What was Nintendo's golden decade?

[Cobalt Blue]

Meta, we're not talking about World Maps here, compared to something like Sonic 3, yes 2D Mario games are extremely linear.


Oh, that'd be pretty interesting to see a 2D Mario game with actual path based layouts like classic Sonic games.

but smb3 later levels arent linear. specially some cave-based ones. the warp pipes and note blocks provide quite a decent amount of optional paths inside a course, let alone the secret spots in some stages.

even smb2 and smb do have their share of optional paths in some stages-