Wow, Super Mario Bros Special looks terrible. Very strong evidence that the main reason the NES was so successful was its easy to use hardware scrolling. Just one write to a memory mapped register and you were set (sort of).
I'm missing the significance of quoting the screenshot captions. The parent post was suggesting that the NES provided a platform that made it easy to create sidescrolling games. From the article, one of the major failures of this game is the lack of decent side-scroll.
> The big difference is that the screen doesn't scroll smoothly, but instead flicks across. Annoyingly you can see part of the next area, meaning the screen flicks across before Mario reaches the edge, totally destroying any sense of timing for precise jumps. Plus, turtle shells will bounce off of scenery even if it's on a subsequent screen, threatening to kill unsuspecting players. The fact the screen doesn't scroll can, in some cases, make this appear as if turtle shells are bouncing off open space.
