Kasey

User Score
10

Presentation - 10
Gameplay - 10
Value - 10

You know, it's really funny.  Three years after the release of New Super Mario Bros., the highly anticipated but slightly too easy Mario 2D platform game for the DS, I am still thinking, "Hmm... will Nintendo make another one of these Mario platformers? New Super Mario Bros. 2??? I sure hope so; the first one was a blast."  A few days later, I go to one of my favorite Mario websites that I haven't been to in a long time because for a while I didn't have access to the internet.  There it was! Just that day, it had updated saying that Nintendo had announced New Super Mario Bros. Wii.  You have no idea how excited I was!  And here I am now, about to tell you if it was worth all the excitement.

But I just can't take it anymore.  The answer is YES!!!  This game is fantastic! It offers everything that New Super Mario Bros. did, and even more gameplay for even more fun!

The story is the exact same as it always has been:  Bowser, once again, kidnapped Princess Peach, and Mario, once again, had to save her.  It's a very simple yet classic story that has worked for 25 years, and continues to work today. 

New gameplay mechanics include various elements from Super Mario World, like Yosh, all the benefits and disadvantages that come with Yoshis, and the Spin Jump, as well as, with a shake of the remote, be able to pick up paralyzed enemies (like in SMB2) and throw them.  All of these elements just bring back extra nostalgia, which will already be oozing from your body as soon as you start playing. 

There are also a number of new items in the game, replacing a couple of the old ones.  The Shell suit is no longer available for use.  It has been replaced by the Fire Flower's counterpart: the Ice Flower.  This allows Mario to shoot balls of ice instead of fire, which has even more advantages.  Not only will the enemy be rendered harmless, it will be frozen, and you can pick it up with a shake of the remote and throw it at other enemies, killing them in the process.  It is a nice feature added to the game.  There is also a fairly similar item called the Penguin Suit, which allows Mario to not only shoot ice balls, but have impeccable swimming abilities (even better than the blue shell enabled him in NSMB) and not slide uncontrollably on ice.  This item is very valuable in World 3, a world full of, you guessed it, ice. 

Finally, there is the Propeller suit.  When you have this item, and you shake the wiimote, instead of doing a regular spin jump, he will spin jump extremely high in the air, and then gently float back down.  It is probably the most valuable item in the entire game. 

While some people might see it as a disadvantage that the Mega Mushroom from NSMB didn't return, I do not see this as a disadvantage.  This way, you can't just crash your way through a level; you must complete it as normal.  This increases the difficulty level.  That reminds me.......

THIS GAME IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT!!  It is just plainly a bear to play!  This is the most difficult Mario platformer ever created, bar none.  You will be playing this game for a lot longer than you did NSMB, even though the level count is 77, three levels less than NSMB.  This is far harder, and there's better multiplayer, much better.  Two to four players may now play all these levels simultaneously, meaning there will be much more chaos.  You might think that with more people, things get easier.  But, they don't.  With each new player, more enemies and challenges get added to the game.  That means that there is also more chaos, and the fact that you can jump on top of the other players and also pick them up and toss them doesn't really make life that easy, either.  For instance, say there are two players playing on a course where there is a moving platform to get across the massive abyss below you.  You mean to stomp on a Koopa Paratroopa's head, but your partner is too close and you accidentally jump on his head.  He falls, cannot jump, and doesn't have time to get back on the moving platform.  He is then lost in the abyss.  You have just cost your partner a life.  This is just one example.  With three or four players, things could get really ugly.  You must all work together so that you don't all accidentally kill each other.  In many ways, this means that the game is actually more difficult using more than one player than it is just flying solo.  Still, it is a lot of fun, either way.  There is also added replay value if you collect all the star coins in the worlds.....but I'm not going to tell you what it is.

Graphically, the game looks good.  The graphics are crisp, clean, bright, and cheery, with lots of color, like the rest of the 2D Mario platforming series.  The game definitely does not push the Wii as far as detail and clarity, but when you stop and think about it, it isn't supposed to.  There are supposed to be 3D models, but the game is still supposed to look somewhat retro, and it really does a good job with that.

Many people have been complaining that there isn't any online support for this game.  Now that I think about it, there wasn't any for NSMB for the DS, either.  Most people would take off points for this.  I, on the other hand, don't think that online is very important in a game like this.  I think that because of the cooperative play, it would be hard to try to figure out what the other character that could be on the other side of the country would do, because you don't know their playing style.  It would have been nice to see online for the coin battle, but since that is a little more of a shallow gameplay aspect, I almost consider that completely irrelevant to the rest of the game, and it will not affect my score.

Overall, this is an absolutely fantastic, bloody hard Mario 2D platformer that, in my opinion, is even more fun than the old ones were when they were new.  Usually, the classics and originals are the best, and the quality sort of goes down from there, but not in this case.  This is a must own, and I'm giving it Best Game of 2009.  Excellent job, Nintendo, and I will be expecting more of this great work for years to come!