Super Mario 3: What Gives?! August 12, 2010

So I’m over at joystiq right before I go to sleep excited for the day ahead that will be full of errands and work, where they have a story about the GBA E-Reader specific enhancements that Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario 3 got. The Japanese version. Only. I knew that the E-Reader existed and while it kind of flopped in America, it was more of a success in Japan but what it really did exactly was beyond me. Now I know – It provided the ultimate 2D Mario game. This is basically an official hack job on the Mario 3 rom! It gives Mario 3 specific levels and power ups from every 2D Mario game excluding the “New” series.

The GBA E-Reader was yet another Nintendo experiment that was designed to bring extra content, or expansion packs to e-reader compatible GBA games. The extra content would come on cards that would be import data onto the gba cart and “enhance the game with new features”. It didn’t quite take off in America, but you could find e-reader cards stashed away in lonely corners of most big retail stores – IMO the coolest feature was that you could by NES games for it and play them off the card and onto the GBA – those were later converted to the insanely priced “NES Classic Series”. It’s kind of crazy how Nintendo was sort of offering a sort paid DLC like expansion for GBA titles almost a decade ago before the practice got huge.

But back to this Mario madness! So many new features were added to Mario 3 – vegetable throwing from Mario 2 USA, the super cape from Mario World, Poison Mushrooms from SMB2 and so, so so much more! Check out the video for the full rundown. If Nintendo takes advantage of the 3DS and adds a GBA virtual console store to it – I really hope they release this “super version” of Mario 3 because I would kill to play this.