Super Paper Mario

I’m going to admit from the start that I was attracted to this game by the little mathematical equations I saw hanging in the sky in the publicity screenshot. As a math teacher, I was curious as to what the square root of mushroom divided by flower plus three times Mario might equal. Now I think I know.

While overall a blasé entry in the Mario verse, Super Paper Mario does have some nifty tricks up front that made it fun to play around with. In this game Mario has returned to his 2-dimensional roots, the world’s only plumber with length and height but no girth. As a 2D creature, Mario sensibly defeats enemies by hopping on top of them… which makes me ruminate again on how strange it would be to live in a side scrolling 2D world, as opposed to the tabletop flatness of the classic book I occasionally inflict on my students, Flatland. If you haven’t read it, by the way, that’s your homework. You know who you are.

Mario, however, has the ability to turn sideways, which puts him in a 3D version of the world and the capability to move along all three directions… updown, leftright, and forwardback (while he himself remains 2D… how bizarre!) It is a neat device that allows the level designers to hide all sorts of treats and special features behind blocks and other “surface” features of the 2D world. But it is a bit confusing if you think about it too much, which of course I did.

The mathematician AK Dewdney wrote a book called Planiverse back in the day that investigated a world like Mario’s. Sideways, with gravity, you have to leap over each other in order to exchange places… something that Mario is fortunately very good at. Mario also cheats… he can do things a true 2D critter couldn’t, even without the game’s granted power of going 3D. If you were a true 2D critter you could never turn around. Your left arm would always be on your left, your right on your right. Dewdney envisioned aliens with heads that stick straight up and necks that could lean left or right so the eye on the top could see in either direction.

This was pretty neat… interesting enough for my Psychiatrist father to give it some further thought, adding that a truly 2D creature would have an issue with eating and excreting… any tunnel that goes through a 2D body would necessarily cut it into two disconnected halves! This makes biology pretty tough… Dad’s solution was to propose a biological zipper system, so that when a 2D alien eats something, it zips and unzips the alimentary canal around the food as the stuff passes through the body, being digested. Thus the critter could get its nutrition without ever falling apart into two halves.

But I digress. Mario gains a bunch of helpful critters called Pixels that give him various abilities, like being able to point the Wii controller at the screen to get information on various things, the ability to turn sideways and disappear, to grab things in a Klonoa-like fashion, to ride a magic carpet and all sorts of stuff. It seemed to me that you were so busy getting all these abilities that you rarely had time to use a lot of them. Much more could have been done in this respect.

I liked the story (it was cute!) but I didn’t care for the inclusion of items, hit points, character leveling and other RPG-like elements. These unnecessary additions just slowed things down and didn’t add much… Mario is best as an action game. For a time I was addicted to an arcade mini-game they offered, however, where you hold the Wii-mote like a boat and tip it back and forward, causing Mario to go running left or right on a platform in order to avoid or grab various falling objects. Kudos to whoever thought that one up!

In the end, I think of this game as a somewhat forgettable oddity. It was fun to play, but didn’t really leave any lasting impressions. A little too long for its interest value, I’m nevertheless happy I had a chance to play. It did serve to whet my appetite for Portal, however!

First Impressions by Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher