Review Information
Game Reviewed Super Mario Shrink, by King Piranha Plant
Review Author Cap'n Coconuts
Created Oct 15 2015, 11:05 PM

General Commentary and Game Overview
Super Mario Shrink is a simple minigame where you collect coins while avoiding harmful objects. As the plot goes, Bowser has shrunk Mario down to a height about half as tall as a Game Boy. There are flies that try to drop plates on you (trying as much as any enemy moving in a fixed pattern will).
 
Pros + The game is not packed in an installer. Therefore, it can easily be removed from your hard drive.
+ I can defy gravity if I crouch, which I found mildly amusing
 
Cons - Game has a couple of bugs
- Excessively simple and tedious gameplay
- Boring premise
 
Impressions
Gameplay
2 / 10
I have to confess that the premise of the game has me rather perplexed. Mario is tiny and at the mercy of Bowser, and the best KING PIRANHA PLANT could come up with was to put Mario in a house and drop plates on top of him. In a scenario where even the lowly Goomba would be an unstoppable colossus, Mario is menaced by nothing more than flies that drop plates. Now hear me out: I know this is the Mushroom World and nothing really makes a lot of logical sense, but flies dropping plates as your primary threat is pretty dumb if you ask me, especially when there many, many more sensible and awesome things to torment tiny Mario with.

Coin and plate dropping seem to be quite random. Once you've gotten the gist of the game, it's easy enough to keep collecting coins and playing for a very long time. The primary threat to getting a high score is not the plates or the thumb tacks lying around. The primary threat is the sheer tedium of the gameplay.

The flies don't seem to like going near the edges of the game window, so you could theoretically stand in a corner and leave the game running like those idle games you kind of let run by themselves. They're weirdly popular for some reason.

The one thing I do like about the gameplay is that you can defy gravity with a crouch (which is a completely unnecessary feature for this kind of game). For reasons unknown to those with common sense, Mario can move left and right while crouching as if he was walking. He can even float in the air like this.

And that's about it. The Graphics and Sound have some things going for them, but that matters little when the game is fundamentally dumb.
 
Graphics
5 / 10
The menu screen leaves much to be desired, featuring a background that is mostly a solid cyan color. The speech bubble is stretched with extremely poor quality. All in all, this screen is just amateurish and tacky.

The actual game itself is a bit better. The game uses custom graphics, with objects such as books, blocks, and a Game Boy serving as platforms. I get the feeling all of this isn't really to scale, but whatever: the game graphics are alright. There's no special effects or anything, but it works for the game's premise, even if that premise leaves much to be desired.
 
Sound
4 / 10
The music in this game fits well enough and is fairly enjoyable. The sounds are fine too, except for the jump sound, which seems to have a 50% chance of actually playing when you jump, and a 100% chance of playing when you are crouching or falling from a jump. That seems a very amateur mistake to me.
 
Replay
1 / 10
The game does not seem to keep track of your score, as I could not find a high score table. Even if there was one, I can't find a good reason to play this again.
 
Final Words
2 / 10
Unless you're bored out of your mind and have nothing else to play, this game is a waste of your time.

Comments
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King Piranha Plant
Aug 7 2021, 9:44 PM
Looking back, this review is so hilarious and well written. The game was indeed terrible hahaha, I think I was just rushing something small to be part of a minigame competition for the first time. Why flies? Why plates??
 
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