Another educational Mario game, this time catering to toddlers who just love that plumber.

User Rating: 3.1 | Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun SNES
Nintendo and the edutainment company that brought you Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine gives it one more shake, this time aiming at kids too young to properly articulate how the game they're playing sucks. Mario's Early Years is the heading for three seperate games released for DOS and the SNES: Fun With Letters, Fun With Numbers, and Preschool Fun. They all play the same, and I suspect they're only seperated because the hefty number of voice samples in each would've been too big for a single cart.

In fact, the game is nothing but voice; highly compressed, chopped up voice. Each word and term was recorded seperately, which leads to lines that sound like "Show me. The. Things! Which are. The. Opposite of! Dry." Each game in the series is made of several minigames, consisting of clicking on whatever shape, number, color, or variety of Australian trap-door spider the little girl voice asks you to identify. They even bothered to put in SNES mouse support, which was nice of them. When you give the right answer, a weird, vaguely foreign old man voice proclaims "You found it!" or "I lke your choice!" or "I watch you in the bathroom!" About that last one: I swear I heard it.

Along with this voice, a character pops up on the screen with a simple animation (as a "reward", I suppose). Most of it is to be expected: a little piranha plant pokes out of a pipe, Yoshi's head rises up over some bushes in the background, etc. One of them, though, is just a hand appearing from behind a pipe with a popsicle. That's it. It waits for a moment, then retreats back behind the pipe, seemingly disappointed that kidnapping children isn't as easy as it appears in the movies. It's kind of creepy, but luckily one of the games also includes a picture of Bowser with a top hat and cane for no good reason to take your mind off things.