Mario Bros. (Game & Watch)

While Mario had made his debut fighting against Donkey Kong back in 1981, it would be a few years before the sprightly plumber would have his brother join him in action and form the now famous duo known as the Mario Bros.. Most people would have seen Luigi debut in the arcade game Mario Bros. appropriately enough, but this technically wasn’t his debut, as he’d appear in a different game by the same name a few months earlier. It does feel incredibly likely Mario Bros. on Game & Watch was just easier to make and ship out first, but whether Luigi was intended to debut in the arcade or on a tiny LCD screen, his first video game outing would be the less than glorious job of packing bottles with his bro.

 

Mario Bros. on Game & Watch features Mario and Luigi working together to do a pretty mundane job. Seemingly working at a bottling plant, the two brothers are in charge of packaging drinks and loading them onto the flatbed of a delivery truck. Unfortunately, this simple task has been made needlessly complicated by the need to rely on a set of constantly running conveyor belts and neither brother seems to be able to do every step of packing the bottles themselves. Mario first takes a box off a different conveyor, sends it to his brother so it can be loaded with a few bottles, and the two need to climb ladders to repeatedly move it up more layers, a machine in the center adding bottles to the pack, placing lids on them, and even wrapping the package ultimately. The part the two play in the process feels like it could have been easily made obsolete with just a long conveyor belt rather than the five vertically arranged layers we see here, but considering we see two characters who are likely Mario and Luigi’s bosses appear to chew them out briefly should they fail, it’s likely the brothers are just happy to do some paying work. Unfortunately, since they’re in a Game & Watch game, the end goal is to earn a high score and play ends one you’ve made three mistakes and had packages fall from the moving conveyors, so beyond the brief breaks they take when you’ve loaded eight full packages on the truck, the toil of the brothers is long and inevitably ends in failure.

Your part as the player involves having Mario and Luigi be in the right places to grab packages and move them up to the next level, an action they’ll do automatically as long as they’re in the proper place at the proper time. The buttons you press to move the bros are kept simple as a result, the player moving Luigi up and down his set of ladders with one set and Mario moving up his ladders with the other. Interestingly enough though, Mario Bros. takes place across two screens, Luigi’s action unfolding on the left while Mario’s play is shown on the right. The part where the bottles are packed by a machine happens during that moment a package is conceptually between the two screens, and having to watch two sides does make this a touch more difficult than if it was all shown on a singular condensed display. The system can be folded and put in your pocket thanks to its two screen design, but one interesting idea that’s not too hard to think up is making the game into a two-player experience by having one person focus on Luigi’s movement and the other on Mario’s. Unfortunately, this will likely make the game incredibly easy, since Mario Bros.’s difficulty mostly comes from the constantly shuffling involved in trying to keep the ever-increasing set of packages in play.

 

Mario Bros. offers a Game A and a Game B which are differentiated by their difficulty, and it does feel like the kind of game that better shines when it is more difficult. A point is earned every time a package is moved up to a higher conveyor belt and when Luigi tosses one onto the truck, the player getting a nice ten point boost and brief break when the truck is loaded to capacity and takes off. Because your part in the action is just having the characters stand in one of three areas on their half of the screen, it’s actually pretty easy to manage the package flow for a long time. Once a package is in play, its movement will become entirely consistent, needing to pass through every layer and never breaking from the same rhythm of movement all other packages are currently following. This means if you spot a package further down its belt than another, you can confidently send the brother to wait for it rather than needing to worry about any unexpected disruptions. This is one reason Game A ends up being much easier, Mario Bros. not sending out too many packages at once in this simpler mode and thus you don’t feel too much pressure when it comes to placing the brothers right.

Pretty much the only element that will vary is when a new package arrives, and it is likely the way you’ll rack up a few Misses will be when a new one comes into play when you didn’t think to watch that area. Game B manages to push just how easily you can juggle your job though, it far more willing to send out plenty of packages and quickly to boot. While all the rules about movement consistency are in place, you start to get far more active at once and splitting your attention adequately does become a little tougher. If you’re able to reach 300 points you can get any Misses you’ve accrued cleared away, but getting there without any failures is more helpful as it starts doubling the point value of every action, adding even greater tension to Game B’s juggling act. There will still be some stretches of Game B that don’t push too hard, sometimes things even calm down a bit as less packages are in play at once, but being a bit more demanding ends up saving Mario Bros. from being too easy to keep going endlessly, although the game’s reliable movement does mean building up to a previous high score in a new attempt can still have its slow periods where things aren’t quite so exciting.

THE VERDICT: While Game A is a bit too easy to manage for its own good, Game B putting more packages into play helps Mario Bros. on Game & Watch actually provide some frantic moments where managing the six positions the brothers can stand in ends up an engaging task. The reliable movement of packages on the conveyor belts does mean there are definitely slow moments where you don’t need to think much though and the more energetic moments in Game B only last so long themselves, but there’s still enough to the hectic package shuffling there to make Mario Bros. a somewhat entertaining score challenge.

 

And so, I give Mario Bros. for Game & Watch…

An OKAY rating. Holding Game A against Mario Bros. doesn’t feel right since it’s basically the obvious easy mode that will give young players nice impressive high scores, but Game B really did need to push harder if it wanted to make the simple action of this game more electrifying. One element that definitely holds Mario Bros. back though is it’s perhaps too honest. Besides that empty package coming in for Mario at the bottom right, everything remains too consistent so it’s hard to surprise the player when there aren’t many boxes in play. Game B overcomes this just with shear quantity after a while, failure more likely when you do have to track so many moving objects all at once, but it does feel like some more unexpected events could have spiced up even the easier Game A if they were added. Later reimaginings in the Game & Watch Gallery series introduced the idea of the belts sometimes reversing, but they also made it too easy to set them back to normal by putting a bro near a lever in a task that barely takes any thought to complete. Something like packages unexpectedly getting added to a conveyor could be the sort of interference that keeps you on your toes, or maybe only certain conveyor belts could suddenly experience problems like increased speed, stopping completely, or even reversing. When Mario Bros. is slow it is far too easy to track every package in play with little effort, so having unexpected shake-ups could at least spice up those moments before the package pile-ups begin.

 

Mario Bros. on Game & Watch doesn’t really feel like the best debut for Luigi, partly because there’s nothing distinct about him here. Even appearance-wise he’s basically just a second Mario, and the game might have actually been more exciting if poor Mario was the one who had to zip around and do this convoluted packing process on his own. However, by technically appearing in this Mario Bros. game before the arcade title though, he managed to lend some importance to the often underappreciated Game & Watch lineup, earning it a bit of a more meaningful spot in history. With Luigi and the Mario brothers combined having much brighter and entertaining adventures in the future though, it’s not so sad that working alongside his bro at a bottling plant lead to a somewhat decent first game for the now iconic character.