Cons: unmemorable level design, difficulty created through frustrating rather than clever means, some powerups poorly implemented, ultimately anticlimactic, overly rife with nostalgia
I'll start by saying that I consider Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 to be the pinnacle of Mario platforming games. This is because the level design in each is fantastic, and, more importantly, memorable -- I know every level in each game inside and out, and that's not because I've spent any obscene amount of time playing them; it's because they commit themselves to memory so easily. Donut Plains 2? Yeah, I remember Donut Plains 2 -- it's underground and scrolls automatically. That's where the exit to the Green Switch Palace is. It's got those rising and falling gold platforms, buzzy beetles, the little green bat/bird things. Tick Tock Clock? Hell yeah, I know Tick Tock Clock! You can alter the speed of everything depending on the position of the clock's minute hand when you enter. You turn around at the start and climb up the wall to get the red coins. You can go alllll the way up to the top to where the giant Thwomp is to get a star.
Let's try the same with New Super Mario Bros. Wii (what a catchy name, by the way). Level 6-2? Uh...World Six was the mountainous one, right? Level 8-4? ...Something fiery, I guess. You get the picture. Every level in NSMBW (shit, the initialism is just as good) is just kind of...there. They're all anonymous, and they're generally indescribable past the setting.
Speaking of setting, the settings (there are nine) in NSMBW are very predictable and boring. There's grass (how bucolic!), desert (now with more sand!), ice (shocker -- it's slippery!), water (annoying!), the fifth one (memorable!), mountain (boring!), clouds (I hate visibility!), volcano (volcanic!), and rainbow (gay friendly!). Okay, I went back and looked up "the fifth one": it's a jungle. There's not much to say about the settings past naming them -- you swim in most of the water stages, there's plenty of lava in the volcano stages, et cetera. Gone seem to be the days of inventive settings. SMW's Chocolate Island, anyone? Granted, very few attributes of chocolate, other than its delightful poo-brownness, were represented there, and the area was definitely a peninsula at best, but, still, it was different!
Bland environments aside, the design of the levels themselves seems very restrictive. I suppose it's worth mentioning that levels follow the standard 2-D Mario formula -- head right or up until you reach a flagpole. Although you can move in two dimensions, most levels scroll through only one. In nearly all horizontal maps, your explorable vertical area is limited to what you can see on your screen, and vice versa. Nintendo compensated for this essential removal of exploration by removing clipping from certain areas of certain walls, creating "secret areas" in which are often (but sometimes aggravatingly not) hidden important items or alternate level exits. So instead of exploring a level thoroughly, you end up humping every single flat surface in the level until you find one that's skanky enough to let you inside without you even buying it dinner first. Often the game gives you a small hint that you may be able to pass through a wall, like an indentation, or the lack of a true border along the edge, but sometimes (especially in ghost houses) you get absolutely nothing, hence the wall-humping.
You know a level is poorly designed when, upon completing it, your very first thought is something along the lines of: "oh sweet baby Jesus, I never have to play that level again." The only time that that thought doesn't indicate poor level design is when a level is excruciatingly difficult. There are no such levels in NSMBW. That's not to say that the game doesn't get pretty difficult at times, but the manner in which difficulty is achieved is more through annoying means than clever ones. For example, there are some levels in which the dominant mechanic is obstructed visibility. Sometimes it's darkness; sometimes it's heavy clouds. So you spend the entire level creeping forward at a snail's pace, because if you essay a bit of running, there's undoubtedly some kind of death in store for you. When you reach the end of such levels, you feel like you've just slogged through a chest-high pool of Miyamoto's excrement, and, sadly, in a way, you have.
Ennessembeedubz's other means of achieving difficulty is through the tried and true "how much shit do you think we can fit onto the screen at once?" mechanic. Plain and simple, the farther you progress into the game, the more harmful things per square inch you'll find. In some of the very last levels, it's rather frustrating. Part of the reason that it's so frustrating is because there are all kinds of abilities that you have -- wall-kicking, picking up and throwing various things, this little spin-thingy that can increase the distance of your jumps -- and, unless you're going for 100% completion of the game, you never need to use them. Ever. Running and jumping are all you ever truly need. Hell, you might even be able to get away with walking most of the time! It makes it feel like these abilities were thrown in; I would really enjoy it if some of the levels were built around the use of these abilities. It would offer a deeper play experience.
All right, I've thoroughly bashed the level design, but before I get on to bashing all sorts of other things about NSMBW, I will say that not every single one of the game's 70+ levels is terrible. I may not remember any of these mystical levels, but I do remember having some fun while playing through the game, so there are a few gems hidden there.
Let's take a step back and have a broader look at NSMBW. The story is classic Mario: Princess Peach is having a birthday party. But wait! Why is there so much fantastically colored hair sprouting from her giant birthday cake? Oh, shit! It's a rape cake! The seven Koopalings you know and love and their assistant (to the?) regional manager, Baby Bowser, pop out, have their way with the princess (why can't the Wii have HD support?!), and run off with her limp body. Meanwhile, Mario, Luigi, and two nameless Toads, who I will refer to as "Blueberry Muffin" and "That Yellow One," are standing around circle-jerking to the show. Once they clean up, they rush off to save Peach. I have no issues with the story; it sets up the classic Mario formula perfectly.
If you'd like to watch the video (NSFW), you can find it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZYPIGNYD9E
I think thirteen-year-old YouTube user GWRStation summed it up best with his insightful comment:
PEACH! LOOK AT THE CAKE! HOW CAN YOU LIKE A CAKE IF IT ANI"T MATCHING there bowtie ling gerrn ! ALL THOUGH I did like how Nentando ( sorry I'm a bad speller to say)
Well said, GWRStation. Well said, especially concerning the "bowtie ling gerrn." Most people don't catch that on their first viewing.
That was a fun diversion. Back to the review. How has Nentando improved the 2-D Mario formula over the years? Well, I'm not sure that they have. It feels very retro. You can walk, jump, run, pick up and hold items, throw items horizontally only (seriously, Nentando? I was throwing items vertically as a five-year-old in SMW). To break us out of the eight-bit era, we have those techniques I mentioned a few paragraphs up: the wall kick, the spin jump, and the spin..."thing." As I said before, while not entirely useless, these techniques are completely unnecessary. The wall kick works great for reaching higher areas and for saving yourself when you're about to fall down a pit. The spin jump seems to do nothing more than shove clouds out of your way. The spin "thing" is a repeatable aerial maneuver (literally just a quick spin) that adds a slight bit of horizontal distance to your jumps.
NSMBW offers seven powerups; some are very familiar, and most of the others are pretty bad ideas. You already know the series staples: the super mushroom, the fire flower, and the super star. The four newcomers are the mini mushroom, the ice flower, the penguin suit, and the propeller suit. The mini mushroom (inherited from New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS) makes you mini (wow!): it offers super-high jumping capabilities, the ability to fit in tiny areas, and it lets you walk on the surface of water, a blatantly pro-Jesus message, as far as I'm concerned. However, in practice, the fact that you're essentially weaker with a mini mushroom than you are sans powerup makes the mini mushroom universally hated and used only when necessary to access a special area. The ice flower works just like a fire flower, except instead of throwing fireballs, you throw snowballs. While your foes writhe uncomfortably from the snow running down their backs, you can safely stand on them, pick them up, and throw them. The penguin suit is the same as the ice flower, except it makes you look really gay. The propeller suit is the retarded, inbred cousin of the far superior raccoon suit (Super Mario Bros. 3) and cape feather (SMW). It allows you to perform one very high jump and then float slowly back down to the ground. There's no way to remain airborne, and your maximum total air time is considerably less than the raccoon suit allowed. The only upside to the propeller suit is that you don't have to get a running start to unleash its full potential.
The game's control scheme is infuriating. In order to feel as much like you're playing a NES game as possible, you are forced to play holding the Wii remote sideways. You'll have to remove your Wii MotionPlus accessory (and, thus, the Wii CondomPlus) for this to be relatively comfortable. Because the only easily accessible buttons on the Wii Remote when held sideways are "1" (run/throw [fire|snow]balls) and "2" (jump), some actions need to be performed by -- you guessed it! -- a motherfucking motion. Want to pick something up? Hold "1" while standing next to it and shake! Want to do a spin jump? Shake while on the ground! That midair spin "thing"? Shake while in the air! Shaking is a very imprecise motion, so if you shift on the couch or move the controller to one hand for a second to pick your wedgie, you're going to execute the shake motion inadvertently.
That's not where the motion controls stop, though: some levels have (annoying) mechanics that require you to tilt the remote to tilt objects, spin objects, or move platforms. This all feels gimmicky, and in levels where you want something to be tilted at a constant angle, you end up looking like a retard, holding your controller at a stupid angle for forty-seven minutes. I'd like to take this opportunity to make the following important statement:
Just because you can put a certain technology into your games does not mean that you need to, especially when the end result feels tacked on and could be better (and more comfortably) achieved by another means.
For example, they could've added classic controller support to NSMBW and left the current control scheme for poor players that hate having disgustingly excessive amounts of white plastic in their houses. That would've allowed for four face buttons, two shoulder buttons, and two control sticks for the "tilting" functionality. I suppose that would've been way too much work for a huge-budget project, though. I hear that there's support for the Wii remote and Nunchuk, but it's so uncomfortable that it's not even worth mentioning.
Well, I've delayed this long enough: let's get to the multiplayer mode, the real selling point of this game. The multiplayer is this game's saving grace. Playing with up to four players at once (Mario, Luigi, Blueberry Muffin, and That Yellow One are your choices -- Miyamoto openly admitted in a Nintendo Power interview that the reason for having two anonymous, palette-swapped toads instead of four unique characters was more or less sheer laziness*) makes things exponentially more fun and does add a bit of depth to the game. You can pick each other up, use each other to reach new heights, and, most importantly, you can use the bubble. Ah, the bubble. The bubble is NSMBW's ultimate cheap trick. In multiplayer, when one player dies, the level doesn't end; rather, a second or two later, that player floats slowly back onto the screen in a big bubble. That player can shake (fucking YES!!) the remote to float in the direction of other players. Touching another player or getting hit by another player's projectiles will break the bubble and put that character back into play. While bubbled, players are invulnerable; however, if all players are dead or bubbled at the same time, you do fail the level.
Obviously, this means that you can chain your deaths throughout a level to accommodate the fact that you suck ass. You can also lose a lot of lives very rapidly. But wait! There's more! During multiplayer, any player can bubble up at any time by pressing the "A" button (which is frustratingly easy to press accidentally). This means that those pesky star coins (large, special coins of which there are three to collect in every level) that actually require a bit of thought or risk to obtain are now a complete yawnfest:
- Player A nabs star coin via some kind of risky means: apparent sacrifice, blind leap into terrifying danger, etc.;
- Player A presses "A";
- Player A enters bubble mode and pretends to jerk his Wii remote off until he's safely back with his friends.
Trivial. Furthermore, if you missed something and can't go back, then just have everyone bubble up! You'll all lose your current powerups, but failing a level while bubbled does not result in the loss of a life (so it's a great technique to use to save a life if you're the last one alive and are about to die).
All that said, multiplayer is great fun: you're going to love the craziness that arises from cramming up to four players into very tight situations. You can't take it too seriously, though, because I can guarantee that you are going to get very frustrated from time to time, and you just need to blow it off. There's going to be a lot of deaths, a lot of people ruining things by being the last one alive and accidentally bubbling, a lot of accidentally and intentionally being dicks to one another, and a lot of people screaming the word "fuck."
Now that I've said something halfway to praise about one aspect of this game, I'm going through some serious negativity withdrawal, so let me wrap things up with some more low notes. The game is horribly anticlimactic. In World Eight, you have your big showdown with Baby Bowser, which is so exciting that I can't even remember anything about the fight. It was probably disgustingly easy, like all the boss fights. After that, Grownup Bowser comes out of nowhere, and you kill him by going downstairs to get a cup of coffee. When you come back, the fight with Grandpa Bowser should be starting; you kill him by sipping on your coffee until he breaks a hip and whines himself slowly to death. Seriously. You never touch the elderly Bowsers at all. Then you find Peach swinging from a gibbet or something, and she probably just gets out on her own, because Bowser always keeps her locked up through sheer will alone. Then she and Mario smile cordially at one another, and she says, "hey, Mario, have you unlocked World Nine yet? The developers decided that this ending wasn't anticlimactic enough, so get on that, would you?"
For every world in which you have collected all three star coins from each level, you unlock a level in World Nine, the rainbow world. These levels are "the hardest in the game," don't have a rainbow setting despite the overworld appearance, and offer absolutely nothing except for more star coins. No bosses, no more story, no extra ending: nothing. But more star coins is good, right? You've been accumulating them throughout the entire game, so they must be used for something eventually, yeah? Don't fret! You can spend every single one of them on awesome new levels, new playable characters, and sweet new features! And by "awesome new levels," I mean videos detailing how to obtain tricky star coins; by "new playable characters," I mean videos showing the locations of secret level exits; and by "sweet new features," I mean (admittedly cool) tool-assisted videos of speed and trick runs through levels. That's right -- once you finish World Nine and collect every star coin in the game, you are treated to nothing more than the ability to unlock more videos and a popup ad that says, "Congratulations! You have completed everything in New Super Mario Bros. Wii! Please take this opportunity to register at Nintendo.com and earn a chance to win free natural male enhancement for one year!"
And now, finally, I must berate this game for committing an unforgivable sin. This is a game that prides itself on an excellent multiplayer experience. Why, then, does it not have online functionality? Why can't I hook up with three remote friends, or three random people? It's two God damn thousand fucking ten. There is absolutely no excuse for a lack of online support in a title whose best selling point is the multiplayer game.
Despite this three-thousand-word rant against nearly every facet of this game, I will submit to the fact that if you have real-life friends to play with, it's definitely worth it for the great multiplayer experience. If not, I'd pass, honestly. I know that it sounds insane to recommend passing on a Mario title, but if you've played Super Mario Bros. on NES, you've pretty much played this game in a more archaic form. I don't know what it is about "retro" games becoming more and more popular in spite of technology growing more and more advanced, but Nintendo really needs to take a risk every now and then. Yeah, we love Mario and we love Zelda, but we can only play the same game so many times. Nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia. With the Wii Virtual Console offering so many old classics and the GBA and DS sporting so many remakes of classics, I have all the nostalgia I need. Take our favorite heroes in new directions! Or create new heroes for us to love. We'll never have new favorites if they're never created and developed.
* Nintendo Power, Vol. 249, p. 81.**
**Miyamoto's statement on why you can't play as Peach: "I originally thought it would be nice to have Princess Peach as a playable character, but the Toad characters have a physique that is a bit closer to that of Mario and Luigi. And if we were to have one character out of the four wear a dress, we would need special programming for how the skirt is handled within the gameplay, and that's really the only reason why Princess Peach isn't playable. And, of course, if we had Wario in there, we'd have to program it so he could fart. [Laughs]" Fucker.
