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Super Mario Bros 1 is hard as shit
- Thread starter Amory
- Start date
WTF I can´t believe that, it is true, the end is near :S
chickdigger802
Banned
man i completely forgot the pattern of that one castle with the repeating level unless you go the correct path :/
SEGAvangelist
Member
Those games require completely different skills sets, though. I think if you don't grow up playing platformers then it will be hard to play them when you're older. Kinda like playing piano really. There is a certain comfort level you gain as a child.
Super Mario Bros 1 isn't that hard. In fact, because of that, I tend to do self imposed challenges when I play that game, such as only beating the game with Small Mario, using Small Firey Mario as much as possible, etc. If you want a REAL challenge though, beat Super Mario Bros with your feet! That took me a long time, and I couldn't do it without the continue code...
Oh and of course, Lost Levels is both a harder and better game imo!
Oh and of course, Lost Levels is both a harder and better game imo!
Heh not really, there's a difference between Mario being invincible and having virtually limitless retries on levels. It's pretty obvious Nintendo keeps one-ups for nostalgia purpose now.
me too I was 5 years old , piece of cake
SEGAvangelist
Member
We sure tried to beat them. Not many of us did... but those people exist for sure.
bitoriginal
Member
Out of interest, how does Super Mario Land on the Game Boy compare to the difficulty of Super Mario Bros on the NES? I remember I used to be able to beat Super Mario Land quite easily when I was like 8 years old. Just googled it's release date, it would have been closer to 5.
Pretty sure I was like 5 when I beat it. Beat the game more times than I can remember. It's tough in the later areas, but nothing impossible. If you haven't met anyone who's beat it... I don't even know what to say. It wasn't like Ninja Gaiden or Contra or anything. There's a reason why it ushered in a new gaming area and if it was that brutally hard, I don't think many people would have gotten into it. My dad could even beat the game and he's not a gamer. Mario was pretty much the only thing he was interested it for the NES.
Wonko_C
Member
Modern games require a different skillset. I eat Contra for breakfast but if you give me Halo on Heroic or higher difficulty I will quickly give up on it and never look back. Hell I struggled just trying to finish it on Normal, I hate those games. oldmanyellsatcloudgivemequakeanyday.
Lupin the Third
Member
Good, because it's fake.
Ace Harding
Member
I beat SMB1 at around 7 or 8 YO.
My 7-year old nephew tried playing it recently on my 3DS. He's completed the first set of worlds in SM 3D Land and is like halfway through the special worlds with like hundreds of lives left. He thinks he's totally awesome at video games. He couldn't beat World 1 in SMB1 (after a bunch of tries) and was shocked when it was just game over.
He was also so confused when he saw a mushroom disappear to the left side of the screen. He walked back to the left, hit the "no backtracking wall," and looked up at me like WTF. "How do I walk back to get that?"
My 7-year old nephew tried playing it recently on my 3DS. He's completed the first set of worlds in SM 3D Land and is like halfway through the special worlds with like hundreds of lives left. He thinks he's totally awesome at video games. He couldn't beat World 1 in SMB1 (after a bunch of tries) and was shocked when it was just game over.
He was also so confused when he saw a mushroom disappear to the left side of the screen. He walked back to the left, hit the "no backtracking wall," and looked up at me like WTF. "How do I walk back to get that?"
tiggerkiddo
Member
Good luck with Lost Levels, now that was a hella frustrating game. I think I was losing over 30 lives easily on some of the latter levels.
ElectricBlanketFire
Member
Current speed-run time is 5:44. I refuse to look up videos and tips to see how to go faster. Want to figure it out myself.
Wtf are you talking about? With warp zones its pretty easy.
Manmademan
Member
sure. most games we're beatable with practice. But there were a few that seemed to exist only to sell game genies.
I have no time for it because of work, some social activities like going out with friends and movies and mostly because I have a huge steam and 3ds Backlog
captmcblack
Member
I never beat SMB1 on my own until I played SMB DX on Game Boy Color...but not because the game was some impossibly difficult thing when I was a kid. I could easily make world 8 without dying - just couldn't handle multihammer Hammer Bros and Lakitu combo levels until I was more skilled (also, other games started taking my attention).
Today's gamer might think that the NES classics that just dropped you in and let you play are impossible. I shudder to think what my 13-year old sister or cousins would think about trying to play something like The Guardian Legend, lol.
Today's gamer might think that the NES classics that just dropped you in and let you play are impossible. I shudder to think what my 13-year old sister or cousins would think about trying to play something like The Guardian Legend, lol.
Of curse I have beaten it. Didn't even think it was hard back then. Not sure how old I was. Maybe 8?
Captain Smoker
Member
I think the wording is bad here.
People can finish the first level of course, they just may die once or twice until they accomplish this.
I was 8 when this came out. I beat it after a couple of weeks of playing it but didnt use warps as I was not aware of them. It was subsequent play throughs were I would fuck around and find stuff. Hell, for a long time, I didnt even know that you could press down to enter a pipe. Figured that out purely by accident, and good thing too since its needed to finish the game.
Omegasquash
Member
This was the game that tons of folks today cut their teeth on. Beating it was par for the course, like using the potty all by yourself or learning to swim. Feels good when you first do it and definitely a milestone, but it's routine at this point.
Edit: Also I was 8. That's when I got it.
Edit: Also I was 8. That's when I got it.
Fun fact: Japanese Mario 3 does this too, US Mario 3 doesn't.
Pretty amazing that your list of reasons behind Mario 1's difficulty doesn't include the lack of continues! That's a pretty huge change from the original to SMB2J. It's mitigated quite a bit by the warp pipes, though.
Yeah I beat it. I was really young and don't remember my exact age. I've never done it without warps. In hindsight it was pretty hard. I remember having to redo the level 8 sections repeatedly until I had the levels memorized to avoid death. There was a lot of trail and error that doesn't really exist today as there is the existence of saves, continues, more lives, and increased check points. What I did was the infinite life trick before making it to 8 in order to have enough continues from the last level.
Space Runaway
Member
Personally I think it's one of the easier, if not the easiest, Mario of the Nes era.
terrisus
Member
This.
1-1->1-2->4-1->4-2->8-1
The real way to do it, though, is without warp zones.
I used beating it without warp zones as a way to test out my Uninterruptable Power Supply. (I made it)
And, I'm 30 now. Beat it at many points, starting around 5.
Mr. Poolman
Member
I beat that game when I was a kid, I'm pretty sure I can still run World 8 without breaking a sweat, I know these levels better than my own city.
Well, you're really bad at gaming or at Mario in general. I'm 35, I've beaten it when I was 13, I've beaten it again some years later on the GBC remake. I think I'd beat it again now. If you complain about certain things (like reverting from flower to small mario on hit) it seems to me you've most likely played other Marios before SMB
Dion Blaster
Member
Mario platformers are exponentially harder if you're playing on a an HDTV with lag.
Conciliator
Banned
How many of you guys beat SMB1 as a kid without warp zones? When I hear people say that I'm always impressed, but I forget about the 15 minute warp zone route.
Went back and beat it on an emulator when I was like 22 or something I guess. Magnificent game. It is pretty tough although I don't know that it would be much harder that super mario world if it had like world-saves.
Went back and beat it on an emulator when I was like 22 or something I guess. Magnificent game. It is pretty tough although I don't know that it would be much harder that super mario world if it had like world-saves.
Cosmo Clock 21
Banned
Didn't beat any of the platformers - SMB1-3, SMW, DKC1-3, SM64, Zelda 64, etc until I was in like middle school. I'd always get stuck at some point and refused to play further. Eventually I managed to get over myself and beat all of them over a relatively short timespan.
I cut my gaming teeth on the N64 and PS1, so I haven't played this game all that much. In fact, the first time I ever actually owned it was on 3DS through the Ambassador program. I haven't beaten it, but I also haven't really put in the effort. I think the save-state I have used no warp zones, but it did use the continue code. Mostly because I play that game in particular very carelessly, constantly moving forward and with the B button practically glued down, even if I don't know the level. The last stage I remember making it to was a castle that I got stuck on because I didn't know the path sequence and got it wrong too many times and ran out of time. I didn't feel like doing any more trial and error, so I put it down for a bit.
It's relatively easy for an NES game, but it's still harder in some ways than many popular modern games. Part of me thinks that there were more hard games back then that were popular because they were still simple to figure out the basics. Like, sure we can call a modern FPS campaign on normal difficulty "easy", but just the act of moving, viewing, and interacting with the world is much more complex with the dual analog, aiming, shooting, reloading, and all the rest. SMB's basic actions are: walk, run, jump, chuck fireball. Literally every possible interaction between Mario and everything else in the game can be described by one of those (and collision in general).
EDIT: PK Gaming, there are literally infinite continues. Just hold A and press Start after a game over, and you'll start back on the first level of the world. (i.e. start at 4-1 if you died on 4-4)
It's relatively easy for an NES game, but it's still harder in some ways than many popular modern games. Part of me thinks that there were more hard games back then that were popular because they were still simple to figure out the basics. Like, sure we can call a modern FPS campaign on normal difficulty "easy", but just the act of moving, viewing, and interacting with the world is much more complex with the dual analog, aiming, shooting, reloading, and all the rest. SMB's basic actions are: walk, run, jump, chuck fireball. Literally every possible interaction between Mario and everything else in the game can be described by one of those (and collision in general).
EDIT: PK Gaming, there are literally infinite continues. Just hold A and press Start after a game over, and you'll start back on the first level of the world. (i.e. start at 4-1 if you died on 4-4)
Conciliator
Banned
Come on dude.
Confusatron
Member
I beat this game almost daily. It's a good way to kill about 10 minutes a day.
Dark Octave
Banned
It was challenging but I didn't think it was that difficult.
Maybe things will be different if I tried to play it today.
Maybe things will be different if I tried to play it today.