Super Mario All-Stars for Wii: What a Lazy POS

Don't even bother opening it, this is as good as it'll get.

I just bought a copy of the 25th Anniversary edition of Super Mario All Stars for the Wii, and the nice, classy-looking embossed matte exterior box really belies the laziest anniversary game I have ever seen. I mean, this is beyond lazy. This is garbage.

First off, the games are not ports, nor are they really retro editions. It's an emulation of an SNES ROM, the already remade original Super Mario All-Stars (without Super Mario World). And man, is this bush league. They put so little thought into this Wii edition that they didn't even bother to change the pictures for the on-screen directions from an SNES controller. And maybe it's just me, but the controls just feel much more slippery than the originals, like Mario's constantly running on ice.

But whatever, I didn't really buy this because I am burning to play Super Mario 2 for hours again. Plus, you can buy all the games on Virtual Console anyway. It's sort of just a nostalgia thing, right? Thankfully, there's an extra disc case with a "Super Mario History" art book and a music CD. And I kid you not: they were even LAZIER with the extras than they were with the actual game. I didn't think it was even possible.

Open up the art book and you are treated to three tiny screenshots of each Mario game with one-sentence snippets of insight from Shigeru Miyamoto, Koji Kondo, and Takashi Tezuka for each. These earth-shattering insights include: "[Super Mario Galaxy] was released in South Korea as 'Super Mario Wii,'" and "When the player hops onto Yoshi, a cheery bit of percussion is added to the track."

Pop the audio CD in and things don't get any better. Half the damn CD is sound effects - the half-second coin noise is its own track! I would honestly have been less disappointed if Nintendo had just ripped some shit off of Overclocked Remix.

And finally, thanks, Nintendo, for requiring me to run a system firmware update to play a game from 1993.