Post by BlazeHedgehod on Oct 29, 2006 4:24:35 GMT -5
I have reviewed New Super Mario Brothers*. Since I can, I am just going to copy and paste it here:
Super Mario Brothers. Everybody remembers that, right? I mean, who doesn't? Some time in your life, you've no doubt played a Mario platformer. Usually, these games are of the pinnacle of gaming; almost as if Mario commands the entire genre - whatever Mario does, everybody usually follows through on. Unfortunately, after Super Mario 64, this trend seemed to kind of stop - Mario stumbled. All it takes is one reading of my Super Mario Sunshine review to learn that I didn't really like the game at all; it not only failed to produce a sufficiently innovative feature, but it even went so far as to REMOVE some of the innovation brought from Super Mario 64. Debates raged on: Was Super Mario Sunshine a good game? In a time when the Gamecube was showing serious signs of weakness, and indeed, Nintendo as a whole was showing signs of weakness, people wondered if this might have been the beginning of the end for Mario. Repeated delays of the titular Super Mario 128 did nothing to douse these fears, either.
Until the Nintendo DS came along. Like some kind of shinning beacon in the night, the Nintendo DS showed us that Nintendo still had it. The system was an instant success; despite experimental gameplay, it pulled ahead of it's rival, the Sony Playstation Portable, eventually outselling it 5-to-1 in Japan. And with the Nintendo DS came a title people had been waiting for since the SNES was phased out in 1996: a new side-scrolling Mario title. Not an "updated" port of something from Super Mario All-Stars, but an all-new, completely original Mario title.
"New Super Mario Brothers".
Immediately hype levels were off the charts. Miyamoto announced that the team working on it was comprised of some of the team who had worked on Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, two of the best side-scrolling platformers to ever feature a plumber. And then, the game dropped. After over a year of waiting, it was finally here.
So what do I think? A lot of what I had heard on the game prior to buying it was kind of questionable: Curiously, most people seemed to complain that it just wasn't new enough. This completely puzzles me; but that doesn't mean I think the game is perfect. It definitely needs work and suffers from some of the problems that were seemingly inherited from the "Super Mario Advance" ports.
So let's start at the good. Eight worlds with roughly 8 levels per-world. That's roughly 64 levels and is nothing to sneeze at. Worlds are grouped on familiar themes, with some new themes poking through; you have your typical Ice and Desert worlds, for example, but you also have a world dedicated to Beach levels, Forest levels, and, harkening back to Super Mario Brothers 3, a world of the Sky. The maps themselves look something like a cross between Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, and Yoshi's Island. Worlds are broken up by two types of boss levels: Towers and Castles. Towers typically come midway through a world, and at the end, you face Bowser's Son. Castles are where the real boss fight of the world comes.
The levels themselves fall into a mostly familiar Mario gameplay mold; bricks, question blocks, Goombas, and Koopa Troopas are all present and accounted for. A new addition that's rather amusing is the fact that music plays a slightly greater emphasis; enemies and items seem to time their movements to certain musical cues. Goombas hop in time to the music, Koopa Troopas stop and pose momentarily on certain beats - it's just something that makes you smile. New gameplay keeps this from feeling like just the same old Mario, too; elements from the 3D Mario games have been blended in - Mario's butt stomp, the triple jump, etc. The Butt-stomp especially becomes useful as you can stomp question blocks and the item will fall out of the bottom - expanding gameplay possibilities a great deal. Several times have I butt-stomped a brick block only to have a vine - originally intended to send me to a bonus area - amusingly shoot downwards into the ground where it immediately becomes useless to me. It's totally one of those "d'oh!" moments.
The game introduces three new power-ups; returning are the Fire Flower and Super Mushroom, but new to the table are the Mega Mushroom, which turns Mario into a massive, invincible giant who stomps and crashes through every item, pipe, and enemy on screen for a limited amount of time; the Mini Mushroom, which transforms Mario into a super-tiny, light-as-a-feather Tiny Mario, who is able to squeeze through tight spots and utilize tiny Warp Pipes; and finally, the Blue Koopa Troopa Shell. With this on, Mario pretends to be a Koopa Troopa himself: Run for an extended length of time and Mario will duck into the shell and spin along nigh uncontrollably just as if you picked up and kicked a Koopa shell. You can also use the shell for defensive purposes; hold down to duck inside of it and you are impervious to nearly all forms of damage at the disadvantage of being nearly immobile while doing so. Secondary power-ups are stored in a Super-Mario-World-esque "storage" container, located on the bottom screen. Touch it at any time to release the secondary power-up.
With the added power of the Nintendo DS over, say, the Super NES, New Super Mario Brothers introduces a greater feeling of physics to the Mario world. Yoshi's Island touched on this a little bit, but NSMB takes it to the next level. Water ripples as things touch it, ropes sway and objects attached to string bounce around realistically; it's all very cool looking. Visuals do not disappoint either: The levels themselves are made up of detailed, vivid, colorful objects that take advantage of the DS's strengths over the Gameboy Advance. No cramped resolution; no washed out visuals. Objects themselves - such as Mario, enemies, bosses, etc. are all crafted out of relatively detailed 3D models. This gives them slick, smooth animations in addition to making things like the aforementioned "Mega Mario" look quite impressive, too. Giant enemies also make an appearance here and there - regular enemies, but at double the size. It all makes for one of the most visually pleasing Mario side-scrollers ever made.
So what's bad about it? My largest complaint is that the game is simply too easy. The game throws a ton of extra lives at you and you rarely, if ever, need to use them. By the time I finished the game, I had nearly 60 lives - and never did I once go out of my way to collect or "farm" extra lives. Through the natural course of playing the game, it had just given me all those extra lives. This same thought process effected the "Super Mario Advance" ports, too. Those games gave you a lot more extra lives compared to their originals. But New Super Mario Brothers is worse; it subscribes to the concept that secret levels are the ones that have to be difficult. Perhaps it's their way of separating the hardcore Mario players from the casual gamers; while most of the game is paced for the casual, those hardcore Mario fanatics will find solace in uncovering every secret (including the "secret" Worlds 4 and 7) in the game - where the challenge ramps up.
But even the secret levels aren't hard. They're hardER, but in all 8 worlds of the game, the only worlds that seemed to give me any trouble were parts of World 7 and the last half of World 8. Had the last half of World 8 not claimed 10 lives, I might have actually beaten the game with nearly 70 lives instead of 60. I honestly assumed I would have topped 99 lives before I cleared the game, and, had I gone just a little out of my way, I could've very likely done that with no problem whatsoever. Just GETTING to World 4 and World 7 is harder than actually completing them, as you have to beat bosses as Tiny Mario, whom dies in one hit. Failing that, every other boss in the game is easy as cake: Like lives, NSMB isn't shy on giving you freebie power-ups. Both the Fire Flower and the Mega Mushroom give you the opportunity of taking a boss down in mere seconds; and both are easily stow-able in your Secondary Power-up reserve, ready and waiting to be activated the moment you step into the Boss's lair. In short, New Super Mario Brothers is a game that's hard only if you WANT it to be, and even then, it's not really that challenging. While parts of World 8 gave me sweaty palms, nothing in the rest of the game did.
"But wait," you, the reader, say. "You've been playing Mario games since 1988. Of course the game is going to be easier for you."
That may be true, but I make no effort in hiding the fact that I suck at games. I used to play RPGs with a Game Genie, for crying out loud. Before a friend of mine went off to college, we went on a retro-gaming co-op binge; we beat many classic SNES games together, including, for the first time in nearly 10 years, Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World. Those games were a LOT harder than New Super Mario Brothers. I don't think we ever even completed SMB3; we got up to World 6 or World 7 and couldn't get any further.
So regardless of my skill level as a gamer, New Super Mario Brothers IS, by a great margin, a lot easier than it's NES/SNES brethren. And THAT'S why it feels like it's just going through the motions; it's not really challenging you. Speed through here, stomp this goomba, hit this brick, slide down the flag pole and do the same thing in the next level. Sure, it taps nostalgia like no tomorrow - paying homage to every side-scrolling Mario game that came before it, but it's simply not hard enough for us to really remember any of that cool stuff. It's got some nice ideas, but it just never really gets down and dirty enough to make you remember those nice ideas.
If this is your first Mario, it's not a bad starting point. I just hope that in the sequel (and there BETTER be a sequel!) Nintendo ramps the difficulty up considerably, as a common complaint I'm hearing from them for ALL their DS games (Super Princess Peach, Mario Versus Donkey Kong 2) is that they simply aren't challenging enough - and New Super Mario Brothers fits neatly within that same criteria.
Score: 7.5 out of 10.
*For those who don't get the Scott Ramoosair line, generally, instead of Penny-Arcade, who does comics about games that have recently come out, VGcats has fallen into this slump of doing comics about games that are six months to a year old, sometimes more.
Super Mario Brothers. Everybody remembers that, right? I mean, who doesn't? Some time in your life, you've no doubt played a Mario platformer. Usually, these games are of the pinnacle of gaming; almost as if Mario commands the entire genre - whatever Mario does, everybody usually follows through on. Unfortunately, after Super Mario 64, this trend seemed to kind of stop - Mario stumbled. All it takes is one reading of my Super Mario Sunshine review to learn that I didn't really like the game at all; it not only failed to produce a sufficiently innovative feature, but it even went so far as to REMOVE some of the innovation brought from Super Mario 64. Debates raged on: Was Super Mario Sunshine a good game? In a time when the Gamecube was showing serious signs of weakness, and indeed, Nintendo as a whole was showing signs of weakness, people wondered if this might have been the beginning of the end for Mario. Repeated delays of the titular Super Mario 128 did nothing to douse these fears, either.
Until the Nintendo DS came along. Like some kind of shinning beacon in the night, the Nintendo DS showed us that Nintendo still had it. The system was an instant success; despite experimental gameplay, it pulled ahead of it's rival, the Sony Playstation Portable, eventually outselling it 5-to-1 in Japan. And with the Nintendo DS came a title people had been waiting for since the SNES was phased out in 1996: a new side-scrolling Mario title. Not an "updated" port of something from Super Mario All-Stars, but an all-new, completely original Mario title.
"New Super Mario Brothers".
Immediately hype levels were off the charts. Miyamoto announced that the team working on it was comprised of some of the team who had worked on Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, two of the best side-scrolling platformers to ever feature a plumber. And then, the game dropped. After over a year of waiting, it was finally here.
So what do I think? A lot of what I had heard on the game prior to buying it was kind of questionable: Curiously, most people seemed to complain that it just wasn't new enough. This completely puzzles me; but that doesn't mean I think the game is perfect. It definitely needs work and suffers from some of the problems that were seemingly inherited from the "Super Mario Advance" ports.
So let's start at the good. Eight worlds with roughly 8 levels per-world. That's roughly 64 levels and is nothing to sneeze at. Worlds are grouped on familiar themes, with some new themes poking through; you have your typical Ice and Desert worlds, for example, but you also have a world dedicated to Beach levels, Forest levels, and, harkening back to Super Mario Brothers 3, a world of the Sky. The maps themselves look something like a cross between Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, and Yoshi's Island. Worlds are broken up by two types of boss levels: Towers and Castles. Towers typically come midway through a world, and at the end, you face Bowser's Son. Castles are where the real boss fight of the world comes.
The levels themselves fall into a mostly familiar Mario gameplay mold; bricks, question blocks, Goombas, and Koopa Troopas are all present and accounted for. A new addition that's rather amusing is the fact that music plays a slightly greater emphasis; enemies and items seem to time their movements to certain musical cues. Goombas hop in time to the music, Koopa Troopas stop and pose momentarily on certain beats - it's just something that makes you smile. New gameplay keeps this from feeling like just the same old Mario, too; elements from the 3D Mario games have been blended in - Mario's butt stomp, the triple jump, etc. The Butt-stomp especially becomes useful as you can stomp question blocks and the item will fall out of the bottom - expanding gameplay possibilities a great deal. Several times have I butt-stomped a brick block only to have a vine - originally intended to send me to a bonus area - amusingly shoot downwards into the ground where it immediately becomes useless to me. It's totally one of those "d'oh!" moments.
The game introduces three new power-ups; returning are the Fire Flower and Super Mushroom, but new to the table are the Mega Mushroom, which turns Mario into a massive, invincible giant who stomps and crashes through every item, pipe, and enemy on screen for a limited amount of time; the Mini Mushroom, which transforms Mario into a super-tiny, light-as-a-feather Tiny Mario, who is able to squeeze through tight spots and utilize tiny Warp Pipes; and finally, the Blue Koopa Troopa Shell. With this on, Mario pretends to be a Koopa Troopa himself: Run for an extended length of time and Mario will duck into the shell and spin along nigh uncontrollably just as if you picked up and kicked a Koopa shell. You can also use the shell for defensive purposes; hold down to duck inside of it and you are impervious to nearly all forms of damage at the disadvantage of being nearly immobile while doing so. Secondary power-ups are stored in a Super-Mario-World-esque "storage" container, located on the bottom screen. Touch it at any time to release the secondary power-up.
With the added power of the Nintendo DS over, say, the Super NES, New Super Mario Brothers introduces a greater feeling of physics to the Mario world. Yoshi's Island touched on this a little bit, but NSMB takes it to the next level. Water ripples as things touch it, ropes sway and objects attached to string bounce around realistically; it's all very cool looking. Visuals do not disappoint either: The levels themselves are made up of detailed, vivid, colorful objects that take advantage of the DS's strengths over the Gameboy Advance. No cramped resolution; no washed out visuals. Objects themselves - such as Mario, enemies, bosses, etc. are all crafted out of relatively detailed 3D models. This gives them slick, smooth animations in addition to making things like the aforementioned "Mega Mario" look quite impressive, too. Giant enemies also make an appearance here and there - regular enemies, but at double the size. It all makes for one of the most visually pleasing Mario side-scrollers ever made.
So what's bad about it? My largest complaint is that the game is simply too easy. The game throws a ton of extra lives at you and you rarely, if ever, need to use them. By the time I finished the game, I had nearly 60 lives - and never did I once go out of my way to collect or "farm" extra lives. Through the natural course of playing the game, it had just given me all those extra lives. This same thought process effected the "Super Mario Advance" ports, too. Those games gave you a lot more extra lives compared to their originals. But New Super Mario Brothers is worse; it subscribes to the concept that secret levels are the ones that have to be difficult. Perhaps it's their way of separating the hardcore Mario players from the casual gamers; while most of the game is paced for the casual, those hardcore Mario fanatics will find solace in uncovering every secret (including the "secret" Worlds 4 and 7) in the game - where the challenge ramps up.
But even the secret levels aren't hard. They're hardER, but in all 8 worlds of the game, the only worlds that seemed to give me any trouble were parts of World 7 and the last half of World 8. Had the last half of World 8 not claimed 10 lives, I might have actually beaten the game with nearly 70 lives instead of 60. I honestly assumed I would have topped 99 lives before I cleared the game, and, had I gone just a little out of my way, I could've very likely done that with no problem whatsoever. Just GETTING to World 4 and World 7 is harder than actually completing them, as you have to beat bosses as Tiny Mario, whom dies in one hit. Failing that, every other boss in the game is easy as cake: Like lives, NSMB isn't shy on giving you freebie power-ups. Both the Fire Flower and the Mega Mushroom give you the opportunity of taking a boss down in mere seconds; and both are easily stow-able in your Secondary Power-up reserve, ready and waiting to be activated the moment you step into the Boss's lair. In short, New Super Mario Brothers is a game that's hard only if you WANT it to be, and even then, it's not really that challenging. While parts of World 8 gave me sweaty palms, nothing in the rest of the game did.
"But wait," you, the reader, say. "You've been playing Mario games since 1988. Of course the game is going to be easier for you."
That may be true, but I make no effort in hiding the fact that I suck at games. I used to play RPGs with a Game Genie, for crying out loud. Before a friend of mine went off to college, we went on a retro-gaming co-op binge; we beat many classic SNES games together, including, for the first time in nearly 10 years, Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World. Those games were a LOT harder than New Super Mario Brothers. I don't think we ever even completed SMB3; we got up to World 6 or World 7 and couldn't get any further.
So regardless of my skill level as a gamer, New Super Mario Brothers IS, by a great margin, a lot easier than it's NES/SNES brethren. And THAT'S why it feels like it's just going through the motions; it's not really challenging you. Speed through here, stomp this goomba, hit this brick, slide down the flag pole and do the same thing in the next level. Sure, it taps nostalgia like no tomorrow - paying homage to every side-scrolling Mario game that came before it, but it's simply not hard enough for us to really remember any of that cool stuff. It's got some nice ideas, but it just never really gets down and dirty enough to make you remember those nice ideas.
If this is your first Mario, it's not a bad starting point. I just hope that in the sequel (and there BETTER be a sequel!) Nintendo ramps the difficulty up considerably, as a common complaint I'm hearing from them for ALL their DS games (Super Princess Peach, Mario Versus Donkey Kong 2) is that they simply aren't challenging enough - and New Super Mario Brothers fits neatly within that same criteria.
Score: 7.5 out of 10.
*For those who don't get the Scott Ramoosair line, generally, instead of Penny-Arcade, who does comics about games that have recently come out, VGcats has fallen into this slump of doing comics about games that are six months to a year old, sometimes more.
