Mario Clash

Mario Clash is the cleverest little thing the Virtual Boy ever got, because it takes the ancient arcade classic Mario Bros. and adds it exactly one new dimension. Mario moves across platforms inside towers and, just like in the original game, dispatches enemies by flipping shells at them, except this time there are two planes: front and back. A shell picked up in front can be thrown to the back, knocking down an enemy walking along the rear plane, and vice versa. The whole game design rests on the player having to keep both planes under control at once and judge where a deflected shell will come back to, since after hitting something it can happily bounce back and hit you too.

Each level is always a single screen, one tower that the player clears in a few dozen seconds before moving on to the next. The arrangement of platforms, the pipes used to move between the left and right side, and the mix of enemies keep changing, so this simple premise manages to stretch into a surprisingly long campaign with gradually rising difficulty. Quickly chained hits earn bonus points, which pushes the game toward an aggressive, risk-taking playstyle and turns it into a classic score chase. The stereoscopy here isn't decoration but a genuine game mechanic, since without a sense of depth the player would struggle to tell which plane an enemy is standing on.

At the time, this was a title received with lukewarm interest, which is often explained by the fact that the game felt like a mere variant of a twenty-year-old arcade machine at a time when the competition was already showing off fully three-dimensional worlds. With hindsight, it's viewed more kindly: it's one of the few games whose core idea simply wouldn't work on a flat display, and so it's a genuinely exclusive experience for this platform. Today it can be recommended as an ideal title for a short session where you know exactly what you're doing and still end up breaking a sweat. It's just a shame Nintendo never took this mechanic any further, since there was clearly enough material in it for a full-fledged platformer.