One of the hottest titles this holiday season and the biggest Shigeru Miyamoto release in a long while, I take a look at Nintendo‘s New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the Nintendo Wii.
As the seminal (PC) gaming connoisseurs over at RPS might put it, my analysis starts a bit like:
You might easily regard the story of New Super Mario Brothers Wii as the biggest cliché of all time. It is, after all, about rescuing princesses from a dragons’ fortresses and it’s been pretty much the same for every Super Mario platformer in existence… but I choose to see it a bit differently.
I find the true story behind every Super Mario platformer is one of surreality & escapism. It’s about being transported into a completely nonsensical world, one filled with mushrooms that change your height, leaves that make you fly, caterpillars with short-tempers and clouds with eyes, that still somehow manages to follow some semblance of rules. So, instead of being completely bewildered when asked to scratch a giant Queen Bee’s back to pluck “star bits” that actually look like jelly sweets, you do the deed ever so casually; it makes sense in context.
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than three years since my review of the DS version. I think that my writing style has changed a bit, but I have an innate aversion to looking at my older pieces for too long, so I can’t say for sure.
