New Super Mario Bros. (DS)

Nostalgia is an incredibly powerful thing, and Nintendo is perhaps the company best poised to use it in their titles, with strong titles across nearly every era of gaming they can hearken back to. Once they hit 3D gaming with the Nintendo 64 though, a lot of their games seemed to be forward-focused, each new one building off the work of the previous title with very few references to earlier games. The Game Boy Advance had quite a lot of remakes and rereleases of old games, but it would be with the Nintendo DS that Nintendo saw to marry nostalgia with a distinctly new product, one so new they put New in the title: New Super Mario Bros.

The original Super Mario Bros. game might be, with no exaggeration, one of the most important games of all time. Its impact on the industry is still felt in the design of games, the presence of Mario as the best selling franchise of all time, and it’s one of the games best known by people even outside of the gaming sphere. Creating a game that is billed as the new version of such an important game certainly draws eyes and inevitably purchases, but the Mario series had moved on since the simple NES title. New Super Mario Bros., thankfully, doesn’t completely strip away nearly 20 years of forward movement in its design, but it’s definitely regressed in a few ways to mimic the original. While that by no means makes its bad, it’s imitating a well-made and fun game after all, but its changes seem too afraid to push things beyond imitating a similar appeal.

Right off the bat things seem familiar as the evil turtle Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach, although his son Bowser Jr. is here to help him this time around. Mario is called on to jump through 80 levels spread across 8 themed worlds to go save her using a world map system that seems most comparable to Super Mario Bros. 3. From here you can enter levels, unlock secret levels by finding special paths in those levels, or access special areas like mushroom houses that can give power-ups and extra lives or take cannons to skip worlds entirely if you’re only playing for speed.

The levels are side-scrolling platformer stages, and if New Super Mario Bros. does one thing excellently, it’s make Mario just as good at jumping as ever. His jumps are easy to gauge, easy to influence so you can fix jumps, you increase your height by holding the button, or get a better jump by doing three in a row. He’s got a few new tricks carried over from his 3D adventures as well, like a ground pound good for quick downwards momentum and wall jumps that aren’t too necessary but let you bounce up in areas where you can perform them. Controls are tight and will never be an issue once you learn their limits. Platforms are spaced properly so the jumps can be challenging while still providing you the room you need to build up to it if you need to run and enough visibility that you’re never making leaps of faith. Running through a level too fast can get you in trouble of course, as New Super Mario Bros.’s enemies are strategically placed mostly as roadblocks and obstacles to impede your navigation. There’s the mindless Goombas who amble about, Koopas who can move more intelligently and you can use their shells as weapons, Bullet Bills who move across the screen dangerously, and many more enemies you expect to see like Piranha Plants popping out of pipes to bite you and some strange new ideas that didn’t quite land like unicorn snails who charge about in ice levels. Some enemies have unique interaction with levels like some boxing ghosts who break blocks, Bob-ombs who also break blocks when they explode, and some enemies are more like platforms since you can bounce off them for height.

Mario’s abilities to deal with enemies are simple. Jump on an enemy and that usually does the job, but if he gets hit once, Mario will die instead. Power-ups help put a stop to that and increase your combat capability, with Super Mushrooms making Mario bigger and letting him take an extra hit, Fire Flowers adding yet another hit as well as letting Mario throw fireballs ahead to defeat enemies, and catching a Starman will make you invincible for a period and let you kill enemies with a simple touch. Surprisingly, New Super Mario Bros.’s only new addition to this classic set are very rare power-ups like the Mega Mushroom that makes you enormous for a time and basically invincible, but it’s rarely given in levels and you usually need to go to special mushroom houses to ever use it again. The Blue Shell is similarly rare, mostly popping up in special pink blocks that can appear in a stage if the world map lines it up right, and it lets Mario curl up into a shell if he runs quickly enough to become a ricocheting, dangerous, player-controlled Koopa Shell. It’s unwieldy but very effective and often able to last multiple stages if you don’t lose control. The last power-up is the Mini Mushroom, whose benefits are gimmicky as it makes it so you’re so tiny you can’t hurt most enemies, you die in one hit… but it lets you run on water, jump higher and further, and is the only way to get to two of the worlds since you need it to find secret exits. Their rarity makes them much more special than the basic power-ups but also means that their presence is barely felt. You can be using one power-up and hold onto another thanks to the bottom screen, but that’s mostly just a good space to store those unique power-ups until you need them or a second spot for the basic power-up you just got a copy of.

Level design in New Super Mario Bros. is definitely the most important aspect due to how many things are simplified. The goal is always still to get from left to right like most 2D Mario platformers, with some complications along the way of course, but New Super Mario Bros. certainly leans towards easy and friendly designs. Most every level does try to have some gimmick or defining feature, often an enemy, platform type, or special arrangement of elements introduced to you gradually over the course of the stage and with a bit more difficulty each time, but it never quite hits its peak. For someone with moderate platforming skills, they won’t find expanding mushroom platforms too challenging or a level with a lot of spinning fire bars too difficult to wait out and move when its safe. There are certainly some stand outs, like a level on a giant caterpillar’s back or one where a giant eel constantly tries to eat you, but that’s more because the visual elements are interesting rather than the player being given interesting challenges. To throw a bone to players looking for something more difficult, each level has three Star Coins placed in spots that take a bit more effort to grab. These are used on the world map to open special paths so they’re good for regular players too, but they’re so abundant and feel a bit more like a diversion so they don’t put too much of a dent in the game’s difficulty. Abundant lives and good checkpointing ensure there’s at least no frustrating difficulty, and while the game only saves after certain actions are taken, it’s not hard to trigger one and you can wait to use certain saves if you feel you might need one. It’s an accommodation of an old game design element that should have been gone by this point, but it’s not bothersome.

Many things in New Super Mario Bros. are kind of the good elements of early NES titles with the DS’s visuals over them. Things are simple and familiar but still well-designed, although when the challenges don’t push the boundaries too much, it can’t quite make a deep impression. The bosses in New Super Mario Bros. are an odd mixed bag of adhering to the past and adding a touch of flavor. You fight Bowser Jr. in every world and his fight barely changes between each iteration, but there are new bosses to face as well, the battles simple but at least somewhat diverse in approach. Having to beat some of them with Mini-Mushrooms to unlock side-worlds also makes them a bit more interesting, and the visual design of levels and worlds also keeps them from being too plain even when their gimmicks are a bit understated. There are underwater levels where you swim instead of jump to shake up the pace, levels that move automatically so you have to keep up with the screen moving, underground levels have more ceilings and castles have more walls, and the ghost houses actually integrate some non-standard level design with more maze-like structures and weird ghostly shenanigans. Pipes will take you to new areas and levels will sometimes sneak in special paths for explorative players, but the world map lets you know if there are secret levels nearby so you know if the reward will be something more than extra lives or just a lot of coins that can total up to 100 for an extra life. There are differences in the levels no doubt, and while the changes don’t quite excite, they keep it fresh enough despite so many reused trappings from the original game and a few nice showings from enemies from games like Super Mario 64.

The main game is your typical Mario adventure, but there are also a few minigames you can play instead, most of them ported over from Super Mario 64 DS but with multiplayer modes added. The main gameplay style also has a mutliplayer mode where you try to grab Stars in a level, but the minigames are more interesting to play with friends. Most of them are tiny amusements designed around a simple touch screen action, with some having quite the design for long term play since they are round based instead of time based. It’s all about angling for a high score save a few gambling minigames, and while they aren’t too compelling on their own, they are a nice extra touch and good to poke your nose into for a brief bit of fun alone or with a friend or three.

THE VERDICT: New Super Mario Bros. succeeds a bit too well at its goal of essentially being what Super Mario Bros. would be like if it was made in 2006. It’s definitely straightforward, but it’s got the controls and slight variation needed that it doesn’t get old, it just doesn’t hit the heights that follow-ups to the NES title were able to achieve by adding to the formula in significant ways. New Super Mario Bros. has plenty of modern elements but nothing that can push it to the heights the series had achieved as it advanced, and this regressive development angle likely stripped away more than it added to the game design. You have to say it’s got the platforming down, it’s got 20 years of Mario behind it to ensure that it controls well, but with a low difficulty level caused mostly by level ideas not getting fleshed out to the fullest, it just settles into a safe spot of accessible fun with a few neat bells and whistles like the minigames.

And so, I give New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS…

A GOOD rating. The defining power-up of New Super Mario Bros. according to the box art, is the Mega Mushroom that it tries to keep out of your hands and doesn’t design levels for. It’s just part of a general problem that New Super Mario Bros. has with identity, not trying to be anything besides Super Mario Bros. but modern. It’s few sparks of imagination fail to catch fire as they are abandoned before they get rolling, but the game is technically sound and solidly laid out to ensure you don’t get bored. Despite the obvious draw to compare it to the rest of Mario’s outings, even when considered on its own it’s still a bit reserved, going the safe route most of the time to guarantee enjoyment rather than risk a divisive but memorable level layout or concept. Mario’s edges have been sanded off, giving you a safe playground where you can go on all the equipment without worry and you’ll feel good after, but it doesn’t have anything potentially dangerous or particularly inspried that would make for the unforgettable experience. I had played this game back near its release and again for this review, and between that time I mostly remembered the giant caterpillar level and the mummy cactus boss, but that’s about it.

New Super Mario Bros. is good, but it’s so easy to see that it could have been more if certain elements were better explored. It’s a Mario game after Mario’s elements had been figured out well enough that they could be adhered to to the letter, but it doesn’t seek to advance that outline any further than it had to to be contemporary. It’s in a safe zone of good fun and good design, and it’s deemed that good enough.