Reception
Upon its release, Hotel Mario was widely panned from video game magazines Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro. The former commented that Hotel Mario's gameplay was simple yet addicting. GamePro, while calling the game fun, believed that it would soon bore players, and gave it a fun factor of 2.5 out of 5. When Electronic Gaming Monthly named Mario the greatest video game character in 2005, they considered Hotel Mario his most embarrassing moment. Similarly, it was deemed the worst Mario game of all time by ScrewAttack, who criticized the game for its audio and controls, as well as for being solely "based on shutting doors." GameDaily included Hotel Mario in its feature of the worst games starring Nintendo mascots, stating its gameplay lacked identifiable Mario elements. The game was also listed as the worst 2D platformer in the Mario series by N-Europe. The site found the Koopaling battles "uniquely bad", calling the game itself a "steaming turd".
IGN said that Hotel Mario was better than the respective The Legend of Zelda titles, but noted that closing doors was not "a strong enough hook for an entire game." Chris Kohler of Wired magazine regarded Hotel Mario as "a puzzle game with no puzzles", assuming it was one of the reasons why Nintendo was not impressed by the CD-ROM medium. The game was referred to as "craptastic" by GamesRadar and "little more than a really rubbish version of Elevator Action" by Eurogamer.
In its 1994 review, GamePro rated Hotel Mario's graphics at 3.5 and sound at 4 out of 5, citing that "the only intriguing aspects of this game are the well-fashioned animated sequences." Years after the game was released, the cut scenes have become a subject of criticism among video game websites, and were called "outright terrifying" by 1UP.com. IGN described them as "abysmal" and "a bad flip-book of images printed out of Microsoft Paint. From 1987." The quality of the voice acting was also questioned. Both 1UP.com and IGN thought the voices were unfitting for the characters and did not achieve the same playfulness as those of Mario and Luigi's current voice artist Charles Martinet. Hotel Mario was listed in the Top 20 Worst Mario Games of all time.
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
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—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)