Super Mario Advance (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough

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Published on September 7, 2023 8:31:22 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z6M8ncQxb8

Game:

Super Mario Advance (2001)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 3:27:54

3,851 views

178

A playthrough of Nintendo's 2001 platformer for the Game Boy Advance, Super Mario Advance.

0:54 Playthrough w/all red coins
1:43:15 Extra mode playthrough w/all Yoshi eggs
3:00:40 Mario Bros. playthrough

Super Mario Advance, a 32-bit remake of the 1988 NES hit Super Mario Bros. 2 (https://youtu.be/v3YZnbT02P8), was a launch title for the Game Boy Advance, and the second game in a series of handheld remakes of Mario console games following the 1999 Game Boy Color release of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (https://youtu.be/V3FAsFHYQ2c).

The GBA game is largely derived from the Super Mario All-Stars version of Mario 2 (https://youtu.be/tJ3Iddc7zrg), though it also incorporates a few elements from the game's 1996 Satellaview spin-off, BS Super Mario USA Power Challenge.

The 8-bit Game Boy machines had long dominated the handheld market, but the Game Boy Color was a dinosaur in 2001. When Super Mario Advance was pushed as a showcase of the power of Nintendo's latest handheld, it impressed everyone with its generational leap in graphics and sound.

Super Mario Advance's colorful backgrounds, large sprites, and sample-based music all helped to create the impression that the GBA was a portable SNES, and the tweaks made to the presentation and the addition of a few new challenges gave the game a fresh coat of paint.

It was a hugely popular release that brought an entire new generation of fans into the Mario fold, and I suspect that this was Nintendo's true goal with the Super Mario Advance series all along.

I say this because it never seemed to me that Nintendo was particularly interested in engaging those who had grown up playing the game. Super Mario Advance is a good game overall, but from my perspective as an 80s/90s kid, it's also the worst way to play Super Mario Bros. 2.

And the reason? As was the case with Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, Super Mario Advance suffers from screen crunch. The NES and SNES both run at higher resolutions than the GBA screen can display, and the graphics weren't scaled down to accommodate the difference. The playfield is vertically cropped, making it so that you have to hold a button to move the camera when you need to see what's above or below you, and the screen constantly rubberbands back and forth on its horizontal axis as it attempts to keep your character at the center of the screen.

If Super Mario Advance was how you first experienced the game, you probably wouldn't ever think that anything was amiss, but as a long-time player, the change immediately stuck out to me and really hurt the experience. The paltry selection of extras (especially when compared to SMB Deluxe's wealth of new content), and the addition of irritating voice clips, oversized turnips, and Robot Birdo were not enough to compensate for such a heavy compromise in my mind. The GBA game's bugs didn't help much either.

I'm not a fan of the included remake of the original Mario Bros. game (https://youtu.be/Qn5z1x9N_jE), either. It looks nice, but it suffers even more from the screen crunch than SMB2, and the difficulty level is dumbed down so far that the game hardly even feels worth playing.

I didn't much care for Super Mario Advance, if you couldn't already tell, but I understand why its fans come to its defense. There's something magical about the charms of a game that serves as your gateway to a cultural phenomenon like the Super Mario series, and as I said earlier, I imagine that a lot of people view Super Mario Advance through that lens.

*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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