New Super Mario Bros Wii - Out Now. 15

SageinaRage · June 2009

NSMB wasn't super hard, but I felt challenged at parts. I don't play a whole lot of platformers though.

I'm looking forward to this. It'll be great for playing with my friends that don't play a whole lot of games.

MinionOfCthulhu · June 2009

I'm surprised to hear people didn't like New Super Mario Bros. I thought that'd be lynchin' talk.
I actually didn't like it too much either. I didn't hate it, there was just something off about it. Whoever said it was trying a bit too hard to be old school may have been on to something. Maybe that was it.
Edit: Oh, yeah, and the music wasn't very good.

Speed Racer · June 2009

I'm okay with easy. A lot of Mario Galaxy was easy, but I still found it to be a blast. I just thought NSMB was really boring. It was just completely Mario by Numbers.

That and I didn't think the music was very good.

Hexmage-PA · June 2009

I wanted a game with the same level of difficulty as

Super_Mario_Bros._Deluxe_GBC_ScreenShot1.jpg

Moioink · June 2009

The wah samples... :...:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_lcZmezlA

So awful.

anoffday · June 2009

This looks awesome. I'm so psyched for this game, SMG2, and the new metroid. Nintendo is making up for the crappy e3 they had last year.

Not too mention, since I was a kid I have believed that platformers are the greatest games of all time. I had thought Nintendo was starting to forget about them. But now I'm happy.

Ginrai · June 2009

I'm just starting to catch up with all the E3 news and seeing this preview has got me giddy.

Not only will there be a new 2d Mario game, it looks like Miyamoto had a hand in this! Hopefully this means that there won't be the same problems that NSMB had (linear worlds, terrible powerups, overuse of mini-Mario, etc). The penguin suit looks great and the spin suit looks like it could have potential; it looks like this could be on SMB3's level as far as awesome powerups go.

Multiplayer mode looks interesting and it's nice that they're trying something new there.

MinionOfCthulhu · June 2009

Moioink wrote: »

The wah samples... :...:

So awful.

Yeeeeargh. Where art thou, Koji Kondo?

SageinaRage · June 2009

Ok, I'm not really getting the complaints about the music. It sounds like Mario music.

UncleSporky · June 2009

I love NSMB's music. It's not a classic theme but it feels so classic, and gets in your head the same way as the old Mario music. It fits so well and has some nice remixes throughout the game. I'm glad they came up with a nice new theme rather than rehashing the old again, as much as I enjoy the old themes.

They're pretty good about that, Mario 64 added a similarly rocking Mario theme.

anoffday · June 2009

SageinaRage wrote: »

Ok, I'm not really getting the complaints about the music. It sounds like Mario music.

I'm not either? I've been playing Mario games since Super Mario World, and it sounds like Mario music to me?

BloodySloth · June 2009

The song does get into your head, but it also does conjure up strong images of old ladies dancing on one of those horrible tourist cruises.

Moioink · June 2009

SageinaRage wrote: »

Ok, I'm not really getting the complaints about the music. It sounds like Mario music.

It's a bizarre poorly done knock off masquerading as Mario music. Too bad really, Mario Galaxy had a great score at least.

DodgeBlan · June 2009

it sounds like mario themed waiting room music

Dodge Aspen · June 2009

Propeller suit seems lame. I really don't like shaking the Wii Remote when it's held with two hands. Penguin suit, though. I can get on board with that.

SyphonBlue · June 2009

So can this game be played single-player or is it like Four Swords?

If it had fucking online, it'd be no problem but I very rarely have 4 friends over to play video games.

Hey Nintendo, it's fucking 2009, change your calendars

Fencingsax · June 2009

Dodge Aspen wrote: »

Propeller suit seems lame. I really don't like shaking the Wii Remote when it's held with two hands. Penguin suit, though. I can get on board with that.

So take off a hand when you shake the wiimote?

Sheep · June 2009

This game will absolutely fail if it does not include the Versus minigame from the original. Online too.

I refuse to budge on this position.

gneGne · June 2009

Man I really liked New Super Mario Bros and it finally was a platformer that didn't get too frustrating for me haha.

RonaldoTheGypsy · June 2009

I just play this while playing the game and mute the actual sound:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW1pME9ZebQ

Lunker · June 2009

Arceus wrote: »

Alfred J. Kwak wrote: »

Arceus wrote: »

Does this mean you can play it on your own with the other 3 characters being bots, like Zelda: Four Swords Adventures?

If you're playing alone, you're playing alone, so nope, no bots. You can see it in the first part of this trailer:

Spoiler:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrBPawVfnWE

Excellent! I don't care for multiplayer games at all, apart from the occasional Donkey Konga or Rock Band, so this is good news. Are the levels exactly the same whether you play them alone or with multiple people? Or is it more like the challenge mode in SSB Brawl, where (IIRC) certain co-op challenges were sadly only accessible if multiple controllers were plugged in?

This is my only real reservation with New SMB Wiiâ€”if it's being built for 4p coop, will it still hold up as a single-player game? I don't really play as much local multi as I used to, and with platformers I always like playing solo anyway. So long as this doesn't feel empty if you're playing solo, this will be an instabuy for me.

overdriveGTO · June 2009

If anyone finds some impressions or a preview of how this game is solo please post. I have no one to play coop with locally (only online) and me buying this game hinges directly on its single player mode.

I did love NSMB so if its more of the same when playing solo then I'm sold.

Speed Racer · June 2009

I choose to believe that this game came about because Miyamoto had a lot of fun playing LittleBigPlanet.

carmofin · June 2009

if so then i wonder what made him think leaving out onlin emultiplayer would be acceptable.

Rorus Raz · June 2009

Seems like they aren't really pushing the graphics on this one. Real similar to the DS.

On the other hand, it feels like they put in more effort towards the power-ups. Propeller is kinda iffy, but penguin is awesome. And Yoshi!

carmofin · June 2009

Moioink wrote: »

The wah samples... :...:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_lcZmezlA

So awful.

and in SMB for DS the track played EVERWHERE, in green hill levels, in ice levels, in wood levels, THE WAHS FOLLOWED YOU ANYWHERE YOU WENT!!!

edit: hey maybe if we can get them to take out the WAHs to save processing power we can have online multiplayer instead!

Norfair · June 2009

UnbreakableVow wrote: »

I hope it's better than the DS version.

NSMB just didn't click with me for some reason, almost like it was trying too hard to be an old-school Mario game. I really don't know how to explain it, but I just found the whole thing really forgettable. Sucks, 'cause it was the reason I bought my DS...luckily I found plenty of other reasons to keep it.

I had that reaction when I got my DS... only sub in "Metroid Prime Hunters" for NSMB, and make NSMB the reason I kept my DS after all.

(Along with Castlevania, Trace Memory, Phoenix Wright, etc., etc.)

On a more serious note, I was hoping for a NSMB 2 on the DS, but this will do more than nicely for me, thanks.

toxk_02 · June 2009

Hands-on from professionals.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/e3-new-super-mario-bros-wii-hands-on

Eurogamer wrote:

What's the best Nintendo game you've never played? Probably a full four-player session of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, 2005's 2D multiplayer excursion for the Zelda series. Its devious and riotous spirit remain a mystery to most because you'd need to assemble a GameCube, four GBAs and four link cables to play it as nature intended, something which was difficult for even games journalists to manage.

But it remains a landmark piece of multiplayer game design, a game that achieved the rare feat of seeing that co-operation and competition, cruelty and kindness, mischief and high adventure could co-exist. Virtually none have followed it, save Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, in its friendly, woolly kind of way. Now, Nintendo has finally decided to resurrect the idea - but this time, in a form that almost everyone will be able to access and understand.

The result is New Super Mario Bros Wii, and it's fantastic fun.

After romping through a few levels with three others at Nintendo's plush and airy E3 booth, I was left grinning from ear to ear. The game doesn't look like much - well, it looks like a New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, exactly like it in fact. But you need to play it for mere minutes to tell that it's got the perfect balance of order and chaos Nintendo's platformers are famous for, mixed with the sugar-coated mean-streak of Mario Kart and the mischievous invention, sharp tuning and secret surprises of the developer's best.

Players start out as Mario, Luigi and a couple of coloured Toads - who knows if more characters might be available later? - and start the time-honoured scroll from left to right. The Wii remote is held laterally and the game uses NES-style controls - d-pad, 1 to dash, 2 to jump. That's it, save a shake that performs a spin-jump or, if you run into another player with dash also held down, picks them up. But as ever with Mario, a simple control scheme doesn't mean a simple move-set. We discovered the wall-kick and ground-pound, and we're sure there are more.

As with Four Swords, physical interaction between the players is at the core of the game - chucking each other around, bouncing off each other's heads, getting Yoshi to gobble up your friends and spit them out. Yes, Yoshi's in it, along with his multicoloured dinosaur tribe, flutter jumps and fixation with eating everything in sight. Opportunities to mount Yoshi are carefully seeded through the level we play, and always an object of scrambling competition between players.

It's bopping other players' heads that makes the real difference in to New Super Mario Bros Wii, though. You friends essentially become a set of wildly unpredictable moving platforms that can be used to grab coins or items - often found floating in bubbles, or produced in fours from blocks - first, or with a bit of co-ordination, to access secret or hard-to-reach objectives. Although it's unlikely to be an essential part of gameplay - New Super Mario Bros Wii will need to be playable solo, even if it's hardly the point - it's a simple stroke of genius that defines the game: it has huge potential for both co-operation and competition, and more importantly, it's really funny.

Unlike Four Swords and LBP, the camera's fixed and doesn't scale much, so if anyone gets left behind, they'll need to find their way back blind or, more likely, die. If you do die, you'll lose a life and get resurrected in a bubble which can be popped by another player (or not) to bring you back into play - a very clever multiplayer reworking of the Baby Mario mechanic from Yoshi's Island. Just so you don't feel completely helpless, you can shake the Wii remote to gravitate your bubble to the nearest player who'll probably end up popping you then, whether they want to or not.

Lose all your lives and you're out of the game, though. The balance between self-interest and community spirit is perfect, since on one of the harder levels we tried, a mini-boss castle, it was noticeably more difficult (though not impossible) to proceed solo than with at least one other player around. The level was classic stuff - Dry Bones, ascents through treacherous moving stone slabs and see-sawing platforms that could be given an extra push with a tilt of the Wii remote (another "secret" control detail - I suspect there will be more).

The only new item we see is the propeller suit, a hilariously cute colour-coded romper-suit and helicopter-helmet combo. It's a shake-driven permanent spin-jump, essentially, which combined with the exaggerated bounce physics while spinning causes all sorts of ricochet madness between the players. It already seems a smarter addition to the canon than any of the DS New Super Mario Bros' slightly gimmicky offerings. In terms of the classics, we also see the fire flower, whose extra range is key when it comes to racking up points.

And believe me, you will want to rack up points. This being a 2D Mario, there are so many different scoring opportunities - enemies, coins, super coins, items, secret areas, based on both level-knowledge and skill - that you'll always be racing to get something ahead of your competitors, but never short of an alternative objective if you fall a little behind. Coin-filled caverns down pipes (everyone follows a single player down a pipe, after a short pause) are pure, mad scrambles for score.

It's all topped off with a fitting finale at the end-of-stage flagpole. After the first player grabs it, everyone else has a few seconds to get there and get higher up it for a higher point finisher. Scores are then totted up, and positions on a cumulative leaderboard shuffled accordingly, and it's on to the next level.

The question mark over New Super Mario Bros Wii is naturally how worthwhile it will be to play alone. But maybe that's the wrong question. It's a multiplayer game through and through, a totally open-minded, open-ended one that doesn't see the difference between rivalry and friendship. If you have at least one other to play with who can get along with the concepts of left, right and jump, then this game could be Mario remade - in a way that Super Mario Galaxy 2, however lovely it looks, can't hope to be.

Hype rising.

Xagarath · June 2009

I actually prefer NSMB to the older 2D marios in some ways.
Level design was slightly less inspired, but it was a lot more playful.

sir_pinch-a-loaf · June 2009

FROTHING DEMAND!

mekman 2 · June 2009

I sure hope that Nintendo is joking about it not being online. In fact they should just come right out and say it, "Oh, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, is indeed online." Because if it's not, it's not funny...

carmofin · June 2009

its not, who knows, maybe its really true it would be too much for the system to handle. their stupid "we will never need more powerfull hardware then the wii" argument is void then though and it would be the first time that i feel the wii is a technically inferior system.

mekman 2 · June 2009

I don't understand it, anymore than I am convinced that this is nothing more than a mere design decision than something that they could not do. It's simply something that they did not want to do. Maybe they'll make a sequel to this for Wii and DS with online play for 4 players... maybe then my Super Mario Online play lust will be fulfilled.

Speed Racer · June 2009

Man the game is not pretty. Brawl did much more visually and managed online, albeit shitty online.

Xenogears of Bore · June 2009

Online tends to fail in these sort of games.

Oh no, not because of lag or mistake in communication due to microphones..

It's because you can't punch someone farther away than a few feet.

mekman 2 · June 2009

I think it's pretty, I wouldn't have imagined it being any different, in fact it's almost exactly what I was hoping for: New Super Mario Bros. in HD. I've wanted this for more than 20 years, since I played the original, and especially since I played Super Mario Bros. 2. It just needs to be online. I'm still hoping that, that is one of Nintendo's late E3 surprises.

Speed Racer · June 2009

mekman 2 wrote: »

I think it's pretty, I wouldn't have imagined it being any different, in fact it's almost exactly what I was hoping for: New Super Mario Bros. in HD. I've wanted this for more than 20 years, since I played the original, and especially since I played Super Mario Bros. 2. It just needs to be online. I'm still hoping that, that is one of Nintendo's late E3 surprises.

I'm not saying that I mind its visuals, it's just that the Wii can't possibly be getting put through its paces to generate sprites and a few DS-caliber models.

Brainiac 8 · June 2009

Actually it's a very nice looking game with all the pop, flare, and color you'd expect from the company that practically perfected platforming.

but I too am at a loss as to why no online.

Don't bother me though, I have buddies of mine that come over and we play SSBB, Mario Kart Wii, World Tour, and now NSMBWii with lots of craziness.

SageinaRage · June 2009

Speed Racer wrote: »

mekman 2 wrote: »

I think it's pretty, I wouldn't have imagined it being any different, in fact it's almost exactly what I was hoping for: New Super Mario Bros. in HD. I've wanted this for more than 20 years, since I played the original, and especially since I played Super Mario Bros. 2. It just needs to be online. I'm still hoping that, that is one of Nintendo's late E3 surprises.

I'm not saying that I mind its visuals, it's just that the Wii can't possibly be getting put through its paces to generate sprites and a few DS-caliber models.

Why does that matter?

UncleSporky · June 2009

Once again, the comment about NSMB "using all the system's power" was a mistranslation, and we knew it before the conference was even over.

# Posted 7:31 PST

What he really said was that hardware has limited all developers since the 8-bit days, and it's a constant struggle for everyone.
# Posted 7:30 PST

Apparently Miyamoto's comments were not entirely translated.
# Posted 7:30 PST

They are clarifying the hardware limitation statement.
# Posted 7:30 PST

Now the translator is being talked to by a Treehouse guy.

Penny Arcade

New Super Mario Bros Wii - Out Now. 15

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