Super Mario Land was Nintendo's first Game Boy game featuring their famous plumber, Mario. Forgoing the conventional adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom, Land takes place in Sarasaland, where an alien named Tatanga has kidnapped Princess Daisy. What's that? Princesses in need of rescue? Letsa go.

If you can actually read these words, chances are you're familiar with Mario platforming. Running, jumping on enemies, and throwing superballs (this game's Fire Flower turns you into Superball Mario strangely enough), you navigate your way through stages filled with enemies, bottomless pits and item boxes. This game can be pretty unforgiving at times with it's placements, but ultimately this makes level completion more satisfying. Read more after the jump.



As far as enemies go, you've got your standard Piranha Plants, Goombas and Koopas, although now the Koopas explode after being jumped on, sure to fool long time players at least once. The bosses function much like Bowser did in the first game, you can either defeat them, or avoid them and press a button to beat them. Funnily enough, instead of falling into a pit, bosses anticlimactically explode. This is followed by 'rescuing the princess' (cue the 'Oh! Daisy' title). Needless to say, the game is just as fun as it was when it came out in 1989 (!!!), and while it hasn't aged as gracefully as other titles in the series, Super Mario Land is still a great game.

What makes the 3DS Virtual Console release great however, is that you can actually emulate playing on a Game Boy. By holding Start while launching the application, you can put the game in it's original resolution, and while in game, pressing L+R+Y will change the color scheme to the black/strange-green color of the original Game Boy series. For a guy like me that played this game almost 15 years ago, this makes the game worth the $5.00 purchase by itself. Nintendo did a great job with the VC port process, and I'm really excited to see more original Game Boy games get released on the service, especially Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, which was my first game, and the first appearance of Wario in the series.

Overall: B+
Super Mario Land - $4.99 on 3DS Virtual Console