Obscure Mario Games

LuigiFan24

LuigiFan24

#LuigiForLife
Just a place to chat about the weird Mario games Nintendo has seemingly forgotten about, but judging by the return of Virtual Boy, could be coming to Switch and Switch 2.

I'm talking about one-offs like Mario Pinball Land and Yoshi Topsy-turvy as well as edutainment and PC titles such as Mario's Early Years. None of these are necessarily bad in my opinion, but they are very bizarre.


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(This is the shock like the expressions Nintendo fans have when discovering these for the first time)
 
I've played Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun, and it may be the only MS-DOS Mario game worth playing.
 
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There was an officially licensed Pong clone released on cable boxes in Italy titled "LEGO Super Mario Goal". It was a reskinned version of "Pongoal", a game made by the same company for other regions. It was removed around a year later.

I actually got to play Pongoal at a hotel, which is the closest I'll ever get to playing this game, unless the game files get leaked or something. The game sucked, like all the other games on their service, but at least it is better than playing a YouTuber branded game lmao
 
Out of all Mario related things, they picked the Lego sets to theme a Pong knockoff around?
 
Fizzle said:
I wouldn't be surprised if that was on Rokus before, just translated.
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Pongoal was released in 2020, and LSMG was on a cable box called "Skybox Italia", which I assume is Italy's Roku equivalent. So why was the Mario version an Italy exclusive? Even more baffling is that Play.Works also released a digital jigsaw puzzle based on LEGO Mario, and that was released in the US. I don't think there would've been much pushback in regards to LSMG getting localized.

But then again, documentation on Play.Works games is surprisingly poor, so there is a chance Pongoal got rebranded for that period of time in the US.

Edit: I found an announcement for the game that said it was exclusive to the Skybox Italia, so this was never localized for the US.
 
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Mario Teaches Typing is probably the most bizarre one out there. Nothing wrong with typing games, I mean, I played them when I was little, but the floating Mario head with no body is unsettling and there are weird pieces of dialogue like when Mario asks if he can have your computer 🤨
 
They used Mario's head from the 1991 Mario in Real Time event and put him into an educational typing game of all things. Mario's dialogue is also hilarious.
 
Fizzle said:
Nice computer you got there.

C A N I H A V E I T ?
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High in the sky like a big pizza pie, it's a moray! Get it, it's a moray eel? - Mario, Mario Teaches Typing, 1992.