Early Impressions: New Super Mario Bros. Wii

I've spent the last couple of hours trying to hammer out a closing statement for a mock criminal trial tomorrow evening, in which I am acting as defence counsel. This weekend, I bought a suit to wear at that exercise, the Blu-ray edition Watchmen: The Complete Story that I intend to watch for post-trial celebratory relaxation, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

I finished World 1 this evening before hunkering down behind my laptop to start crafting legal arguments. I remarked to my friend who was watching, "Alright, World 2, here comes the desert!" and, sure enough, I was greated by the golden brown sands of a pretty standard Mario desert overworld map.

This sort of predictability is alright by me.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is the sequel to the 2006 DS game that returned Nintendo's well known (and perhaps overworked) plumber mascot to his two dimensional roots. This time, the focus is on a Mario platformer first - simultaneous co-op multiplayer, for up to four players. I was a little dubious at first, until I remembered these games always include exemplary level design coupled with that retro-quirk sense of humour that Mario and company provide.

Right off the bat, it somehow felt more natural to be playing this sort of game on a console rather than a portable system, with the Wii Remote in its sideways, NES-controller guise. Brought me right back to those days of marvelling at the original Super Mario Bros. Well, not really, but we'll get to that.

I played through a few levels on my own, and then noted to my delight that adding a second player (killerclair, of course) was as easy as pausing the game and having Clair grab a remote and hit a button. Having her exit the game when she wanted to get back to work was just as easy. Drop-in, and drop-out. Beauty.

One of the things that hit home for me early on was the rather clever integration of a controller-shake as, essentially, an extra button. It worked well and felt natural; I guess if anyone is going to get waggle right, it would be Nintendo first-party developers.

I always instinctively shudder when I read about new Mario costumes. Having grown up with Frog and Raccoon Mario, I feel that, for a game that's supposed to capture what I loved about these games as a kid, Penguin Mario or Bee Mario or whatever-animal Mario seem silly and foolish. I guess the "newness" of the games keeps me from going back to 1990 in my mind.

But, that's okay. Because New Super Mario Bros. Wii seems to contain everything that was good about Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World or even Yoshi's Island to an extent (I giggled a bit to myself when Yoshi appeared for the first time and I could do his little leg-kicking mid-air boost).

It's a combination of the old-school jumping, running, and princess-saving premise with just enough tweaks and new, fun elements to keep things hopping.

Propeller-Hat Mario wasn't so bad, I guess! Onto World 2!