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 (This is why I can't stand An American Tail, if you just FUCKING TURNED AROUND FOR ONCE this shit would be over sooner)
AWFUL GAMING
Mario Is Missing
Developer - Radical Entertainment/The Software Toolworks
Publisher - Mindscape
Genre - Educational/Puzzle
Year - 1993
System - NES/SNES/PC
Despite the greatness that is Mario, no hero would be perfect without some dark stains on his soul, even if they are sometimes outshined by the great acts they perform unto the world. But we never forget, and some of us may never forgive. After Super Mario World, Mario became a motherfucking marketing machine, a triple M if you will. And one of the terrible results, but not THE most terrible, was this educational number.
Also, I am reviewing ALL THREE VERSIONS of this game, so you better fucking enjoy this.
Story - All three versions agree on one thing. Mario is missing. But how he turns missing is different for every version. In the NES version, Bowser clumsily throws a huge sack over him. In the SNES, Mario falls down a trap hole. In the PC version, Mario is tricked by Bowser in a butler suit (without any kind of facepaint or facial covering mind) to eat candy and get captured.
And so this would be Luigi's first ever role in the spotlight as the main hero, even if his heroism largely results in having to cross the entire world, preventing the Koopas from stealing priceless artifacts (and weirdly one entirely fictional character) in order to prevent Bowser funding his most fiendish plan. Which is revealed in the PC version as buying a shit ton of hair dryers to melt the South Pole and flood the entire Earth. Why? Because he's fucking Bowser, do you need a reason?
Graphics - We'll do this step by step, starting with each console's version of graphics and upwards. The NES version, graphics wise is actually pretty good, and at the very least as better graphics than the original Super Mario Bros, which does not say much for a game made eight years later.
Mario and Luigi look like their SNES selves, which is something for the NES.
Bowser looks like a mutant, the koopas look like they were from the SNES and the rest of the people across the world.....well they can be sorted into five types. New York Cop, Reporter Woman, Useless Tourist, Jaundiced Kid, and Monica from Friends. The buildings are all very ugly and non-distinct from each other and you will be using the map a LOT.
 (Ironic I think that she looks like Monica, because this area is supposed to be New York. Seriously)
The SNES and PC versions are significantly better with appropriate different backdrops and buildings for every city, moreso in the PC version which does a decent job of making each city look actually different from the other so you can clearly see when you're in the USA or Kenya or Britain or Japan, and so forth. The people however are a more different matter.
The cop is now female with a slightly retarded face, the kid no longer has jaundice, the tourist is now black for some reason, the reporter is still a woman and Monica from Friends has been replaced with a younger kinder-looking Dr Wily.
Bowser however is just absolutely fucking horrendous. He doesn't even look like a reptile, he looks like a fucking pig that's trying to cosplay as Bowser, or some kind of Pokemon reject.
Is it really that hard to do Bowser, when you have Mario, Luigi, Yoshi and the Koopas all sorted out. I mean how can you not just ask Nintendo for the permission to use the sprites, because you're already practically doing that? Hell the NES Bowser version looks the best because he at least looks like a goddamn reptile! Oh also, the Koopalings are in the SNES and PC versions, and in the SNES they look fucking terrible.
 ("IT'S WEEGEE TIME! "NO DAD NO!" Bizarro-Bowser had a cruel childhood, especially when he's this fucking ugly)
In the PC version they look more like themselves, which is just more confusing in how they managed to look good but not their big daddy. The PC version also has Weegee, which makes Luigi either a total badass or the creepiest a man can ever look without being an actual paedophile.
Because, seriously, why do paedos all have the same look? You know the look I mean, I'd wanna say Ted Bundy kinda made that popular, but he was just a run-of-the-mill serial killing rapist, far apart from your good ol' kiddy fiddler. Either way, Weegee has that look and it is terrifying. We will call him Weegee in the PC because that is not Luigi.
Gameplay - All the games have the exact same gameplay mechanic. You travel to different cities, using pipes from various doors in Bowser's Antarctic Castle, find the Koopas who robbed the priceless artifacts, return them to the appropriate places, return back to the castle, and repeat ad nauseum until you reach Bowser.
There are some slight differences in each one, but a few things remain the same, such as Yoshi.
Yoshi not only grants you faster travelling around the city, but also in the SNES and PC versions, allows you to leave the city by eating the Pokey that blocks your way out. Yoshi can be obtained in each city by first knowing where the hell you are, then guiding Yoshi on a map to the appropriate city.
 (Sadly, Yoshi would not learn how to fly out of horrendous worlds like this one, until 17 years later)
The NES is the laziest with only three koopas in each city you have to find and destroy to get the artifacts back. You then return the artifact to their proper place, even selecting them first in the inventory, and you are then asked a question about the artifact itself to validate the fact you actually have the item, an interesting different method than just showing the item off in front of them and going "BITCH I GOT YOUR FUCKING ARTIFACT RIGHT HERE!"
Then you get money which is your score in the game and after returning them all you get to leave through one of the many pipes in the city, and you will only be able to leave when you actually have returned them all, or otherwise the pipe just teleports you to somewhere else in the city.
The SNES version is middle of the road in everything and is probably the best of all the versions for being not as bullshit, of a good length, and upping the difficulty some. Firstly, there are now koopas EVERYWHERE and only three of them drop the artifacts. You have no indication which is which so you have to essentially hunt down all of them. Thankfully you have a small GPS showing the area around you to give you less reason to open up the map about 60% of the time.
When you return the artifact, you are instead grilled with not one but TWO questions, and this time, if you answer incorrectly, you will be made to wait a short time by the bitch at the tourist office (who, for some bizarre reason, is Princess Peach at every single fucking tourist booth in the world that you go to) before you can answer again. This MIGHT be a problem if you cared about getting a score, of which you can get added points by having any remaining time left on your counter by the time you leave.
 ("Ante gamisou, puta." Which is Greek for "Go fuck yourself, bitch." THE MORE YOU KNOW ====*)
Finally there is the PC version, which despite its highest of quality, is marred by the fact that being on either the Floppy DOS or Deluxe CD-ROM, slows right the fuck down when anything too intensive happens....like every fucking time you enter a city, as well as every fucking time you LEAVE a city. Seriously, how graphics intensive is it to animate Yoshi eating a fucking cactus?
Most of the SNES dynamics are there such as mini-map, two questions per artifact, and Pokeys, but now there are only 3-5 koopas in each city instead, each of them holding an artifact. Problem is the map no longer tells you where people, exit pipes or koopas are, but you can find them by obtaining the Koopa, People or Pokey Tokens.
There is an upside in that you can now navigate around the city much quicker using a limited supply of Cab Tokens, which will automatically be reset to 3 every time you leave the city, giving you no excuse to save them. Lastly they made artifact retrieving more obtuse, by making you have to CALL them with your phone, even if you stand outside the fucking tourist booth.
Actually scratch that, that is the ONLY way you can call them. I know cell phones weren't the best in the early 90s, but fucking hell this must be a shit phone Luigi has when he has to basically stand outside the tourist booth, memorise the number on the booth, call the number from 20 yards outside it, get asked two questions on the artifact, fuck up, be forced to wait a while, call back, get two questions right, THEN hand the fucking artifact over to be rewarded, if you want, by a crappy .png image of the exhibit which may or may not consist entirely of an entrance sign.
Oh also, the cities are all in the same fucking order. They NEVER randomise. Joy for predictable educational "value". Lastly, the PC version has a difficulty level you can set from 7 to Adult (which is over 17 years old). I am not sure what this difficulty level does, maybe it makes the questions harder, maybe time runs out faster to give you less points, but either way who gives a space-flying fuck.
 (Toad exhibits the same soulless expression that all call-centre operators share)
Music/Sound - Oh jesus, we're gonna talk on the music huh? Me, the FinalGamer, master of videogame music knowledge from Jesper Kyd to Yoko Shimomura, having to talk about the music in Mario Is Missing. Well....alright then.
The NES soundtrack is just plain fucking terrible. It's practically insulting to the level of racism to each city. But to give some fair credit, each city does have its OWN theme, giving each locale their own little stereotypical blend of unteachable merit. This is however rendered moot by the fact that they fuck up the warp pipe sound, which they DID manage to get in the SNES, but what the fuck, it's the warp pipe, you could have taken it from Super Mario Bros, you took a song from it for the end, how the FUCK do you mess up one of the most iconic sounds of videogames ever!?
The SNES and PC versions have pretty much the same soundtrack down to the same fucking cities, and every song they have is just a different rendition of the Super Mario World level theme. Los Angeles and New York have a crappy slow-jazz version, Beijing and Tokyo have an actually decent-sounding oriental theme and probably the best music in the game, while Rome and Paris have a very classical European-feeling rendition, and so on.
The PC version does have a few extra cities with their own themes, fair enough, but the PC soundtrack has such godawful bad quality compared to the SNES which actually makes the music sound a lot better. That and you will probably have problems hearing it over the groaning continuous hum of your PC struggling to make this thing work (at least it did for me in DOSBox).
 (At least the SNES version had lovely backdrops)
So what HAVE we learned from Mario Is Missing?
1. 92% of all educational games should not be called games unless they are Math Blaster, Pink Panther's Passport To Peril or Typing Of The Dead.
2. Mario had a huge sell-out period in the 90s that thankfully died with the Virtual Boy to a certain extent, and was then more-or-less buried after the CD-i games which Nintendo have officially excluded from gameographies of Mario and Zelda.
3. King Kong does not exist, so fuck you game for trying to confuse me as a kid and potentially causing a lot of failed tests and futures.
4. Luigi a.k.a The Green Thunder a.k.a Mr. L, deserves way better than this shit, something he would not get even close to until 8 years later.
Fun and Innovation - 1
Replayability - 1
Gameplay - 1
Presentation - 2
(A 2 on Presentation if only for the SNES and PC having rather good city backdrops for different places, as well as the NES game having good sprites of Mario and Luigi)"Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto  Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
Groups: Newsie, {pDs} Member
Joined: 6/15/2006
Posts: 594
Points: 486
Location: Scotland, Geographical Penguin Shit
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On an additional note, I will be doing a Let's Play of all three versions of Mario Is Missing, which I will put up on my Youtube channel someday. If anyone's interested you can go ahead and subscribe to me over on - http://www.youtube.com/user/FinalGamerJames"Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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