Pros: One of the best games ever, portable!
Cons: Big old style GB cartridge.
The bottom line: For little money, you can have one of the best games ever and take it anywhere.
In keeping with my theme of the day, old games, I thought I'd do a little something special for the one and only Gameboy Color game in my massive collection, Super Mario Bros Deluxe. What can I do special for it? Why write a review of course.

Super Mario Bros Deluxe is a remake of the classic NES game of the same name (minus the Deluxe. It quite frankly, even by todays standards is one of the most complete and perfect remakes of a game for the portable handheld ever. Released originally in May of 1999, it was a landmark game for the now extinct Gameboy Color system.

The Story
Everybody knows the story of Mario and the Princess, and if you don't then you probably have never heard of video games and don't really care.

But for the one or two of you whom don't know the tale of the heroic plumber and the damsel in distress, here it is in a nutshell. Mario is a Plumber, right. His main squeeze in life is Princess Toadstool. His arch enemy is the evil King Bowser. With me so far? Good. King Bowser has kidnapped the Princess to annoy Mario. Marios quest is to platform jump and mushroom eat his way through multiple levels in search of his Princess. That's about all you need to know of the story as the Mario games main strength is in its characters and game play, not its story.

Features of the Game
Super Mario Bros Deluxe is a pixel for pixel translation of the original NES game. All 32 levels are included along with a new VS. mode for two players providing you have a bud with a Gameboy. It supports the Gameboy printer in case you still happen to have one of those lying around as well.

Game Play
The main game is a true remake of the 1985 mega classic NES game, and it plays identical to it. All of the levels are intact with all of their secrets (there are a ton of secrets in Super Mario Bros.) What's new in this incarnation is the ability to save your game at any time, something the NES version could not do.

The VS. mode is great if you have a friend with a Gameboy and a link cable. It's mainly a race between Mario and Luigi from flagpole to flagpole and during the race you can mess with your opponent by hitting blocks and triggering other obstacles to try to slow him down. Pretty fun actually.

Also in this version is a Challenge Mode. In this mode, you are tasked with finding 5 red coins and a Yoshi egg as well as beat the levels record time to completely finish the Challenge. It's a pretty hard task and can get frustrating, and there's not much point to it besides your pride. Pride's pointless anyway.

You can also earn photographs as you progress through the game that are transferred into the games photo album. From there you can view the pictures or print them out should you have a Gameboy printer.

There is also a Mario Fortune Teller portion of the game where Mario can tell you generic fortunes like "Looks Like It" or "Hard to Say." In addition to that there's a calendar where one can mark important dates on and view what day it is (I think we all know how a calendar works. Don't we?) These two extras are pretty pointless, but still neat to mess around with for about 5 minutes or so.

The real meat in this game is the actual game. It translates amazingly well to the tiny Gameboy screen and offers the same great game play that we all know and love. It plays like a dream on the Gameboy Advance SP with its lighted screen. It is a big old style cartridge, so it looks kind of dorky in your GBA, but people will stop laughing eventually, trust me. There's also the option to make it full screen when playing it on the GBA SP, which kind of makes Mario look like a little person. Fun stuff indeed. All in all, performing Marios hairline jumps is just as much fun on the handheld as it was on the NES. It's platformy goodness at its best.

Overall
Overall, Super Mario Bros Deluxe paved the way for portable games of today when it was released back in 1999. Now today we are seeing all the classic Mario games and many of the great Super NES games being ported over to the hand held and who do we have to thank for this? That's right, little Mario, excuse me, Super Mario.

If you have a Gameboy and are looking for one of the best games of all time for it or any other system, this is it. It's dirt cheap as well and can be found for $14.99 most anywhere video games are sold. It needs to be in your collection.