New Super Mario Bros

As much as we hate to begin a review with a question or comment framed in the resoundingly negative, we have to ask. How can a franchise continue to thrive with such little actual innovation? The answer, of course, is that the germinal ideas were so strong that they simply have more staying power than more modern throwaway digital junk. This is the only explanation we can find for why New Super Mario Bros. is so engaging, the only alternative to that mode of thinking being too terrifying to contemplate; that for all of the innovation in videogames over the last two decades, it’s all been for nought. Who knows, perhaps it has. Equally, if you were an optimist prone to flights of fancy then you may have been expecting Nintendo to offer a complete reinvention – silly you. If you are one of those people… that’s simply not the case.

Where New Super Mario Bros does innovate, though, is in its much-publicised co-operative play. Co-op is certainly an ‘interesting’ term to describe it and we can’t help but wonder whether Nintendo misunderstood what it actually means. The problem is that rather than provide assistance, outside of boss fights, other players hopping around the screen when attempting pixel/millisecond-perfect jumps simply add to the mix what’s easily the game’s most infuriating hazard. No matter how skilled your fellows, it’s going to feel like Wario is at work.

The problem stems from each player’s solidity. Any contact will see you bounce off one another – usually into some molten lava, an enemy’s path, or any of the variety of bottomless holes that litter each world. Naturally, you and your team soon learn to stay as far apart from one another as possible, but that approach creates more problems than it solves, since when putting distance between you, the screen zooms out a little to accommodate you, but seems to stop shy of where it needs to be.

The thinking behind it has clearly been that if you zoom out too far then none of the players will be able see what it is they are doing as the fine detail disappears into pixelated obscurity. Where it does stop, however, is at a level of zoom which fails to shout loud enough to the player barrelling ahead without a care in the world, that his team mates are about to go off-screen and, by default, die instantly. Even with the best will in the world, the nature of the game’s design sees to it that this happens with such freakish regularity that by the fourth world or so, we and our reviewing counterpart were sworn enemies with nothing left to offer one another outside of the odd evil eyes and a kick to the shins.

In fact, we spent so much time blaming each other that we almost lost sight entirely of the fact that all of it is a result of hugely flawed game design and not of our own purposeful attempts to see our team-mates dead. It’s as if it was decided by Nintendo that the co-op bandwagon was one worth pouncing on. But with no real idea of how to make an alloy of two such disparate concepts, what we have instead is the failed experiment of a naïve alchemeist. A lump of purest green. The entire co-op experience is ill-conceived and moreover, simply does not work. And after this rant, you’re probably staring agog at that overall score and wondering why it isn’t lower.

Here’s why: Without the annoyances of ‘friends’, New Super Mario Bros is every bit as entertaining as the original was back in 1985. And that really is saying something when discussing a game that’s as old, or older than much of its audience. Coming back to the thrust of our original gist at the beginning of this review, if year on year, the hard and fast rule is that series suffer the slow-decay malady of diminished return, Mario appears somewhat immune.

Part of this is perhaps the game’s use of the stereotypes that the series itself created. Moving platforms, secret bonus areas, rule-of-three boss battles. Most of these things can be originally credited to the series, so its hardly a surprise that carrying perhaps the only genuine the seal of the germinal archetype, all of these elements seem more like a return to form than a lack of innovation.

What’s more, we simply loved the game’s power-up system. There’s a broad range of these available and you can stash as many as you like from those you win in the game’s mini-game bonus rounds. While in the world map you can then select which power-up or power-ups you wish to enter the current level with. Uber-tough stages can therefore be easily declawed by those with less of a thirst for true challenge.

And that challenge is a credible and substantial one. In the game’s nine worlds it’s going to take a serious investment of time to truly plumb the depths. A hugely enjoyable blast throughout. In fact, our only major criticism of the game beyond the largely infuriating multiplayer is the controls. Lifting boxes and one or two other power-up actions are activated by shaking the controller, which when suspended between two thumbs, NES-style, feels awkward and shares no correlation with what it is you’re actually trying to do.