Everyone agrees: the first Super Mario Land is really, really weird. Turtles would explode when you jumped on them, the Flower power-up gave you a ball that bounced all over the place... things looked familiar but were decidedly different. Now while you could shrug it off and keep playing as a kid because it was frickin' Mario, or as an adult because it felt fresh and interesting, many were still craving a more traditional Mario game on their portable system.

So for the sequel, R&D1 looked at what Miyamoto's team was doing for the console Mario games and gave us a more traditional entry: the Fire Flower allowed Mario to shoot the familiar fireballs, Koopas would hide in their shells when you jumped on them and you could them kick them toward enemies or pick them up, the Piranha Plants and Goombas looked more like they did in Super Mario 3 or World... finally, a traditional portable Mario.


...okay, maybe not. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is close to being as weird as the original. Not only do you fight fish-bull things or ants with bazookas on their heads, but the worlds Mario visits include space and a giant mechanical statue of himself, instead of your usual ice/desert/fire worlds. Not to mention that Mario doesn't cash 100 coins for an extra life anymore, but keeps up to 999 of them to blow at the casino. If you were won over by the weirdness of the first game, you are still getting that here.

Only, everything is bigger and more detailed. As mentioned before, the sprites look close to their NES and SNES counterparts, at the cost of visibility: bigger sprites means not seeing as far ahead on the small, crowded screen. To compensate this, Mario and the enemies are a bit slower than usual. Those looking for the exact same physics as console Mario games therefore don't get them here, but it is easy enough to adjust. The controls are different, but excellent.

In addition to the Flower, Mario has a new power-up in his arsenal: the carrot, which gives him rabbit ears that allow him to float gently down. Very useful for tough platforming sections and discovering the half-dozen hidden doors in the game that lead to secret stages on the world map. Oh yeah, secrets and a world map: two more enhancements taken from the console games that add even more depth to this game.

You can blow through the game's 30+ stages in just a couple of hours, but it is still substantially meatier than its predecessor. The main problem arises from being able to tackle the different worlds in any order: there is no sense of progression, each world is as easy as the last. Only when you collect the titular 6 Golden Coins do you unlock the doors to Wario's castle and face a substantially harder platforming challenge.

In the end, Super Mario Land 2 is another bizarre Mario game, but a deeper, more ambitious one. In hindsight, it is very much a transitional step between the simple and short Super Mario Land, and the bigger, slower and secret-filled Wario Land. Check it out, knowing you can look forward to something even better!