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November 15, 2010
New Super Mario Brothers Wii
Nintendo Wii
Developed and Published: Nintendo
Released: November 15, 2009
Welcome to the return of gaming’s most awkward love triangle: An Italian-American stereotype saving the clueless princess/girlfriend from an adversary that’s become a metaphor for French military output. This round, Mario is his own adversary. He’s a testament to the law of diminishing returns, the opportunity to shout profanities are loved ones as “four-player excitement” becomes “this would be a much easier game without you morons”.
Despite a sales run that simply won’t die, predecessor New Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo DS will have some fun going down as one of the most overrated games in the history of the medium. Rather unsurprising that Shigeru Miyamoto had nothing to do with that product. Fortunately, the creator returns to save the platformer that loaned him his god status. Yeah, New Super Mario Brothers Wii is not going to derail Super Mario Brothers 3 or Super Mario World from the highest rungs of the Mario Pantheon™. Yeah, New Super Mario Brothers Wii sets the standard for the most ridiculous name in the Mario franchise. But the final game is proof that this business still has plenty of leeway in neglecting the Z-axis. The worst of New Super Mario Brothers Wii is the thought-process behind the business of producing and selling this Mario game. And that’s a pretty good thing.
Let’s cut straight to the selling-point: The four-player cooperative multiplayer is the glorious return of “Zombies Ate My Neighbors” Syndrome. That 1993 cult classic was a challenging overhead shooter with plenty of style and just enough substance to overcome its flaws. One of those flaws was a fixed camera and a lack of split-screen multiplayer. With two players sharing the same camera, team chemistry is everything. It’s a battle to move at your teammate’s pace while sharing items and without endangering each other. Instead of feeling like you have another gun backing you up, your opposition gets the joy of knowing there’s a second target to wreak havoc upon.
New Super Mario Brothers Wii preys on these principles. The levels are explicitly designed for multiplayer madness. It’s a sport that will gut your competitive side. It’s “hilarious party action”! Fall behind your teammates? The field of play will knock you into pits and hazards. Get too far ahead of other players? You’ll discover why Sonic the Hedgehog made in-roads against Mario during the early nineties. You’ll discover that Mario is completely inadequate in defending himself against what he can’t see.
In theory, this nightmare is the most challenging Mario game to-date. The Lost Levels punished its audience with impossible jumps and obnoxious level design, but it never asked you to pull nail-biters as three uncooperative players fight for the same strip of real-estate. It can be frustrating, sure. But it’s a brilliant receipe for “holy crap” moments; where wall-jumps and propeller hats offer more than enough of a chance to cheat death. (Though your friends and family will probably opt for the A-button and encase their character in a bubble, allowing the remaining players to continue the level and free their buddies at a later point. Fuck the bubble.)
Did I say “cheat death”? I meant “prepare to embrace death”.
The challenge level clicks because this exercise in video game genocide is completely balanced for multiplayer, the first Mario game in twenty years that treats coins and lives with legitimacy. You’ll need as many as you can get. Players share the coin total, so coins become substantially more valuable as you add bodies. The same (usually) applies to one-up boxes, giving fall-behinds a chance to restore their stock. Of course, single-player isn’t balanced for this flood of free lives. And with a couple of contentious arguments from the game’s later levels, single-player can prove quite easy. For the solo acts, the challenge shifts to collecting the Star Coins that players could typically sacrifice lives in other to obtain in the multiplayer mode.
But multiplayer or not, New Super Mario Brothers Wii embraces what’s made the best of Mario platforming work. It’s about diversity. Everybody that’s played Super Mario Brothers 3 has a favorite level. Mine was World 6-10. Yeah, the one with frozen pirahnas. With frozen coins. It’s about salting levels with their own calling card while convincing the player that the stage with flying stingrays is not an over-the-top gimmick. New Super Mario Brothers Wii does it well enough. When you and your buddies are trying to keep a foot in front of a smoldering wall of magma, you won’t have time to think about whether “pyroclastic flow” works as a game mechanic.
“Pleasant surprise” would be an understatement when dissecting this product. Most venerated franchises are simply looking back at their glory years and their copyright holders are trying to convince their audiences that good times are still ahead. And it turns out New Super Mario Brothers Wii features the best power-up lineup in a Mario game to-date, excellently avoiding the pratfalls of previous Mario power-ups that would allow you to skip large portions of the level. The final boss fight is several layers of awesome. Even the motion controls are implemented intelligently, in that they’re never necessary for the sort of manic, twitch-reflex moments that the Wii-Mote can’t handle.
The only thing holding this game back is the company behind it. Let’s face it: The Wii prints money for Nintendo. Nintendo could have titled the game “New Super Mario Swine Flu” and it would still bank. If Nintendo had their back to a wall, death impending, this may have been one of the true greats. But instead, punches were pulled.
Today’s high-profile releases embrace content creation systems and online play. And it’s unbelievable that in 2009, Nintendo refused to make Princess Peach a playable character because they “couldn’t get her dress right”.* So it should be little surprise that there’s no online play (a selling point for the inevitable sequel), nor should it be any surprise that there’s no level editor. From a business standpoint, why bother? The value of eight-and-sixteen-bit level design is in freefall, a market where Shadow Complex and Mega Man 9 can be had for ten dollars. So Nintendo decided not to risk the currently-inflated value of their Mario level design against a robust world editor and the most creative minds in their consumer base. Why? Because those fans are talented enough to create their own level editor and hack new levels into the game. They’ve already done it.* Do you think Nintendo execes are going to greenlight the chance that user content diminishes the value of a sequel?
Thankfully, your little brother can learn why we make such a big deal of the franchise that saved the North American video game market. For me? I expected New Super Mario Brothers Wii to be a dated tribute to the series’ glory years and found out the plumber can still kick some ass.
4 out of 5
(Games rated four-out-of-five are very good. In a slow twelve months, they’re dark horses for Game of the Year. Even if you don’t care for the genre, you won’t feel like your money is going to waste.)
Special Thanks To:
IGN’s Screenshot Gallery For The Pretty Pictars