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 Descending Luigi |  T-posing Mario |  Trans Queen Birdo |
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 Midnight at the Oasis |  Another cheap shot |  Down the tubes |
All 3 NES-era Super Mario Bros. games, revamped for the '90s! Plus, the much-talked-about "Lost Levels" in their first-ever overseas release! And, new for the 1994 holiday season, all this PLUS the breakout title, Super Mario World, all crammed into a single cartridge!
My first-ever interaction with videogames was with this version of Super Mario World. All the way back in 1996, a classmate of mine from kindergarten moved into the duplex next door with his Super NES and 4 games, one of which was the console's pack-in, Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World, unaware he was about to change my life forever.
Apparently, that's the only way you could get this game in North America without involving the secondhand market: it was only available as a pack-in with the Super NES console from December 1994 to about 1997, when they changed the console's shape. After that, Nintendo killed it forever. Even though the standalone Super Mario All-Stars (with everything except Super Mario World) has been re-released a number of times, All-Stars+World has always been ignored. Most likely because Nintendo wants to make more money by selling All-Stars and World separately, at which point you lose the ability to play as a unique version of Luigi.
At the time of writing, I'm mostly playing Super Mario Bros. 2. Whilst I have been giving the NES original a bit more of an earnest go lately, I just love World 2-1's whole "Midnight at the Oasis" aesthetic on the Super NES. Soyo Oka did a masterful job of rearranging her colleague's music to make better use of the Super NES's Fairlight-style instrument samples, though I've always been of the opinion that SMB2 could have done with more unique music. I guess Tezuka wasn't going to let her do that, or even extend Kondo's underground theme, which is the problem you encounter in commercial art: people with greater pull than you've got make all the decisions. Regardless, I highly recommend the SMAS version of SMB2 over the NES original. Though a free option exists for enterprising gamers who don't mind poking about on the internet some, the easiest option is Nintendo Switch Online.
SMAS | World