Month of Mario: Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun (SNES)

When should you introduce your child to Mario? Naturally it shouldn’t be before the age of 2 when their minds are still working to even understand the world in general, but many Super Mario Bros. games require some motor skills and a bit of dexterity so popping a controller in their hands at age 3 might still be a bit early. However, the games are often built to allow young players to have some fun, 4 or 5 years old a fairly safe bet for the child to understand what’s happening and engage with it. This runs into a bit of an issue when you consider the premise of Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun though. By the time they’re acquainted with Mario they will probably want to play his entertaining adventures instead of an educational game that has far less engaging gameplay. If this is conversely their first Mario title, the game won’t be able to wave familiar characters in their face to try and keep them patient for absolutely dull tests on things you had likely already taught them elsewhere. While it’s easy to understand how Nintendo was suckered into letting Mindscape develop some Mario edutainment games since a token effort to teach children has always been a way to smooth over parental acceptance of video games, Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun is a particularly egregious case of targeting a very specific age range of children who likely will want to just play Mario instead once they see the lifeless “teaching tool”.

Immediately things get off to a little bit of a rocky start with Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun, because this Super Nintendo title is a port of a PC game where they didn’t want to adjust it enough to make it work better on console. Not only did they remove the nursery rhyme area that was more animated than any other area of the game with its mild portrayals of songs like The Wheels on the Bus, but you still have to use a mouse cursor to select things. Controlling it with the directional pad is a bit more of a barrier than moving a character right by pressing right, but perhaps Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun is meant to be thought of as a game someone plays with their young child, controlling the on-screen actions as the kid responds to the game and tell their parent what to do. Whether the parent or child is in charge of selecting the activities, you’ll be presented with a set of islands, each one corresponding to a subject. There are six worlds in total, Body World, Listening World, Shapes World, Color World, Counting World, and Opposite World, but a few are pretty similar in presentation so it feels more like a shift in topic rather than a truly new style of play.

Body World though is unfortunately pretty egregious when it comes to how little effort the programmers want to put into their supposed job of teaching and entertaining young players. Body World sees Mario standing in a plain grassy field, two monkeys never seen in any Mario game before sitting at a table nearby so they can be clicked on for very slow mild animations. Mario himself is more important to click on though, because once you’ve found a piece of his body that you can click on, you’ll hear a child’s voice tell Mario to do something with that body part. If Mario is told to stomp with his foot for example, the entire rest of his body will remain absolutely still as his one leg moves a touch to do a stomping motion. If you click his hair, his hat will float in the air as he slowly lifts his arms to lightly touch the side of his head. Mario’s plain forward-facing stare makes the task hollow and joyless, the only amusing element to the animations being how the game tries to be as lazy as possible in executing on them. If you are interested enough in your child’s development to buy them a Super Nintendo and this game, you probably can do much better to teach them without even trying hard and your kid will probably be much more interested in you doing silly actions than this stiff representation of Mario.

Counting World does cover the more complicated matter of properly saying numbers in sequence, but that doesn’t mean corners weren’t cut. Here, Princess Peach is overseeing a classroom where two children are sitting on the floor. The room has different groupings of objects for you to click on, and when you do, the children will join you in counting out how many items are represented on their fingers. The number of the item appears in time with the counting, although previous numbers do disappear, and the counting happens at a slow pace. Unfortunately, the items being counted are completely static, only the appearance of a number and the finger counting causing any change on screen, so it’s hard to say there’s really any entertainment to be had in this edutainment portion. It very much feels like the first idea you might have if asked to include a counting game, just lay things out and count them with no flair to make it interesting or real gameplay beyond clicking things to start the counting. A counting storybook would probably outshine this low effort handily, since they at least try to present nice illustrations and can sometimes make counting everything on the page an activity rather than something that’s just presented to you without your input.

The four remaining worlds all utilize a similar format to each other, these starting to get characters from Super Mario World a bit more involved in the events. In fact, they’re involved enough that the game lets you select if you want to play as Mario, Princess Peach, or the dinosaur Yoshi, although they aren’t really controlled so much as moving to whatever object you click on mostly so there’s some motion on screen since these would otherwise be static picture selection tests. In Listening World, Color World, Shape World, and Opposite World, you will see a screen with objects to click on relevant to the subject. In Listening World for example, you’ll hear an animal noise and need to click on the proper creature. Color World will have objects on screen and you’ll be shown a range of objects and need to pick the one that’s the spoken color, Shape World unsurprisingly shifting that format so it features shapes instead. Opposite World is a bit more involved, in that there’s more contemplation at times as you are told to click the opposite of something rather than getting a direct instruction. Opposite World probably has the greatest right to exist of any of these activities, it likely a child might not have a full grasp of them by the time they’re playing a video game and there is a little wiggle room for actually making guesses rather than being shown the answer. A child has to compare things like an empty bucket of popcorn to a full one, or they’ll see a carousel and have to pick the riding horses that aren’t down. They’ll even place ducks in a row and have the player pick the opposite of the end, these types of tests feeling like they ask the player to consider what they’re seeing on a level beyond the basic surface details.

When you get a question right in any of these games, there’s also a somewhat silly male voice that praises your choice. The games do change up their backdrops some too. Color World will start you in a circus but there are also grocery store settings, Opposite World takes place across a few different places in a carnival, and Shape World shifts up its abstract backgrounds but more importantly the shapes you collect are eventually combined into pictures like a wizard or a candle. Listening World stays stuck on the barynyard, but these four areas also feature Luigi sleeping off to the side. Wake him up with a poke, and you go from idly clicking on things and move into a sort of test format. This is where you’ll be asked to click the right thing and be judged for it, losing technically not possible as you can try again but eventually when you’ve done a few properly you’ll be sent back to the world map. Luigi’s tests give it a bit more of an interactive format and one where a child could conceivably learn through process of elimination, but it still feels lacking in terms of presentation and the format feels flat because the very simple task of pointing at something to see if you’re right wears thin even if the subject has shifted to something new. There may be more effort here than Body World and Counting World and it can classify itself as a game a bit better than those homes to basic animations, but while it remembers the subjects should cater to pre-schoolers, it’s forgotten the “fun” part of the title.

THE VERDICT: Don’t introduce a child to Mario with Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun and don’t make them go back to it if they’ve already tried his more entertaining adventures. The supposed “Preschool Fun” on show here not only is incredibly low effort, but it can barely even muster up animations at times when even a basic edutainment game should at least try to make its on-screen visuals appealing. From the robotic stiffness of Mario in Body World to the joyless counting of Counting World, it’s already easy to see little thought was put into teaching or entertaining, and while it at least rehashes its best idea across the four other worlds, it legitimately feels like a preschool teacher would do more to make information fun than this soulless attempt to get money from well-meaning parents.

And so, I give Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Education can be fun. Educational games can even be fun, or even if they aren’t, they might still be decent for a kid despite their flaws. Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun is a shameful showing though, Mindscape well aware you don’t really need to try hard when a kid is likely being forced to play your game over more entertaining ones by well-meaning parents. Considering that Mario games are already designed so younger audiences can enjoy them, it’s probably wiser to let them play those but make them do a little test of their educational understanding between levels if they want to keep playing. If you want to actually teach them things like shapes or colors, an appealing illustrated book or even just a single poster you work through with them would be more useful and entertaining. Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun isn’t trying to be fun, it’s putting in the leanest of efforts so they can point at it and insist its educational. Opposite World is probably the closest they came to a good idea since its subjects are broader but also more quickly understood after some experimentation. Counting World’s generic and lifeless efforts don’t make listening to the numbers be flatly listed out to you entertaining enough to learn, and Body World is an absolute joke. A surprising amount of this could at least be smoothed over if the game was lively and had more animated characters. If Mario did a big leaping stomp rather than a light stomp, that might hold a young child’s attention. If the objects being counted all did a little twirl, it would be easier for a preschooler to follow. Shape World does touch on the lightly interesting idea of combining the shapes after you picked the right ones into a picture. At least bump things up so they can compete with toddler television if you’re not going to embrace the options interactivity gives in making it a true learning experience, but by targeting an audience whose complaints about game quality won’t be taken seriously, Mindscape felt they didn’t need to put in the work to make this much of a game at all.

Don’t make your kid hate Mario with this awful excuse for edutainment. Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun didn’t have to reach for the stars, but even Mario Teaches Typing does a better job than it and it is mostly just a way of practicing a single simple skill at length. Even Shrek got better educational games than this one, but it might be because Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun was already aiming low before it decided to absolutely phone things in. Even if they had just let the player walk Mario and friends up to the answer to pick it, this might have a bit of energy to it, but this educational game feels like a cynical attempt to do as little as possible because Mindscape knows the game’s quality doesn’t matter when it comes to actually sealing the sale. As long as it is functional and throws up some child-friendly topics on the screen, parents will forgive it because they’re not the ones playing it. With Mario’s Early Years: Preschool Fun, the kids are the ones suffering with something that ends up weaker than if you grabbed a piece of paper and used that to teach them the featured topics.