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Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 Review - GBA

Ever since the beginning, Mario has always appeared on a Nintendo console. He is mostly remembered from his NES classic Super Mario Bros. which saw Mario, and his younger brother Luigi, fight his way through the Mushroom Kingdom by jumping on enemies and hitting them with fireballs. Their main goal was to restore peace in the kingdom by rescuing Princess Peach who had been kidnapped by the evil Koopa king, Bowser. Since then, every Mario game has mainly focused on Mario rescuing Peach with a few exceptions.

Now we have Super Mario Advance 2 which is, like the first Super Mario Advance game, a remake of an old Mario classic game. Sure it offers younger gamers the chance to experience the older and arguably the best Mario games out there but one must wonder, when will Nintendo make an all new Mario adventure on the GBA?

Gameplay

Super Mario Advance 2 (A.K.A. Super Mario World) is set on Dino Island where Mario, Luigi and Peach have taken flight to, to have a vacation. During an FMV sequence, players will find Mario and Peach arrive on Dino Island where they meet Luigi. Mario and Luigi decide to have some fun and leave Princess Peach alone for a while and then in typical Mario fashion, Bowser kidnaps her. Players will then take control of Mario and Luigi and set out to find her.

In SMA2 (Super Mario Advance 2), you'll find that Dino Island has many different areas to explore including open range areas and underground areas. While the areas may appear to be the same, players will often find that most of them are different. At first the overall ground and sky appearance will remain the same fooling you but as time progresses, you'll discover that the landscape starts to change dramatically. This brings new challenge as the game progresses and will indeed make the game harder to complete towards the end. The major difference in landscapes would be from a flat ground type level with very few major challenges to levels that involve timing in coordinates to your jumps to reach platforms or otherwise, resulting in you loosing a life. Also, don't be surprised if you find a few hidden features in the levels such as locations where there are a lot of coins up for grabs.

The levels have one main goal in this game, and that is to reach the goal post before time runs out or suffer one less life in your life metre. Besides this, the next, main goal you'll face is to survive by jumping on enemies (there are two ways of doing this with either a normal jump or a spin jump), shooting enemies or flying/running straight to the goal without exploring the level. Depending on what item you have, it will limit what you can and can't do in the level so at times you may not be able to go where you want to (continued next page)