I liked some of the small but effective extra details and changes they made to the obstacles and items that made the remake seem less repetitive, eg. the giant enemies and power ups, the new boss characters. It\'s a shame the other Advance games didn\'t put the same effort.
Still I would have liked the first Super Mario Bros ported first, especially since they were basing them off the All Stars versions.
Yeah, it's definitely the one that has the most effort put into it to make it seem fresh and new. But with the other games, for me at least, the originals were good enough as they were. Most of them added entirely new content instead, which I place far above the bells and whistles treatment of the original SMA. Inconsistent design elements between the games is a small price to pay ...Heck, just the idea of having my favourite Mario game (Yoshi's Island) on a handheld was enough for my money to magically fly out of my wallet through some kind of, I don't know, empathetic telekinesis or something.
As for the original Bros., the GBC remake was fairly recent, and what with the GBA backwards compatibility I guess they figured there wasn't much point. Didn't they already release SMA4 pretty late in the GBA's life span anyways? Still, it's a shame that the All-Stars SMB isn't available on a handheld. I don't much like the later NES versions of the game with the slower gameplay physics, but if they're going to use those physics they might as well choose the version with better graphics, at least.
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Super Mario Advance, or How an Infamous Sophomore Slump Became, err, Less Slumpy
Despite growing up with this game as part of Super Mario All-Stars, the first game cartridge I ever owned, I have few fond memories of it. It was just the "other" game on the cart that was there if I needed a change of scenery from Bros. 1 or 3 (Lost Levels was out of the question from the get-go: I was not, nor am I now, a big enough masochist to even bother giving it a proper play). As a game, let alone a sequel to the first game that truly highlighted the full potential of video games, it just plain leaves me cold and wholly un-entertained. "E'rry tiem," as the kids say these days. This is a roundabout way of saying that yes, this was a game to which mowing the lawn seemed a more engaging activity; the very capital sin of game design.
There's nothing technically wrong with it; in fact, it pioneered more than its share of ideas and characters that would became mainstays of the Mario series as a whole... only, usually implemented in a better fashion. Aside from having the tepid gameplay and pace usually associated with contemporary third-rate licensed games based on some obscure, long-forgotten animated series, it's suffused with forgettable level design, and a frustrating feeling of never really accomplishing anything (having your hard-earned life containers taken away at the close of every level sucks hard) besides gathering lives you'll need for the few times the game decides to provide any noteworthy challenge (usually in the form of Goddamned Bats, the era's poor excuse for "difficulty", that the game does little to train you to handle) And in the end, after making a poor man's Bowser eat his veggies (seriously!) it's revealed to all have been a dream. Whoopee.
...But!
THERE ARE NO CATS IN AMERICAAAAAAAAAAA...
No, wait, what the hell happened there? Anyways...
...But!
Some fifteen years later, some genius at Nintendo had the bright idea, presumably after having been burned by the game much the same way as I, to make it FUN! You wouldn't think Bros. 2 would be a great launch title for the first Nintendo handheld device able to produce colours other than primaries and various shades of puke, but with some choice additions of fresh and engaging (if admittedly, still pretty shallow) things such as a point counter, a more steady stream of power-ups, red coins to be gathered, and even a bit of a second quest dealie that added some genuine, uhh, taxation(?) to a relatively non-taxing game. Not nearly good enough to make it a classic, but these changes, combined with the smaller bursts of playing normally associated with handhelds, finally made it worth the effort to play, at least. Not being a blight on Mario's otherwise exemplary main series record is good enough, for government work.
(...True, the remake also featured drawbacks in terms of those annoying soundbytes they tacked onto everything from that era, but ehh, it's just as well I'm often partial to listening to music with the game sound off, eh?)