written on Sunday, June 7, 2009
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.
New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 2006) is a throwback. Sure, the graphics are 3D, but the gameplay is all 2D. Part of me says I should start discussing the game's merits and flaws, but all I can think of is how it's not as good as Super Mario 3 or Super Mario World. Of course those are flagship titles, system sellers. NSMB is portable. And it feels more like an homage to than a continuation of the 2D Mario games.
The main changes to the formula are added collectibles. Every level has three special coins to find. Some are easy to get to. Some are a huge pain. I can use them to unlock bonus levels and toad homes with power ups and extra lives. It also has the hidden worlds and levels of the older games, so there are plenty of secrets. And to me there's nothing more satisfying than clearing an especially difficult level and saving my game with a sense of accomplishment.
It's too bad the game doesn't let me do that. It's a portable game and it only lets me save when I clear a castle, and even then only the first time. This is seriously annoying and makes all the time between when I wanted to quit and when I can quit without losing all my progress annoying. There are probably dozens of perfectly good levels that I just wanted to end because of this design error. Plus I think now that I've beaten the main game, the only way to clear some of the bonus levels I skipped and save that progress would be to complete them, then finish the final castle again.
$*(# that.
The main mechanics also don't feel quite right. Sometimes I'll lose speed in the middle of a jump. Infrequently, I'll fail to jump entirely. Of course, the DS directional pad is worse than the NES one from 20 years ago, and the buttons aren't the best either so maybe it's the hardware. Regardless, it still feels good, but not great. But sometimes the difference is life and death, and that's frustrating.
For some reason the game has weird difficulty spikes. Some levels are super easy. I just breeze through and get all the secret coins, barely going out of my way. Some are a huge pain in the butt and it takes me a long time and many deaths to get all the secrets. I noticed no pattern to where these more difficult levels would occur, either. Sure, there were more of them as the game progressed, but even on the final world, there were some super easy levels and the worst level for me was back in world four. It just doesn't feel like the polish was fully applied.
Because of its faults and possibly because I'm just not that interested in the genre any more it gets a three
out of five.
I gotta go back and play the old Mario games again to see if I just don't like them any more.
Oh, and I almost forgot the spoilers. People who played the original SMB know that you beat Bowser at the end of every world. They put a bizarre and macabre spin on it in this game. You beat Bowser in the first world by dropping him into lava, just like in the original game. But instead of just disappearing he flails and screams and turns into a skeleton. When you meet him again his child revives his bones with dark magic. You fight skeletal Bowser and drop him from a great height so that he breaks in pieces. For the finale, the child throws the broken bones into a cauldron to resurrect a giant Bowser. For a world where death usually means disappearing or making a face and falling off of the screen, it feels pretty creepy and out of place. I think Nintendo got tired of Mario a long time ago.
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