Super Mario World was the first
video game that I ever owned. I
consider it to be one of the
best games ever, though I'm sure that has a lot to with it being the first
game I ever
played much. I actually hurt my thumb and couldn't play
SNES for a day because of how much I played this game when I first got it.
Like other
Mario games, Super Mario World has 8
castles with a
boss koopa defending each. Each castle has its own "world", where the levels are of similar types. There are 5 types of boss koopas in the game (all of which are fairly simple to beat), with 2 bosses having each of the 3 types, 1 unique normal boss, and the
final boss,
Bowser.
One unique (though not necessarily good) feature of Super Mario World is that it allows you to skip almost the entire
game and go to the
Bowser, the
final boss, after beating just a few levels by traveling through the
secret Star Road. It was designed to make traveling across the entire world faster, but it also makes the game very simple to
beat. I
beat the
game like that the first time, and did not go back and beat it the
normal way for several
years. There is also an interesting
secret about
Star Road.
Besides having better
graphics than its
predecessors, Super Mario World added
Yoshi to
Mario games. You first find
Yoshi in an
egg near the beginning of the
game, and you can ride him. Yoshi can jump on many
bad guys that
Mario can not, and he can also swallow
bad guys by grabbing them with his very long
tongue. Also,
Yoshi can temporarily gain
special abilities by holding
koopa shells of different
colors in his
mouth: blue makes him
grow wings and
fly, red lets him
shoot 3
fireballs out of his mouth, and yellow makes him hit bad guys that he lands next to when he jumps. There are also blue, yellow, and red
Yoshi's that treat all
shells as if they were the color of the
Yoshi.
Ghost houses are also a fun part of this game.
Ghosts are
impossible to
kill, but can be bounced on by using the spin jump. The most
common type of
ghost will slowly move towards
Mario when he isn't facing the
ghost, and will stop moving when
Mario looks at it. This actually looks really
funny for some
reason. Most of the
hardest and most
confusing levels in the game are
ghost houses.
Though Super Mario World may not have been very
original or
graphically amazing, I had much more
fun playing it and other old
console games than all the
new 3D stuff which is almost all
crap that's just designed to look good.