Hotel Mario is one of the few titles in the franchise not developed (or even published) by Nintendo. It was the product of a deal between Nintendo and Phillips to design and release the CD attachment to the Super Nintendo. In exchange Phillips could commission development of games for the CD-i platform using the company’s classic franchises. This is where things get interesting. Hotel Mario is one of the only non-educational titles in the franchise to not be ported anywhere else. It’s also infamously bad. Today we’re going to take a look at Hotel Mario so let’s dive right into our review!
Upon booting up Hotel Mario we’re treated to what can only be described as one of the cheesiest and worst fully animated sequences in video game history. Here we have a dopey looking Mario and Luigi discover that Bowser has once again kidnapped the princess. Things are a bit different this time around. Now he’s a businessman running a series of hotels along with his koopa kids. Princess Toadstool has been made a ‘permanent resident’ at these estates, and it’s up to Mario and Luigi to rescue her. Now, typically I’m all for the early CD terrible voice acting and animation in these sequences. I felt compelled to skip these ones. They’re downright painful, and occur even in between stages. They’ve clearly been created as a low budget stinker.
Hotel Mario is not a traditional platform game. Instead it leans heavily into puzzle elements, and each stage takes place on a single screen from a side view. You play as Mario (duh, who else) and you can run both left and right as well as jump. Your goal in every single screen stage is simply to close all of the doors. Sounds easy enough, right? Well there are a lot of these, and each screen has multiple floors. Mario’s jump can’t reach new floors, and so you’ll have to use the elevators. These are marked as either going up or down, and in the beginning they move you up or down just one floor. It’s pretty simple. Enemies come from open doors, and they themselves can open closed ones. This means you’re going to want to defeat all enemies on each floor AND close all the doors.
Things start out easy enough, but the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly. The early enemies are mindless goombas that slowly move from one side of the screen to the next, new foes are introduced as you progress. You’ll also have to deal with fast moving koopa troopas, then multi-hit wigglers, then flying foes, and even bullet bills which shoot in from all directions. Hotel Mario becomes downright difficult in the later areas, but the enemies aren’t the only thing you’ll have to deal with. Later on the elevators don’t move you just one floor. Instead they have exits which can lead super far away from the entrance. This means the stages are no longer played linearly, and you’ll have to figure out which elevators lead where.
I’ll get this out of the way right now; Hotel Mario doesn’t feel like a Mario title. Yes, you play as the titular plumber and jump on enemies heads to dispatch them. The level of polish leaves a lot to be desired. The hit detection for example is all wrong. You can’t rely on your reflexes and instead have to learn just where and when you can hit foes. It’s easy enough when all you’re dealing with is goombas, but later on it’s a serious problem. Furthermore for being a Mario title there’s a big lack of power-ups. Yes, I understand this is primarily a puzzle game but it screams for more power-ups. You can collect coins to increase your lives, and there’s even a fire flower, but Hotel Mario needed more. To make matters worse the fireballs are slow moving and have choppy animations.
The game is divided up into seven different ‘hotels’ (which function as worlds) and I was happy that they each had their own theme. Unfortunately this doesn’t lean nearly as heavily into the Mario universe as it should. One is based on a forest, another ice, then you have a haunted house are (which is the best one to be honest), a world based in the sky, and a couple of others. It just doesn’t scream ‘Mario’ and to be honest this would have been stronger as an original title in my opinion. The highlight is that at the end of each of these you face one of the koopa kids as a boss encounter. These guys regenerate through open doors so gameplay is largely the same as in the standard stages. In this case you just have a more dynamic enemy to deal with.
Hotel Mario isn’t a very good looking game. I own a Phillips CD-i but to be honest I’m not even sure where it fits in as far as the bit wars go. Yes, this one has better backgrounds than most 16-bit titles with a lot of detail and less pixelation. Unfortunately it animates far worse than something like Super Mario World. Characters have so few frames of animation that nothing can be called smooth about them. It’s very choppy looking. The worst thing is when you throw fireballs and see them pretty much warp into different locations, and slowly at that. Also, without the characters you’d be hard pressed to find anything ‘Mario’ about the visuals. The soundtrack fares a bit better thanks to the CD technology, but again, it doesn’t reference the franchise in any way. Plus the voice acting is absolutely horrendous.
