Growing up with a Nintendo meant that, invariably, one would play Super Mario Brothers and all of its successors.  With it being the most successful video game franchise in history, it’s hard to argue its popularity.

In this day of fully immersive 3D game environments, there are many who still yearn for a taste of that time gone by, with a bit of a modern makeover.

And that brings us to:

Secret Maryo Chronicles

SMB is a major force to be reckoned with, and yet I do believe that the development team behind Secret Maryo Chronicles (hereafter referred to as SMC because I don’t want to keep typing it) does quite well at making their game fit the same pedigree.

As always, click the thumbnails for the full monty.

Title Screen

Pirhana plants nipping at your feet...

Everybody gets a graphical facelift in this one

The graphics and gameplay in this I would say are on-par with the SNES’ Super Mario World.  It was a lead-off title for the console when it launched, and you can definitely see the inspiration drawn from it in SMC.  Graphics are done in Inkscape Vector format which gives them a beautiful sheen and almost surreal quality when you play.

But I would be remiss if all I talked about was how pretty it looked.  Fans of SMB will find that SMC’s gameplay is very much the same as its SNES cousin.  The levels are myriad and expansive and there are quite a few new types of powerups that make it even more fun to play.

Secret Maryo Chronicles is released under the GNU GPL and available to play on Windows, Linux (including specialized packages for Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, and a bunch more), FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and OS X 10.5 or later.

Keep up the good work, guys!