I'm still in awe with this game, going back to it and to the making of video basically every year. Back in the day Super Mario Bros. was considered to be a technological marvel, fitting so many levels and mechanics into a 40 kb game. But this game shows what was actually possible, and every decision is beautiful. For instance, all the devs on NES tried making characters bigger and bigger, while Micro Mages feature one 8x8 px sprite characters and showing that good artist can make characters look good even in 8x8 px. But what this gave is the ability to make much richer animations, and compared to Micro Mages, Mario's characters look like stagnant paper figurines. M.M.'s just feel so much more alive. Not only that, but making characters 4x smaller consequently makes the world 4x bigger! More things to see, explore and interact with. And also it allows the 4 players multiplayer mode to be a full-fledged game mode.
Then we have levels. They're packed with content both horizontally and vertically, and have lots of graphics in the backgrounds as opposed to just blank sheets. And the giant bosses at the end of each world provide much needed sense of scope, which again is multiplied in power by the small size of the player's character. They're well done and this spectacle rewards the player for finishing yet another world, while in S.M.B. there's really only one boss.
And if that's not enough, there's twice as much levels due to hard mode being the second half of the game! Which again features not only new challenges and harder enemies, but new graphical palettes as well, making it feel new (for instance 130 KB Ghosts'n'Goblins didn't feature new palettes in the second hard half of the game, and this 40 KB game does).
And the best part is that the game is not just a technical demo on a demo scene, but a finished super fun game! The challenges are fair, not too hard to feel obliged to quit but also not trivial. The controls and sounds give satisfaction from just playing the game. The levels are designed to be beatable wether the player has power ups like flying or lost them all. And of course they are designed to work in the hard half as well. So there's a lot of good game design there.
This is no doubt one of my absolutely favourite NES games, it turned my phone into a much loved game console and gives me joy even when lying on a bed. And I just like going back to this marvel again and again, which gives me game development inspiration. Love your work, guys!