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Wii Game Review: Bowser's Back: Super Mario World |
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Written by Rancour
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Sunday, 18 March 2007 |
Why change a great formula? In Super Mario World for the Nintendo Wii, Mario travels through a slide screen world looking for the infamous Bowser. He jumps, hops, grows bigger and tosses fireballs. Like the other Super Mario games, there is a map of the world where you can choose which way you want to go. You can also go back and play previous levels to find the many secret goodies hidden there.
Mario's dinosaur buddy Yoshi is also back. Yoshi swallows different colored turtle shells that give him special powers.
Lots of new games come out packed with superfluous specials and state-of-the-art new features, but Mario sticks to what's always made it great: imagination. Super Mario World is a well-designed adventure through a strange and fun fantasy world. Compared to the other Mario games, the new levels in the Wii game are even more imaginative and fun.
Super Mario World has great graphics, definitely outdoing all the previous Mario games, and new monsters and music. The scenery is always strange and fantastic, and the hidden goodies will make you want to play it over and over again.
As far as movement and control, game makers have made Mario as faithful to the original as possible. That means all those little trick jumps that you have in your muscle memory from when you were in 5th grade will still get you safely over that swinging axe.
With Super Mario 3, the designers got pretty imaginative with Mario's power-up abilities. Super Mario World takes us back to the classics: mushrooms that make you bigger, flowers that make you chuck fireballs, and a feather you can use to fly. There is also a little storage box where you can save an extra special ability you couldn't use for later.
And, speaking of getting back to the original, some of the glitches that were taken out of later versions are back in. Remember the "minus world" where Mario gets his head caught in some bricks and floats into a hidden world from which there's no escape? That old trick is back so that you can impress your friends with it again.
Like the SNES version, you can save your games and come back to them later. This is convenient for those of us who occasionally take time out of our busy gaming schedule to attend to minor distractions such as job or family.
You can use either the GameCube controller or the Wii's Classic Controller, but most people prefer to use the Classic. The game is more suited to the regular controller that everybody's used to using.
Mario took the world by storm in 1985, but he's still as popular as ever. Cool features can't make up for lack of imagination, and Mario has more imagination than all the new games out there put together. You just can't beat the classics. And, to top it all off, you can buy Super Mario World for the Nintendo Wii for as low as five bucks. |
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