Hotel Mario (CD-i) Playthrough
490A playthrough of Philips' 1994 action-puzzle game for the Philips' CD-i, Hotel Mario.
This video shows the entire game played through without warping, and it includes all of the cutscenes. Here are timestamps for each of the hotels:
1. Morton's Wood Door Hysteria Hotel 1:10
2. Roy's HardBrick Hotel 13:10
3. Larry's Chillton Hotel 29:53
4. Lemmy's High-ate Regency Hotel 46:02
5. Ludwig's Thump Castle Hotel 1:04:40
6. Wendy's Blitz Snarlton Hotel 1:28:56
7. Bowser's Seizures Palace Hotel 2:00:07
And since I didn't take the warp in the playthrough, I show it and its cutscene at 2:59:50.
I thought that a playthrough of Hotel Mario would make for a fun way to say thank you to everybody who has supported the channel over the years. It's really humbling to think just how big a milestone 250,000 subscribers is, and I lack the words to express just how much I truly appreciate you guys.
Thank you.
That being said, why Hotel Mario? Memes aside, it has gone largely ignored and forgotten over the past thirty years. However, that's precisely the point. It's an officially licensed Mario game that very few people have played, and because of that, I thought that a playthrough would aptly reflect the meaning behind the channel's name.
Hotel Mario is an arcade style platformer/puzzler. There are seventy-five stages spanning seven hotels, and each is ruled by one of the Koopa kids. The goal of each stage is to close all the doors as you avoid being creamed by the roaming bad guys and the strict time limit.
Mario can move between floors using the elevators and collect coins and power-up items by checking behind closed doors. Super mushrooms, fire flowers, and invincibility stars are particularly welcome since Mario has to do a lot of fighting - if you don't clear out the enemies, they'll reopen the shut doors as they walk by.
It's a simple concept that hearkens back to the design sensibilities of some of the biggest hits of the early 1980s, and in many ways, Hotel Mario pays homage to both the original Mario Bros. arcade game and Super Mario Bros.
If the game had been created by (or under the direction of) Nintendo themselves and released on a viable platform for action games, I think that it would've had the potential to become a minor hit - a sibling to games like Wario's Woods, Yoshi, and Yoshi's Cookie.
Hotel Mario had no such advantages, though. It was a product of an agreement that gave Philips the right to produce their own games based on Nintendo's IPs. Neither Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (https://youtu.be/M52zKfu-cHk) nor Link: The Faces of Evil (https://youtu.be/iPn3LIe2e3w) impressed the year before, and Hotel Mario didn't fare much better when it came out in the spring of 1994.
It, like the Zelda games, feels like a game built on good intentions and a love of the source material. The developers were ambitious in their aims and clearly wanted to please the fans, but alas. Nintendo's lack of involvement is immediately made evident in the game's underwhelming production values and amateurish look, and Hotel Mario makes it glaringly obvious that the CD-i hardware was not designed to be a game console.
The famous cutscenes are uniformly terrible. Their quality is leagues behind even the cheapest TV animation of the time, but that's exactly what makes them so much fun to watch.
The actual gameplay isn't quite as easy to appreciate, though. The mouse and the CD-i remote render the game virtually unplayable, and though the Gravis gamepad does improve things somewhat, the controls with it are still sloppy and maddeningly imprecise.
They seem to work well enough at the beginning. The first couple of hotels make for a reasonably fun time, but by the third, things quickly begin to fall apart. The controls actively get in the way of your attempts to juggle the random stage gimmicks, the time limit, the choppy framerate, and the game's tendency to throw an absurd number of things at you at once. It becomes a thoroughly joyless experience past the first half-hour or so.
The in-game graphics and sound are nice, at least. The high-resolution sprites and backgrounds are sharply detailed, there are some fun new takes on standard Mario enemies (Elvis Goomba!), and the soundtrack is a pleasant enough way to fill the gaps between sound effects.
Hotel Mario is more a novelty than it is something you'd actually want to play, but it is a part of Mario's history, and I think that is enough to warrant the effort to document it thoroughly.
Hope you all enjoy it, and again, thank you guys for making all of this possible!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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