So yeah, I bought New Super Mario Bros Wii. I was not planning on it, because I know this is not my kind of thing, but I was watching for any deals that would knock the price down. I was expecting Toys R Us to show up with another ambush gift card sale, but they did not. They did, however, have a Buy One Get One $20 Off deal, and I deemed that good enough since I was already pretty set on picking up Rabbids Go Home anyway.
There were a couple other tipping points. I like the Super Guide idea, I like the multiplayer angle... and Clark saw a screenshot in Nintendo Power that showed a level with Egyptian pyramids in the background. I cringed internally when I said it, but I described the game for him as "LittleBigPlanet with Mario." Eeyow.
Regardless, it's not my kind of thing. After playing through one-and-a-half worlds (many with Clark as the Blue Toad), I can say for sure that's it's not my thing. I've been through nearly all of the Mario Land series, most of the Mario Bros/World series, Super Paper Mario and New Super Mario DS. I don't need it again. I especially don't need it again in exactly the same 1989 form.
I'm not going to debate the subjective nature of whether one enjoys a 2D old school sidescroller. But I am going to be supremely annoyed at Nintendo for not modernizing that old school framework.
Why does a game with infinite continues bother with counting lives? You get five lives per level. If you lose all of them, you get a Game Over, a screen pops up showing your continue count going up by one, and you get your five lives back. It's a waste of time when we could just stay in the level and keep playing.
Similarly, if I die by falling into a pit, why should I be kicked back to the overworld? How about if, for as long as I have lives, I get to stay inside the level and avoid having to re-load. Let me decide if I want to hop back to the map. Generally, I don't.
In multiplayer, if a player runs out of lives, they do not get to come back until the surviving players beat the board or die themselves. Poor players STILL get to spend most of the time staring at other people play. So much for making the game accessible for new and non gamers.
As a game that is ostensibly based around high scores, where are the online leaderboards? Not that I specifically give a crap about online leaderboards, but it only underlines the fact that there is no friend-interaction of any kind. No friend scoreboard. No sending challenges. No screenshotting. No use of Miis. No uploading plays to YouTube. No posting success stories on your Facebook wall. This is why the phrase "dropped out of a time warp from 1989" is not a compliment.
NSMBW does not support Classic or GameCube controllers, mainly so Miyamoto can force us to shake the Remote a couple times. It would be nice to not have to do that. But it's not as terrible as it could have been. There is one baffling control choice: to pick up an item, you have to hold 1 and shake. Guh-whut? To keep holding the item, you have to keep the 1 button held. Guh-whut again? And you know what, the B button does nothing. Absolutely nothing. We dare not pretend B is sort of like a shoulder button and map a function to it, right?
So that's annoying. Here's some good stuff to wash the rant down:
In multi, hitting A puts you in a safety bubble. So if you're at a spot you know you can't make, but the rest of your party can, you can bubble up and float along while they manage it. Dead players come back inside a bubble (and bubbled players make great warbly sounds in the Remote speaker!) The entire bubble mechanic is great.
If you are entirely out of lives, you can press buttons to play silly sound effects while you wait to come back.
The enemy characters bop to the music. This is far more gameplay-impacting than you might expect.
I imagine we'll have some good multiplayer times with it, but I also imagine I'll be in a bubble for most of it.
Super Mario Bros hit the NES in the US in 1986 :P I hear understand where you're coming from if you don't enjoy side scrolling, jumping on mushrooms, etc but this is the classic that started it all. My wife is actually way more excited for this game than I; fitting because Super Mario Bros is the game we played constantly together while dating and in our early married years.
Complaints about the control... hmm... I say you've got to blame the Wii for that. There comes a point where having to purchase 4 Classic controllers is just asking too much, same with 4 nunchuks and whatever other dumb contraption that needs attaching to the Wii-mote. I'm actually very happy they decided to just use the basic Wii-mote like the old NES days. The usage of the B button as a trigger isn't really a comfortable design. Even the A button is out of place. Again, blame the industrial design of the Wii. It really wasn't thought out to be a core gamer console. Waggle and attachments... license to print money machine is what the Wii is.
Facebook and Youtube integration? On the Wii? I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist now and won't in the future. There isn't enough storage in the device to even store the video for one; SD cards don't count. Nintendo actually allow someone to upload to the internet, preposterous. You'd need a double encrypted friend code, a hand written note from your Mother, and the secret handshake from Google first. Not gonna happen. Facebook? Same problem.
To me this rant sounds more like a "Why I should play my PS3 more and stop buying Wii games like Rabbid's" then anything else ;-) Your PS3 has Youtube uploading in some games, it has Twitter in others, and soon it's going to have direct Facebook integration with an API for developers. The PS3 also has 4 triggers, 4 face buttons, and TWO analog sticks + a digital pad. Mind blowing!
xD
I guess I realized during New Mario DS that this is not my favorite genre. And it would be awesome if Nintendo threw in other ancillary benefits (YouTube, friend-interaction, Miis, etc) to sweeten the deal for me. I just find this old Mario junk frustrating and stale. LittleBigPlanet, while the controls are floaty and the online is janky, does 4P multiplayer in a much smoother fashion, plus the art direction is leagues better.
I know Nintendo isn't playing in the same Open Internet World, but they have had so many fits and starts in that arena that I wish they'd start combining it all. Plenty of Wii games have allowed sharing screenshots in some form. Excitebots lets you send challenges to friends. Smash Brawl saves three-minute replays. The DSi uploads photos to Facebook.
I really wish they had included the option for all controllers, so that we would not be forced to shake the Remote. Having to hold a button and shake is a painfully stupid idea, and I'm peeved that no reviews dare to take Nintendo to task for that. By all means include the NES-Remote as the default, but offer a Classic/GameCube setup as an alternative. Seriously, go play a few levels and then tell me you're not dying for an actual dedicated Pick Up button! We certainly didn't need to hold a button and shake to yank an onion in SMB2.
And Rabbids Go Home is way better than you're allowing! IGN scored it barely half a point lower than NSMBW.
I'm just not a fan of the whole Rabbid thing. I tried the very first one on Wii way back and it didn't resonate with me at all.
LBP is an interesting comparison. The whole 3 plane deal is horrible for casual gamers, my wife can't stand it and my son has issues with it. This is where something basic like a single plane side scroller works so well. I was disappointed with LBP overall, not playing it nearly as much as I had thought I would.
My copy of NSMB hasn't arrived yet but I should be playing it soon enough. I'll report back on how I feel about it, the controls, etc. Trust me, I would much prefer using a standard controller, I love the classic controller BUT I'd be pissed if I had to buy two more just to play one game with my family. We'll see how it goes, hopefully my son won't get frustrated, that is the true test of any game such as this for us.
Nintendo just doesn't get it and probably never will. Yes, there is a Facebook option in the DSi... the DSi takes the worst pictures ever so it's pretty lame. Reggie can't understand why 3rd party games aren't selling on the Wii... he is now blaming the 3rd party publishers lack of strong marketing. Uhm... generally speaking, 3rd party ports on Wii suck so bad core gamers aren't going to buy them when they have either an Xbox 360 or a PS3. Ain't gonna happen. Plus they're gimped with core gamer "friendly" features like friend codes, no voice chat, and piss poor matchmaking. Yup, that's how you sell 3rd games, make them feature rich experiences! *chuckle*
Nintendo generally hits the mark with the 1st party titles. They usually please both sides of the aisle causing them to sell like hot cakes. Hopefully I'll enjoy NSMB or else the Wii will go back to being the least used console in the house.
I dislike the Rabbids as well, but Rabbids Go Home is an entirely different game from the Raving Minigames crap. It's sort of like a platformy Katamari with a soundtrack from AM radio. Load times kinda suck though.
The three-plane LBP is a litmus test for new gamers. It's weird. But the game is still way more forgiving than the pixel-accurate NSMBW, and it handles the 4P better. In LBP, as long as somebody gets to a checkpoint, everybody else gets back in the game. In NSMBW, when your lives are up, you're out of the level until it ends or until everyone dies. In other words, my amateur gamers get to stay in the LBP game quite a bit more than in NSMBW.
Not to defend Reggie, but when good third party games do show up, nobody buys them. Dead Space Extraction, Little King's Story, Boy and His Blob, Klonoa, Deadly Creatures, Madworld... all well reviewed but barely sold. There's this whole audience out there that flies in to buy a first-party game, and then vanishes for six months until the next first-party release. And there is obviously a huge population of people that have a Wii and nothing else, so why aren't they buying these games? Now you have to point to these releases getting swallowed up in the marketing mire.
But yeah, the lack of community-building features on Wii continues to mystify. Reggie has no defense for why we can't see when Wii Friends are online.
I would have totally bought Dead Space Extraction on Wii IF I didn't already play it on PS3 AND it wasn't a ghetto on-rails shooter. Seriously, on-rails? Fail. This is why 3rd games don't sell. The game was marketed heavily, I saw plently of ads, plently of gaming news on the title. I knew when it was going to launch. But due to it being a lackluster prequel, meh. Bargain bin title at best for me.
The Wii isn't cut out to compete with the PS3's and 360's of the world. The hardware can't handle it, the WFC network infrastructure isn't built for it, and Nintendo frankly and obviously doesn't want to compete with them either.
That's all fine and good as far as I'm concerned. But when Reggie comes out and slaps publishers in the face by saying they aren't marketing their games well enough and that 3rd party games can sell on Wii, he's full of shit. I'm sorry but that's the truth. The Wii is a Nintendo money printing machine, pure and simple. If I were a 3rd party publisher, I'd get the hell out of developing retail titles for Wii. Dead Space Extraction sold 9000 copies it's first week? Uh... Nintendo needs to add more pleasing features to the Wii so games sell.
What features you ask? For one, a REAL GOD DAMN CONTROLLER. Playing shooters on the Wii is impossibly lame. I really tried with Medal of Honor Heroes but it was just so ghetto compared to a real dual stick controller it's no contest. Second, they need to remove friend codes and unify the WFC network. Third, they need to add more network features like friend presence, game invites, VOICE CHAT, messaging, achievements/trophies/mario coins, etc. Nintendo needs to wake up and join the 21st century if they want 3rd party publishers to stick around. I'm not going to buy 3rd titles when all these features are missing.
I honestly don't think Nintendo cares about 3rd party. This has happened with every single console since Nintendo 64 and I don't see it changing. Nintendo is making a truck load of cash off first party titles and licensing. Maybe once their licensing revenue drops they'll take notice but I doubt it.
Just got my copy today and reading through the instructions it talks about Wiimote+Nunchuk. Have you tried this method yet?