We've covered the eight best Mario spin-offs, so... you really should have seen this one coming. We're about to run a gauntlet of eight spectacularly terrible games that just happen to star Mario and/or his pals.
Any character as prolific as Mario is eventually going to be in some pretty awful games. For gamers of my generation, though, we expect a certain level of quality when Mario puts in an appearance. Super Mario Bros and Mario 64 were revolutionary, while most everything else in the main series is at least pretty good.
The bad spin-offs we discuss below aren't just crap-- they're insulting crap, which is of course the worst kind.
8. Mario Party
I've come to detest the Mario Party series, but I'm not happy about that. Mario Party games weren't always horrible. In fact, the first couple Mario Party games on the N64 were reasonably well-made and refreshing. Back then "party game" wasn't yet a byword for "shovelware."
It was at some later point in the series that both Hudson and Nintendo stopped caring and everything went all to crap. Maybe it was around the time the ill-advised Mario Party Advance came out, since ha ha screw you nobody plays Link Cable games! Enjoy your single-player party of loneliness, suckers.
By the time you get to the most recent entries in the series, like Mario Party 7 and 8, the games are just garbage. There's little effort put into the individual mini-games and even less effort put into making sure the rules of the board game are fair and satisfying.
Let's say you waste at least an hour and actually play through a whole Mario Party 8 session. The game hands you star bonuses so arbitrarily that winning and losing just become meaningless. Someone can trail you for the entire game, failing persistently, and still win. ARGH.
7. Yoshi's Story
Remember the last list, where I praised Yoshi's Island? Well, as much as I love Yoshi's Island, that game as a serious dark side. It spawned a series of Yoshi-focused games that played host to some of the worst Mario spin-offs of all time. Yoshi's Story is about the best of them and it's still little more than a cruel mockery of what made Yoshi's Island great. .
Yoshi's Story was <i>in theory</i> produced by members of the Yoshi's Island development team, sans Shigeru Miyamoto. So did they all just spontaneously develop cerebral palsy the moment Miyamoto stepped out of the room? How could functioning professionals have designed this?
Yoshi's Story is an ugly, baffling game that's so easy it could only hope to challenge children too small to tell the buttons on the controller apart. The whimsy that was great in Yoshi's Island is just gone here, replaced with a noxious, fake sweetness. It offered no challenge and no satisfaction, while also becoming the poster child for a disaffected generation that could only sneer at Nintendo for making babby games for babbies.
(The extra 'b' there is not negotiable.)
6. Mario's Time Machine
Mario starred in an avalanche of educational software in the early 90's. None of the games were great but most of them were passable enough given the basic problem of education not being any fun. Mario's Time Machine, however, was just goddamn lousy.
Gamers associate Mario with originality, but Mario's Time Machine is a pretty shameless knockoff of the Carmen Sandiego. Visually, Mario's Time Machine features an expert blend of sprites ripped from Super Mario World and what appears to be backgrounds drawn by five-year-olds in MS Paint.
Where you metaphorically run around asking people questions in any given Carmen Sandiego title, you literally have to do this in Mario's Time Machine (only you're beating information out of blocks with your skull) and it sucks exactly as much as you'd expect. Where your average Carmen Sandiego game had a bunch of different endings to unlock per session, Mario's Time Machine had three that made no sense at all.
Mario's Time Machine is the sort of game so inept that the soundtrack is mostly tunes from other Mario games and yet somehow the developers managed to screw them all up. If you want to play a fun Mario game, this title is a disappointment, but it's even disappointing by the fairly low standards of educational software, too.
5. Mario Pinball Land
You know what sucks? Portable pinball video games. Pinball ultimately requires a good field of view, so let's put it on hardware where you can't see a damned thing! Console pinball can at least hope to faithfully emulate great boards of years gone by or just offer a weird, novel spin on the concept.
I have never played a portable pinball game that is actually fun, as opposed to "passable" or "not irritating," yet Nintendo keeps making the damn things by the truckload. Mario Pinball Land was Mario's turn to go through the portable pinball cash-in grinder and, as one might expect, he came out as an unidentifiable meat-paste.
Mario Pinball Land involves Mario deciding to turn himself into a sphere and bounce around an amusement park to defeat Bowser, which I guess is at least an interesting change of pace for him. You have to find Bowser by gathering up stars, a mechanic all the kids loved in Super Mario 64.
In a portable pinball game, though, a hunt-and-gather mechanic is just torture. Mario Pinball Land's boards are awful and attempting to gather the required stars is frustrating since you can't really control Mario all that well. Nintendo, please, just stop making these damned things.
4. Yoshi Topsy-Turvy
In Europe, this game is called Yoshi's Universal Gravitation. That's about the kindest thing I can say about it. It was developed by the veteran crapmeisters at Artoon, I guess during a phase when Nintendo thought it'd be fun to license their characters out to the lousiest studios imaginable.
Yoshi Topsy-Turvy's first problem is that it's inspired mostly by Yoshi's Story. Its second problem is that it's one of those irritating "gimmick gameplay" games where the whole thing is built around one passingly novel hardware trick. In this case, it was the GBA's tilt sensor, which was used to much better effect in WarioWare: Twisted.
The tilting mechanic was terrible in this game for so many reasons. The way the tilting mechanic worked ensured that it played like ass on a GBA SP, which you held very differently than a basic GBA. An involuntary twitch of your arms could foul up any of the game's platforming segments, which weren't otherwise very interesting.
This was a game that really, really highlighted the basic hardware problems of the original GBA design, too. The first GBA wasn't backlit, so you'd often have to tilt the system a bit to make sure you could see the screen... which in this game would cause parts of the universe to flop over a bit.
3. Yoshi's Cookie
Dr. Mario was a ridiculously big hit when it came out. Nintendo immediately went to work trying to develop more cheap puzzle games that could quickly addict soccer moms around the country who'd already gotten a taste of Tetris.
The effort was a bit like what Nintendo does with Touch Generations these days, only a lot more half-assed. Yoshi's Cookie was perhaps one of the worst games from a line of clunkers. Ugly graphics, poor music, and a boring puzzle mechanic combined to result in a game that was just plain bad.
In Yoshi's Cookie you had to match so many cookies in order to fill up a set of meters and pass the stage. You did this by moving entire rows of the puzzle board. It was like playing Dr. Mario, but after an extensive lobotomy.
Even the highest levels of difficulty in Yoshi's Cookie offered little challenge. The game also had a Game Boy port that could border on unplayable in bad light, since it could be very hard to tell certain cookies apart by shape alone.
2. Hotel Mario
I've totally flipped out over Hotel Mario before but the sheer stinking gall of this game continues to amaze me. The game mechanics would be pretty bad just on their own merits, as the idea here is basically Elevator Action with a bad case of Down's Syndrome.
Hotel Mario goes far beyond that, though. Hotel Mario features "fully animated" FMV cutscenes-- horrible, nasty things apparently drawn in MS Paint by someone with a bad case of the tremors. They pulse across the screen in a blur of garish, queasy colors.
There's voice-acting, too, though it appears to be from the "Go find me a programmer who's not busy right now so he can say a few lines into this microphone I've set up in the broom closet" school of video game voice acting.
The Hotel Mario cutscenes are emblematic of why the Phillips CD-i was a failure of a system. They're ugly and slapdash in a way that isn't going to distract you from the fact that the game itself looks no better-- in fact, in some ways much worse-- than most SNES titles.
1. Mario is Missing
Mario is Missing is a lot like Mario's Time Machine, only infinitely worse. Using a basic concept that would later be handled better in Luigi's Mansion, Mario is Missing is about Luigi trying to find his kidnapped brother.
Ah, but it's also an educational game. Specifically it's an educational game from the developers who would later create Mario's Time Machine. So what you have to do in order to find your brother is eerily similar to what Mario later has to do in order to power-up your time machine. Funny, that.
There was a PC version of Mario is Missing that deserves special mention here, since it may be the all-time worst game to spiral out of the Mario franchise. Where the NES and SNES versions had graphics similar to Mario's Time Machine, the PC version was different enough to merit original artwork.
That original artwork is almost too goddamn bad to be believed. The sprites are trying to be cartoony but they're horribly drawn and animated. There's a flickering effect as they move around the screen that can be nausea-inducing.
Playing Mario is Missing on PC is like playing an entire game that looks like a Hotel Mario cutscene. The entire game also features extensive voice acting that's about as bad as the brief Hotel Mario snippets. That's pretty much as bad as video gaming gets, Mario or no Mario.
