Continuing on with my trend of moving on from lengthy RPGs to more manageable games, I recently played and finished New Super Mario Bros. I had very little history with this game, although I kept getting a strange sense of deja vu at points in the game, so I may have borrowed it from someone at some point. But the focal point of my collecting goals for this year is to get a complete set of all of the Mario games, now that my set of Final Fantasy and Zelda is complete (or was complete until they went and made new games in those two series...), so I'm going to try to clean up my completion record on some of the newer games, having beaten all of the mainline titles from Super Mario Bros. up until Super Mario 64.
New Super Mario Bros. is a 2D side scrolling platformer, which puts it in company of some excellent titles, but also against a lot of competition! The 2D games are generally very good across the board, save for the one average title in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Man, my reviews used to be way shorter. So how does this one stack up?
Graphically, the game looks really nice. It doesn't have the sprite work of the older games, and I wouldn't say it looks better than either of the games on the SNES, but it's appropriately cute, and using computer animation rather than sprites opens up a lot of visual options that the game uses pretty well. It's one of the better looking DS games out there, so no points off here.
The music is really good, as is usual in a Mario game. Kondo doesn't serve as the primary composer here, but his replacements do a very nice job in his place, and he did compose one track for the game, which is nice. The general sound effects are also quite good.
The controls are very good, although the game's physics are slightly lacking, as I'll explain later. Once you get used to the physics, Mario performs exactly as you'd expect.
There are many really fun levels in the game, and this is definitely the game's strongest point. They frequently use new features, such as the ability for Mario to ground pound and wall jump, to create new and different takes on classic Mario designs. They also use the DS' power very well to come up with some new and unique possibilities in platforming that previous games really couldn't touch. Following Super Mario World's lead, the game has a lot of secret exits that unlock cool new levels and shortcuts.
The game's bosses are really fun and diverse, with very little of the rehashed boss approach the plagues some earlier Mario games. What makes some of the bosses even more fun is that defeating them as mini-Mario opens up entirely new worlds for you to explore, which increases the challenge of the game, as well as the number of levels available to you.
Criticism of this game has generally focuses on its similarity to previous entries in the series, and I think this mostly misses the point. People ultimately want some similarity when they buy a new entry in a series, but they also want the new tweaks to work. And here, some of the new stuff completely bombs. The mushroom that turns you super huge almost never appears in the game, and when it does, it's awesome! But with only a handful of appearances, it doesn't really make it's mark on the game in any discernible fashion, despite its prominent branding on the front cover. Also troubling is the inclusion of another useless new power up, which gives Mario a blue Koopa shell. The workings of this shell are still confusing to me, and I guarantee that getting this item will kill you more often than it will make your life easier. I thought the mini mushroom was cool, but like the big one, is rarely included in the levels, and not really incorporated into the level design other than for use in beating the bosses and unlocking secret areas, as well as finding some secret exits from the levels.
The physics also bothered me. One of the best things about Super Mario Bros. (and that's really saying something) is the genius of adding weight to Mario. Before this game, platformers really didn't exist in a modern sense, or if they did the characters just didn't feel weighty or real. Super Mario Bros. captures a bit of realism while still keeping it fun so that you can use your momentum to your advantage, and in a sensible way. New Super Mario Bros. makes Mario way too weighty, however, making it so that if you make a mistake, it's very hard to correct it. There's a balance here, but unfortunately for this game, Miyamoto and co. kept nailing this balance time after time until this game, which is disappointing.
There are 80 levels in this game, but it still felt too short, and too easy. I don't know if I'm spoiled or not, but I feel like it could have used 10 more really good levels to boost it up to an excellent game. The game was definitely too easy, however. I ended up with over 80 lives at the end of the game, and that wasn't because extra lives are plentiful, like in Super Mario World. It was far more likely that I would clear a level on the first try than after a few tries, even at the very end of the game.
New Super Mario Bros. is a fun platformer, and definitely one of the better DS games out there. But in the shadow of titans of the genre like Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros 3, I found it more disappointing than it probably deserved. I'll give the game an 8.6.
Up next for handhelds is another Mario game that I recently acquired, and am very excited to review! Here's a quick teaser...
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment