nintendo made a lot of people happy (including me) when for the first time they made games previously unreleased in the U.S. available through the wii’s virtual console. in an interview for wired w/ nintendo rep perrin kaplan re: the import titles, she says: “Everything’s been doing fantastic. It really has exceeded our expectations.” so it’ll be very interesting to see what else they’ll be releasing.

i’ve been interested in trying out the lost levels for a while now, and since i have them on both the SNES’s super mario all-stars and the game boy coor’s super mario bros. deluxe i decided to first tackle it on the SNES. particularly since i’m a wuss and the SNES version lets you continue from the current level, whereas the original makes you start at the beginning of the world.

there have been a lot of reviews of this game of late, and lucas thomas’s review at ign is fairly accurate, particularly when he says:

The layout of platforms, bricks and pipes and the placement of enemies in The Lost Levels all pick up at about the same difficulty setting as the last few worlds in Super Mario Bros., and then get increasingly tougher after that. Skills that were secondary before become required here …

the review at racketboy.com goes into a bit more detail and is also an interesting read.

so the question on everyone’s mind is, so how tough is it really? the answer? well let me put it this way: i haven’t had sweaty palms and nervous twitches from gaming like this since i played through f-zero GX. unlike that game, however, the goals seem rather more attainable here, more tantalizingly out of reach, although the original version is prob. rather more frustrating. i did finish all the way through to the end of the D worlds (four extra, even harder, worlds that come after level 8-4) and only warped a couple of times. (i confess, i skipped past a few levels. just a few, honest!) it is interesting to note that once you figure out how to get all the way through a tough level it’s way easier to get through the same level a second time. in fact, after being stuck on the very last level (D-4) for a while, once i beat it i was able to immediately beat it again.

anyway, next time i get the urge to tackle this again i’ll have to work my way through the SNES version without skipping any levels. and when i’m really feeling up for getting my butt kicked then i’ll have to pick up the virtual console release. after all, as w/ many things in life there’s no substitute for the original thing. or pretty darn close to the original thing anyway!

super mario lost links found:
- endings at vgmuseum.com
- entry at wikipedia.org
- detailed guide at strategywiki.org
- insane super mario world fan-made level video at youtube.com. this is exactly what playing the lost levels feels like at times.