Arcade Archives Mario Bros. (Switch) Review

Retro gaming is such a funny thing. So many older games, by today’s standards, are simple. Outpaced. But so much effort goes into recreating the experience of those older games, To emulate the simpler technology these games ran on as best they can. To purposefully downgrade the fidelity to fool you into thinking you’re a kid, playing these games for the first time. And while the Virtual Console service may be a long while off, Hamster has done an excellent job of recreating a classic arcade experience.

Mario Bros. is an arcade classic, also being the first game to feature the second Mario bro, Luigi. Everything that can be said about this game has already been said, but if you’re somehow unfamiliar with the game, let’s go through a quick summary.

This is a one or two player game, with Mario and Luigi clearing sewers of monsters. The sewer is a few stories tall, with enemies being flipped over by hitting the floor they’re on from underneath, and then needing to be kicked off by touching them. Each enemy has a different moveset, with Shellcreepers (not Koopa Troopas) following a straight forward walk pattern, Sidesteppers taking two hits before they flip, and Fighter Flies hopping around the level, rarely touching the ground. They’ll all start at the top, moving to the bottom, where they’ll enter a pipe back up to the top until you defeat them all.

It’s the sort of gameplay that fits right in at an old school arcade, alongside Donkey Kong or Pac Man… I think, I’m too young to have seen these in the arcade myself. But I did play the game as a kid on my old NES, which is more or less the same, just missing the coin slot.

And to be blunt, if you never enjoyed the original, or if this description sounds bland, you might not find a lot to do here. The selling point of the Arcade Archives is more to do with recreating the original experience as best as possible, and I’m happy to say they’ve done a great job with that, at least.

After the first play through of Mario Bros, I immediately jumped into the options menu, where there’s a huge variety of buttons and knobs to play with. You can set different scan-line filters to the image, along with adjusting the size and even orientation of the screen. Every button is remappable (with a few exceptions), and probably the most impressive to me, is the audio filter settings. I played around with a few, finding one that made the game sound like it was being played from an actual cabinet!

There’s a few different modes to try out as well, with the vanilla mode being the first one I tried. There’s also a high score mode, which tracks your high score until a game over, limiting your credits. Caravan mode is similar, but limits your time to just 5 minutes. The game also has online leaderboards, which is something I’d love to see in Virtual Console titles when they eventually come!

All of these features supplement an already solid, retro game experience. While Mario Bros. is one of the less exciting classic games out there, everything else in this release set a new standard for retro re-releases.

Rating: 4/5