Up next on the list we have the last “Mario” game which is really a Wario game. From the antagonist in Super Mario Land 2, Wario becomes the protagonist in his own story. I’m not sure what Gunpei Yokoi had against bringing a normal-ass Mario game to the series, but I guess for either expressive or technical reasons the team decided to switch over to Wario completely, as the two games that followed this were Wario Land II and Wario Land 3.

I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of Mario games, but it still seems messed up that Mario only gets one slightly good game with Super Mario Land 1, and relatively good game with Super Mario Land 2. It seems like they could have continue to improve on the progress and make a definitive Mario game, but instead the developers decided to switch over to Wario entirely. That being said the Wario games are pretty good as far as games go, taking control of the antagonist, getting money and saving up to buy a Castle. Overall I can say that this title is enjoyable, but I would have liked to see another attempt at a Mario entry.

Rom Hacks

Unfortunately there are no ROM hacks for this game. With Super Mario 1 & 2 having DX hacks, and Wario Land 2 & 3 being on the Gameboy color, this game seems like an ideal option to have a color hack but it doesn’t seem to exist. I’ve looked around to see if the people who made the colorized ROM hacks left any tutorials, and I couldn’t find any. I can’t say I’m a fan of reverse engineering things that shouldn’t have to be reverse engineered, but at least it seems like there might be something to go off of. If we look at the original ROM and the patched rom and compare the differences we might be able to identify specifically which aspects of the ROM need to be changed to have color implemented.

We could also get lazy and color in screenshots with paint to simulate what a colorized version would look like.