Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

Best and Worst Games I own: 1995 Best: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES) Worst: Batman Forever (SNES) Yoshi's Island is one of my all-time favorite games and the first game I ever finished on my own as a kid. The gameplay and the artwork are what make this game so great. The game is a perfect game. 1995 itself was packed with incredible games: Killer Instinct Mortal Kombat 3 Virtua Fighter 2 NBA Jam TE Separation Anxiety Batman & Robin Batman Forever showed up three months after the movie and Acclaim built it with digitized actors that made it look like a Mortal Kombat ripoff turned into a side scroller. It was weird and out of place. The gameplay was dreadfully bad. Batman Forever is one of my favorite movies and to me, it's the ultimate 90s movie. The marketing for it was insane, it was everywhere, and I still have one of the frosted glass mugs from McDonald's. Now imagine how disappointed I was with this being the game we got. What a huge letdown. What are your best and worst picks for 1995?

Honest and Unpopular Reviews No. 10 Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES) This game never should have been called Super Mario World 2. Nintendo put Mario's name on it because Mario sells, and thirty years later people are still measuring it against a game it wasn't trying to be. It's not a sequel. It's barely the same genre. Take the branding off and what you've got is one of the most original platformers of the decade. The thing nobody gives it credit for is the baby. That crying is the health bar. You get hit, you've got ten seconds to get him back and the game is screaming at you the whole time you're trying. Every other platformer on the system just took a heart away and moved on. This one makes you go get it. The art took hits too. Crayon scribbles, looks like a kids game. That was 1995 and Donkey Kong Country had just convinced the whole industry that pre rendered plastic models were the future. Nintendo went the other way and drew a storybook by hand. One of those two games still looks good. Egg throwing doesn't get talked about enough either. You're holding a reticle that ricochets off the level while you're in the air trying to land a jump. That's aiming, in a platformer, in 1995, with no second stick on the controller. Every red coin you missed is sitting behind a shot you rushed. I'll say the rest of it plainly: This is one of my all time favorite games. My mom helped me beat every Mario game I owned before this one. Yoshi's Island is the first one I finished by myself. I rate this a 5 out of 5, and it's a better game than Donkey Kong Country.