The New Super Mario Bros

New Super Mario Bros: A two-dimensional side scroller in the vein of…Mario Bros.

Story : A dystopian tale of love and loss, examining the inner workings of the human psyche under extreme duress in an age of industrial crisis. Just kidding, Princess gets kidnapped. Though in a sign that this is one of the less important Mario games, it’s Baby Bowser and not full-grown ordinary Bowser that you’ll chase after. I will say this; it’s nice to have a game that doesn’t start with 5 minute introductory credits or forced tutorials explaining how to walk or even any dialogue. There’s a 10 second introduction, and then you get to the jumping and goomba-killing.

This game is meant to be some kind of homage to the original Mario games, which to me seems frivolous being that every Mario game is a homage to the original Mario games. Though NSMB could be considered a homage people actually wanted to play being that it’s a old fashioned sidescroller, akin to the Mario games people actually liked, and not some lame duck baseball or soccer game. You run, you jump, sometimes you fling fireballs, and you like it because it reminds you of when your mom told you to stop sitting in front of the television all day rotting your brain and neglecting your math questions.

A small aside, there are way too many people in the world that don’t quite understand that there’s a button you hold to run faster and thus jump farther. You know who you are.

New Super Mario Bros is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Old Super Mario Bros, and it’s a strong success in that field. The level design is diverse and stimulating enough to put this game miles ahead of the many, many, many rom hacks, Flash imitators and other attempts to create Mario games by normal people. Though if I had to say that if the game had a weakness, it’s that it’s not trying to be the greatest song of all time and only a tribute…meaning, little in the way of originality.

The big Mario platformers, and especially the recent Mario Galaxy, were so memorable because they were so…strange. It doesn’t make sense for a plumber that can jump really high to deal with giant teethed plants and bullets with angry faces on them, much less doing so wearing a frog suit and on a flying pirate ship. Here, almost all of the enemies, locales and ideas came from the most basic of Mario clichés. And despite rendering the world and all the characters with 3D polygons, there’s no “2 and a half D” use of enemies attacking from the background or anything existing on a plane aside from your own. The level concepts are the usual ideas; land world, water world, fire world, another land world, and so forth, and there’s not a zany suit power-up to turn you into a statue or anything equally absurd.

Well, there’s a few new items. The Fire Flower is here, as is the star, and 3 new toys (which can be bought at certain stores with big coins in case you want to hoard one.) The highly advertised Big Mushroom turns you into a giant behemoth that can plow through everything in your path. It makes a good first impression in the first level watching Mario shrug off koopas and pipes like they’re just rubble, but none of the other levels seem to be designed with this ‘shroom in mind, so I’ve often found myself too big, too trapped or just plain unable to avoid death. Inversely, the mini-mushroom makes you smaller, lighter, more vunerable and able to fit into rare smaller passages. The most dubious and entertaining power-up, however, is the blue shell, where running too fast will transform you into a pinball, bouncing off walls at full speed and probably into a bottomless pit. Reckless shelling will lead to your demise, often actually but I have to admit that pinballing it up has its zany sense of fun.

It seems that bringing back old 2D franchises in their semi-original glory is the hip trend in gaming and New Super Mario Bros is a worthwhile follower. It’s far from the most memorable game in the franchise, and it’ll fit on the lower end of the totem pole of Mario platformers, but a lower-end Mario game is still better than the vast majority of portable games on the market. The levels are mostly short, but that works for the game’s handheld format; as levels are ideal for a quick bus ride or such. It’s certainly one of the stronger DS titles out there, and you’d do well to carry a copy on you.

Pros: The Single-cart multiplayer mode, where you and an opponent race in a single area for stars, makes a fun minor distraction.

Cons: Very forgettable bosses, very forgettable touch-screen mini-games. The “hidden” levels are mostly the more forgettable stages.

4 stars.

And my word that I’ll review Mario Galaxy.