Dark Age Iron Savior wrote:Many early CRPGs had grid-based combat systems that bear a passing resemblance to later SRPGS - the SSI Gold Box games, Ultima III-VI (although VI and the two Worlds of games removed the abstract overworld and made everything take place in the same kid of map, including combat, which was pretty unique for the time). Not many of them really stand up today though.
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2761
I think Mr. Iron Savior has been reading Tim Rogers too seriously. I mention this because it's the only other instance where I've read such a claim. Here are some choice quotes from Rogers' Super Mario Bros. 3 review.
So it was in that great centrifuge Super Mario Bros. 3 was born. The “adventure” was pried away from the “action”, and the “world map” came into being. No platform-action-adventure game that mattered would ever be without one again. (Seriously, Bubsy doesn’t matter, and Sonic doesn’t count, because he was something else.)
Years of hindsight have opened my ears to the truth: though I had at first, at age ten, been admittedly disappointed that the music playing in World 1-1 was not the original Super Mario Bros. theme, I have grown, and changed; now that I’ve been laid more than a few times, I can see that the music in Super Mario Bros. 3 is, in fact, the champion; the main stage themes are deeper and bolder, and the fourteen-second pop-symphonies (my absolute favorite) that cycle over those superfluous world maps only grow more musically amazing with time.
Super Mario Bros. 3’s greater game design is about throwing caution to everything; other developers failed to sell more copies than Super Mario Bros. 3 because they tried to make it “better” or “cleaner”. Take the world map, for example: in the future, in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Nintendo themselves would try to “clean up” the world map by making it a straight line. Literally: all of the levels are oriented on a straight line, with a pastel, sketch-like background. Each stage starts roughly where the last one left off — there’s some kind of sketchy internal continuity. Yoshi’s Island was recognizing that the world map scenes in Super Mario Bros. 3 were kind of superfluous, though it was simultaneously dead scared to excise them completely. This is the kind of Nintendo we 21st Century Man-Boys grew up alongside with: when it came time to make a baseball game starring Mario characters, Nintendo would include a Goomba as a playable character, because Goomba was their property, and when it came time for Goomba to step up to the plate, well, the bat was just going to have to hover outside Goomba’s head, because it doesn’t matter if Goomba didn’t have hands — he was Nintendo’s property, and they were going to use him.
Mario 3 had a superfluous world map, and an ever-present, eyesore-sized heads up display...
Obviously “multiple stage exits” is a brilliant idea, though wouldn’t that make the “world map”, as executed in Super Mario Bros. 3, kind of even more superfluous?