Super Mario 3D World

[posh_somme]

well it came out in europe today, so I went and picked it up. now i'm at the last castle of the 8th world, i'm guessing there's more to come after this, though? I've got 149 green stars, just need to get 170 to get inside.

 

it's a good game!! nintendo can still surprise me and put a big grin on my face with some crazy level design ideas i've never seen before. I liked the shadow area, for example. most of the bosses seem unusually easy/unimaginative compared with the rest of the game, i dunno why they keep rolling out the koopa kids

 

my biggest qualm though is probably with the fact they put a timer on every level. the nice thing about 64, galaxy and sunshine was that you could freely explore each level. I know the structure is totally different and most of these levels have a clearly set out crit path but there was a level in world 4 where it drops you in a huge field with the sun setting in the background and some rabbits hopping around - i was cat luigi at the time and i really just wanted to scamper around but i only had about 100 seconds left. maybe getting rid of the timer is an unlock or something, i don't know

 

edit: the music might be my favourite in a mario game yet (except for dire dire docks) and the sand looks pretty great. almost journey-level sand.

[miffy495]

I got this! In a night of playing I am at the end of World 3! I really like it. Starting it four days after finishing NSMBU, I can't believe how dramatic a difference there is between the two games. This is a great, great experience. A Wii U is becoming worth it if you're even a bit interested in Nintendo exclusives. Pikmin 3, Wind Waker HD, and now 3D World are a pretty damn good line-up for a system, and they've got Donkey Kong and Mario Kart en route early next year too. Buy that shit!

[Thrik]

I resisted in the end. At this point I'd still largely just be buying it for SM3DW, which I can't really justify so I'll wait until next year when some more of the first-party stuff is out. I can't see me doing much third-party gaming on the Wii U, having had another look at how things are going on that front.

 

This game does look so sweet though. I'm guessing the gratuitous use of Koopa Kids and timers is because the game is meant to be a bit of a hybrid of the 2D and 3D Mario games, and the timers did add a layer of challenge/threat to the older games in the same way Spelunky's ghost does. On the other hand, Donkey Kong Country was excellent without one.

[tegan]

Important update: one of the Boo Houses in this game is a fucking ship graveyard populated in part by the Big Bullies from Super Mario 64. Best Mario game ever? y/y

[Jake]

When did they get renamed "boo mansions" instead of "ghost houses?" Also when did they get changed to just "Boo" from "Boo Diddley?" I guess that happened immediately post-SMB3 and its musician-flavored naming localizations.

[shammack]

Yeah, Boo Diddley was only in SMB3. In Super Mario World, they called them Boo Buddies (c.f. the Big Boo), and I think Mario 64 was the first time they just called them Boos.

[Jake]

Oh man Boo Buddies yum.

[tegan]

When did they get renamed "boo mansions" instead of "ghost houses?" Also when did they get changed to just "Boo" from "Boo Diddley?" I guess that happened immediately post-SMB3 and its musician-flavored naming localizations.

 

They're still "Ghost Houses." Looks like the only exception was "Haunted Houses" in Super Mario World. ...I have no idea why I said "Boo House." Sorry.

 

"Boo Mansion" was the best area in Paper Mario, though.

[tegan]

Okay, so the map for the world I'm on now is incredible. It's a bit of a spoiler since it's right after the first "gotcha" moment.

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LvZKeO34PA

[tegan]

Credits rolled!

 

 

[Merus]

I saw the icon of the person who posted the music video, Teg, which is a picture of Sonic, thought it was part of the game's art, and thought, 'ah, that explains the zone'.

[toblix]

So far I'm loving this game. The movement is perfect, the levels are super-interesting and varied, and getting all the collectibles in a level is just hard enough. However:

• Whenever you've done a thing and come back to the overworld, you have to wait for it to save, which is completely unnecessary in a technical sense; the amount of data they're storing couldn't possibly be super-large, and even so they could do it asynchronously like every other game I've played the last five years. So I'm guessing it's a conscious design choice, and the reasons I can think of for them to surface game saving so heavily is that they want the player to know exactly when the game state is saved (not confused by checkpoints or moving around in the overworld?) or to make them feel safe the data is stored and they can turn of the Nintendo. These do not seem like remotely good enough reasons to make me, a cool pro gamer, wait so long before being able to jump back in when I just missed a star or whatever. I guess it says a lot that this my main problem with the game.
• The one-off power-up houses that give you a single thing. They're one-off, so you're supposed to use them strategically, but they're often random, which means they're strategically useless, and you still get power-ups throughout the level, usually where you start. These appeared in SMB3, right? Were they any more useful then?
• What happens if you lose all your lives? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess nothing? Do you lose any more progress than the last mid-level checkpoint?
• If you complete a level as small Mario, you start the next one as small Mario, which feels like a punishment and makes no sense, seeing as passing a checkpoint restores you to full Mario.
• Are points used anywhere for anything, like leaderboards?
• The ghost player stuff is a cool idea implemented in the most annoying way. Why would you want strangers jumping around and confusing you when you're trying to precisely jump on one of those invisible money frogs? They're not even ghostly!
• The overworlds are themed, but none of the levels seem to care.
• The actual in-level gameplay is good enough to make all my concerns irrelevant.

It really feels like one team design a super-great, well-tuned, platformer, and then some other team takes all that and places all the levels around the overworld, because that's what you do, and then I guess they should have some other stuff to do in the overworld since it's just levels, and they couldn't think of any really relevant things to add.

[Jake]

The over worlds not matching the levels is the worst bit of that to me. The aesthetics are otherwise really clean.

The Toad House spots just seem like they're there for variety at this point. They were random in Mario 3 as well, but seemed slightly weighted by world (you could get a frog suit from Toad in the water world where it was helpful). The notable difference in SMB3 is that you had an inventory on the map screen, so you could bank all the items you get from Toad, on-map Hammer Bros etc, and use them later.

[toblix]

Yeah, an inventory would make all that make more sense. It's interesting to have a power-up become a power-down, though, like if you have the cat suit in your reserve slot, and hit a block spawning a mushroom, suddenly you want to avoid it.

 

The good thing about the overworld/level dissonance is that the current variation in level styles keeps things feeling fresh. I would tire quickly of five or six successive underwater levels.

 

On a different note, I'm currently doing my best to get three stars, the stamp and yellow flag on each level as I go. Currently this only makes things more fun for me, since they hide stuff so cleverly, and running through a level is quick when you know where to go, but I'm wary of having that turn into a frustrating element as I progress. How big a reward is there at the end for the stars/stamps/flags? Is it worth slogging through some potentially more frustrating parts?

[tegan]

I'm still playing this. Spoilers for post-credits stuff.

 

This feels like it might be the most difficult stage in the whole game, yet I still have so much left.

 

[tberton]

• Are points used anywhere for anything, like leaderboards?

 

I can answer this. If you're playing co-op (which you really should if you have the opportunity, because it's awesome), each player's score gets tallied at the end and the player with the most points gets a crown to wear into the next level. The crown is pretty sweet and it's really fun to lord it over your friends. But if you get hit, your crown falls off and somebody else can grab it and usurp you. It's a small, silly thing, but it's a smart way to subtly introduce competition into the game and make points relevant.

 

Speaking of co-op, it can create some hilarious situations. For instance the level (in World 5 or 6) where you find the classic "panels that flip when you jump" that are so common in Mario games. These things are interesting but manageable in single-player, but in co-op they are absolutely nuts, because they're keyed to everyone's jumps! If Luigi jumps while Mario's on a platform, the platform flips and Mario falls to his death. Even when playing with 2 players, that level was ridiculously, hilariously difficult, with thoughtless jumps causing countless deaths. I cannot imagine how much more it insane it would be with 4 people.

[Jake]

Sounds like you'd need to make everyone huddle up and say "one two three jump" and the sorts of things that you have to do in LBP co-op sessions of difficult, platformey levels. I like that sort of stuff but it really depends on your friend group. Also I love the crown.

[tberton]

Yeah, we ended up using the bubble mechanic a lot. It was a good time.

[Merus]

On a different note, I'm currently doing my best to get three stars, the stamp and yellow flag on each level as I go. Currently this only makes things more fun for me, since they hide stuff so cleverly, and running through a level is quick when you know where to go, but I'm wary of having that turn into a frustrating element as I progress. How big a reward is there at the end for the stars/stamps/flags? Is it worth slogging through some potentially more frustrating parts?

 

If this is anything like Super Mario 3D Land, you don't need to gather any of that stuff to beat Bowser. If you're collecting most of the stars you'll be fine for most of the post-credits content, but if you want to see absolutely everything you'll want to go back for the collectibles eventually.

[Thrik]

What a wonderful game this is, which yes I've only just gotten round to after nearly polishing off the splendid DKC:TF. The visuals are so crisp, the music so refreshing after the ho-hum of the New Mario Bros games, and the throwbacks to previous games are smile-inducing. Sometimes I forget just how impeccably polished Nintendo games are — there wasn't even a patch to download!

Also, that (world 1) map music is totally a remix of Zelda's Lullaby, right?