The 15 worst 'Mario' video games

The Mario Bros. arcade game only takes place on one screen, but the action is just as fast as any other Super Mario game. The Brooklyn plumber brothers are attempting to clear plagues of critters from an underground sewer by punching the level ground below them and jumping on platforms to knock them off the screen. Nothing looks the way it's supposed to in this Atari cartridge port. The enemies look nothing like Koopa Troopas, and the crabs look like bits of driftwood with legs. The "POW" block is just...well, a block. Worst of all, the controls and movement play more like one of those LCD handheld games from the '90s.

Nintendo's first foray into video games started in 1980 with the Game & Watch series. These little LCD games weren't as complex as their pixelated offspring, but they were as fast and challenging as they were portable. This two-player attempt is the only one that really doesn't cut any ice (no pun intended). Donkey Kong Hockey looks like a test version of the forthcoming NES offering two GamePad controllers attached to a main LCD screen. Players try to shoot a puck with Donkey Kong or Mario into their opponent's net across an icy field of obstacles that can change their shot's trajectory. The game is barely a step above Pong if Pong moved 10 times slower. 

Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Bart gets caught shoplifting a copy of his favorite game, Bonestorm, and his mother forgives him by buying him a copy of Lee Carvalho's Putting Challenge? Golf is the real-world version of that. This blackbox NES title is barely a golf game. The challenge and courses are about as boring as the game's unimaginative title. The sound effects are literally one note and sound like they came from an early prototype for Electronic Battleship.

The launch of the Super Nintendo in 1990 brought some all-time classics into our living rooms and presented some old favorites with a new coat of paint. The Super Mario All-Stars cartridge came with the first three Super Mario Bros. games with new, flashy 16-bit graphics and a dud called The Lost Levels. The Lost Levels is actually Japan's Super Mario Bros. 2 instead of the Super Mario Bros. 2 that American players got in 1988. 

If you tried to play the SNES version, you'd understand why. For starters, the game has power-ups like poison mushrooms that can shrink or straight-up kill you (which doesn't make them power-ups) and warps that take you back to previous levels instead of ahead of the game. The levels are frustrating because they are designed to be three times as hard as the first game. Worst of all, it doesn't add anything new to the game. It's like playing some super psycho's Super Mario Maker level. 

Educational games and Nintendo go together like mayo and bubble gum: Their purposes cancel each other out, and the result is a bland, sticky mess.

Mario Is Missing! applied the adventure game formula to the Mario universe in which Bowser kids Mario and players are forced to (shiver) learn geography by traveling the globe to save his little brother. The SNES version is almost unplayable since there don't seem to be any solid instructions besides just making poor Luigi wander around a 2D world with no apparent purpose. Plus, educational games just don't work on the Nintendo unless the game element is WAY higher than the gaming part. Playing it after school just felt like the teacher found a way to cram more homework into the machine. 

The other educational game in the Mario library focused on history knowledge because nothing makes for a better Mario game than remembering the dates of human tragedies.

This time, players control Mario, who must go back in time to rescue his pal Yoshi and retrieve vital historical artifacts that Bowser has stolen, forever changing the breadth of human history. It's basically Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego? if the game didn't have the fun of obtaining character traits of the thief to get a warrant and if the end goal was to save a dinosaur that can't be sated. In other words, boring. 

To be fair, pretty much every major video game franchise of the '90s had a typing tutor spinoff for PC and/or Mac. It's not like today, where everyone owns a keyboard and learns how to type before they can speak. 

However, Mario Teaches Typing barely works as an engaging tutor game. The formula is typing letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and words fast enough to make Mario, Luigi, or Princess Peach break blocks and avoid incoming enemies. The animations are wooden and move like a hand-drawn flipbook. The menu animations of a motion capture Mario look and sound like something out of one of David Lynch's nightmares. The worst part is how it reminds you that you're stuck at school and aren't home where you could play a much better Mario game.

The most horrifying Mario animations live in the CD of this barely played title for Philips' doomed CD-i system.

For some bizarre reason, Nintendo allowed Philips to obtain a license to make a Mario and Zelda game for its CD system. The game boasted full animations of your favorite plumbers because if there's one thing Mario games needed up until now, it's endless cutscenes you can't skip. The story is even stranger. For some reason, all of Bowser's kids have gone into the hotel business, and Mario closes levels of doors in each hotel as Goombas and Koopa Troopas open them. That's it. That's the whole game. Hotel Mario turns one of gaming's most beloved experiences into a part-time job. 

This entire feature could be filled with games from Nintendo's biggest console bomb, but since we only have time for one, Mario's Tennis stands out (or down).

Even if you look past that it's not the kind of Mario game players wanted back then, Mario's Tennis feels like watching a tennis game if you burned out your retinas and can only see red. The Virtual Boy attempted to stay ahead of competitors by offering a "virtual" headset with 3D graphics that didn't require a TV, but it put Nintendo way behind, and Mario's Tennis was a bare-bones tennis game, except you could play as Mario characters. A Mario game on the Virtual Boy where your favorite characters work as office temps would be more engaging and original than a forced perspective tennis clone. 

The first Dr. Mario on the NES gave Mario a whole new dimension to play in with a challenging, color-matching puzzle game. It introduced players to new game genres through their favorite characters. However, the one Nintendo made for the Nintendo 64 stopped the good doctor in its tracks. 

This version of Dr. Mario does offer more modes for single and multiplayer matches and even a story, but they all feel like the original game. The only addition is a slightly higher level of graphics and sound effects. It's the video game equivalent of Cedric the Entertainment's film remake of TV's The Honeymooners. When you're experiencing it, you wonder, "Do we really need this?"

Remember Sonic Spinball on the Sega Genesis, where that wily Sonic the Hedgehog is trapped in one of Dr. Robotnik's puzzling layers with conveniently placed flippers? That makes sense. Sonic is fast and can roll into a ball, so a pinball game fits the character. Now, try explaining the concept of a pinball game with Mario.

This Game Boy Advance title looks better than the average Mario game but barely functions as a pinball game. The playing fields are almost barren, negating the whole concept of creating a pinball game. Fortunately, you won't be playing on them long because you constantly have to reset, and a glitch keeps erasing your saved games. 

It's hard to make a game that becomes a best-selling franchise. It's even harder to make a whole new franchise within a gaming franchise, but the Mario Party games did just that for nine whole games. Then, this one came along. 

The Mario Party games are precisely what the title implies. They are party-style games where players move various Mario characters around a board to rack up coins with a mix of lucky die-rolling and a ton of super fun mini-games. Then, for some reason, the makers of Mario Party 10 decided the whole concept needed to be reinvented for the failing Wii U console.

Sure, you could use your Amiibo figures to plug them into the game, but whether you use your own or the game's roster of characters, there's not much for them to do since the gameboard are so boring, and the mini-games feel like a copy and paste of the coding into new settings and formats. 

The whole reason for the Mario Party games' success is its inclusion. They are accessible for kids and grownups. Anyone can play the games on an even field, sit together, and root for each other in a party setting. The word "party" isn't just in the title because it's catchy. 

So, it's bewildering that anyone thought a Game Boy Advance version of Mario Party would work even on a logistical level. It loses the party atmosphere the other games can create by shrinking the action to a portable device. It also didn't help that moving the game to a 2D platform limits the sights and sounds that go into making a successful party on any console, big or small. It also didn't help that some mini-games included with the cartridge offer some of the worst gameplay in the entire series. 

Unfortunately, the Mario Party games didn't improve when Nintendo upped its portable game with its 3DS series. Since it failed to learn that the other portable party games wouldn't work on a console you can fit in your pocket, it goes even further.

The game has some of the worst controls of any Mario game in history and even blander mini-games that feel like they were designed for preschool kids still developing their hand-eye coordination. The multiplayer connections are improved, but they don't go online, and there's really nothing for four people to do at all, let alone one player with no friends. 

Just before Nintendo climbed back to the top of gamers' Christmas lists with its Nintendo Switch console, it tried to take one more stab at making its games' portable by producing a series of smartphone apps, starting with this tired Super Mario clone for iPhones. 

Super Mario Run plays like a traditional Super Mario game, but it does the running for you. You can control when Mario or Luigi jumps or throws fireballs, but that's it. Super Mario Run turns the Mario game experience into a boring puzzle game where you don't care what the final picture looks like because you'd rather someone just ported all the original Mario games to your phone instead.