| | Nintendo finally tries getting back to the style of game that made their fortune back on the old NES. And even though it's kind of icky 3D, and carries a completely superfluous lower screen, it seems like a pretty solid game. I hear that it's much easier than the originals, to the point of maybe not being much of a challenge, but I guess that's par for the course these days. It did seem kind of pointless to me that sometimes you get a huge mushroom that makes you so big you need fear no enemies, nor walls, even, and you just smash your way straight through the level--then you get two extra life mushrooms at the end, to top it off. Is this fan service or something?
Oh, and saving requires collecting tokens, or being in certain huts, or I don't know. The game has a world map similar to Super Mario 3, where you advance along a segmented path in each world, sometimes in somewhat non-linear fashion. I couldn't figure out where to save after the first two (quite easy) stages, though, which was mildly annoying. Why can't we just save at any time on the world map? Would that be so bad?
Anyway, I guess the first two stages seemed okay. The characters didn't talk too much, which was nice, compared to the constant babbling in the GBA ports of the NES versions.
There's some kind of Luigi mode, which I didn't see, and then there are what looked like maybe fifteen minigames. From the looks of it, most use the darn stylus--you can't even navigate the minigame menus without the stylus--and the few I played didn't seem all that thrilling. One was dragging a slingshot to fire balls into floating koopa shells, I think, and the other was drawing trampolines to catch falling Marios. Eh. Maybe I just picked the not-so-great ones, I don't know. |
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