K-SCORE: 79
Developer/Publisher: Nintendo
Director: Shigeyuki Asuke
Spoiler Level: None
“Without brothers, this game is just a lesser Super Mario World”
New Super Mario Bros Wii isn’t really that funny all by itself, but it’s a factory of hilarity, pulling the personality traits of its co-op players out of them and then mashing them together in a hodgepodge of platforming chaos. Without brothers, this game is just a lesser Super Mario World, featuring the same cast, the same brittle-boned kidnapped Peach story, the same enemies, world themes, and level basics. With brothers to play at my side, it’s brilliant.
Scott was Luigi. He gets a little impatient at times, or maybe just overly optimistic about the number of frames he has to make a specific jump or the precision of his inputs. The screen scrolls according to the farthest forward player, and that was usually Scott. Graham and I would be tiptoeing over some lava, dodging fireballs, and bopping koopas on the head and suddenly I’d say, “Oh God, Luigi is off and running again!” Then inevitably I would chase after him so as not to get pushed from the invisible leftmost wall or just fall into the bottom of the screen and die an irrelevant death. I could usually keep up for long enough for Scott to kill himself, and then I was back to controlling our team’s progress.
“Bubble, bubble, bubble!”
Graham played as Blue Toad. A little pudgy that toad, and overly cautious, he’d wait back for platforms to go through their moving rotations over and over or for enemies to tiptoe to slightly safer locations before going anywhere. This meshed perfectly with Scott’s play-style, as you might imagine. Thankfully the game gives players the option to voluntarily enter into the bubble of uselessness that it puts you into when you die but one or more of your teammates are still alive. So Scott would bolt forward and die and Graham would get overwhelmed by the moving stage and, “Bubble, bubble, bubble!”
“Once Scott picked me up and just chucked me in a hole...”
The best interactions are always the failures. On a harder level in world 8 I used Scott’s bubble as an additional platform to get farther along, thereby freeing Luigi just long enough to have him drop straight down into bottomless pit. Or we’d all assume somebody else was in a better spot to deal with a huge rotating chain taking up three-quarters of the screen and we’d all hit the bubble of cowardice at the same time and have to restart. Or somebody who was already big and well-equipped would hit a block that contained power-ups and take everything before the little characters could grab anything. The game allows you to pick up your friends and throw them, but there’s never a need to do so. Once Scott picked me up and just chucked me in a hole before I could react. Later on he had to help his wife with something, but I didn’t feel like pausing the game and waiting for him, so I picked him up and played through a few screens carrying him on my head. Graham might have had more lives to contend with as we progressed, but he never made it to the top of flags at the ends of stages for extras. I don’t think he ever fully grasped how to hold the 1 button and a direction on the D-pad to jump higher. Like I said, Blue Toad’s a little pudgy.
“Twice I had to release my right hand to shake it as a stab of pain shot into a weird spot along my finger joints.”
The game mechanics and concepts are fine, worse than other Mario games, even ones that are decades old, but mostly because of limitations with the Wii. Twirling is an annoying shake-of-the-remote input that often doesn’t happen when you want it to and happens when you don’t mean it to. Also the whole thing feels gluey. Jumping on springs isn’t springy, it’s like trying to leap out of fudge. The characters feel heavy and every surface has a little bit of ice-physics going on it so you can’t stop on a dime as you might want. That means the ice world is easily one of the hardest despite being the third world you come to. Worse than that though is that holding the Wii remote sideways is painful. It’s like trying to play a game with a flimsy, jagged-edged TV remote. Twice I had to release my right hand to shake it as a stab of pain shot into a weird spot along my finger joints. The D-Pad is too small, the buttons not aligned nicely, and nothing curves to your hand when held sideways like that. I’m guessing you could hook up what is basically a SNES remote to the game somehow and it’d be better.
Even though it’s all the same platforming Mario fare you’re used to, there are some notable pluses and minuses. The penguin hat, for example, is kind of interesting, but ultimately has too few moments of being truly useful to warrant its existence in the game, let alone its differentiation from blue fireballs. Blue fireballs are almost always worse than red fireballs, so it’s frustrating when you replace red with blue and then have to take two steps to kill things instead of one. The helicopter hat is a cool addition, and Luigi and Blue Toad look mighty fine wearing them. My favorite was the little blue mushroom that makes you tiny. I think it’s a cool dynamic to be able to run on water and glide at the cost of being large enough to kill things. That particular power-up was under-utilized. Really though they’re all fine, decent substitutes for the Super Mario World cape or Mario 3 frog suit. The bigger problem is in the archaic way that it gives them to you or expects you to use them in the overworld. Item huts, especially star ones, are ludicrously useless. When do I want to be invincible for the first few seconds of a level? When am I feeling so confident that I’m going to have a good run on a ghost house that I’m going to pop one of three of my helicopter hat power-ups? And it is downright scary when you get to the end of one of the castles and it asks you if you want to save. A game made this late should just be saving. Constantly. Behind the scenes.
Bosses are always a great time. You have to hit them all three times, obviously, and there are two castles per world so something like forty-eight, maybe more like fifty-four opportunities to bash a member of Bowser’s Koopa troop. I wouldn’t be too surprised if I registered forty of those hits. It almost felt like Blue Toad didn’t care about doing damage, but just wanted to not die, and Luigi, well, Luigi sometimes got a bit bold at the beginning of fights and ended up flying in from stage right. In a bubble. The last boss is well designed. You have to platform as you guide, dodge, and utilize giant Bowser fireballs. On the second attempt I managed to outpace Luigi, Blue Toad floated around in a bubble, and I leapt forward to rescue the princess, but as I looked behind me, I saw no green-hatted brother in tow. Yes, I saved her, but at what cost. AT WHAT COST!? (Scott won the credit scrolling coin-collecting game though, even if there was a mean-spirited ‘Luigi eats dirt and is left in the dust’ cutscene he had to endure before that.)
Oftentimes, my brothers and I would discuss whether we thought the game in general or a specific level would be easier or harder if played alone. If you’re alone you’re not going to accidentally run into a character that chose to go the other route up the board and then both fall right in front of a chomp, but if you die, there’s no one coming to redeem you and save the progress you made on the level. Also a lot of the secret coins and alternate exits can be acquired more easily just by jumping on a friend’s head instead of doing whatever elaborate Bullet-Bill jumping puzzle they planned. At the end of the day though, who cares. Playing the game alone would be a tenth as fun and not funny at all. So yeah, I highly recommend New Super Mario Bros Wii to anyone who likes playing co-op platforming games with Scott and Graham Blackburn.
My reviews are so god-damn useful.