Super Mario World and The Great Divide

The cartoon graphics created a lot of the magic and atmosphere I thought, as with Yoshi’s Island. Horrible 3d graphics in a 2d game just can’t absorb you in the same way I think. I’m not saying NSMB is a bad game, it was fun. But just not as fun as all those years of waiting and excitement building inside you when you knew a 2d Mario was finally being released again. Going into a game with such high expectations probably influenced me not thinking it was great.

That’s partly because it’s quicker to do those 3D models and animating them, than doing 2D sprites.

And time is money.

Exactly.

As I haven’t had experience working with 3D models, I can’t comment on whether they’re easier or harder than drawing pixel sprites. But that aside, I’d be curious to see if a graphics swap in New Super Mario Bros. would somehow sway the opinion you have of it.

On that note, though, I think you did critcize the upcoming Super Mario Bros. Wii for having its graphics being derivative of the DS game – the idea being that it’s lazy to use pre-existing graphic and art assets in a new game. But then this brings to mind a series which truly does this: Mega Man. What did you think of Mega Man 9 using many old art assets? Is this lazy/cool? I’m of two minds of it myself. On one hand, I understand how it looks lazy – but then on the other hand I really love Mega Man 9. Would I have not loved it as much if it had graphics similar to NSMB? I would like to think so but I’ll never know.

In my opinion NSMB was a very good game, thing is that it was too easy, you could beat every single boss battle with the fire flower power up including the last one.
It didn’t feel like an accomplishement to finish the game, I remember back when I was playing Super Mario World and Mario 3 that getting to the end and beating bowser felt like a huge adventure and a real challenge.

Fantastic article!

“The real gauge for this would be to somehow experience these new Mario titles with the exact same mindset we had when we first played the ones that made us all fall in love with Mario in the first place.”

How true. I’d hate to think I’ve gotten to old to experience Mario the way I did back then. I hate to admit it but I’d be more comfortable with just blaming Nintendo as usual.

If Super Mario World isn’t as meaningful to you today as it was then, you are the one who changed. I recently replayed it from top to bottom (all 96 exits) on Virtual Console and found it to be as grand as ever. I had only made it to 91 exits as a kid, and discovering them all anew was a really wonderful experience.

I can only hope that NSMBWii will be as filled with surprises and secrets as World was/is.

If Super Mario World isn’t as meaningful to you today as it was then, you are the one who changed. I recently replayed it from top to bottom (all 96 exits) on Virtual Console and found it to be as grand as ever. I had only made it to 91 exits as a kid, and discovering them all anew was a really wonderful experience.

I can only hope that NSMBWii will be as filled with surprises and secrets as World was/is.

Sorry, but New Super Mario Bros in no way comes even close to being on the same level as Super Mario World, nostalgia or not.

You are better off comparing New Super Mario Bros with… Super Mario Bros. I think of it as falling in-between SMB and SMB3 in the Mario evolutionary timeline.

We can only hope for a New Super Mario World.

I’m with Daniel. I’ve beaten each of these games multiple times in my post-college years, and there’s just no comparison between NSMB and SMW. NSMB is just a different thing altogether. Mind you, it is fun, but it’s not SMW. SMB3 is of course the greatest game of all time, but even still, I wouldn’t necessarily compare it to SMW in terms of size and scope, just fun. Each of the games so sort stands on their own.

Good article! As a Mario fan since the NES, I’ve thought about things like this a lot myself, and totally agree that a person’s mindset can be a huge factor in how much they get out of a game, or for that matter, life in general.

Personally, I’m not content with the notion of “nostalgia” as a remote peculiarity of childhood. I’m seeking to understand the mindset and attitude I had when I was little and experienced things that made life special, and am determined to recapture it. I’ve thought about this for a while, and I believe there are (at least) three main elements of the way people think as kids that they can lose as they grow older.

First, the sense of freshness and awe: when you first played Mario games you were introduced to a new and fantastic world, and fireflowers, giant mushrooms, and castles in the clouds weren’t old familiar things, they were fresh and magical. Second, you were less burdened by the cares and responsibilities of life, not as cynical from knowledge of all the crud that goes on in the world: you had an easier time entering into the happy, brightly-colored atmosphere and humming along with the music. Third, thankfulness: as a kid, you looked forward to birthdays, and probably Christmas, not seeing them as occasions where people felt obligated to buy things for each other, but a wonderful time when you received things you enjoyed even though you hadn’t earned them. Similarly, a candy bar wasn’t just a bunch of cheap sugar some company sold for profit, but a treat you were priviliged to have.

As for my opinion on how the games compare, I prefer SMB3 to SMW overall, though I think that with some tweaking SMW could have been the better of the two. As for NSMB, I haven’t yet bought a DS (though I plan to), so I haven’t played it through, but from what I’ve seen, I actually think that, visually, at least, it might capture the “magical” atmosphere even better than SMW or SMB3. I may be in the minority in thinking that, and I do admit that some of the music seems a little clunky, the game seems a bit on the easy side, and it’s clearly not as innovative for its time. Even from just seeing pictures and videos of it, though, I can tell that the magic of the series isn’t dead, and could definitely see it making a lasting impression on a new generation of gamers.

@Shaun I don’t think graphics would have changed my opinion on the game, the difficulty level and design was the biggest problems in my opinion. What did you think of Yoshi’s Island 2?

I think what we’re keying into here is that special convergence of all these factors (Miyamoto’s genius designs, nostalgia, our innocence as kids, amongst others) that makes something, in this case, a series of games, so special they border on the magical.

It’s hard to replicate that feeling again, although I would say Nintendo still manages to do so. I remember seeing Super Mario Galaxy and having this intense desire to play it, like it was important to my life, not unlike that feeling I had as a kid many moons ago with Mario 3.

These days gamers both young and old are so techno-savvy that a bit of that gaming magic is lost. I’m not entirely sad about that either, as it takes that much more effort on the developers part to truly wow us again – meaning ever more creative and original games for us.

Galaxy was amazing, Scribblenaughts looks mind blowing though. I’m so so excited to get hold of that game.

@Sobe – I don’t actually own Yoshi’s Island DS. Shame, I know. I really enjoyed SMW2: Yoshi’s Island for the SNES, though. What’s funny about that is prior to playing it, I had reservations about the game focussing on Yoshi babysitting Mario, and I hated the visual style from the screenshots I had seen in game magazines from that time. So it came as a pleasant surprise when I played the game to find it was still amazingly fun despite breaking away from many of the Mario traditions I enjoyed in SMW.

You bring up a good point about the difficulty in NSMB, particularly regarding bosses. But here’s another thing: the fortresses in the game all had that same boss, didn’t they? Seems something I overlooked when I wrote this article is the amazing variety in creatures that inhabit Super Mario World. Each section of the game seemed to bring with it new enemies – and there was so many of them!

That’s definitely a good point! The chocolate zone, cheese bridge (i think thats what it was called) Buy Yoshi’s Island 2, its a quality game. New babies add a lot to it and its damned tough in places (especially the unlockable levels on completing it) I think reviews treated it quite unfairly. The only thing missing was mode7 really

Super Mario World was adventure. For the first time and ally, each new island introduced new enemies to be dealt with in new ways, secret level exits, levels that took a sense of urgency or patience to survive, and unexpected vastness. And then just when you thought you’d seen it all, you passed through the Star Road and the whole world is changed; the familiar is new again. You played and you played and you played, until the muscles in your hands knew, of their own accord, when to push the buttons so your jump’s timing was perfect.

I’ve played NSMB for the DS and it wasn’t the same. It was too easy, as all 7th generation games seem to be. What happened? Remember Mega Man? That game is impossible. Remember the first Mario Bros? The black sky in level 7 terrified me. When did games get so easy?

I recently gave SMW a shot on my sister’s Wii and it wasn’t right. The controls were just different, and muscle memory failed me. I don’t think I could go through that again.

One short comment: Super Paper Mario pulled off the visual feel of the series way better than New Super Mario Bros.

Paper Mario graphics would have been awesome, Mario+Luigi would have been fine too.