


The only particularly negative thing you can say about Super Mario Land is that it’s far too short, but this series would quickly improve upon that.ġ9. The game looks pretty good for its age and still plays very well. It was an impressive release for 1989, capturing at least the spirit of Mario as Nintendo put in what retroactively proved to be one of his strangest adventures.Ĭlearly, Nintendo didn’t quite know what a Mario 2D platformer should entail at this point, but everything you need for a good time can be found here. While Tetris may have been the bundled game with Nintendo’s mighty new handheld called the Game Boy, Super Mario Land made it clear that Mario would always be a big part of Nintendo’s plans for any given system. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars With that in mind, put on your freshest dungarees and chow down on the ripest mushroom as we reel off the best Mario games ever made. It must be a narrative adventure starring the greatest fictional Italian hero since Rocky Balboa. So that means no Mario Kart, Mario Party, or anything along similar lines.

We’re not going to cover all of that, because only a lunatic would do that, but we are going to look at the very best games with the mustachioed plumber at the center of the adventure. This character has been a fixture across every Nintendo console, appearing in just about every type of video game you can imagine.Įxactly how many Mario games are there? The number varies, depending on what you include, but the number of games simply featuring Mario in some form or fashion numbers in the hundreds. More than that, Mario continues to be as relevant as ever, with a massively successful theatrical film release, new games on the horizon, and the character remaining Nintendo’s first and foremost mascot character. Does Mario even need an introduction? It can be daunting for any ranking of the best Mario games to sum up arguably the most iconic video game character in history.
