Date Acquired: 11.14.2009
Date Completed: 12.30.2010
Thoughts: I could have completed this game a year ago, but It has always been my impression that this is a game built for multiplayer and that I needed to beat it in multiplayer. So I saved it for irregular co-op sessions, often with different people, forcing me to start at the begining again and again for them. Not a chore, the game's a ton of fun, especially in co-op. I was in no hurry to burn through it.
How does this game compare to SMB 1-3? That's hard to answer. It may technically be a better game, and certainly is light years better graphically, but SMB 1-3 and Super Mario World are legends, established in gaming's infancy. I'm not sure any new game could live up, particularily for someone who grew up on the original games. A young gamer, being introduced to all at the same time might like this one better, but for me, Nintendo was smart not to try to pass this off as Super Mario Brothers 4. There should never be a Super Mario Brothers 4. I won't sink countless hours into this game, playing it over and over again by myself, looking for hidden pathways and warp whistles, but that may speak just as much to my own different place in life as to this game's quality.
Pros: The Co-Op, obviously is the biggest draw to this game. Nintendo had co-op in the very first Mario Brothers game, but in all games after that, 2 players had to take turns through the game, if a 2 player option was even offered at all. So this represented both a welcome change for the series and a return to it's roots. The co-op is crazy fun. Insane. It's impossible not to play through this game laughing when you have 3 other people playing with you. It's pure chaos with 4 players all trying to jump to the same platform, and often jumping on other player's heads, which propells them further up into the air, and their unfortunate platform falls into the abyss. It is very, very easy to kill your fellow players in this game. Fortunately the game offers the bubble save. If you are about to fall to your death, be it because another player is advancing the screen too quickly, or through your own mis-jump, you have the option to go into a bubble at any point in the game by pushing the A button on the wiimote. Doing this will keep you from harm and you float around until another player pops you. Now if all the players go into a bubble (which happens a LOT), the level is exited and you have to start again, sans any power ups you may have had at the time, but not at the cost of any lives. This aspect saves the experience from becoming very frustrating and instead adds a lot of fun to the game.
Cons: My one big regret for this game is that there's no online co-op. The game is built around, and best experienced in co-op, and no online option was added. That was a crushing dissapointment to me. I dont' know what the reasoning for leaving it out was, it took 24 years for Nintendo to put co-op in a Super Mario Brothers game, so maybe in another 24 years they'll add online.
Another big annoyance was the controller. The Wiimote simply isn't suited for intense side-scrolling platforming. The placement of the A Button is too close to the arrow pad. It is way too easy to accidentally go into a bubble when you're only trying to move right, and get away, which leads to a lot of accidental level exits.
Outside of the multi-player, the game doesn't tread a lot of new ground. Most of the stuff in the game are things you've seen many times before in Mario titles. The largest surge of creativity is saved for the last fight with Bowser, which is both an homage to the past, and something new and different. The lack of new territory isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's a bit disappointing.
Conclusion: While it may not live up to the NES original games, this is a very good game in it's own right, and if you have people to play with regularly, then it's a must-own. Without that, it's likely in the same boat as the DS New Super Mario Brothers, a game I haven't touched since I completed it years ago. It stands up as a single player experience very well, but the multi-player aspect is what compels replays.
Nintendo's approach to the core "Super Mario" series on Wii and DS has been brilliant. You have New Super Mario Bros. DS and Wii looking and playing exactly the way the successors to the 8 and 16 bit Mario games should play, refining but not radically reinventing the franchise, and then you have Super Mario Galaxy 1-2, which are exactly the way true 21st-century Mario games should look and play. It's the best of both worlds: new and crazy and different on one hand, and familiar but refined on the other. Nintendo has struggled with this with its other franchises, reinventing some but playing it safe with others, or doing an inconsistent, alternating combination of both approaches, never really striking the right balance to keep the hardcore fans, the casual gamers, kids, and critics all satisfied.
ReplyDeleteMetroid: Other M is a prime example of this internal struggle, as it tries to be the ultimate midpoint between the 2D and 3D games and fails to match the quality of either. Or if you look at the two big Christmas releases from Nintendo this year, you again have one of each: a radical new interpretation of one franchise (Kirby) and a refined and well-made but very familiar and obvious sequel to another (DKC). I'm fine with either crazy or safe so long as the games are good, and with Nintendo they usually are, but the Mario series is the only one that has been getting it right on both fronts lately. Zelda is close, but it sort of cheats by making the big-budget console releases all basically being Ocarina remakes and only letting the the crazy ideas happen in the portable ones.