A playthrough of Nintendo's 1999 platformer for the Game Boy Color, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe.

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is a precursor to the Super Mario Advance series of remakes of older Mario titles for the GBA, featuring a heavily upgraded conversion of the 1985 NES launch title Super Mario Bros.

There is a lot of content packed into this one-megabyte cart. It's amazing just how much mileage Nintendo got out of the base game here!

0:23 "Original 1985" mode features a port of SMB, now with overworld map screens and the option to play as Mario or Luigi.

40:10 "You vs. Boo" mode has Mario racing against Boo through two stages per world, all newly populated with colored block switches that Boo activates to hinder you.

47:30 "For Super Players" mode, a bonus unlocked by beating the game in 1985 mode, features a port of the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, known as "The Lost Levels" in the US. This version ends at 8-4 since Worlds 9 and A-D were removed, the wind has been removed from any stages that originally included it, and it borrows assets from the first game rather than using the original's unique tile designs.

1:30:38 The challenge mode is where most of the new content can be found. Each stage now has three special challenges: to find all five red coins, to find the hidden Yoshi egg, and to beat the preset high score.

(Just a heads-up: the challenge mode was not all recorded at once. There's no way I'd be able to clear every single one on the first attempt in a single sitting, so I edited out the many times I had to restart a stage. It makes for a much easier-to-watch video.)

2:32:52 And finally, all of the achievement-style goodies that you unlock over the course of the game can be found in the Album and Toy Box areas. The album is filled with art that can be printed from the Game Boy Printer if you have one connected, and the toy box has a few neat gimmicky things, like a fortune teller and a (very useful) roulette game that will give you hints as to where to find the hidden Yoshi eggs.

I remember buying this when it first came out and being completely blown away by how much stuff had been added to the base game. There was a lot of value to be found here for a $30 Game Boy game! I was expecting a straight port from the NES, and this was a really nice surprise.

The game itself is faithfully reproduced here, and the bugs in the original have been fixed, though that does mean that the minus stages are no longer accessible. The graphics are pixel-perfect representations of their NES counterparts, it sounds exactly the same 99% of the time, and the controls immediately feel comfortable and familiar. The battery-backed save files are also a really nice addition. It *almost* qualifies as the definitive version of Super Mario Bros.

So if everything is so good, why almost? Well, there's one big hiccup that nearly upturns the entire ship: the screen crunch. The GBC's screen runs at a far lower resolution than the NES puts out, but the graphics haven't been scaled or redrawn. They are exact replicas of the originals, and since the GBC's screen resolution is only about 60% of what the NES displays, everything is super zoomed-in on the handheld's screen.

You can adjust the camera with the up and down buttons, but let's be real: there's no ideal fix for an issue like this. There are far too many blind jumps to make, and it's easy to fall prey to traps that you would've seen coming from miles away on the NES. Until you know the stage layouts cold, you'll find yourself getting very frustrated very quickly, *especially* at the SMB2 levels, many of which were already verging on being too difficult before this new handicap was introduced. Remember the Sonic games on Game Gear? All the same problems they suffered due to the limited resolution are on full display here, too.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Super Mario Bros. Deluxe back when it was new, and it is still a lot of fun to pop in now for a quick game. The awful view distance is just too limiting, though, and it ends up undermining much of the value that the package would've otherwise provided. If only they had redrawn the graphics, or better yet, waited to put it on the GBA instead!

I don't know how difficult it would be to rejig the game for a higher resolution display, or how feasible it would be to extract its level data for use in a new remake, but I'd happily buy it again if Nintendo fixed that one issue and put it on the Switch store as a $10 download-only game.

It's classic Mario all the way, but it's just so disappointing to see this GBC title, brimming with the potential to become the best version of SMB, become the worst official port of the game Nintendo has ever released thanks to a single poor design choice.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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