New Super Mario Bros

Just about anyone who grew up in the 1980s can recall fond memories of the original Super Mario Brothers on the now fabled NES. Here was the game that practically invented the platforming genre. Easy to engage but chock full of teeth-grinding extra challenges, Mario was a pre-internet communal experience, as kids across the nation gathered in backyards or parents’ basements to whisper the locations of secret levels and extra lives or at least pool their allowance money to buy a guidebook. There have been many, many iterations of the Super Mario Brothers ever since, but until now none has dared to suggest itself as a remake or replacement for the original. But today for the Wii we have a game designed with just that in mind… can the only red-boxed Wii game truly be a match to this monolith of gaming history?

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Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher


Mario, of course, got his start in the arcade classic Donkey Kong, a game that still has dedicated players today (if you haven’t yet rented the documentary about competitive Donkey Kong play, The King of Kong, consider that your homework after completing this review.) Mario was next joined by Luigi for a single screen action game called Mario Brothers. For some unknown reason I still more or less remember the commercial for this game, which had a catchy jingle: something’s gumming up the plumbing, poor Luigi’s in a bind, killer turtles out to get him giant crabs are right behind. Fighter Flies, holy cripes, they’re all gumming up the pipes… (cut to Luigi’s wailing, plaintive voice)… “Mariooooo, where are you?!?!?!” It was only after this that the Super Mario Brothers emerged as a true, side-scrolling action adventure.

In today’s internet-driven world, it is a challenge for a video game to bring people physically together like the original Super Mario Brothers did. Following the success of Mario Kart and Brawl, Nintendo had a clear motivation for adding local multiplayer to the platforming genre, hoping that four players working their way through a cooperative campaign would bring people together once again. Unfortunately, it is in this regard that the New Super Mario Brothers Wii fails in the worst way, literally driving people apart rather than encouraging them to play together.

As a caveat the following discussion, it should be mentioned that Americans such as me can often value individualism over group efforts. Each secure in the belief that they are the hero of their own story, Americans are assertive, competitive and ego-driven, as compared to, for instance, someone hailing from the overly cooperative Japanese society. These are certainly grand stereotypical statements, but it is folly to ignore the effect of prevailing cultural traditions. The New Super Mario Brothers game was fated to meet with a poor reception here in the States, as it requires not just a high degree of cooperation to play, but also a willingness to be stepped on, pushed aside, and otherwise abused for the greater good. This is not a fantasy that Americans appreciate.

Ignoring the advice of other critics who have dubbed this Mario as the worst threat to friendship since the board game Diplomacy, my wife and I decided to give the new game a spin. There were two central game mechanics that we found to be particularly problematic as we started into the game. The first issue is that, for some reason, you have to keep both of your characters within a certain distance of each other. If you don’t and one person lags a little too far behind, they automatically perish. This is a pretty brutal conceit, as many levels require long series of precision jumps that can easily leave one person behind. Add to this the fact that every level has a strict time limit for completion… you both die if time runs out… and you have competing stresses to rush forward and win or wait for your partner and potentially lose.

The second particularly vexing issue is created by the physical interaction of your characters with each other. Mario and Luigi cannot pass through each other, but instead push each other around, which, in many cases, means pushing your partner off the side of a cliff. In addition, characters bounce off of each other in complex, almost random trajectories, making it incredibly dangerous to be anywhere near your partner whenever you make a jump. Of course, power-ups and other resources often appear in pairs, but you can only share them if you are both close enough to grab them before they disappear, and if one player doesn’t accidentally grab both.

So essentially, what we have is a game that forces you to stick close together, and then quite often punishes you for doing so. It is a game that is supposed to promote cooperation, but always rewards you for screwing over your partner. My wife find two player Mario to be quite a challenge, but playing it makes it obvious that four player Mario would be utterly aggravating and in no way cooperative. There are some other, strictly competitive modes like coin battle that might work better for a party, but they also didn’t appear as interesting or engaging as the campaign.

On the plus side, as neither my wife nor I care how many “continues” we use, we can play the game in brief stints and enjoy the extreme challenge of not accidentally killing each other’s characters. As long as you don’t care how many times you have to replay a level due to accidental deaths and you are in no hurry to finish (and if you don’t mind regularly missing secrets or challenging star coins) then the game does have its nostalgic, enjoyable moments. But make sure the two of you are of a like mind on these issues, and don’t for goodness sake, play with four people and expect to get very far as a “team!” There’s a reason why the 3rd and 4th players are identical mushroom toads… think “red shirt” from the Star Trek universe and you’ll understand.

It is rather too bad that the multiplayer focus creates so many issues, as buried underneath the Jean Paul Sartre “Hell is other people” vibe there is a lot of satisfying Mario fun to be had. Propeller suits and penguin suits and mini-marios are fun variations on the old power-up theme, although somehow not as enjoyable as the classic tanuki Mario of old. The Mario style guide is in full operation, with giant rotating toy blocks, quicksand and zombie turtles and blue skies and inane Mario music that turtles and other enemies stop to dance to at regular intervals. Bowser and his large family are back with their fleet of propeller-powered pirate vessels as usual, and pipes supply the expected piranha plants and secret areas full of coins.

The New Super Mario Brothers Wii succeeds in being stylistically similar to the original Super Mario Brothers classic, but it is unlikely to catch people’s imaginations in the same way. I predict that, like the Wii fit, it will be a common gift purchase that will get a few hours of use and then never be played again. As my fingers ached from trying to use the Wii-mote as a traditional controller, I noted that the game exists as an uncomfortable hybrid between the console gaming days of my youth and the fads and trends of today’s games. It is a mutant failure, but reminiscent of some grand adventures indeed.