This game is notable for marking the debut of Yoshi, the green dinosaur who can gobble up just about anything in sight. You first get Yoshi early in the game, and when you’re riding him, the background music has drums (just wait until you hear the drums in the underground levels). With Yoshi you can stick your tongue out and eat any small enemy and a handful of larger enemies. Each enemy you eat also counts as a coin. Yoshi can also hold many other enemies in his mouth, most notably Koopa Troopa shells.

And in this game, Yoshi can get a new ability depending on the color of the shell. A red shell always spits fire when you spit it out, a blue shell gives Yoshi wings, and a yellow shell gives Yoshi something similar to the cape shake you get when you’re Cape Mario or Cape Luigi. Later in the game you can also get Yoshis of different colors, which always have abilities corresponding to their shell colors. If you are riding Yoshi as you enter a ghost house or castle, Yoshi will not ride with you. One possible reason is because they’re just afraid of it, but the programmers never gave a solid reason.

The music in this game is generic feel-good Mario style music. Like I said before, the music adds drums whenever you’re riding Yoshi. Ghost houses and castles play appropriate themes for them (I used to not be able to sleep at night with that scary ghost house music). The sound effects are also typical Mario sound effects, although they have been greatly updated to fit sixteen-bit times.

Overall, this is, in my opinion, the best Super Nintendo game. This is the first sixteen bit game I played and all the puzzles and Yoshi and everything was great. True to Nintendo form, they created a masterpiece that no die-hard Mario fan should be without. It’s the best-selling game on the system and for good reason: Nintendo never fails to amaze its fans. This game will never go out of style.