I love the whole idea...it sounds like it was a lot of fun!

I still enjoy the Mario games...and to me, Mario 3 was one of the best games ever made.  My brotehr's and I used to spend hours exploring all the different worlds...beating the lvls that you didn't need to do to win the game.  From my experience, lvl 7 was actually harder than 8, but also more fun.

Mario 2 was very weird, and that link you posted does help explain it.  I remember the "Lost Levels" coming out here, and finding out that they were in fact Mario 2 in Japan...I never got to play those as I went from NES to playstation and skipped the SNES, but I heard they were pretty hard.

I also like the Princess in Mario 2.  I found her long floaty jump really came in handy.  And yeah, Luigi was terrible, as was Toad.

I never beat that one, though I did see someone else do it.


This makes me want to go back and play all those games...it's been a while.  I don't think my NES works at all anymore, but I'm sure can easily download an emulator, and I think my girlfriend has a USB controller.  The biggest problem with emulators is that unless you get the right one, the games are unplayable, since the game speed was tied directly into the clock speed of the system.  I don't even remember offhand what I got for a new processor, but it's a wee bit faster than the old NES processor.  Something to look into, anyway = )