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Comment by faragon | Hacker News Reader

Super Mario games are way better than what they look at first glance, in my opinion. E.g. even the 16-bit SNES Super Mario World, with its modest looking by its time, has a huge amount of work below everything: the games are so good because there is way more than the first impression. Perfect game play, lots of secrets, pretty amount of freedom, etc. make you enjoy and love them over time. Pure genius, pretending being just simple video games.

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Shigeru Miyamoto named SMW the game he was most proud of. I can see why that is.

SMW, Super Mario Kart and The Legend Of Zelda on the SNES are milestones of the genre, never again has this level of perfection been reached in 2D gaming imho (excluding SMK here).

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is no. 1 on some all-time best of lists. Maybe its the impression it made on many of us in our youth, but a year ago I played it again, and it was still great. The music, the art style, the controls - its the stuff that nostalgia is made of.

I recently started playing ALttP again too and one thing that was really neat to see was the hitboxes of the swords. You can only hold your sword in four directions but youcan riposte by bumping against your enemy's sword and then hit their body without touching their sword. The precision in the synchronisation of what's seen on the screen and what's actually happening was so simple, yet so fascinating.

When I replayed I found the ending really satisfying. A mesmerizing effect with the 3D Triforce, triumphant music that makes you feel like a hero and you revisit places in the game and see how you restored them to good (your uncle is well again!) When the credits come with some parallax background you watch them silently and with crazy respect for the team and only then switch off the Super Nintendo.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JU0C_l4aac

Hyper Light Drifter, released this year, comes close for me. Imagine a cross between alttp and dark souls, with the art style and music of fez. It's superb.

It's not as expansive or elaborate as the snes marios or zeldas, but the gameplay is very polished and deep, and the plot is... well I won't spoil it ;)

SMK is 2D. Its like Doom or Wolfenstein in that its "pretend 3d".

How old were you in 1990? Because I was 12 and remember SMW's arrival very clearly. I had played video games enthusiastically for years. Super Mario World was not at all modest looking for its time. It was absolutely mind blowing. It was gorgeous and everything was so smooth, and the number of different animations Mario had, plus being able to ride Yoshi, it was a total revelation.

For the record, it was only in Japan that SMW was released in 1990.

Yep, but we started seeing images of it over here then. And I was lucky enough to have a friend who had a Super Famicom w/the Japanese edition. Even without being able to understand any of the tutorial blocks it was still amazing. (I know it sounds like I'm making that up but it's true. I knew at the time how lucky I was to be playing it early.) After playing his Super Famicom I was a little disappointed with the SNES hardware's purple buttons instead of the rainbow buttons on the Super Famicom.

Wonderful video game anecdote! I’m from Sweden so we had the rainbow buttons just like in Japan. The purple ones look super weird :D I hadn’t even started in 1st grade in 1990. I think SMW showed up on my radar in 1993 or so. Still love that game!

SMW was released in 1990... in Japan. In Europe it was released in 1992, and I was 16 years old then, with knowledge about software (I started programming at 12). Anyway, in both 1990 and 1992 there were much better looking video games (richer backgrounds, etc.). My point was that SMW focused in playability and fun, instead of the color count and overloaded graphics.

> Anyway, in both 1990 and 1992 there were much better looking video games (richer backgrounds, etc.).

Maybe in the arcade, certainly not at home in 1990 and 1991, SMW was one of the best looking games of the time.

Look at the games in 1990:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_in_video_gaming

Some of the best looking games of that year:

SMB3 just came out to the US, SMW was light years beyond it.

Bonk's Adventure was good looking for the time but doesn't hold a candle to SMW.

On the PC we had the original Commander Keen, which while a great PC game of the era, doesn't even begin to approach the quality of SMW.

Secret of Monkey Island was a beautiful game, but it is an adventure game. The screen is mostly static. SMW is far more impressive, being side scrolling and having parallax scrolling of multiple background layers (and occasionally foreground layers as you see in the forest.)

Nothing in 1990 compares to SMW.

If we jump forward to 1992 (by which point SMW is 2 years old):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in_video_gaming

Then we see Wolf 3D come out for the PC, which was really impressive and of course changed everything. But it wasn't like it made SMW look dated (besides being FPS vs. side scroller, Wolf didn't have very many types of enemies, had static ceiling and floor, etc.)

For side scrollers we have Ecco the Dolphin, which is a cool game but I don't think as visually complex as SMW.

Mega Man 4 looks great but is not doing anything graphically that SMW hasn't already done. It has a different art style that you may personally prefer.

On the Genesis we have Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which looks good but again doesn't have as much going on as SMW.

I'm struggling to find these games that were much better looking. Can you give me some examples?

When someone is a European game snob of that era they are almost assuredly referring to Amiga games like those produced by Psygnosis(e.g. Shadow of the Beast) which have some gorgeous painterly work in them, make good use of the hardware, play smoothly with largish sprites, and on occasion, showcased parallax scrolling effects. There were some pretty solid side-scroller and shooter games made for that platform - it was the lead for "Another World", which was groundbreaking on a number of levels. And there were also many games on that platform that were mostly-static adventure games not of the Sierra or Lucasarts imprint, but beautiful looking all the same: Silmarils made some of those, as did Horrorsoft.

That said, those kinds of games weren't actually the norm on the Amiga, either - there was far more low-end drek that threw higher fidelity, but artistically underwhelming, graphics on the screen sluggishly and semi-competently(ports from other platforms, licensed tie-ins). Console games did tend to have a higher average level of polish along most axes.

I had friends with Amigas and they had some great games but even the best of those couldn't compare with SMW or other top shelf SNES games.

Amiga had graphics almost on par with arcade machines (the golden standard of the time), have you actually looked at some screenshots of Shadow of the Beast and other Amiga games? Yes SMW had a great art style (I love it!) but it used simplified/cartoonish shapes. I still think Amiga was the best graphics you could get at home, unless you were so rich that you could buy arcade cabinets.

I'm not really interested in getting into some kind of Amiga vs PC fanboy debate. Those were tedious in 1990 let alone now.

But Shadow of the Beast, while an impressive game for the time and for the Amiga is not on par with SMW technically. You may prefer the art style of Shadow of the Beast, and that's fine, style is subjective. But technically SMW is just doing a lot more. The multi-layer parallax in Shadow of the Beast is only used on the flat levels without any level architecture, Shadow of the Beast has few frames of animation per enemy, and fewer colors per enemy, and fewer colors on screen (128 vs. 256.) I don't have the details of the Shadow of the Beast level engine but it seems like the levels are also made out of much larger blocks than levels in SMW.

Anyway, this conversation is getting boring and like I said I'm really not interested in any kind of "Amiga is the best of all times" shenanigans. I'm not a fanboy of any particular hardware, console, computer or otherwise. Every platform had good games, and things that were good about it and things that were less good about it. This thread was about SMW.

I don't understand why you want to slap the fanboy tag on me, when I actually said in my comment that I love both games. Also, sorry if I got you bored, I usually enjoy talking about technicalities and often forget that others around me might be uninterested.

I accept your point about the colour mode, it seems [1] that SMW has more colours on screen as you said.

Regarding the animation frames, I couldn't find info, I'd love to read about it so let me know if you have any good link.

In my parent comment I was thinking more about smaller vs larger sprites (up to 128px in SotB) [1][2], and flat colours vs extensive use of gradients (I don't have hard data on this but it seems pretty evident by just looking at a few screenshots).

[1] http://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beas... [2] http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/SuperMarioWorld/sprites/SuperMa...

I find no mention of Amiga games in your post, you keep mentioning PC games but in those times PC was far from having the best graphics.

I don't recall the game being "modest looking" at the time. I remember being impressed with the greatly improved graphics and all of the beautiful colors. You have to consider Super Mario World as a predecessor to Super Mario Brothers 3. Perhaps removed from its historical context, it may look modest, but I was blown away at the time.

Don't think predecessor is the right word there, or you swapped your titles. Super Mario Bros 3 came out 1-2 years earlier than Super Mario World, not the other way around.

I'm aware that SMW is a SNES game, newer than SMB3 (NES). My point was that SMW is focused in playability and fun, and not in color count nor overloaded graphics (e.g. the SNES is able to show 32768 colors, while SMW color count is way far from that potential).

SMW looks good and they made good choices, but they weren't leaving that much in the tank (they even broke out Mode 7!). The SNES is theoretically able to show 32,768 colors through scanline trickery and/or color math, and has a sometimes-workable 256-color mode (but like its successor the GBA it's slow), but nearly everybody used the tile-based mode, where every 8x8 square was mapped to a 15-color palette.

(I have spent entirely too much time in the guts of that thing. Send help. And liquor.)

The reason it still looks good now is because they created a timeless art style with clear, readable sprites which didn't need many colors. Compare that with 16-bit era attempts at photorealism which look muddy today.

The same is true of Metroid Prime on the gamecube, which looks better than some modern games despite hardware which was underpowered even at the time, due to masterful art direction.

I'm watching chrontendo - a chronological exploration of all the games released for the Famicom/NES https://www.youtube.com/user/Chrontendo

Super Mario did for video games like Star Wars did for sci-fi and special effects.

Am I missing something? Where are (all of) episodes of Chrontendo?

edit: nm, youtube's list has an electric boogaloo moment. Search within channel finds them just fine.

I totally agree regarding SMW, IMHO it’s one of the best video games of all time.

Yep, plus the background music :)

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