Super Mario Bros. 3 review - Nintendo Entertainment System

Super Mario III is simply the finest videogame I've ever played. It mightn't have the graphics and sound anywhere near as good as many Megadrive and Super Famicom titles but what it does have is utterly fabulous playability. Its perfectly graded difficulty level, massive depth, constant surprises, hard-to-find secrets, mega-rewarding gameplay and supreme challenge combine together to make it horribly, horribly addictive. I mean real Government Health warning stuff! Once you start playing you want to keep going, just to see what surprises are around the next corner! I ended up playing it all night! And when I wasn't playing the game I was thinking about it! It's truly awesome stuff - the greatest game yet seen! And if you haven't got a Nintendo to play it on, you'd better start saving now!

Finally! Mario II's been propping up the Nintendo charts for many months, and now Mario III's out I confidently expect it to sell by the jumbo-jetful - and it deserves to! Mario is a truly brilliant game, combining a massive amount of depth with totally superb playability. Featuring many devious platform traps and puzzles that rely both on brains and reflexes, Mario is simply a truly classic game. The graphics, though quite simple, are incredibly varied and there are hundreds of excellent enemy sprites, each with their own behaviour pattern. The sound is superb too, with a special sound chip built into the cart to provide some excellent bongo drum samples! Having completed Mario IV, I expected this to be a doddle - not a bit of it! In some aspects it's even better than the Super Famicom game, and in the playability department it makes Sega's Sonic look poor by the comparison. In my view, Mario III is THE game for the Nintendo and is worth every last penny!

Another game I recently revisited on the GBA. All the fond memories came rushing back. I was quite late to the party with this game having been a late-comer to the NES scene. My early allegiance to Sega almost made me miss out on this gem. So good was this game that on a hot summers day in the 6 weeks school hols I ran an power extension into my back garden and played through all the levels in one day!

There is something so special about this title. Nintendo really got it spot on. Never too hard to put you off but you had to keep your wits about you for some of the demanding platform sections. Cheery music, stunning graphics for the NES, a great variety of enemies and bosses and fab level design with loads of hidden goodies made this a game to go back to time and time again.

Next to Super Mario World on the SNES and Streetfighter II this is the highest rated game in Mean Machines. Totally deserved too!