Retro|Spective 075R: Super Mario

[Neon Ignition]

Game 147 - Paper Mario: The Origami King
Focusing on the RPG nature of the franchise the next entry saw Mario fighting to protect the Mushroom Kingdom from being turned in origami. The game tried to make a unique air for itself as its developers felt it would be hard to follow a predecessors lied directly without disappointing a portion of fans. The game reviewed well and has sold several million copies marking another hit for the plumber.




Does this entry (Paper) Cut it?

[Neon Ignition]

A double whammy today to cover tomorrow's update as well:


Game 148 - Super Mario Bros. 35
An online game for the celebration of the franchises 35th anniversary. The game used some battle royale elements and was delivered for subscribers to Nintendo's Switch online service. 35 players would compete until only one remained as they made their way across levels from Super Mario Bros whilst fighting each other. Six months later Nintendo withdrew the game from the service as part of their bizarre approach to the anniversary releases and needless availability restrictions.




So good you curse Nintendo for removing it?


Game 149 - Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit
The Switch finally recieved its own Mario Kart but not the way people had waited for, here a physical toy kart with an inbuilt camera used the Switch to use AR functions in your own home. Gamers built tracks physically in their own home and the Switch controlled the RC car whilst the camera fed footage back with power ups added to the view. A Luigi version was also revealed and between them they sold just over 1m units.




Home run or the Pits?

[Asura]

Game 146 - Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
Yet another entry in the sporting franchise and the most recent one to date. Yet again reviews weren't great, most of the issues raised surrounding a lack of content for both single player and multiplayer gamers. 32 characters made the cut and following the Switch version Sega made another for Arcades. It's getting late into 2023 and time will tell if the next Olympic Games result in a new entry.




Gold medal stuff?

Absolutely not.

Honestly, I know I go on, but this was an enormous disappointment for me. I actually bought it on-launch to play in my office at lunchtimes, because we had a Switch dock set up on the communal TV and after several people in the office had remarked they enjoyed the prior ones.

There are some great ideas in it. The 16-bit mode was a fun addition. Some of the events, even new ones, were kinda fun.

But it was simply a bad game, made in a way that made you wonder if those who designed it had ever played these games. Highlights, from memory, were...

No way to do a playlist of events. You just pick each event from a list and do them 1-at-a-time. You can't set up a decathlon or something. It'd be like if Mario Party was just a selection of the minigames you chose to play, with nothing to connect them - that's fine to have as a mode but not as the entire game.

Many events were quite complicated. Many of them required multiple goes just to be able to play them to any reasonable level, and I really mean that. My friends and I must've done, I think it was hammer throw, about 3 times before anyone fielded one shot which wasn't a foul. The best event by far was Rugby Sevens, but even that took multiple games to grasp. Fine if a couple of events are more in-depth, but not great if most of them are like this.

Too slavish to the rules to the detriment of the game. I think it had 2 events which were just crap, fencing and Karate? Or maybe Judo? In both cases, as they stick to the points/rules of the real game, each bout is over really quickly. I'm pretty certain that if you play an hour of the fencing minigame, you'll spend ~40 minutes of that hour in the loading in screen, staging screen, en garde screen, results screen and loading the next match screen. This is actually one reason why Rugby is good as you can at least change the duration of the match.

Just really puzzling gameplay design. Events like Javelin, instead of having you take turns (like (1) every other Olympics game and (2), REAL LIFE) put you in 4-player splitscreen and everyone throws at the same time. Not only does this drop the 60fps of the solo mode to 30fps in splitscreen, it also misunderstands how this is meant to work - watching other players take turns for track-and-field events, or roll the dice in Mario Party etc. is as much a part of the game as playing yourself. It'd be fine if the game demonstrated through-line in its design, where they were trying to remove "dead time" and have you playing consistent over, say, an hour, even in 4-player - but for all the reasons I mentioned above, it doesn't do that.

Honestly it's a ****ing mess.

Admittedly, given it was 2020, the year that didn't happen, local multiplayer games weren't going to have a good time of it. But this was before all that. It's funny, in the end, that this remains probably one of the biggest now-defunct pieces of merchandise for the 2020 games.

[Nu-Eclipse]

A double whammy today to cover tomorrow's update as well:


Game 148 - Super Mario Bros. 35
An online game for the celebration of the franchises 35th anniversary. The game used some battle royale elements and was delivered for subscribers to Nintendo's Switch online service. 35 players would compete until only one remained as they made their way across levels from Super Mario Bros whilst fighting each other. Six months later Nintendo withdrew the game from the service as part of their bizarre approach to the anniversary releases and needless availability restrictions.




So good you curse Nintendo for removing it?

Even by Nintendo decision-making standards, removing SMB35 was a shocker. It was all set-up for it to be made an eventual standalone release like Tetris 99 was.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Super Mario All-Stars/Super Mario Collection turned 30 years old yesterday.

[Neon Ignition]

Game 150 - Bowser's Fury
Packaged in with a port of 3D World, this new adventure spread a 3D focused Mario across several islands with players free to roam and complete the challenges on each one in order to open up more of the map. A timer would herald Bowser's transformation into a Kaiju sized incarnation that players would have to contend with before returning to their Cat Shine search. The game was a very well recieved addition to the package offering an extra slice of new to the tweaked 3D World.




A tasty addition or Fury making?

[Nu-Eclipse]

Bowser's Fury looks and plays like an EXTREMELY rough draft 3D Mario, a 3D Mario that wants to be a lot more open-world and free-roaming a la BotW/TotK. Clearly cobbled together quickly by EAD in an effort to justify charging premium price for yet another Switch port of a WiiU game, albeit a WiiU classic.

I tried to play it after running through SM3DW and got as far as the first Fury Bowser battle before losing interest in it. Might try and go back to it....someday....

[Neon Ignition]

I had a moment early on in it where it felt like it was going to be too bareboned, that it would show its side-dishness too much but as it went on it felt like a massive shame that it didn't last longer. The building blocks are definitely there for an openworld Mario title, ended up enjoying it more than I did revisiting 3D World

[wakka]

I thought it was a great peek behind the curtain into ideas that EPD are experimenting with, and a lot of fun to play. It was exciting to imagine, while playing, what a truly open world Mario with multiple biomes that follows this model might be like.

I'm not sure that's what we'll eventually receive in the next game - I think a structure which uses some of these ideas but retains some kind of hub world, rather than uses a purely open plan map, is more likely - but Bowser's Fury is a beautiful, compact experience and consistent with the mainline Mario series' legacy of continual re-invention.

[Neon Ignition]

Game 151 - Mario Golf: Super Rush
Camelot returned with a sixth entry in the golfing series, this time with Speed Golf and Battle Golf modes added. In more broad terms the game was much like its predecessors and this carried over to reviews which found it not only to be very familiar but also light on content.




Lost in the Rough?

[Neon Ignition]

I couldn't really say much at this point about the Mario sports games, I opted out on them a fair while back as they just leave me cold. The only one I tried in recent years was the Switch Tennis game and it bored me senseless

[Neon Ignition]

Game 152 - Mario Party Superstars
With tired joints and blistered feet the Mario crew still party with the eighteenth entry in the franchise which featured five boards remade from the first three Party entries on the N64. Alongside that were 100 mini-games taken from across the entire franchise. Relying even more heavily than ever on recycled content you'd think reception would be hitting a new low at this point but instead Superstars saw reception improve hugely.




Welcome to the Party?

[Atticus]

Game 150 - Bowser's Fury

I had a great time with Bowser's Fury. Everything an expansion should be. 3D World is still the main event.

[Neon Ignition]

It's Friday and to end the week and also after an epic ten month run, the thread, the final two entries are here:

Game 153 - Mario Strikers: Battle League
The third entry in the series saw the game suffer from mixed reviews thanks to a lack of launch content to go along with its returning arcadey approach to the sport. Whilst its online mode gave it shelf life, it was criticised for lacking in single player content with some reviews stating it might last some gamers no more than an afternoon.



Third Strike and It's Out?


Game 154 - Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope
The sequel to the Ubisoft and Nintendo tactical series saw more elements taken from the interplanetary Galaxy series introduced. The sequel tightened the battle system and as a result almost every area of the game was seen as an improvement with the game posting strong scores however commercially it hugely underperformed leaving a question mark over whether there will ever be another entry.




Beyond Hope?

[Neon Ignition]

Haven't touched Strikers, never plan to
Haven't touched Rabbids 2, plan to at some point though