Hmm.

Stupid hard:

SMB3

AoL

Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde (WORST GAME EVER)

LoZ

ALttP

Challenging hard:

SMW (only some levels & areas, like the fortresses, star road, special world, and the valley of bowser and whatever the world after the forest of illusion is called)

SMB2 (borderline stupid hard)

SMB1 (very easy till 7-2, then it gets very hard) 

Uh...I haven't played many SNES games. I think I've played like 3. And pretty much every NES game I've played is impossible. 

SMB3 is great! You can replace the levels, put only while your in the same area. It is a fun game with interesting mini games. It is better than Mario 64 or Mario Sunshine because the control is much better. The control and cameras suck in Mario 64. Mario Sunshine has good cameras but the controls are challenging.

What's the problem with Mario64 and Sunshine controls now?

While I agree with you that it isn't the best Mario out there... I have a hard time understand why you think it's so hard. I always thought it was pretty easy.

I hooked up my nes to the tele' about a year ago and I played through it with my girlfriend and we didn't have any trouble with it.

You have to realize that the missing features you complain about hadn't been introduced in the era of SMB3.

The map and being able to choose a route through the game (even if it is limited) had never been done before. Complaining it doesnt have features that no other game had isn just silly, its like saying Half Life 1 wasnt all that because it didnt have incredible physics gameplay or dual wield. So many elements of the scrolling platformer were born in SMB3, that is why its regarded so highly.

Ofcouse SMW, NSMB and so on are better, they are sequels to SMB3 and have taken elements from SMB3 and improved them.

If you were a NES gamer (or in fact any gamer) when SMB3 was launched it would have blown you away.
I had a NES and bought the game and at the time my friends had megadrives, 16bit Amiga/Atari computers and so on and everyone was impressed by it.

As for it being too hard, thats how hard games used to be back then, if you are playing the GBA version then you had the luxury of being able to SAVE! Not play the game from the beginning every single time you turned it on. Hardcore gaming in a differelnt realm to the so called hardcore of today.

Super Mario 3 was all about practice. It definitely did have the hand-bleeding toughness of Ninja Gaiden or the sheer frustration factor of Battle Toads...

Still, call me crazy but I like Yoshi's Island more than any of the other 2D Mario games... and yes, I consider it a Mario game even if you play as Yoshi.

I don't say this a lot, but I think you earned it:

ROFLMAO!!!!11!!11!1

I cleared it back when I was a kid. I kicked ass on the ghost ships. The game was hard but it wasn't impossibly hard. It was just right. SMB2 was almost impossibly hard and I cleared that game as well as a kid (I was never that good at clearing games as a kid).

Games have gotten WAY too easy. I've cleared more games on my DS then I have on any console before it. The SMB3 GBA edition has a few edits in it I believe. If you are going to play SMB3, play the original version on the NES or VC. It's a great game, easily one of the best ever made. The level design is still awesome. If you are complaining the game is too hard. You're too young to understand. ;)

Also... I found levels in Yoshi's island SMW2 to be harder then some levels in SMB3. The main game was easy, the unlockables... damn those are freaking hard.

 See, that's the thing.  All NES games back in that era were hard.  I thought SMB3 was actually easy compared to the other games I was playing back then... although maybe megaman was easier.

 The point is that it was absolutely amazing for its time.  It looked and played so much better than pretty much anything else at the time.

After doing most of my gaming during the NES and SNES era, I find many current games are so easy that they don't actually interest me.  For example, I think A Link to the Past is incomparably better than Ocarina of Time.  My brother and I used to sequence break A Link to the Past so we could play any of the last 8 dungeons and fight the bosses with low health (but all the items) just for fun.  Ocarina, with half of the number of items and totally linear gameplay, and no difficult boss fights just seems boring in comparison.