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| Aimee Green |
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Aimee Green: 'New Super Mario Bros.' a perfect blend of new, old
Friday, May 19, 2006 - 12:10:45 am CDT
I have many fond memories of the original “Super Mario Bros.” My best friend and I used to sit in my basement and see who could beat the game first. And when someone won, we started all over again (because then all the goombas became beetles, and it was a whole new game).
There have been lots of Mario games since then, but none has been quite the same — side-scrolling, hitting question-mark boxes, jumping from platform to platform.
Finally, we have a proper salute to the game that started it all. “New Super Mario Bros.” for the Nintendo DS does everything right, keeping things the same while adding just enough to make it fresh.
It’s a side-scroller, but the characters are fleshed out in 3-D. Mario still goes from little Mario to big Mario to fireball-spitting Mario, but now he also has special power-ups. One mushroom makes him super-huge, and he stomps his way through the level, breaking pipes and smashing blocks. The small mushroom makes him tiny so he can get into small spaces and bounce off the tops of enemies. And the blue shell lets him retreat into it and spin through his enemies.
Mario also has some smooth new moves. He can wall jump, for one, to reach high places. He can swing on vines. And he can smash bricks by landing on them hard from above.
The new “Mario Bros.” isn’t as linear as the original. It’s similar to “Super Mario Bros. 3” in that you have branching pathways and can choose which level or world you want to go to next.
Each of those worlds has a different theme — there’s a water world, mushroom-pad world, ancient ruins world, desert world … you name it.
The enemies mostly are familiar, too, though some of them have grown.
“New Super Mario Bros.” gives its own shout-outs to the original, too. There’s a flagpole at the end of each level, and landing on it can still result in fireworks. Bowser shows up at the end of each fortress with the kidnapped Princess Peach and runs away when he sees Mario.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you no longer can do “The Mario” on top of vines (if you have to ask what that is, you won’t miss it).
When you add in the little things — such as the enemies doing little dance moves to the music and Mario saying hello and goodbye when you flip the DS open and closed — “New Super Mario Bros.” is everything any Mario fan could ask for.
New Super Mario Bros
Nintendo, for Nintendo DS
Rated: Everyone
Cost: $34.99
Grade: A
Nintendo certainly is a leader in the field of innovation. Its new GameCube game, “Odama,” is definitely different.
Let me lay it out: You’re in medieval Japan and you have troops to command on the battlefield. With a microphone. Oh yeah, and there’s a huge ball — the Odama — that you roll around the field, which it turns out is really a giant pinball game.
Yes, it’s strategy and pinball rolled into one.
It gets points for being so different. Nobody can complain that this feels just like something else they’ve played. It’s cool to command your troops by speaking into the microphone. And it is kind of fun to watch the giant pinball rolling over enemies (there’s that sick side of me again).
But “Odama” doesn’t quite make it to a fun, workable game. For one, the graphics are just horrendous. I understand the style the developers were going for (medieval Japanese), but the troops look straight out of a game from 10 years ago.
OK, graphics aren’t everything. Unfortunately, the gameplay needs work, too. There’s an interesting puzzle element, in that you need to hit certain things, such as the gate that will stop a river’s flow, before your troops can advance. But it can be pretty difficult to get the ball there, and I ended up rolling over my own troops most of the time. The pinball mechanics aren’t as smooth as they should be.
In part because of clunky controls, “Odama” is hard. At one point, I’d tried the beginning level so many times that the narrator basically told me I was a loser and should stop trying (though that was actually pretty funny). There’s enough multitasking going on to make a person’s head explode.
I can’t write off the game completely, though, because I really think it could be a fun, different game. It just needs some serious work.
Work on the controls, polish up the visuals, make it a little more forgiving, and “Odama” could be great.
Who knows, maybe a sequel already is in the works.
Odama
Nintendo, for GameCube
Rated: Everyone 10+
Cost: $49.99
Grade: B-
Reach Aimee Green at 473-7326 or Aimee.Green@lee.net.
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