New Super Mario Bros. (2006)

After a very, very long hiatus, Mario returns to his 2D roots with the appropriately titled New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS. Lifelong fans of the little Italian stereotype will be pleased to see Mario in his natural element and not whoring himself off shamelessly in childish rip-offs of other types of games. Mario jumps, shoots fireballs, ducks, dodges, and slides down flagpoles with all the majesty of his golden NES days. The graphics pop and the color pallete makes this the prettiest 2D Mario ever.

All is not good in the Mushroom Kingdom, however. There are some nagging issues gamers from any generation will be confronted with. First off, the game is short, even for a handheld. Front to back, without taking time to collect everything and explore every path, Princess Toadstool can be rescued in a scant 3 to 4 hours, making this a little too similar to the original SMB lengthwise. I'm sure we can all agree that the original game is a great game, but it's from a different time. There's a different standard for today's games, and New SMB doesn't quite make the cut lengthwise.

There are also a total lack of interesting power-ups for Mario. There's the standard fire flower and red mushroom (yawn). There's also a giant mushroom which inflates the little plumber to screen filling porportions, and a tiny mushroom that shrinks him down to a few pixels in width; think Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. These two abilities rarely, if ever, affect the flow of a level aside from having to use them to nab hidden or harder to reach coins. Aside from that, there's only a blue shell that Mario can where on his back and slide into enemies with. Sound exciting? It isn't. You'll loath receiving it as a power-up as opposed to even a fire flower. After we've seen capes, feathers, boots, etc. these standard or semi-standard power-ups are the epitamy of boring.

And for being a DS game New SMB doesn't take advantage of any of the hardware's unique abilities. Sure, you can select a stored power-up by touching the bottom screen, but we've seen this mechanic before and executed in a more user friendly manner.

I don't mean to nitpick the negatives. We all know what to expect from any traditional Mario game. And if this were an NES game it may have barely edged SMB3 in terms of enjoyment. The bar was set with Mario's first SNES adventure, Super Mario World, and New SMB doesn't quite clear it. This is clearly a bare bones Mario; no thrills or chills. The problem is that super simplified play mechanic isn't very exciting.

New SMB hovers somewhere between NES era Mario and SNES era Mario. Is it worth the $35? Barely. Perhaps after reaquanting themselves with traditional side-scrolling/jumping goodness the fine folks over at Nintendo can churn out what we all had really hoped New SMB was going to be. And perhaps they won't take their sweet time about either.

Grade = C+