Month of Mario: Mario Clash (Virtual Boy)

The Virtual Boy was an ambitious effort from Nintendo, attempting to bring stereoscopic 3D gaming to people’s homes and even claiming to be a portable console despite being an unwieldy headset you’d likely need a good table to prop it on. Trying to making a gaming headset in 1995 though came with some technical limitations, the system only displaying visuals in red and black and even including an automatic pause function you can toggle because Nintendo was worried playing it for too long could have adverse effects. Virtual Boy had quite a mountain to climb then in terms of convincing the gaming public of its value, and while it launched with a Mario game, that straightforward tennis experience wasn’t really wowing people. Mario helped usher in other consoles like the NES, SNES, and Game Boy with full adventures, so he needed to do something bigger and bolder here if Nintendo hoped to sell this strange console to the public.

Enter Mario Clash, a game meant to hearken back to Mario’s plumbing adventures in the original Mario Bros. arcade game. Here, the Clash Tower (or Clash House Tower, the manual has a different name for it than the sign above the front door) has been invaded by angry creatures. Across the tower’s 99 floors they’re clogging up the pipes and patrolling ledges, Mario entering and finding most of them can’t even be trounced with the usual jump on the head trick. However, the Koopa turtles that infest every floor actually ending up being more of a help than a concern. Leap onto a Koopa and it will retreat in its shell, turning it into the perfect throwing item that Mario can use to take out the more dangerous foes. However, rarely can you just toss the shell at a creature on the same ledge as you and damage them. Instead, the Virtual Boy’s 3D is put to use as there are always two layers to a floor, a background and foreground ledge where the enemies walk back and forth. Line up on the other side of the gap and hurl the shell across and you can start damaging your foes, the player clearing a stage when all baddies besides Koopas have been wiped out.

The enemy design of Mario Clash ends up being the make-or-break factor in terms of the game’s quality, and when things kick off, the foes are a fine enough quarry for this particular type of play. Spike and Thorny are little shelled creatures who match their names, these being the most common foes and a nice way to introduce you to how the game is played. Usually they’re only much of a concern if there are a lot of enemies in general or you’re down to the last baddy, the final living enemy in a stage always getting a speed boost. Enemies like Snakes will spit out eggs to multiply if you don’t take them out quickly enough, Lobbs are little black boxes on wheels that will actually try to attack you back even across layers, and Sidestepper crabs actually need to be hit from the side first so you can turn them around so they’re not blocking your shell with their claws when they’re across the gap. The moving Pokey cactus regenerates its missing pieces if you don’t take them all out quickly enough, but then you have the Boo, or as the manual calls them Big Boos despite the ghost being around its usual size. Big Boos can float, meaning they can rise up and down, and if you want to hit a flying foe, you can try and jump to nail them, but that requires a lot more lining up and timing than a throw to catch a walking creature. They will go low to the ground sometimes, but where they get annoying is the Big Boos will periodically turn invisible, meaning there will be nothing you can do during that period but wait. They’ll still keep moving, often meaning you’ll need to run to a new position, but that’s not always going to be possible either.

Where Mario Clash goes from a decent time to a tedious one is when the game’s heavy emphasis on waiting starts to really slow down the play. At all times, the game will try to have two Koopas in play so you can have shells to throw, but if you miss and lose a shell, waiting for the new one takes a bit of time. A punishment for sloppiness makes sense, but then you have to factor in other elements. Oftentimes, crossing between the two ledges or reaching higher ledges will only be possible with pipes. Even when a Koopa appears, it might be some time until you can reach them, traffic near the pipes a common problem and you have no way to manage it if you have no shell. One nice trick you can use is to throw a shell at an enemy next to you to make them start walking in the other direction, and while most foes take more than one hit to take out, sometimes the second hit can be dealt by you running over and kicking the foe in case you did lose your shell despite it always deflecting back after a successful hit.

If you are made to wait for Koopas to appear, Boos to get in place, or pipes to open up for transit, you might be punished, Mario Clash having Fireballs sometimes appear if you linger to long that add a danger to the area you’re in. Icicles appear in later levels to discourage jumping, meaning sometimes you have another barrier to try and getting where you need to be, and when the ground itself is frozen, it’s a lot more likely you’ll literally slip up and the throw you set up might be a bit off or you’ll miss the window of opportunity. Mario only has 3 lives to start with to cover all 99 floors before the game loops around, this being a score chaser with no true ending, although unfortunately while the game lets you start from different floors, they can only be one of the first 40 stages. You’ll really have to work if you wish to see every level, although admittedly, you’ve seen everything the game has to offer before level 20 rolls around and the game just stuffs it few floor arrangements with enemies placed in slightly different ways as you make it higher and higher. Occasionally, after defeating 30 foes without a game over, a Mushroom can appear that makes your shell throws instantly take out enemies for a bit if you grab it, but speeding up the process on occasion isn’t going to alleviate the frequent need to wait for things to line up.

Mario Clash does feature a bonus game with a bit more energy, Mario standing in a special stadium as coins fly towards him. Already the shell throwing is meant to play with the 3D of the system, but the coins coming towards the screen feels like it better shows how that feature of the Virtual Boy can be used for a little challenge, positioning Mario properly important to get the best score. Seeing other characters from the Mario series like Luigi and Peach is a nice touch for the brief and mostly insubstantial diversion that crops up from time to time, and similarly, when you reach certain score thresholds, you’ll see a congratulations screen with other familiar characters like Wario, Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr.. There is technically something close to an ending should you reach 999,999 points, but the gameplay continues on after and much like trying to see all 99 stages, it’s not worth the effort when it involves more time spent with a game that all too quickly becomes repetitive.

THE VERDICT: Mario Clash’s shell throwing action works in small doses, but as levels get packed with more foes who inevitably take up more space, stages start to drag as you wait for a chance to even set up shots. Enemies like Big Boo who briefly turns intangible, waiting for new Koopa shells to be available, and the frequent fact that pipes are unavailable for use with enemies using them for transit can lead to slow periods where there’s nothing to do but bide your time. Playing on past the early stages becomes a sluggish affair with little variety before you’ve even hit a quarter of the levels on offer, making it hard to muster the enthusiasm to commit to the game for more than a few minutes at a time.

And so, I give Mario Clash for the Virtual Boy…

A BAD rating. Mario Clash is built with a bit of an arcade mentality, something that helps it hearken back to Mario Bros. even more, but the design featured here strays from the arcade in that the rising difficulty often comes with stagnation. When things get tougher here, they get slower, the player technically having a ticking clock to try and ensure they don’t dawdle too much but there’s a fair bit of mandatory waiting baked into the design. You can’t do anything without Koopa shells, you often can’t harm enemies unless they are properly positioned opposite a gap, and certain foes like Lobbs and Big Boos complicate that by removing periods of opportunity with their unique gimmicks. Not every enemy feels like their unique trait makes them tedious though, the Snakes do multiply if left alone but they otherwise behave pretty normally and you can even crush their eggs for a bit after they appear to give you even more time to prevent things from snowballing out of control. Para-Goombas take large jumps that mean there are moments you can’t hit them, but they also linger a bit after landing or take smaller hops at times, meaning they’re not as pesky as the ghosts. Perhaps more variety in the level layouts could help things, especially with how often Mario can’t do much of anything if he’s on the wrong side. More ways to travel could prevent traffic jams at pipes that lead to the action slowing down, the dwindling game speed not so much a matter of impatience but an unfortunate fact of the complications Mario Clash uses for rising difficulty. Time spent doing nothing through no fault of your own adds up, and with levels not serving much new after the early stages it means you can’t help but wonder if there’s something better you could be doing, even on your Virtual Boy.

Mario Clash was not the savior Virtual Boy needed, the system doomed to leave the market in Japan a few month’s after this game’s release. There are other reasons the Virtual Boy failed, although the quality of the system is perhaps overly maligned in people’s efforts to make it seem like even more of a disastrous product. Truly though, Nintendo didn’t seem to have a strong idea for what the system could do that justified its technology. Mario Clash’s implementation of 3D feels too plain, the two layers for the action not a bad concept but it doesn’t feel like it needed a special game system to pull off. Mario Clash doesn’t offer strong gameplay nor does it wow with its visuals, it not even having the strongest direction for realizing its design and leaving us with a game that had no hope of being a system seller.