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Review : Super Mario Advance 3 : Yoshi's Island
Last week I was so blown away with Super Mario Advance 4 : Super Mario Bros 3 that I figured that I just plain needed more 16-bit Mario action on my Gameboy Advance so I found a used copy of Super Mario Advance 3 : Yoshi's Island.
This is a direct port of the mostly ignored and forgotten Super Nintendo game but it really feels like a brand new Gameboy Advance game.
You see ever since the days of the Nes Nintendo has created new chips to include in the game cartridges that could be used to upgrade the capabilities of the hardware. The Nes would not have gotten the success that it did without it. You know why later games like Super Mario 3 and Castlevania 3 Dracula's Curse looked way better than earlier Nes games like Pro Wrestling and Excitabike? New more powerful graphics chips in the freaking carts. Fast forward a couple years into the 16-bit era of the Super Nintendo and the only real upgrades that we saw were increasing the storage capacity of the cartridge. But Nintendo did develop a very privative 3d chip that was used in Star Fox called the Super FX chip if I recall. Then Nintendo developed a Super FX chip that allowed the scaling an real time deformations of 2d graphic elements.
This was used in the creation of Yoshi's Island the sequel to Super Mario World. The problem was that it finally came out in 1995 after the launch of the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation. Nintendo made one of the most artistic and visually impressive 16-bit game ever but they did it after the 32-bit era started and most of the audience ignored it. This really bothered Shigeru Miyamoto and he sort of made a sequel on the N-64 years later and it is poetic justice that this game find a new audience on the Gameboy Advance and finally be enjoyed as it should.
Remember the weird dinosaur that Mario rode in Super Mario World names Yoshi that could eat baddies with it's frog like tongue and then instantly eat them and pop out an egg that would be full of a power up item? Well the entire game is about a who cast of them trying to unite Baby Luigi with Baby Mario. This game's plot is freaking weird and the execution is freaking weird in fact there is nothing not freaking weird about this game.
So in this game you play a Yoshi, Not Mario but you have to keep baby Mario on your back at all times. If you get hit Baby Mario will float away in a magical bubble and if you do not get him back soon magical evil hooded flying turtles will capture him and you will lose a life. That make sense? No well to bad. You have to eat bad guys and then pop them out as magical eggs that follow you around like a freaky hopping egg tail. You can then throw these eggs at a different angles to kill other baddies and to solve puzzles.
One might think that Sega's Yuji Naka was the first to really explore surreal cartoon egg based video game action in Billy Hatcher on Gamecube but Shigeru Miyamoto was doing that back in 1995 with Yoshi's island. I guess it is really obvious that neither company is rigorous about drug testing their employees.
The graphics were one of the first real experiments in different artistic rendering styles. Nintendo wanted to try using hard cartoony hand drawn graphics that looked rough and hard edged. This is pretty interesting compared to the some what overworked Japanese animation styles of other games. This was used with scaled and rotated sprites to come up with a very unique looking game. The weird cel-shaded graphics of Legend of Zelda the Windwaker and Sega's Jet Grid Radio might have had their genesis here.
The gameplay and difficultly curve is just what one would expect from a Mario game. It is easy to pick up in the first couple levels and really challenging the more you get into it. The graphics are full of spiffy 2d graphics effects and it really felt more like a 32-bit 2d game. OK the Gameboy Advance is a 32-bit system but the Super NES game looked just like this with very few changes.
Technically this is not a new game. Since I never got threw the Super Nintendo version I am having a blast playing the Gameboy Advance version.
This is probably Miyamoto's weirdest and wackiest 2d game and that is really saying a lot. If you have never played through the Snes game and you love your Mario than you really owe it to yourself to check this out.
Jake at October 26, 2003 
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Comments
For proof of the proliferation of secret drug use at Nintendo, you don't have to play any further than the "Eat Puffy, Get Dizzy" stage of this game.
Magic Mushrooms indeed!
This is a great game - the challenge level ramps up nicely, and constantly throws new challenges at you. And I love the butt-wiggle tribal shyguys. :D
Posted by: Chris at October 27, 2003 6:11 AM
Such an awesome game.
Funny that you should mention it now, as I was just thinking of its visual style while playing Viewiful Joe. And the game itself is a blast -- the egg-firing mechanics are Miyamoto perfect. I wonder why the n64 sequel was so abysmal?
Posted by: Trapp at October 27, 2003 6:26 AM
This may be a bit heretical, but i think Yoshi's Island is better than Mario world 3, it I think it just may be the best side scrolling platformer ever.
I finished Yoshi's Island about 3 months ago on the GBA, and it was just as good as the first time around n the SNES. I picked up Mario Advance 4 last Friday and will be splitting my time between that and Crimson Skies (for Xbox) and may very well fall back in love with Racoon Mario. Who knows.
I suppose my point is that Yoshi's Island certainly is/was highly ignored, and it shouldn't have been. It's quality stuff and worth the $29.
Posted by: Dan at October 27, 2003 6:51 AM
This is definitely on my "must-get" list for GBA. Since getting a gameboy player, that list has been expanding at an astronmical rate.. ;)
Posted by: wuji at October 27, 2003 7:19 AM
I really dislike Yoshi's Island. It's not as bad as SMB2 (which of course wasn't really a SMB in the first place) but its cutsyness is a bit on the grating side. And plus I never liked Yoshi as a character. His presence in any Mario game always annoys me.
SMB3 and Super Mario World are nearly perfect games...both are superior in every imaginable way to Yoshi's Island.
Posted by: jason at October 27, 2003 7:20 AM
Technically...yoshi's island was supposed to look like donkey kong country, but miyamoto was so pissed off at that requirement that he made it look even more cartoony, guess it pays to be miyamoto when you bring nintendo the big bucks...anyway, yoshi's island is the best incarnation of a 2d platformer ever created.
Posted by: Ben at August 2, 2004 5:37 AM
