New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a side-scrolling platform developed and published by Nintendo. It is the first Super Mario game to feature simultaneous 4-player multiplayer cooperative gameplay, and the first title to include Nintendo’s new “Super Guide” feature. To highlight the uniqueness of the title, Nintendo chose to use a red keep case instead of the traditional white. It was critically and commercially successful. It is one of the best-selling games on the Wii and has received several honors, including the Best Wii Game award from the 2009 Spike Video Game Awards, IGN, and GameTrailers.

Pros:

Oh, so much nostalgia here. I would like to rename this game Super Mario Bros. 3.5. If you ever played and loved Mario 3 and Super Mario World (like this guy) this game will be a stroll down memory lane. I got to give credit where credit is due and to that fact they really did a grea job, but this plays into one of my biggest pet peeves about the modern era of Nintendo. All they seem to do is to try to revamp the same old instead of focusing on creating new. This is the “Pros” section so I will leave that train of thought be until I get down into the Cons section, but because of this the game only seems to get new and creative around world 7, which sadly is only a handful of levels from the end. It is a pretty easy and quick game if you are going for a “speed-run”, but if you are going to try to 100% the game, it will quickly become much more challenging. The new, up to 4 players at once, multiplayer can either help or hinder this depending on who you are playing with. The fact that this is the first time in Mario history that a 4 player co-op feature has been implemented dumbfounds me. It’s a really great dynamic, but it really depends on who you are playing with. Another new feature is the “Super Guide” option that shows up if you die enough times on one level, it’s… meh. You can play through the level with no consequence, but you got to play it from the beginning even if you keep dying passed the checkpoint, so that’s kind of annoying. The music is also… meh, since they have more or less just revamped the classics, but somehow managed to make them worse. They have added a few fun emphasized parts to the song now, and all the bad guys stop and kind of sing/dance when it hits. It’s pretty cute, but it can throw off your planned attacks as a bad guy now stop just a second before you hit the ground to do a quick dance and thus you land and slide into a rather mediocre death. I will give them this though, the boss battles in this one, specifically the final boss battle are some of my favorite boss battles in all of Super Mario history.

Cons:

So picking up from where I left off above, this game is too much of the old. Sure I love me some Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World, hell they might be some of my favorite Super Mario games ever made. However, without the multiplier, you are doing the same old shit for pretty much the whole game. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great and unique parts, but as a whole, it really is the same thing. Yeah, some of the new power-ups are fun, but they are either new versions of things we have seen before, like the ice balls or the flying suit, or the power-ups are crazy specific, like the penguin suit or the shrinking mushroom (which are pretty cool, though you hardly ever have to use them). The power-up pannels in the mushroom huts are randomized so there is no skill there and very few levels are actually challenging, and though they were very clever with strategically placing coins and such to try to trick you into a challenge, you can more or less blow through almost every level if you are not going for 100%. I managed to rack up over 50 lives before world 3, that’s probably a good indicator that this game might be a bit on the easy side. I usually find most of my deaths and frustrations cause more by the controls than the actual difficulty of the levels. You can shake the controller to do a spin, but in the heat of a quick maneuver, you might jolt the control to one side instinctually and merrily twirl to your death. In general, the controls feel a bit sluggish, like the acceleration in speeding up and slowing down, and this annoyance is compounded heavily on the ice world.