Super Mario World is without a doubt, 100%, a stone-cold lock of an essential game – even though upon release, it wasn’t essential for me.
These sorts of distinctions are important in an exercise such as ranking games, because when you’re talking about games that are, for lack of a better term, essentially perfect, and you’re interested in determining an order of some kind, picking the nits and trying to dig for problems can be, well, a little fruitless.
Take Super Mario World as an example. Am I going to sit here at the outset and say it has microscopic faults that definitively prevent it from finishing higher on my list of retro gaming essentials, picking at stupid things like the color palette being slightly different or the gameplay not quite being the same as the previous games, or any other number of dumb, nitpicky things?
Nah, that would be boring.
It would also be dishonest. Super Mario World is universally beloved as one of the greatest platformers of all time, many consider it to be THE best Mario game of all time, and still others think it’s got an argument as the greatest video game of all time, period.
One of the greatest games of all time? And we’re going to try to find faults with THAT?
I fully believe this game to be borderline perfect, and that is the thing we should focus on: why it is so good.
And of course the real reason why I don’t have it higher than No. 23 on my list …
Well, that comes down to my personal story. And so here is my acknowledgement of how this ranking came to be.
Continue reading Super Mario World: Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 23)Super Mario World
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1991
Platform: SNES
Empire’s greatest game of all-time
