New Super Mario Bros. - ★★★
I realize this game is going on four years old, but hey, I just finished it recently.
This is a really fun game. If all you want is one sentence to sum it up, here’s the one you probably expected: Nintendo returned to Mario’s 2D roots and made a really fun Mario game in New Super Mario Bros. for DS. So fun that I was compelled to collect every star coin—meaning, I completed the game. This is news; I’ve rarely completed games from top to bottom, start to finish, corner to corner. Only a handful come to mind: Star Fox 64, Super Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Super Mario World, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (the first one for Nintendo 64), and now New Super Mario Bros. There may be others I’m missing (though very few, if any), but the point remains that this game was fun enough for me to enjoy investing my time in finding every secret, an uncommon feat for me.
With that said, you’re probably wondering why I gave it only 3/5 stars. Well… what kept it from a higher score was its complete lack of anything noteworthy or memorable. I wasn’t keeping track of any exact times, but I’m fairly certain I beat the final boss under five hours into the game, and that’s including time I spent exploring. The game overall was just much too easy. I don’t think I even died once until the final world. Even completing the game by collecting all the star coins was a relatively painless affair; only three or four involved any actual skill to retrieve. I understand there’s a need to make the game easy to pick up and play (more appealing to children and casual gamers on the go), but many times I found myself disappointed or underwhelmed at the game’s difficulty and wished for something more challenging.
Another aspect I found supremely lacking was the game’s utilization of the DS’s capabilities—which is to say, it didn’t use them at all. For example, when you go down a pipe, Mario drops to the bottom screen, which now becomes the play-action screen. This would be cool if you could use the stylus in these moments to perform some novel act with Mario or interact with the environment. But the game does nothing to leverage this opportunity; and unfortunately, it never does in any other circumstance either.
This is what separates New Super Mario Bros. DS from being a great game: it has the unfortunate talent of substituting charm for cleverness more often than not. Where it could do something fun and novel, it opts instead for fun and familiar. The mega and mini mushrooms are cool power-ups in their own right (the mini being the more interesting one), but these are just new power-ups—they’re not new ways of playing Mario. The raccoon hat brought flight to Mario in Super Mario Bros. 3. Yoshi brought multilayered gameplay to Mario in Super Mario World. These two things genuinely changed how we play a Mario game. New Super Mario Bros. did nothing of the sort, and is worse off for it.
Again: a fun game, but too easy, and ultimately too unimaginative.
