But even if you dont wait for the attract mode to kick in, the goals make themselves manifest immediately after you start. The game begins in an unusually low-stress fashion with Mario at the far left edge of the screen, facing right, with nothing else in sight. This calls back to Donkey Kong, which began with Mario at the bottom left of the girder course; placing his back to a proverbial wall coaxes the player to move forward
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Once you move to the right far enough, youll cause the screen to scroll forward. At this point, you may try to backtrack, at which point youll discover the scrolling is ratchet style it moves forward at the players discretion, but it wont double back. This is a more expansive game than Mario Bros. by far, but its still limited. You still have a singular focus: Get to the other end of the stage before time runs out. The one-way progression allows for some tough choices and nasty tricks along the way as well. But for now, it simply keeps you on track.
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Once you begin scrolling the screen ahead, you find your first few details in the world: Some floating bricks, and a small mushroom-like enemy that walks slowly toward you. Mixed in with the bricks are a number of blocks featuring flashing question marks. A Mario Bros. player should be drawn, instinctively, to act here: Punch the Question Blocks, just like they did the POW Block in the previous game. But for the newcomer, the enemy a Goomba provides a clue, and incentive. Its timed to catch up to Mario right around the time the player should have guided Mario to a point right beneath the first Question Block. Like the fireball in Donkey Kong and Hadoukens in Street Fighter, the Goomba becomes a catalyst forcing the player to react. If you dont jump the Goomba, Mario will die.
Chances are that for the first-time player, Mario will die anyway. If you dont time the jump right, or if you smack Marios head against the Question Block and kill the arc of his jump, the Goomba will walk right into him. But hey, lesson learned either way, right? Punch the Question Block and a coin pops out; smoosh the Goomba by jumping on top of it and a point tally floats up. In both cases, youre given an indication of a reward though unlike the Goomba, the coin increments both your score and a separate coin counter, with a cash register chime to indicate some sort of greater value than mere points.
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With the Goomba dead or avoided and the hit me essentiality of Question Blocks confirmed, the player moves on to the second portion of the block formation. The bricks do nothing but bounce when struck, but the leftmost Question Block the first youll hit yields a new prize, a Mushroom. It slides to the right along the bricks, drops to the ground, rebounds off the pipe, and slides to the left along the ground.
You can snag the mushroom at any time before it slides off the screen, but you can also screw it up. If you get overly zealous and immediately hit the lower-right Question Block, theres a pretty good chance the upward motion of the reacting Question Block will glancingly strike the mushroom and send it bounding immediately to the left. This placement is surely not accidental; you can survive the loss of a mushroom here, so bouncing it away offers another of those Super Mario hard life lessons.
Whether or not you manage to snag the mushroom, this block formation also clues you into the fact that despite Super Marios emphasis on horizontal movement through the stage it still retains some elements of Mario Bros.: To hit that upper block, you have to use the lower blocks as a platform. (Hence the genres name.)
