Retro|Spective 075R: Super Mario

[Neon Ignition]

Game 116 - Dr Luigi
The sixth game in the franchise, it was made for the Year of Luigi and featured L shaped puzzle pieces. Reviews were mixed as it was otherwise more of the same.




A Bitter Pill?

[Neon Ignition]

Game 117 - Yoshi's New Island
As much as their is a timeline to Nintendo franchises, this entry is set before Yoshi's Island DS and retcons the ending of Yoshi's Island with the stork delivering Baby Mario and Baby Luigi to the wrong parents and Yoshi setting off to put things right as Bowser plots revenge. The game received a mixed reaction, largely considered solid but not up to the originals standard and too familiar as well.




New or Old Hat?

[Neon Ignition]

Game 118 - Mario Golf: World Tour
The fifth entry into the Golf arm of the Mario franchise, this entry hit on 3DS and featured online tournaments. The game scored decent reviews, held back mostly through not delivering much new despite the Mario Golf franchise having been dormant for a decade.




Four! Or Poor?

[dataDave]

3D World features loads of wonderfully designed levels which work extremely well, and sometimes work even better when playing co-op. They really do require lots of coordination and teamwork.

[Neon Ignition]

Game 119 - Mario Kart 8
The most recent entry added anti-gravity racing to its mix, a change largely visual only in nature it none the less allowed for courses to take on more outlandish designs. As something of a visual showcase for the WiiU, the game mixed new courses with full on redesigns of classic courses and launched to critical acclaim. Later in its life two expansions were launched bringing the first examples of cross franchise content to the series with Link appearing along with Zelda, Animal Crossing and F-Zero themed tracks. It became the best selling WiiU game, selling over 8 million units, nearly two thirds the number of all WiiU's sold.




The greatest Mario Kart ever?

[Nu-Eclipse]

The greatest Mario Kart ever?

Commercially? Without doubt.

Gameplay-wise? Not for me. Nowhere near it.

I'll leave it at that.

[Neon Ignition]

For me it's the best entry, if fixes almost everything that had lost me in most of the previous entries and ended up with me sinking a huge amount of time into it. There are still some elements I'd like to see further refined but that nudge away from perfection is why the wait for MK9 has been so painful

[Nu-Eclipse]

For me it's the best entry, if fixes almost everything that had lost me in most of the previous entries and ended up with me sinking a huge amount of time into it. There are still some elements I'd like to see further refined but that nudge away from perfection is why the wait for MK9 has been so painful

Who says that MK9 will ever come?

[Neon Ignition]

This day and age it probably won't. It'll emerge that the 8 was an infinity symbol all along

[Neon Ignition]

Game 120 - Super Smash Bros. For Nintendo 3DS/WiiU
Absolutely the worst named sequels ever. The game was the first to come to handheld with each version contain some differences from the other in terms of modes etc but essentially being the same. Compatible with the newly launched Amiibo's, the game was intended to strike a balance between Melee and Brawl. With a roster of 58 fighters and 7 more added via DLC later, the game offered a huge compendium of Nintendo history along with tie in franchises.





Did this version deliver when it came to the handheld experience?

[wakka]

I would say, yeah, the best Mario Kart ever. It successfully built on and refined everything that had come before, and it's a class act from start to finish. The visuals are great, too, a quantum leap over the murky Wii game. The first time I ever saw those HD coins I just wanted to bite one, they looked so good.

The initial batch of DLC maps and the 200cc were an absolutely brilliant inclusion too. They include some of the best tracks in the game and I really liked how 200cc made you completely adjust how you played to accommodate the faster speed. You effectively need to kinda relearn the maps.

Ten years on though, I think that while the core gameplay is incredibly strong, there is plenty of room for improvement in the structure of the game.

Once you've three starred everything, there's really nothing left to do except grind out individual races in online for VR points (which I did, for ages, on WiiU - think I got to over 10k points in the end).

This is all well and good and fine if you have people IRL to play with, like I did back in the Wii days, but when you're a lonely solo player, it does lack somewhat.

My ideal MK9 would focus on root-and-branch restructuring of both single player and online. I'd love to see a single player quest which more closely resembles the approach taken with the Sega racing games by Sumo, incorporating a variety of different types of race and boss battles and so on.

For the online mode, I'd like to see something which is much more alive. Daily challenges, weekly playlist updates with different types of race and types of cup that are there for that week only, that type of thing. I also think there should be a much greater range of available customisability to the actual carts and characters. It would be fun to have those kind of things to shoot for. Online basically needs more variety and more purpose, more mini-goals to try and attain as you grow your overall level.

Probably we will get none of this but I think the opportunity is massive.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Game 120 - Super Smash Bros. For Nintendo 3DS/WiiU
Absolutely the worst named sequels ever. The game was the first to come to handheld with each version contain some differences from the other in terms of modes etc but essentially being the same. Compatible with the newly launched Amiibo's, the game was intended to strike a balance between Melee and Brawl. With a roster of 58 fighters and 7 more added via DLC later, the game offered a huge compendium of Nintendo history along with tie in franchises.





Did this version deliver when it came to the handheld experience?

Not a Super Mario game though.

[Asura]

My ideal MK9 would focus on root-and-branch restructuring of both single player and online. I'd love to see a single player quest which more closely resembles the approach taken with the Sega racing games by Sumo, incorporating a variety of different types of race and boss battles and so on.

Yeah, it's tricky because the game has such a multiplayer focus.

My personal weakness with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was that, as everything was unlocked from the off, I didn't ever feel much of a pull to play it alone. Whereas in Mario Kart 64, I have fond memories of playing and winning all of the speeds and GPs in sequence.

Does Mario Kart 8 even label the GPs by your best trophy, in the way 64 did?

Ultimately the high watermark for this, even years later, is still Diddy Kong Racing, for its free-roam adventure mode between races - even if I never found that game as fun in the actual races as the Mario Kart franchise.

[wakka]

Does Mario Kart 8 even label the GPs by your best trophy, in the way 64 did?

Yeah it does. It also tells you what rank you received, all the way up to 3 stars. Getting 3 stars in this one is substantially easier than in earlier entries though, since you just need to get first place in all four races of a cup. Scraping wins is fine, you don't need to win by a wide margin in each race like you did in Wii or Super Circuit.

Yeah, it's tricky because the game has such a multiplayer focus.

It could be a much broader church though. CoD, for example, is fundamentally a multiplayer game that bundles a campaign. That's what I'd like to see from Mario Kart, for it to become more of a platform for a range of experiences. Structurally it's basically the same as it was on 64 and I think there's so much scope for more fun with the same mechanics.

[dataDave]

For the online mode, I'd like to see something which is much more alive. Daily challenges, weekly playlist updates with different types of race and types of cup that are there for that week only, that type of thing. I also think there should be a much greater range of available customisability to the actual carts and characters. It would be fun to have those kind of things to shoot for. Online basically needs more variety and more purpose, more mini-goals to try and attain as you grow your overall level.

Splatoon does all of this really well, especially in the latest game, so who knows.