Nintendo auteur, Shigeru Miyamoto probably never imagined that one day he'd be listening to the latest pitches for a new Mario game instead of the one actually giving them, but success can be pretty funny that way. One day you're a young, unproven designer with a quirky idea for a new video game, the next you've spawned a bona fide entertainment revolution in the form of a rotund, Italian plumber with a penchant for animal suits.
Maybe it's precisely because of Miyamoto's shift from hands-on designer to hands-off producer, or maybe he's just been devoting all of his time to cashing Wii Fit royalty checks, but for whatever the reason, after playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii, one thing's clear: the revolution is over.
It's not that New SMB Wii is bad per se, there's just an off-putting, uncanny quality to it. At best it could be called an homage. At worst, it's a half-baked attempt to appeal to our nostalgia. Really, it's just an okay Mario game. Like a koopa without a shell, New SMB Wii may have all the familiar and necessary pieces, but they just don't add up to what we've come to expect from the series.
The big design twist in New SMB Wii (every sequel needs at least one, right?) is the much-touted ability for you and up to three friends to play the game at the same time. And while there's something to be said for the chaotic fun of seeing Mario, Luigi, and two Toads run across the screen in a mad dash for mushrooms and floating gold coins, after a while the novelty will wear off and you'll find that sharing the diminished real estate is more of a hindrance to seriously playing the game than it is a boon. Levels will become more and more difficult and eventually simply surviving will take precedent over cooperation -- a feat best achieved by just keeping your distance from the other players.
Despite this, if you're going to play New SMB Wii, I'd still recommend playing it with at least one friend, because the game's deficiencies will stick out like a Fire Flower from a floating break when going solo. For one thing, playing as one solitary Mario will make painfully apparent the fact that these stages were designed with four players in mind. Without the madness of a quartet bouncing all over the place, the levels seem stretched and oddly lifeless. This of course has the unintended side-effect of making playing the game alone exceedingly easy (I had fifty-five, that's right, fifty-five lives half-way through the second world). It's sad, but when you take away the distractions that come from playing with other people what you're left with is a 2-D platformer that bears only a superficial resemblance to the Mario games of Miyamoto's imaginings. His distinctive wit and charm just isn't here.
New SMB Wii feels very much like a paint-by-numbers Mario game -- something the series has remarkably managed to avoid given the familiar and largely unchanging nature of the games. It's as though the designers thought that picking up random aspects from the series' back catalogue and throwing them all together in a "Mario stew" would be enough to make the next great Mario game. A recipe without a chef to cook it may fill your belly, but it won't leave you asking for more. New SMB Wii is a competent platformer, it's just not a Miyamoto platformer -- the difference is profound.
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