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HONORABLE MENTION #1: Super Mario Bros. 35

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/6/6/AAA-H0AADWce.jpg

In earlier drafts of this list, back before I was fully satisfied with the number of games I had on it, I included SMB35. I didn't see why not. It was definitely one of my favorite gaming experiences from 2020-2021 - quite specifically so, in the end - so putting it on the list made sense. But I couldn't go through with it, and I axed it from the list to make room for other games. All 50 of the games on my list share one thing in common - you can play them. Right now! They are all games that I would recommend, and that you should play if they interest you. I couldn't bring myself to trot out a corpse and prop it up as if it were alive. Super Mario Bros 35 is dead. In place of a ranking, I will deliver a eulogy.

Super Mario Bros 35 is - *was* - a game released by Nintendo for SMB1's 35th anniversary that refashioned the game as a 35-player battle royale. The original Super Mario Bros, if you haven't heard, is a pretty good game. I certainly think so, at least. I happen to think it remains an excellent game to this day, but that's another writeup for another list. Suffice to say that it's one of my favorite games of all time.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/6/7/AAA-H0AADWcf.jpg

Playing the game involved racing through a series of levels picked by the other players of the game, trying not to die or run out of time, and being the last one to not die or run out of time. The levels were more or less exactly how they are in the original, but the game played quite a bit differently; every enemy you kill sends it to another players' game, where it appears at the next available opportunity, creating more obstacles for your opponents to avoid. To make it still possible to win even when the screen is completely filled with Bowsers, you can spend 20 coins to hit a roulette and get a powerup - a mushroom, flower, star, or a pow block that kills every enemy on screen. The timer would keep ticking down through each level, but defeating enemies and getting powerups increase the time, so the pressure is on to keep moving to be the last one standing.

The first thing I learned from playing SMB35 is that people really suck at SMB1. It wasn't uncommon at the start of the game for about a quarter of players to randomly lose somewhere in 1-1, a famously pretty unchallenging level - to be fair, this usually involved a few more goombas than usual, but players wouldn't fare much better getting to 1-2 with its slightly trickier level arrangement and first piranha plant appearances, and god forbid if they get to 1-3 with all of its pits. The herd thins out pretty quick. If I didn't make a stupid mistake early I usually top 5'ed every game.

The second thing I learned from playing SMB35 is that SMB35 was a completely broken and absurd game. You had to play through 1-1 and 1-2 in sequence quite a few times to really get deep into the run where there's only a few players left, but that's when stuff started to get really fun. Once you get to 4-1, you can kill a Lakitu and send it to others, and because this game was completely busted and ridiculous, this would inevitably result in a chain reaction that would cause everybody's game to have 30+ Lakitus flooding the screen at basically all times, at which the only hope you have is to mash the item button and hope for stars or pow blocks, and god help you if you don't have the coins to afford it because you're probably dead. At this point, the game ceases to be Super Mario Bros and instead becomes a sort of perpetual torture device that continually stretches the limits of how far the players can go, all while the timer ticks downward faster and faster.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/6/8/AAA-H0AADWcg.jpg

There was something kind of beautiful about it to me. It was Super Mario Bros, the game I remembered, but it was also something completely insane and different that didn't resemble it in any way. This is the same sort of reason I love to play randomizers - taking the old and making it new again, giving me a reason to see aspects of a game I hadn't noticed before. Even though I've played SMB1 quite a lot, there's definitely aspects of the game I hadn't noticed before. Coins don't matter that much in SMB1, but they're essential in SMB35, so learning where 10 coin blocks are is suddenly something you have to learn. I often don't think about how many powerups there are in SMB1, so the realization that 8-1 contains NONE AT ALL was quite a shock, and became something I had to adjust for. Every different level brought something new to the game, based on the elements it provided. Levels like 4-1 and 8-2 introduced Lakitus into the game. Levels like 3-1 or 8-3, Hammer Bros. Any -4 level would put Bowsers in. Levels like 6-3 could trip up the players by forcing them through a gauntlet of difficult jumps without any coins or enemies to keep their timer up. Underwater levels like 2-2 and 7-2, as well as an optional segment in 5-2 that I had long completely forgotten about until playing this game, put Bloopers and Cheep Cheeps into the mix which can both be deadly in land stages. Some levels had many powerups, others none at all. The list of pros and cons for each level is lengthy, lengthy enough that I actually did a ranking of the intrigue factor of every level in the game. This was the skeleton of SMB1, yes, lovingly recreated just as it was in 1985, but its beating heart, its animating essence, was something entirely different, and doing this writeup still makes me think about all those little elements of the game that I was so interested in at the time.

That heart, sadly, no longer beats. I knew of course that someday the game would have to be taken down, as Nintendo won't host the servers for it forever, but it's baffling to me that they saw fit to only provide this game as a service for a year. They could still run it to provide extra value for their online service, but instead they pulled the plug at some point in 2021. Now it only exists in memory, a few Youtubers recording their runs of it to at least preserve the game in some fashion, but it can no longer be played. I still have the game downloaded onto my Switch and I can't bring myself to delete it and free up room, even though it's inoperable. I don't even know if you can go in and play the practice mode or see your stats.

I'm pretty bummed out about it. Super Mario Bros 35 was sort of a broken mess of a game, but I really did enjoy its antics, even if every game eventually did eventually dissolve into unplayable madness. I think a few adjustments could make the game even better, and I sort of had hope that maybe this would be a test run for a better version of the game someday, but it seems that this was just something Nintendo developed to be a fun little event that would only last for a little while. But, who knows? Maybe Nintendo will bring it back for the 40th anniversary. Or maybe someone will figure out how to reverse engineer the game and make a playable bootleg of it. I can only hope, because I'd love to get just one more Lakitu party going, for old time's sake.

The old time being 2020, to be clear, not 1985. Yeah, I know, it's a little ridiculous for the first game on my list to be a reimagining of a game from 1985. It won't be the last time something like this happens.