This was the first time I've ever played it. Probably took around 20 hrs to beat it. Having a power outage during a storm when I was in World 5, playing through all worlds, didn't help. Took about 10 tries to beat Bowser.
I really, really, really dislike this game. I don't think there was ever a point where I was having fun. The lack of any sound during the title screen (until you push Start) made me think there was something was wrong with my NES or TV. I really can't stand the extreme sliding. Dying when I'm not even touching the enemy, but rather the square that the enemy occupies was infuriating (and here Parsec on TI-99/4A was pixel perfect the better part of a decade earlier). It apparently can't handle having two items on-screen at the same time as a 1-UP mushroom disappeared when I hit a ?-Block for a feather. The fortress bosses are pathetically easy with, what, two different flavors -- ones that can float for a bit and ones that can't? Having to go through the screen when using the pipes is just an annoying waste of time (and what's the point of them having timers?). Outside of the SMB1 themes that were reused, I found the music to be awful.
I got to where I searched out something to extremely shorten the game and found out about the warp whistles. After that, I just picked up the first two whistles, played through World 1, and then warped to World 8. I despise auto-scrolling stages in anything other than a shmup, which made the several ship stages in World 8 extremely annoying.
Really, the only thing I can say good about this is that the ship stages in World 8 act like fortresses, so when you beat them, they stay gone.
