Super Mario All-Stars 25th Anniversary Edition (Wii) Review

Nintendo has been celebrating Mario’s 25th anniversary in a big big way for just over a month now. There have been events, tours, special promotions and they’ve even covered busses all around the country in Mario. Seriously, when was the last time Nintendo plastered anything on a bus?!

There’s the other part of this celebration too, however. The tangible parts, basically the bits you can buy. There’s not only a red 25th Anniversary Wii but there’s also Super Mario Collection, or at least Super Mario All Stars as it’s known here.

I know what you’re thinking, why would you review Super Mario All Stars? We all know how the games play, we’ve played them many times over the years. So this review is less about the games that come in the collection and more about the collection itself.

Super Mario All Stars on Wii contains all the same games that the original All Stars did on the Super Nintendo. It is exactly the same as you remember it, it’s essentially the unedited data dumped onto a disc. There is no special features on the disc, no new menu explaining the different controls, nothing. The entire game is as you remember it, untouched and it looks really crisp over those component cables like most Virtual Console games.

There are three control options available this time around, you can use the Wii Remote on the side, the Classic Controller and the GameCube controller. The only problem with playing with the Wii Remote? Going to shake the Wii Remote for a spin doesn’t work, obviously. All the games are presented in their All Stars form, so if you don’t like the tweaks Nintendo did to the games then, you won’t like them now.

So what’s in the nice embossed red box apart from the games? Well there is two DVD cases, one contains the game and it’s instruction manual just like any other Wii game. The other DVD case contains not only a CD with Mario tracks (more on that later) but also a booklet celebrating the history of Mario. It contains not only early artwork of all the titles but catalogues Mario’s travels from the NES all the way up to the Wii. The best page in the book is a picture of some of the Mario team at Nintendo including Shigeru Miyamoto, Koji Kondo and Mario himself all lined up in the shape of a 25. It would make for an awesome poster.

The CD included is a standard music disc so it’ll play in anything that can play music CD’s (funnily enough there is a warning saying it won’t play on the Wii). The first 10 tracks are all the ’title’ tracks from every Mario game including all the NES Mario’s the SNES, N64, GameCube and the three Mario games on the Wii. However there are 10 more tracks on the disk which are just 8-bit samples of the sound effects from Super Mario Bros. The audio of the disk is crisp sounding but I can’t help feel disappointed with the disk. The tracks aren’t anything we haven’t heard before but then again the whole collection apart from the booklet is just that.

I guess that’s the point of the collection. You won’t be buying this one because you’re dying to playing the classic Mario games, this set is a collectors set. If you’re keen on collecting all things Nintendo, then you’ll want this set. Playing the games is just the sweet sweet side benefit.

No score given for this title.

We reviewed the Japanese version of the collection which contains Super Mario Collection (All Stars), a booklet, a audio disk in a nice red box. The Australia, European and America versions may differ slightly when they get released.