super mario 3d world (wii u)

i’ve been playing this game for about a week and a half, here and there for about 2 hours, and today i finished it. i enjoyed it quite a bit more than the recent new super mario bros games. i know those games are really geared more for multiplayer and not-so-much a quality single player experience. nintendo fixed that in this game. 3d world brings back the creativity and the coolness of discovering new things that were staples in older mario games. i’m not really sure how to describe it, but its just a good feeling when you experience something truly original in a mario level for the first time. you immediately want to play the level again after completing it. this game has those types of levels.

i found the play controls to be spot-on in this game. in the new super mario bros games (particularly the first one) i’ve always felt the controls were kind of slippery. surprisingly, i played through the entire game with the wii u gamepad. it’s actually not that bad to play with. the battery dies fairly often though.

difficulty-wise, i’d say it’s harder than any of the previous mario world games. it starts out really easy and then ramps up in difficulty for the later worlds. i particularly disliked a lot of the levels on world 7 and world 8. and i don’t think the levels are really that hard, but i was definitely feeling frustration trying to collect all 3 green stars on those levels. i associate the feeling of increased difficulty to one flaw in the game. doing platforming in this game over pits in the 3d perspective can be a nightmare. i found myself dying constantly from not being “lined up” correctly in the 3d space. a lot of the levels default to a 2d-ish camera view so you’ll be thinking everything is gravy until you go to jump to a new platform and end up falling off the screen. you can alleviate this problem most of the time by altering the camera angle and paying very close attention to your character’s shadow when jumping. unfortunately!! there are levels that you can not alter the camera angle on. particularly this seemed to be true on those dreadful auto-scrolling levels. the best you can do is pray silently before each jump on these levels. during levels i was experiencing problems on i kept thinking that man i could blaze through this so easily in a 2d version of this same level. overall, it’s not a huge flaw just an annoyance. like most mario games, deaths are offset by a surplus of extra lives. at times i had 40 lives and after several difficult levels my surplus would dwindle to 8 or so.

there are 2 levels that i know i died over 15 times each on and i hope to never play them again. this would be levels 3-2 and 7-3. ultimately, success on these levels came down to memorizing the level layout and knowing what to do at each segment.

another thing that is odd/interesting is that all the levels (in some form or another) have a visible edge. i’m guessing this something related to the game engine that is no doubt also used in the captain toad game. the result doesn’t bother me visually, but it sometimes ends up sucking from a practical standpoint. what i mean by that is that you have to be extra careful running around or jumping wildly in the game. if you play around running & jumping, i can almost guarantee that you will end up falling off the edge of the screen to your death. this happened to me early on and i learned my lesson. even so i still died by doing back flips off of trees, running too quickly, or performing a bad jump from time to time. dying at the flagpole screen because of these mistakes is ANGUISH.

the concept of the white tanooki suit doesn’t really bother me. i never used it, but i will say that my anger/frustration would rise every time i saw that block appear. to me it’s basically the game saying “hey we noticed you kind of suck and might need this baby suit for babies”. i’m not sure if there’s a way to disable it or not, but i’d be glad to never see it again. but like i said the concept of it doesn’t bother me. i’ve definitely played many games in the past where no matter how hard i tried i couldn’t pass a particular level. there comes a certain point where you realize something is simply beyond your skill level. and in those instances i think it’s okay to have a method to skip a level so that you can actually see the rest of the game. that being said, i don’t think it’s okay to instantly give into frustration and use it. as i said above i died 15-20 on certain levels and that’s nothing really. i would have died probably a 100 or more times on a level over several weeks before i would ever consider using the white tanooki suit.

you can choose between playing as mario, luigi, toad, and peach. there are differences amongst the characters just like there were in super mario bros 2. i hate playing as luigi just like i did in super mario 2. his movement is so dodgy. on certain levels i felt there would be a need to play as toad because of his speed, but i always ended up feeling that his speed did not make up for his incredibly short jumps. to finish the game i primarily relied on mario and the princess. mario for the majority of levels and the princess for any levels that had lots of spikes or platforming in the sky (using the princess on these levels can save you a lot of heartache).

occasionally, to get a certain star or stamp you need a special suit like the cat suit or boomerang suit. often that suit is available on the level, but in later levels i didn’t find this to be true. this would present a mildly irritating situation where i would have to backtrack to a level that had that suit (and that wasn’t a drag to play). you have to play through the whole level again because you can’t simply pop in get the suit and pop out. this gripe is more about wasting time rather than anything related to difficulty. i almost think they just let you have the option of starting a level with a particular suit (if you so choose) to prevent the need for backtracking.

when gathering the stars and stamps i would limit myself to about 3 playthroughs of a level before looking on the internet: http://www.ign.com/wikis/super-mario-3d-world/Walkthrough

the graphics in the game are incredible and there’s nothing negative that can be said about them. the music is great too, but i would have liked just a few more tracks (2 or 3 more) for a little more variety.

and finally my end game stats:
194 deaths (that’s about a 100 more than i would have guessed)
66 stamps
240 stars (i’m still missing 2 from the last level)

i plan on getting the last 2 stars soon and i’ll start playing some of the star world levels (at a slower pace though).

This entry was written by resinblade , posted on Wednesday December 31 2014at 04:12 am , filed under Games . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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