hands of beasties placed under his spell throughout the 6 zones of Mario Land. Upon the successful rescue of Princess Daisy, Mario returned to find himself locked out of his own home and that the creatures of his homeland were all under Wario's spell and had turned on him. He had to go grab them coins back and kick Wario's fat, unwelcome ass back to from where it came.
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This time round, the game was considerably larger, boasting 6 zones of varying themes. The stages themselves, while not necessarily longer, felt larger because of the multi directional scrolling. There were a variety of new gameplay features, inspired again by other console Mario titles. Mario could ofcourse still eat his mushrooms and fireflowers but he now had an additional culinary delight! A really fat looking carrot, that looked a bit like it had little eyes, ewwww. So what did eating this carrot do to Mario? It gave him rabbit ears, naturally. Rabbit ears that gave him the ability to float (as we all know rabbits can do). Mario also had a couple of extra handy-moves - the ability to pick up and throw Koopa shells, and the spinning jump that could destroy blocks from above.
The zones of Mario Land, shown on a scrolling map like
Super Mario World, could be entered whenever you wanted to. You could visit one zone, play a few stages then visit another, or revisit previous stages, which was always useful to gain a load of extra lives. The zones themselves were an interesting mix of themes, The Tree zone: Start at the roots and make your way up to the branches. The Turtle zone: Mario gets eaten by a huge koopa and taken down into the depths where he has to swim through a collection of underwater stages. The Mario zone: An enormous clockwork Mario statue, no doubt erected in honor of the man, inside which you'll find instead of masses of bad guys, deadly traps and difficult to negotiate platforms . The Pumpkin zone: A hollowed out Halloween pumpkin full of ghostly enemies with a graveyard and castle theme to the stage . The Micro zone: A miniature house which Mario gets shrunken down in size to enter, becoming the same size as the ants he's up against. Then finally we have the Space zone, accessed by jumping into a bubble blown from the nose of a hippopotamus, something Nasa have yet to fully utilize. Then it's on to low gravity fun for Mario, going on to face off against Tatanga from
Super Mario Land again.
After clearing all those zones and collecting the aforementioned 6 golden coins you could now unlock the door of castle Mario and teach that Wario a lesson. Only problem was that in Mario's absence his castle had been filled with all manner of traps. Eight rooms would lead up to the throne room and in each of those was a mixture of avoiding flames, bouncing from one platform to another and trying your best not to fall on spikes or into lava. The usual castle shenanigans but not something your expect in your home castle. Beat those and then its time to whup Wario, which I'll leave to your imagination.
Written by Philip Jones on Thursday, August 10, 2006
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posted September 26, 2006