While Super Mario Bros. was Mario’s main breakout game, it wasn’t his first game. Mario was first introduced in the 1982 arcade game, Donkey Kong. Some time later, Mario would gain a green-clad brother named Luigi and would be featured in another unrelated arcade game aptly named Mario Bros. Then they were stars of the Super Mario Bros. game and became well-known icons in Nintendo games. So given that they were popular, Nintendo decided to feature the brothers in another NES launch title; this one a game of lesser quality, but still fairly decent. The game was called Wrecking Crew.
In Wrecking Crew, Mario and Luigi are working as demolition workers and their job is to smash every wall into oblivion, all the while avoiding avoiding a plethora of enemies such as fireballs, waling monkey wrenches with eyes and eggplant enemies. AS you progress further, the brothers will meet a construction foreman named Spike, who will also work to smash down walls. Seems like he’s a friend, but he’s actually trying to screw our heroes over by screwing up your game. See, Wrecking Crew requires that you not only smash every wall in the game, but you smash things up in a certain order. Not only can you shatter walls, but also certain ladders and columns which drop the floor above you. Be forewarned – once the ladders are smashed, they don’t come back and if you needed to get to a higher level and the ladder was the only way up, you’re fucked big time.
So as stated, the game featured the Mario Bros. as the main protagonists. Player 1 was Mario, while Player 2 was Luigi. Strangely enough, Luigi wore purple. Some people would find this odd later on, but the truth of the matter is that nobody seemed to know what colors to stick Luigi with. In the original Mario Bros. arcade game, Luigi wore his familiar green overalls. In Super Mario Bros, he wore white overalls over a green shirt. So this purple outfit was another outfit Luigi was considering before sticking with his current choice of colors – green and blue – which would debut in the US-modified Super Mario Bros. 2. Say what you will about the game, but if we had gotten the other Mario 2, Luigi would still be wearing white and would still be a virtual Mario clone.
Okay, enough about Luigi’s wardrobe choices. Back to Wrecking Crew.
So a truly innovative feature that was included in Wrecking Crew was the ability to build your own levels… up to four levels can be built and enjoyed by all. And really, the builder wasn’t actually that bad. There was pretty much no limits as to what you can create in terms of level design. Levels can be really easy or frustratingly difficult. So now we save our levels for future use, right?
Well, no.
You see, Wrecking Crew had the ability to create levels and the option to save and load levels were there, but the thing is they didn’t actually work. The reason they didn’t work is simple: Wrecking Crew was originally released on the Japanese Famicom and level data was saved through a cassette recorder peripheral released for the Famicom system. The cassette recorder was similar to what was used by the old Commodore computers and quite possibly other similar brands. The NES didn’t have a similar device and nobody had bothered to remove the options, and so the save/load commands remained, even if they didn’t work. Fortunately for fans of the original Wrecking Crew who also happen to own a Wii, the Save Function has been fixed in the Virtual Console version of the game, so you can save your levels with no problem whatsoever.
Wrecking Crew was a fun little game. I know some people might be put off and that Screwattack had named it one of the worst Mario games, but I didn’t think it was that bad. Certainly, it had to be better than, say, Ice Climber. But that’s another story entirely.
Next up: More Zapper titles.
dtm666 