Mario's Time Machine (SNES) Playthrough

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Published on July 8, 2022 4:41:48 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o8akduR1mU

Game:

Mario's Time Machine (1993)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 2:11:39

17,748 views

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A playthrough of The Software Toolwork's 1993 edutainment game for the Super Nintendo, Mario's Time Machine.

Following about six months after the Mario is Missing (https://youtu.be/Y5O6Fy2EOkw), Mario's Time Machine was the second entry in the line-up of educational games starring Mario to be released in the early/mid-1990s. Similar in concept to the enormously popular Where in Time is Carmen SanDiego (https://youtu.be/Uc21kHjbxeg), Mario's Time Machine's goal is to teach kids history in a novel, fun way.

Bowser has sent his Koopalings back in time to amass a collection of historical artifacts, and it's up to Mario to return these items to their rightful owners.

To return an item to its correct place and time, Mario will need to program his time machine and then surf to his location. Yes, surf. For whatever reason, the machine will only activate once he has collected ten mushrooms and fallen into a whirlpool.

Once he has arrived at his destination, the owner of the artifact will not engage with Mario unless he has all of his facts straight, so Mario will need to speak to the locals to get the information.

For each location, Mario has a Mad Libs-style information sheet that must be filled out before he can return the item, and he can get this information by doing simple fetch quests for people in the area.

When the job is done, Mario returns to Bowser's castle to grab another artifact, and this cycle repeats until all fifteen items are back where they belong.

To be honest, it's quite a humdrum experience.

Mario is Missing! was a success largely because it made some effort to feel like a video game. The exploration and platforming were all window-dressing, sure, but it was enough to make it appeal to kids that might've otherwise been reluctant to sit down and learn something.

Mario's Time Machine, on the other hand, feels like a digital textbook. The text is well written but incredibly dry, and though the graphics and the music are good, the locations are tiny, the act of gathering info requires you to (literally) fill out worksheets, and nothing feels like it has anything to do with Mario. There's no princess, no Luigi, no koopa troopas - nothing beyond a few throwaway bits of dialog referencing the fact that Mario's a plumber.

(Well, okay. There is a mildly amusing nod to Hotel Mario at one point.)

But the game's biggest offense has to be the way it punishes you for playing it the way it's meant to be played. The whole game is centered on speaking to people to learn things, but if you take the time to do this, like I did in this playthrough, you get a bad ending and are told to do it all over again. The game never tells you that you're under a strict time limit until you've reached the end, and it feels like a total kick in the teeth.

Imagine how slighted you'd have felt if you were a kid in school who had worked his ass of on a project and your teacher failed you for not meeting a deadline that you were never told about. I'm not aware of any educational theory that promotes setting people up to fail as a good instructional practice, and I have no idea why someone would think this would be a good idea in a game meant to inspire a love for learning in kids.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, there's a different bad ending for not returning the objects in the "correct" order - you have to go from left-to-right on each floor - and again, this is something that the game doesn't tell you about until you've hit the end.

I've included all three endings at the end of the video in case you wanted to see them.

The NES version of Mario's Time Machine (https://youtu.be/tnZ5PukOf_k) was hardly a masterpiece, but it felt like a good, solid effort.

But this one... speaking as a former teacher, I can confidently say that Mario's Time Machine on the SNES is a disrespectul waste of time. Don't bother.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video except for at the end to show the game's different ending sequences.

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