it's a mario!

Until Saturday I had never played Super Mario Brothers.

Well, that's not strictly true. In fact, it's not at all true now that I think about it - I had a super mario game on the original gameboy.

But that was in green and black and on a tiny, tiny screen. The only other mario game I've played was a thing released for the Amiga that was more like bubble-bobble if you've ever heard of that. It was a single screen thing where you used to have to kill baddies that came out of pipes on fixed platform single-screen play areas.

You see, the problem was my family was always towards the poorer side of middle class. I don't actually know quite how they decide on classes - I don't think we were working class, but then we didn't seem to be as well off as all my friends families at school.

So where all my friends had all sorts of games systems as they grew up (I remember there was the divide between Nintendo and Sega fans, a bit like X-Box versus Playstation nowadays) I kinda missed out on all that.

So as I say, I thought I'd never really played a mario game - certainly I've never played the 'classics' back in the NES and SNES eras. (I've definitely never played Sonic.)

Anyway, the point is that on Friday evening I got a lovely package from Amazon that contained Tropico 3, which I've not really had a chance to look at, and New Super Mario Brothers for the Wii.

So not only do I now own a 'proper' mario game, I've actually bought a new game for my Wii! A veritable double whammy.

So what do I think of the game?

Well, I've been enjoying it, although I've been suffering from what I believe is called "Nintendo thumb" where the tip of your thumb hurts where you're been pressing on the hard D-pad control.

It seems the basic idea is that the game has a multiplayer mode as its big feature. I've yet to try that out, as I'm just pleased to have the chance to enjoy the old mario game. Is that a bit sad at my age? Probably, but I'm not sure I really care.