May
27, 2006
Yay!!
It's
been 11 years since Yoshi's Island, and 15 years since Super Mario
World. Those were the last two traditional 2D Mario games. After
that, only two proper Mario games, one of which (Super Mario 64)
is just about the greatest videogame ever made; the other (Super
Mario Sunshine) is unfairly maligned for not meeting players' unrealistic
expectations. Then there are various spin-off titles, like Luigi's
Mansion, Yoshi's Story, and Yoshi Touch
and Go, which are loved by a few, but dismissed, waved away
by the masses. The Mario Brothers have become the Orson Welles of
the videogame world.
So
you can understand why New Super Mario Bros. has been positioned
as a return to greatness. It's a magnificent game, clearly among
the finest for Nintendo's DS handheld. It may even be the best,
right up there with Meteos and Animal Crossing and Yoshi. From a
technical view, every visual trick is used, from smoothly animated
polygons to pre-rendered characters to all those little sprites
and sound effects that hark back to classic Mario. This is clearly
meant as a grand nostalgia trip for aging 30-year-olds who grew
up on Nintendo. It's also a triumph for that other old dinosaur,
the 2D platform game. Remember those?
Nintendo's
belief is that the games industry has lost its way, lost in a sea
of corporate consolidation and exploding budgets and horribly overpriced
consoles. It's all down to The Sports Game, The Driving Game, The
Doom Game, and The Game Where You Shoot Hookers. Is that supposed
to be fun? Perhaps, for the overweight, lazy, stupid children of
America.
So
Nintendo's out to either take us back to their youth, or ours. Either
way, they're promising games that are actually games, not Comic
Book Guy's latest lousy pitch to Hollywood with Ken and Barbie dolls.
The DS has been a great success, and New Mario is a perfect capstone
to that success.
A
bit too much thinking, I suppose, for something that never was meant
to be more than lighthearted, imaginitive entertainment. But I've
always suspected that Shigeru Miyamoto and his collaborators had
something of an agenda up their sleeve. Somewhere between the nostalgia
trips and thinly veiled psychedelic imagery ("magic mushrooms"
were perfectly legal in Japan until a few years ago, didn't you
know), there's an optimism. A belief in the brightness and magic
of everyday life. We just need to reconnect with that sense of magic
we possessed as children, before the world of the grownups tried
their best to pound it out of us. There's a reason most adults end
up in lousy jobs, dispirited.
Again,
I'm thinking too much. Current events are on my mind a lot - can
you tell? Maybe that's why I'm eager to revisit the worlds of the
Mario Brothers again, eager to stomp on those Koopa shells, eager
to consume the magic shrooms and watch the colors bleed. There has
to be a better world out there; we just have to look around hard
enough and find it.
We
need Flower Power more than ever, kids. |
