Mario's Time Machine was one of the two Mario-themed educational games produced by The Software Toolworks, an evil corperation bent on sucking the fun out of video games. The saddest part about this game is the fact that it's really a great concept: Mario travels through time, returning historical artifacts. If only this had been produced as an actual Mario title by Nintendo, instead of some pseudo-educational game by some company nobody's ever heard of. The story is something like this: Bowser has used a time machine to steal historical artifacts, thus rewriting some of history's most important events. This again proves that Bowser is the dumbest villian in the history of video games - Magellan's steering wheel is only valueable if he actually used it, idiot. Aside from his useless history robbing, Bowser has also kidnapped Yoshi for no foresable reason. Now Mario must find these artifacts and return them to their rightful place in time BEFORE HISTORY GETS REWRITTEN FOREVER!!!

The controls on Mario's Time Machine are, to say the least, not good. No matter what enviroment he's in, Mario tends to have the traction of a seal on ice. His jumping is equally hard to control, which results in a lot of falling from single-tile blocks. Aside from the controls, the gameplay is not what you'd expect (or want) from a Mario game. Keeping with the trend in educational video games of not hurting anybody's feelings, Mario can never die, or even get injured. When he's hit by an enemy, it just causes him to duck for a second. If that sounds like it doesn't make any sense, it's because it doesn't. The only Mario-themed enemies in the game are Bowser and the Koopa Troopas. Everything else is just... weird. Like this thing that looks like a walking egg with sunglasses on.

The last thing I want to discuss is the artifacts that must be dealt with in Mario's Time Machine. Mario returns things like Abraham Lincoln's stovepipe hat (and thank God, because if it weren't for Honest Abe's hat, the South might've won the Civil War!), a dinosaur egg, and Shakespeare's quill pen. That last one really bothers me. The game claims that without his quill pen, Shakespeare would've never written his classical sonnets and plays. What kind of jerk doesn't write just because his favorite pen is missing? But something that bothers me even more than the quill pen is the sledgehammer, stolen from the site of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After pondering this for a while, I made a realization, one that could rock the very foundation of the video game world. Think about it: What could Bowser possibly want to steal the sledgehammer from the Berlin Wall for? Then it hit me: Bowser's a communist! Why else would he want the East Berliners to never break the wall down? He wanted them to remain in the confines of Soviet communism! And now I'm out on a mission to let the world know the truth. Bowser can hide his dirty secret no longer; BOWSER'S A DIRTY COMMIE!

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