And man, I gotta hand it to both Nintendo and the human psyche. I managed to forget every last truly shitty memory I had of the original Super Mario Brothers games that I've ever played. Seriously--I forgot how insanely frustrated the SMB games were. You conquer a level almost entirely only to screw ONE thing up. Then you have to do it ALL over again. Sure, you can "save" your game, but not where ever you want and if you run out of lives before making it to the halfway point or the end of the level (or world) you get to do the whole thing over again!
Seriously, I've done several hard levels three and four times over just because I couldn't get to the tower level for a given world or the final castle level of a given world. The fact that the "save where ever and when ever you want" feature was left out can only come from the interest in extending playability.
In other words, by making it stupid hard, instead of challenging, they make you frustrated and want to come back to beat the game--not out of fun, like the SMB64, but out of revenge. I never swear more than when I am playing a classic or this new Super Mario Brothers game.
Sure, most gamers find sidescrollers like NSMB to be easy and even boring. I don't. I've always found them fun and challenging. I've also always found the SMB games to be fairly imaginative, too. Sadly, I'm 3 worlds into NSMB and I have yet to see anything truly imaginative.
Sure, playing as Mini Mario and Mega Mario are both fun, but to me, so far, this game seems like just more of the same, as opposed to a worthy sequel. Sure, I'll keep playing because I have been programmed since childhood to love and respect an Italian plumber who does what he has to do to keep the water flowing and his girlfriend, Princess Peach, safe.
But it really is bizarre how my brain (and I assume the brain of other Mario fans) blocked out all the abject frustration, anger and general venom, we had for the SMB games at their low points. When I first started playing this game yesterday afternoon, I felt like I did when I played Super Marion Bros. 3 for the very first time.
Sadly, NSMB is like a bad sequel to a good series. Still, that bad sequel is now part of the good series, so I'll just deal with the stupid shit in the game and hope I don't chuck my DS through the wall in frustration in the meantime...
In my younger days I actually did suspect that I had broken a bone in my hand after punching an NES game controller. Luckily, the bone was just bruised. The controller wasn't even broken in the least. :)
Another thing that annoys me about the NSMB is that there's no wifi, as in, you can't play it with people on the other side of the Internet.
Why do game programmers/producers/etc. think that games that have vast, imaginative, but silly, universes are not places folks would want to hang out in online? Aside from Tetris and Mario Kart, it seems like the only online communities out there are for violent action games. I think it would be so cool to explore the universe of Super Mario with friends around the globe--JUST so long as I don't have to keep doing the same level OVER AND OVER...
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