Most old-school gamers, if asked, name
Super Mario Bros. 3 as their favorite of the mustachioed plumber's 8-bit outings. Not me.
Don't get me wrong, I think
Super Mario Bros. 3 is a swell game--more than swell, actually--but if I was forced at gunpoint--hey, it could happen--to choose between it and the game that we in the Western world know as
Super Mario Bros. 2 (in Japan they call it
Super Mario Bros. USA, in case you haven't heard), I would, with just a smidge of hesitation, go with the latter.
Why? Well, I love its graphical style, for starters. Everything just looks, I don't know,
softer in this game than it does in its predecessor and successor.
Other things I love about this rather awesome (in my opinion, of course)
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic re-imagining:
* For the first and only time in a mainline
Mario game, you can choose to play as Peach and Toad as well as Mario and Luigi. (I almost always go with Peach, by the way. What a shocker, right?)
* Any and all of the aforementioned characters can pluck stuff--turnips and other veggies, mainly--from the ground and throw it at the game's many enemies.
* It introduced a number of inventive and imaginative characters--including Birdo, Bob-omb, Shy Guy and Snifit--into the Mario canon.
There are many additional reasons to love this, er, dreamy platformer, of course, but those mentioned above are the ones that keep me coming back to it time and time again (often at the expense of its predecessor and successor).
