Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

Details: Written by Luke Hackett

Release dates

	Australia	N/A
	Europe	October 6th, 1995
	Japan	August 5th, 1995
	N.America	October 1st, 1995

General information

Platform: Super Nintendo (SNES)

Developed by Nintendo EAD

Published by Nintendo

Players: Single-player

GAME INFORMATION

Overview

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is the first Mario adventure game to star Yoshi, the game was designed as a prequel to all of the Mario games and goes back to when Mario was a baby. Your aim as Yoshi is to get Baby Mario back to his parents in the Mushroom Kingdom, while avoiding a Magikoopa sent by Bowser to kidnap Baby Mario - the Evil Kamek.

The graphics don't conform to any Mario games before it, and feature a unique hand-drawn look to colourful levels and scenery. Yoshi's Island has six different worlds, each of which has eight different stages, it also features six different bonus games which reward a player with items and extra lives. This title utilised the Super FX2 chip allowing for more powerful and smoother graphical elements such as smooth scrolling, zooming in and out, bigger bosses and much more.

Interesting Facts

GameInformer's top 200 videogames of all time rated this game 185th, one of the lowest ranked Mario Games, despite being 'technically' one of the most advanced games that the SNES would ever see.
Despite its relatively poor overall rating from GameInformer the 100th issue of Nintendo Power magazines "Top 100 Titles of all time" placed SMW2: Yoshi's Island a respectable 18th.
The "?" blocks of the original Super Mario World did not feature in this game
Sees the return of POW-Blocks unseen since SMB2.
The player controls Yoshi throughout the entire game
This game was actually more of a prequel than a sequel
Reference to "Loch Ness" the Scottish lake in which the legendary Loch Ness monster resides in the fish enemy called "Loch Nestor"
There was a comic series called Super Mario-Kun in Japan which featured stories based around various Super Mario videogames that were out at the time. The comic had an edition whereby it featured around the story of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island whereby the Adult versions of the Mario Brothers as we know them went back in time with the Adult version of Bowser, stopped Kamek from kidnapping Baby Mario and help Yoshi complete his mission to reunite the Baby Mario Bros.