New Super Mario Bros Wii

The Short


Pros
- A "new" Mario game made in 2D throwback of Mario's earlier outings
- Eight worlds and a ninth bonus world provide a decent amount of content
- New suits including the Penguin suit and Ice Flower mix some stuff up
- Looks bright and colorful and is faithful to the original Mario formula
- Included "Super Guide" means if you suck the game will just beat a level for you
- Handful of minigames like the DS version are fun, silly, and great for four players

Cons
- Has four player co-op, which (if you are playing the game seriously) is a massive mess
- The level of griefing (hurting your allies) in multiplayer is absurd and impossible to avoid
- Bizarre difficulty curve is inconsistent
- Why do video games like this still have lives? Seriously?
- Does little beyond what was introduced in New Super Mario Bros on the DS, especially for a full priced title
- While I welcome 2D Mario back, its weird mix of past and present seems like both a lesson in originality and a refusal to move the series forward
- Why are there two Toads? Why can't you play as Peach? Why aren't the characters unique like in Mario 2?

It's Mario, and he's Super, but is there really any "New" here?

The Long

I've made no secret in saying I believe Super Meat Boy and Rayman Origins to be the best 2D platformers this generation. Super Meat Boy for its incredibly difficult but immensely satisfying single player, and Rayman Origins for being an excellent multiplayer game that manages to do so without being frustrating or annoying. But what about that other 2D platformer franchise? You know, the biggest one in the industry, the one that could very well be considered responsible for this whole thing? What's Mario doing these days?

Well, New Super Mario Bros Wii, winner of an absurdly long title award, is Nintendo's sort of "spinoff" iteration of the classic Mario franchise. While he's blasting himself through space in 3D in the Mario Galaxy games, NSMBW is a return to form, going back to the series' 2D roots in an attempt to bring back players who were fans originally. Kind of like the exact thing they did on the DS a few years earlier, except now on the Wii. Oh, and you can play with four players now, so it's a party game! How awesome is that!

Well...it hits a few and it misses a few. Let's go over it in brief. 

Don't be fooled by its kiddy appearance: this game can get tricky. 

First off, there really isn't much to say with regards to the core gameplay. It's a Mario game, through and through. You start on the left and go right until you reach the end, where you'll jump up on a flagpole, get some meaningless points (or an equally meaningless 1-Up), and then continue to the next level. There's a world map like in Mario 3 or Super Mario World, and mid level castles/bosses like Mario 3 as well. With the same Koopa Kids as Mario 3. I guess they were saving the Tanooki suit from Mario 3 for Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS, but the rest of this game really plays a lot like Mario 3. You get items that you can use before levels for a boost (which is completely unnecessary), the game has a similar feel as Mario 3, and it...it's a 2D Mario game, ok? I really shouldn't have to be going into much more detail than that; you've all played these things.

So what's different? A few small changes. There are some new suits that force you to use the Wiimote (shaking it, mostly) to do annoying things. For example, the propeller hat launches you in the air like the Tannoki tail, only without the balancing aspect the tail had of forcing you to have a straight distance to take off; just shake the Wiimote and away you go! You can soar over a lot of the early levels this way if you want, though the smartly put an arbitrary stone ceiling in the way of some others so you can't cheat to the finish. You also have ice flowers, which turn enemies into solid blocks that can be used as platforms or picked up (again, having to do the annoying "Wiimote Shake") and thrown like shells. There's a few other suits that aren't particularly worth mentioning as well. The point is: there's a little bit different, but the whole thing will feel very familiar to anybody who has played a Mario game. Which is everybody in existence. 

You tilt the Wiimote to position the ledge the way you want.

Let me take a moment to talk about the controls. It's the standard fare at first: you can hold the Wiimote like an NES controller, with one button as jump and the other as Fireball/Sprint. What's obnoxious is the forced Wiimote integration (which is forced; no Gamecube controller support for NSMBW). Shake the Wiimote to fly, shake the Wiimote to pick up an ice block, twist the Wiimote to move a platform...I don't know about you, but I tend to play my platformers stone-faced and holding the controller still (unless I die a lot, then it gets thrown against the wall). Being forced to shake it in order to use a power is really annoying. This is probably due to the fact the Wiimote only has two real buttons; on the SNES Super Mario World it also had a spin-esque jump, but they just mapped it to a face button. The Wii controller integration really feels tacked on, and actually adds an unintentional annoyance/difficulty spike when you are trying to be precise while flailing the Wiimote about.

As a single-player experience, NSMBW works, and works well. While the difficulty curve is kind of all over the place, other than castles you probably won't get stuck anywhere for long, and finding all the big tokens/coins has that right balance of difficulty and intuitive reasoning that makes them fun to collect and not a huge deal if you have to go back and get them. Aside from some dorky Wiimote usage, this is a decent Mario game, not the best but certainly a welcome sight considering his last console 2D outing was all the way back on the SNES. 

Then your stupid friends want to play. 

It's the multiplayer of NSMBW where things get completely out of hand. Remember my rant at the end of my Rayman Origins review, about how I thought Rayman Origins took what it saw in NSMBW's multiplayer and fixed it for the better? Yeah, my point still stands; even playing two-player NSMBW is a overtly stressful and encumbering experience. It's just a harder game when playing with more players.

The first issue is the fact that no two players can take up the same physical space. Meaning if there's a small ledge to jump to, you'd better hope and pray you can shove your companions off least you be the one to succumb to the lava/spikes/death beneath. This also makes just traversing levels a pain; you'll ram each other, shove people off ledges completely on accident, push people into enemies, and more. It's a pain. 

The second is the lives. You all start with five, but I challenge you to get four people together and make it through a single level of NSMBW with everybody having the same or more lives at the end as when they started. I do not think this is possible. In Rayman Origins, this is fixed by just not having lives. If you die you float around as a bubble (like NSMBW) until punched or jumped on, and then you are revived and back in the action. While this certainly made the game "easier," because this portion was painless it meant they could add impossibly hard levels to counterbalance it, making the game a fun challenge. It wasn't stressful because reviving was so easy and there was no penalty other than looking like a moron in front of your friends. 

It let them do levels like this. Geez. 

Because of the lives, your friends can die completely during a level, or if they start a level with just one life they might as well just not play it, since they'll probably lose it and be out the rest of the level, where they can't play. This is never a problem in games like Rayman Origins since you can just keep going. And yeah, you have unlimited continues, but that still requires going back to the main map screen between levels before they can go again. It's a needless frustration when people just want to run around like idiots and shove each other off cliffs without penalty.

The combination of these two problems leads to the game actually being much harder in multiplayer, because the awful players will constantly screw up the good ones. It isn't even as fun for just messing around like idiots as a group, since the lives thing (and the fact it kicks you back to the world map when everybody dies, rather than just hit a checkpoint) means your fun will be limited.

But if you have three people who you want to hate after a few hours, this game works great!

The minigames luckily fare better, focusing more on the insane madness that is four-player Mario rather than trying to force you through what was clearly designed as a single-player experience. With simpler goals and quicker checkpoints, the minigame and miniscenarios are just the right size for four players, and some actually encourage griefing to beat your friends, which is always fun. Certainly the better multiplayer way to go. 

The game looks a lot like the DS version

Like most Wii games made by Nintendo, NSMBW overcomes it's lack of HD by having a great color pallet and art style. The one drawback it is does steal a lot from the previously released New Super Mario Bros on the DS, and while it's flashy it isn't particularly gorgeous like, say, Super Mario Galaxy. Still, it gets the job done, if being a bit par for the course. The music is in the same boat: exactly what you'd expect, nothing particularly catchy or new, but it works as background sounds. It's a solid package, if a wholly unoriginal one. 

Single player: The way this game is meant to be played

I think this game was a product of incorrect marketing. They slated it as a fun multiplayer Mario game, and while the "multiplayer" part is right, the "fun" is only there if you are really reaching for it. Sure, it works with kids if you don't actually want to beat a level ever and just want to send them off into madness, but even then Rayman Origins is a better "toy" in that regard than NSMBW. This game does work very well on its single-player roots, though you won't find anything particularly new here that you haven't already seen in Mario 3 or Mario World or even New Super Mario Bros. As it stands, if you were really hurting for a new 2D Mario game, it isn't a hard sell. If you were looking for a slightly more refined or modern approach on this genre, however, I'd say pick up Rayman Origins instead. Double that if you are buying for the multiplayer aspect: Rayman Origins blows this one out of the water. 

Still, a solid Wii title and a decent Mario game. And those multiplayer minigames are pretty much quality. Here's hoping they learn from their mistakes and the New NEW Super Mario Bros Wii takes a few plays from the competition and makes their multiplayer aspect funner. But this is Nintendo, so I'm not banking on it. 

Three out of five stars. 

Slidin' to the finish line.