by sandersn
24. December 2010 01:47
(henceforth, New Mario)
New Mario is "Mario 3".
I'm not sure what to say about New Mario. It's not like Star Wars where the old is clearly better than the new, and only those unacquainted with the old say otherwise. New Mario is good. But the reason it's good is that it's the same as Mario 3 and Super Mario World (and to a lesser extent, Yoshi's Island).
New Mario is even more polished than those two old games, but otherwise there's nothing new. If you ever wished that Mario World just had a few more worlds, then New Mario is precisely for you. On the other hand, if you ever wished somebody would come up with the Next Thing after Mario World, you might be more interested in, say, Mario 64, Braid or Super Meat Boy. And if you wished you could just reclaim that feeling from childhood of spending hours with your cousin trying to beat world 3-2 in Mario 3...
Well, don't be an idiot, Nintendo SELLS Mario 3 on the Wii. Just buy that and play until you reach World 3-2! If you're the type that hasn't played games in twenty years, you'll probably start dying there just like you did as a kid.
This is the reason I dislike New Mario: it doesn't need to exist.The target audience is not the person who appreciates New Mario for what it is (more 2-D Mario levels), but the nostalgic who has forgotten that the Wii has a Virtual Console. Nintendo made New Mario solely because they would otherwise be selling Mario 3 for $5.
Disclaimer: The one new idea in New Mario, multiplayer, doesn't seem to work. I suffered through a five-minute griefing session on level 1 and a twenty minute attempt to two-player-coop through 1-1 to 1-4. That ended badly at the vertically scrolling section. If the top player gets too far ahead, the bottom dies unless he's quick enough to push A to bobble up and let the top player reach a stable platform. I learned about that trick after we burned through our 10 lives in 2 minutes. Tycho calls it marriage poison and I suspect he's right.
Disclaimer 2: Yes, I know there is a New Mario on the DS. It's a bit simpler than this New Mario. If you must you can pretend that the DS version is the moral equivalent of Mario 3 while the Wii version is the equivalent of Mario World. But that's kind of stupid.