"I'll give you one guess," The Red Snifit states.
Seriously, I love both games, but Super Mario Bros. USA has always been a far more appealing game to me... (For future reference, I will only be comparing the NES versions of these games, even if I will be using the names that became associated with them with All-Stars)
Lost Levels was essentially a slightly souped-up Super Mario Bros. with ridiculously difficult level design to me, and for that reason it was more like today's decent ROM hack than a new game. This difficulty made it just generally unpleasant to try and get through the game fairly, let alone those "secret" levels. I might actually love the gameplay more than SMB, but without any sort of save feature, it quickly becomes a chore to get though the same bunch of levels over and over just to progress ever so slightly more.
Super Mario Bros. USA is a different story, however. The difficulty of this game, the main reason I have a love-hate relationship with Lost Levels, is far more reasonable, but it's still challenging enough that to this day, it is unlikely that I'll actually complete a playthrough. Furthermore, it is actually not just a mere souped-up version of Doki Doki Panic, but a complete improvement. Doki Doki Panic has less animations, less overall design, a much more difficult method of completing the game (much like how you get to the secret levels in Lost Levels), and no running. The fact that both were actually made by the good ol' Mario guys, along with a few others, also solidifies its state as a true Mario game in my mind, even if it wasn't originally.
Besides, it's fun throwing Snifits, Pow Blocks, and whatnot to kill everything instead of just jumping on it. |