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RETROspectives: Mario's Time Machine
We've already seen what would happen if Luigi and Yoshi ventured into our world to save Mario who was still in the Mushroom Kingdom. But now that Mario has been rescued it's time for his adventure in our world with a time machine. Mario's Time Machine also came out on MS-DOS, the NES and SNES. Like Mario is Missing we'll mainly focus on the NES port.
Mario's Time Machine sees Mario in a museum in the Mushroom Kingdom where he discovers that Bowser has found a time machine and using it to steal famous artifacts from human history. Mario must return 7 artifacts to their correct places in time to meet Bowser for the final battle. It sounds promising but it all quickly falls apart. Once you go through one of the doors you face the koopa troopas in much the same way as in the original Mario Bros (however, in the arcade game Mario Bros these were not koopa troopas but instead Shellcreepers) to be given an artifact corresponding to one of the available time periods. mario must jump in the Timulator (Bowser's time machine) and select a preset time in history. Once in the time period Mario must rely on message boxes to learn about each time period, this is where the educational part of this game is. Mario is Missing teaches players geography and Mario's Time Machine is designed to teach history.
At each time period you must place Mario in a certain position and drop the item, if you have the correct item in the correct time period and are standing in the correct spot you clear the area. If not a bird will steal the item from you and you'll have to fight the koopas for it again. Each of the 7 doors has two items so to clear each door you need to fight the koopas at least twice. This gets very tedious by the end of the game especially when you aren't told where to stand to drop the item in each time period. Take the apple, the clues in one time period talk about a tree and using our knowledge of the history of physics we are bound to think of Isaac Newton. Didn't he think of the concept of gravity from an apple falling from a tree? Is that where the apple belongs? No. The bird takes the apple and you have to fight the koopas again! But what did you do wrong? Does it go on top of the tree? Is this even the right time period? You'll never know, the game doesn't let you know what you did wrong.
In the SNES version the whole ordeal becomes much more tedious. In this game all the objects are available at the start of the game. You choose an item and put in a time period, location and the BC or AD. There are only a few possible places so you're unlikely to get the right date or location at times. You won't know until first you've taken a ride on a water ski, collected 10 mushrooms and went into a tidepool! But be careful, if you touch a Sea Urchin you'll lose a mushroom and to rub salt in the wound you're also on a time limit! Once you make it to one of the locations in the game you have to answer trivia questions. Once you finally beat the game you free Yoshi (he was kidnapped) and they pose next to a crying Bowser.
These games are truly horrific. Educational Mario games designed to teach children geography and history. They do succeed in teaching children lessons but lose sight of what makes a Mario game timeless. Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine are truly forgettable games and now that we've covered these we might as well do one more. One more abomination to the name Mario "Jumpman" Mario and one not made by Nintendo. What? A Mario game and not made by Nintendo? It's not even on a Nintendo console but we'll save that for next time!
