The New Super Mario Brothers – Almost but Not Quite

[Dracos]

As a graduation gift I received a few new games, among them the remake of the original Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo DS.  As a bit of a foreword, Super Mario Brothers was the original game that got me into gaming and remains a historic favorite of mine with good reason, it was a ground breaking and superb gaming title.  The series that follow it are, as a rule, superb games which would be respectable in any game player's library.  This is a pretty high standard to live up to and for those wondering, the remake kind of makes the grade, though it certainly isn't among the best of breed.

   The New Super Mario Brothers, shortened to NSMB for ease for the rest of the review, chronicles Mario's quest to recover Princess Peach who has been kidnapped by Bowser's son with the aid of some of his monster pals and, of course, his old man, Bowser.  The kid turtle provides the game's primary nemesis as you chase him through eight worlds in very classic Mario platformer style, facing off with him at various towers, followed by showing him hauling Princess Peach to the next castle or tower.  Alongside him, there are nine other bosses for Mario to deal with in the eight worlds.  Each level ends with a classic flagpole challenge reminiscent of Super Mario Brothers and includes three hidden star medals which can be used to open paths or buy new backgrounds for the menu screen.  In effect, this creates two real games: The normal one where the goal is to get through the eight worlds and the puzzle one where the goal is to find all the medals.  I'll talk about both aspects separately later.  The game also includes a variety of power ups, including the classic Super Mario and Fire Mario as well as Mini Mario, Giant/Mega Mario, and Turtle Shell Mario.  Unfortunately, no water or flight focused powers, which keeps the gameplay pretty grounded without much vertical leeway on most stages.  As in Super Mario Brothers 3, there are mushroom houses around the world that can be used and come in three varieties: giant mushroom house which gives a giant mushroom, item house which gives a random item, and one-up mushroom house which can give between zero and twelve one-ups.  New to Mario himself is a downward smash attack which is twice as powerful as a normal jump against enemies and can be used to crush bricks beneath him.  The stored item is also kept in from Super Mario World, which abates much of the annoyance with death and provides extra lee-way during levels by allowing you to store an additional power-up for later use.

   Getting back to the dual aspects of the gameplay, the main game, getting to the end of world eight and rescuing the princess, is reasonably good but also quite easy.  The majority of the challenge in the game involves the risks to collect the medals, and without collecting them, even the last levels are pretty easy to get through without much dying.  The game also gives you both a surplus of lives, a surplus of ways to build up lives, and unlimited continues.  You can re-enter any level you've already played and one-up mushroom houses are plentiful enough to get even mediocre players well into the fifties of lives.  The bosses take about 3 normal jump attacks each to beat as a rule and are almost all vulnerable to fireball barrages as well.  In this aspect of the game, you only really want to use the Fire Mario power as there's never any benefit to doing any of the others and it's the only one you can get easily all the time anyway.  I recommend playing this way first as beating the game once unlocks Save Anywhere on the world maps, something that should've been there from the beginning and was retarded to place as a reward, and beating the game a second time unlocks permanent mushroom houses, which is just a convenience for the puzzle side of the game.  These two are elements that really are sort of needed for the getting all the medals without a fair bit of undue stress.

The puzzle side of the game is far more challenging, both showing the classic Mario Brothers secret design and a fair amount of influence from Kirby games as well.  Personally, I felt as if the Mario vs Donkey Kong team was behind the project, at least in part, as their stylistics were evident as well.  Many of the medals are fairly dangerous to go after and are the main reason for the huge lives inflation the game shows versus other Mario games.  This is why you'll want the save anywhere feature as after spending fifteen minutes trying to get a medal, you'll want to save that medal right away.  The level design, in general, is pretty good in this regard with one notable failure: they often don't include the power-up you need to solve a puzzle in the same level as the puzzle.  Sometimes not even in the same world, excepting the random item houses, which makes acquiring the power up much of the time cost for each attempt.  I couldn't help but feel the item houses ought to have taken a hint from Kirby and just allowed you to choose a power up, especially in light of the unlocked permanent item houses, which meant you could just sit there until it gave up the item you wanted in time consuming fashion.  The item based puzzles never had alternate solutions, so it basically became a game of playing the level carefully enough to protect your power up until the chosen point, use it, and then survive until the exit.  This I often found really unnecessary, especially with the designer favorite being Mini Mario who died in one touch of pretty much anything.  World Eight had particularly nasty variants on the Mini Mario puzzle, as the levels included randomly spawning enemies or meteor particles, which meant there was no real ability to memorize or go slowly.

Strangely, Mega Mario had almost no real use throughout the game.  Aside from the proof of concept level for him, he was used in only a couple of puzzles in the entire game, and generally was unproductive to use in the normal course of gameplay.  You wouldn't think this with the heavy emphasis on him and the giant mushroom houses that just delved out the giant mushrooms, leaving it the second easiest power up to acquire at any point in the game.  Turtle Shell Mario was actually used even less, having a total of two puzzles in which he could be used and zero levels designed really to show him off.  At least Mega Mario got his concept level.  Overall, most item puzzles were really Mini Mario ones which is kind of disappointing.  It could've benefited from variety here and greater depth of use with the various power-ups.  Unlike Kirby or Super Mario World, there wasn't much of a point for using the power ups just because they were fun.  Mega Mario was, don't get me wrong, but there was a sense of pointlessness about him as it was both time limited and didn't really have much for him to do aside from going Godzilla on the stage.  In general, I was left with the feeling they could've done better.  It was good, sure, but the elements felt underutilized and they definitely had way too much fun with the fact everything was a 3d model and they could just scale it up and go 'ooh, new enemy!'  They could've done more with everything and at the end, finishing all the levels, I felt rather unfulfilled.  I kept wondering where the rest of the levels were, since it felt too short aside from the massive time-sink that was collecting all the medals.  I think I would've preferred less medals and more levels.  Especially, more levels that took advantage of the special powers.

   The art style is reminiscent of Mario vs Donkey Kong.  Everything is done in 3d models, seen from the side, and it really looks pretty good.  There's a lot of playing with size in the game, with the various enemies often having miniature and giant versions.  Normal Mario I don't think looks so good, kind of midgetish and a little awkward on the transition between 2d and 3d versions, but otherwise everything made a pretty decent transition and the special effects, used sparingly throughout, are pretty nice as well.

   The music both deserves thumbs up and thumbs down.  Everything in it feels like a remix of old Mario music and the variety is pretty abysmal.  It really could've used more tunes and some new ones to fill out its line up.  This is excaberated by the need to repeat levels frequently in order to collect all the medals.  For what was actually playing, I wasn't a huge fan.  They have done better and hopefully will do better again.  They did do something neat though.  Almost all the enemies and items were tied into the music tracks and would hop and dance around a bit as it played.  This really added a nice happy go lucky atmosphere to everything and was a nice touch.  I question a bit whether this should've been used as much as it was, but I think it turned out alright and had the music variety been better, it would've been an exceedingly nice overall effect on the music front.

   Before I wrap up, I've got to take a moment to complain about the nemesis.  I didn't like Bowser jr. one bit.  I didn't like the trivialization of Bowser himself in favor of the little runt.  I thought the Bowser kids earlier used in Super Mario World and Super Mario Brothers 3 had a lot more style to them.  Bowser Jr. really didn't help the game any as a nemesis as he didn't ever feel dangerous.  It felt like I was running around and beating up a petulant little kid and that narrative didn't help the game much.  It was particularly contrasted in the last fight where you deal with both Bowser and Bowser Jr, and where he is this little nuisance you have to take care of first, Bowser comes off as a reasonably mighty and massive presence that I would've rather been Mario's nemesis through it.  As with many heroic tales, the hero is taken in light of the villain he faces, and the villain in this game just didn't have it going on.

   Overall, NSMB is good but not great.  It's more pretty than it is good, and that's sort of unfortunate.  It's something good to pass the time with, but it is a poor demonstration of the mighty staying power of the Mario Brothers 2d platformer game style, and I think that's unfortunate.

[Anastasia]

You hit the one thing that bothered me in NSMB(Besides the utter lack of challenge), Mega Mario was completely added on. He just wasn't useful at all and often was a waste of a powerup.

[Dracos]

And he was very accented for it, which made it worse.  It's common for excess powerups in games, but that was just ridiculous.

Dracos

[Anastasia]

And he was very accented for it, which made it worse.  It's common for excess powerups in games, but that was just ridiculous.

Dracos

I don't think NSMB had excessive powerups. It was more a case of one of his powerups simply wasn't used at all. The others were golden - Fireflower, Shell and Tiny Mario all rocked.

Oh well.

[Dracos]

No, you misunderstood.

Not excessive, excess.  As in it is common that there'll usually be one or two useless power ups in a given game.  Which usually isn't so much of a problem as it usually isn't THE BIG POWERUP EVERYONE WANTS(tm).  Mega Mario is shipped as that though, which makes it far more egrerious than it'd be if it was just one of 5 power ups that just didn't have much in game use compared to the others.

SHell though was kind of pointless, I felt.

Dracos