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 Bug and Dead Bug |  Ramblin' Evil Mushroom |  Coin hell |
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 Bomb Koopa |  It's Bonus Time! |  Platform trees |
After Mario rescued Princess Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom, news of his keen princess-saving skills got out to Sarasaland, where their own princess, Daisy, has been kidnapped by an alien named Tatanga. All of this is taking Mario's attention away from the private island he bought with the coins he took from the Koopa clan... I sure hope no one decides to take advantage of Mario's absence!
The first proper videogame I ever owned, Super Mario Land is a short little game with tiny graphics. This kind of game makes perfect sense for a Game Boy launch title (several years before my time, I'm not that old)— it's a step up from Nintendo's previous generation of handheld games, the Game & Watch series, which were little more than calculator LCDs with transistorised games built into them. The Game Boy is a computer, but it's the first handheld computer that Nintendo ever made, so to make the transition between Game & Watch and Game Boy, the games were all pretty small to start out with. Pinball, skill games, and little platformers like this one. The game was made by the same team at Nintendo that was responsible for Metroid and Kid Icarus on the NES, rather than Shigeru Miyamoto's R&D4, which was busy with Super Mario Bros. 3 at the time.
I don't really remember much about Super Mario Land from being a kid. I know I got it and my Flying Brick the first weekend of elementary school and I played it a lot. It was more of a surrogate for Super Mario World, which my friend in kindergarten introduced me to... truthfully, I would have much preferred World to Land, despite being able to play it outside the house. Oh well. A lot of my childhood memories revolve around whatever iteration of the Game Boy I had at the time, and I was finally able to play Super Mario World on Christmas of 2001. Speaking as an adult looking back, that was only 5 years into the future from Super Mario Land, but as a kid looking forward, it was an interminable amount of time. Anyway, my Flying Brick and my copy of this game were stolen out of mum's car at the laundromat in around about 1998 and I never played it again until I jailbroke my 3DS and installed a Game Boy emulator on it in December 2023.
9/10, would recommend. Though I feel I should mention, it's short and it's small. You can always change the screen magnification, but the short length might be a deal breaker in this day and age of tutorial quests that take 8 hours to complete. Another thing is, to an adult, this game is easy. Silly adult male game journalist— this game's for kids!
