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review:
You might think Mario had never gone away, but you’d be wrong. Sort of. Long before he started making guest appearances in EA Sports games, he was famous for all the right reasons – because until the mid-’90s, practically every single game he starred in was universally acclaimed as the Best Thing Ever. Mario was videogames. And now he’s back.
But can New Super Mario Bros possibly scale those unreachable peaks? It’s very much a retro affair – so retro, it’s as if Super Mario World, or even Super Mario Bros 3, never existed. If you want to ride Yoshi, or glide, hawk-like, through coin-filled skies, you’re looking at the wrong game.
In fact, from the moment we first picked up a stomped Koopa shell and found that Mario could no longer toss it straight up in the air, only left or right, we suspected something was amiss. And the further we progressed through the eight worlds and 70+ levels on offer, the more our fears were confirmed. This new Mario game offers considerably less variety than the 16-year-old Super Mario World.
Bearing in mind that Super Mario World is the best platform game ever made, perhaps it’s churlish to expect something equally grand in scope from a title pitched as a follow-up to a much earlier game. But when we’ve been waiting so long for a new 2D Mario, having been spoiled in the meantime by the incredible feats of imagination that were Yoshi’s Island and Super Mario 64, it’s hard not to feel disappointed on finding that New Super Mario Bros is a comparatively limited affair.
Of course, if your experience of Mario doesn’t range much further than a couple of joyless Parties and that godawful football thing, prepare to be impressed. And re-educated. When you fire up the cartridge and grab yourself a Mega Mushroom within the first ten seconds of the opening level, you’ll feel as though Nintendo has declared a public holiday in your honour.
And there’s plenty more to admire in subsequent levels. Despite certain parts of Mario’s heritage being written out of the game, it’s still packed with what we at Nintendo Gamer like to call Nintendo Love. You can almost smell it, wafting out of the DS, when you’re riding on the back of a supersized Wiggler, dodging the most ridiculously ginormous Banzai Bill, or evading an entire school of Blooper squid in search of another Star Coin.
All roms need to be deleted within 24 hours unless the legal copy is owned.
