FreePlay: ‘Super Mario Bros. Crossover 2.0′
I’m not usually one to spend much time with browser games. I know there are a lot of great titles out there, and many of them are cheap as free, but for whatever reason I have a deep-seated prejudice against games that can’t be bothered to have a local executable file. Fortunately, I was recently ripped out of this bigotry by a game with a premise too intriguing to ignore.
I come from a generation raised on the NES, and a common fantasy of my peers has always been the ability to mash-up the classic games from our iconic console, and bring across characters from one game into the setting of another. Someone finally took the initiative to make this a reality, and Super Mario Bros Crossover was born.
Jay Pavlina’s homage to the 8-bit era is the kind of surreal experience that requires a double-take to assure you that it is, indeed, real. The game takes you though the many levels of the original Super Mario Brothers with one major catch: you can choose to play as Mario, Luigi, Link, Samus, Ryu Hayabusa, Bill Rizer, SOPHIA III, Samus Aran, Simon Belmont, and Bass. Each character plays just like they do in their original games– some shoot, some have swords, and some can climb walls. This drastically changes the gameplay depending on your character choice, and tickles a special spot in your brain that emits pure nostalgic nerd joy.
The upgrade to version 2.0 is a highly-polished offering, with detailed tutorials, expansive power-up systems for each character (Mega Man can obtain many of his iconic weapons which you can cycle through at will, for example), and a wide array of audio/visual customization (such as selecting among NES, Game Boy, and SNES sprite sets). The pause menu offers configurable controls and a nifty collection of unlockable cheats, plus a handy save/load option.
This is a “game that should not be,” and it is all the more delicious for its absurdity. Grabbing the spread gun power-up and mowing down goombas as the hero of Contra is simply a sublime experience, as is taking out Bowser with a few well-placed bombs from Metroid. It could only be better if it had built-in gamepad support (there are instruction on how to get it working with third-party tools), and could be launched without a web connection, but it feels petty to nitpick a free game that satisfies a desire I’ve been secretly harboring since the fourth grade.
Super Mario Bros. Crossover is easily two hours of fun just messing around and learning the characters, and I could easily see enjoying it for 10 to 20 hours to see everything. For extra entertainment value, be sure to watch the developer play his own game while providing hilarious commentary on his own work.
Kristen is a dormant volcano of creative awesomeness. One of these days he is going to erupt into a giant explosion of compelling audio-visual masterpieces. Until that day, he bides his time as a floundering father of two boys, an insular geek, and a purveyor of crudely fabricated multimedia experiences. Kris contributes regularly through the “Prattle” podcast, as well as the animated feature, “Scribble.”
