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There are a lot of good games on the Virtual Console, and a lot of them that are wastes of time and data. To help you tell the difference, we're going to do lovely posts about awesome new VC downloads when they hit and just ignore the junk. Does it really take more than fifty words to let someone know that Power Golf is a pointless download, after all? No, it does not. So. Super Mario Bros. 3. Between this and Galaxy, we have one very Mario-soaked week ahead of us. There's all kinds of little factoids I could throw at you to try and inform you of how important Super Mario Bros. 3 is. First platformer with a battery save and World Map. Highest-selling single title in history, at seventeen million copies. The beginning of building Mario games around "new" power-ups. Hell, the epic cheesy Fred Savage movie The Wizard was produced more or less as a 90-minute commercial for it. But... c'mon, it's Super Mario Bros. 3. It's the most famous video game ever made, and chances are high that just about everyone reading this has played it or watched someone play it at some point. It goes without saying that it's a worthy Virtual Console download. If you haven't played this game, start on it now before the Nintendo Police find you and haul you off. Of course, Nintendo's re-released this game at least twice before, so it may be a little over-familiar to gamers like me who hammered on it incessantly in original NES cart form, in Super Mario All-Stars with the sweet graphics upgrades, and then again in Super Mario Advance 4. If your budget is limited, you may want to save your money for something you haven't had a chance to play before. If you're undecided about whether or not to download this one, here's a video Freddy Andersson's famous eleven-minute speedrun of Super Mario 3. If this doesn't make you itch to pick up a controller, or go "yeah, done that", then I don't know what else can help you.

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