 Mario's Time Machine As the mid-90s drew near, the NES’s time in the sun was coming to a close due to the growing demand for the 16-bit market. More and more developers starting making SNES-exclusive games, but some still held on to the NES for a little while longer. Unfortunately, one of those developers happened to be The Software Toolworks, who just so happened to pull off the impossible... the impossible being the creation of something worse than what LJN could come up with. That’s right... a very crappy educational game with Mario characters by a third-party developer that was actually made with Nintendo‘s permission.
The graphics are nothing more than a perfect example of why using the 16-bit Super Mario World sprites in an 8-bit game is a bad idea. You can tell what each sprite is supposed to look like, but the details are a lot more lacking than they are on Super Nintendo. Blame it on the NES’s ability to show only 16 colors at once. Mario’s shoes aren’t even brown, and the Koopa Troopas practically look like they’re all one color when you go back in time.
The gameplay is about as perfect as it can get and works like it should. Unfortunately, that was the only thing Software Toolworks got right. At least you can spin jump in this game (which the SNES version does not let you do), and this skill is actually useful for breaking yellow hourglass-shaped blocks below you. Sadly, that’s the only interesting thing about the gameplay.
I did not enjoy this game at all... after playing it only once, it’s all too easy to remember all the facts and where to place the artifacts, making it possible to beat the game in a very short amount of time. Because of that, this game not only fails at life, but at everything else imaginable and is deserving of a review in Something Awful’s ROM Pit. If you want a real educational game, go play Donkey Kong Jr. Math. It’s a crappy game, but at least it’s not a fraction of any synonym of bad compared to Mario’s Time Machine.
English (Plot and Storyline): 1.0 (D) GPA (overall): 0.42 (F)
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The story begins with Bowser stealing various artifacts throughout history and housing them in his museum. Mario rides Yoshi there, and before he can go in, Yoshi gets ahead of him and goes exploring on his own! Unfortunately, Bowser catches Yoshi. Now Mario has to not only return the artifacts to their rightful place in time, but also rescue Yoshi from Bowser’s clutches and defeat the King of the Koopas himself!
The music sounds like generic filler. The music you hear when you’re fighting the Koopa Troopas (classic Mario Bros. style) to get the items repeats every four seconds, and the music in each area usually sounds like something similar to the Jackson 5 minus the voices of said musical group. Do yourself a favor and mute the TV or emulator, and go listen to something other than this this game's sorry excuse for an NES symphony. The sound effects aren't even that good, either. They're all just substandard blips and bloops, and since the music isn't even that good, how can the sound effects be that decent? They can't be.
The only thing that can make this game better is if Mario went back in time to 1993 and actually told The Software Toolworks not to make this crappy excuse for an NES game. You can’t die, the game is far too short, and the game is so easy it can be beaten in ten minutes. That, and 1776 along with the Declaration of Independence aren’t even covered in this game. Changing any of these things wouldn’t make it any better, and some people who have played this game would probably agree that the world would be better off if this game had never existed... yet here it is anyway, swimming around in its own detritus.