I'll remember 2006 for a long time: it was the year Nintendo felt the Super Mario series was due a reboot. New Super Mario Bros. was delivered (in America) in sync with the Nintendo DS' own iconic redesign, the Nintendo DS Lite, and back-to-basics is a pretty good way to describe it. While it sported a few unique powerups of its own and didn't hearken totally back to the days of the original Super Mario Bros. by restricting players from backtracking within levels (optional challenge modes aside), it was clear Nintendo was doing their own backtracking, reverting to physics more like that original game's and—shockingly, for some—not even providing a way for Mario to fly.
Two months ago, we got the excellent New Super Mario Bros. Wii, made in the new style that its predecessor sported on its way to wild success, but with a key feature that made it feel right at home on the family-room-oriented Wii: simultaneous multiplayer. While I—unlike some others—wouldn't call the DS NSMB a poor game by any stretch, it's clear that with NSMBW, Nintendo has hit its stride once again in producing great titles for this series.
But this all leaves the question: now what? Where can Nintendo take this not-quite-so-New-anymore Super Mario now? The answer, I think, lies not just in a look back at the series' history, but also at what today's Nintendo has been doing in its recent past.
If you don't have a DSi or didn't get the excellent Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again, you're missing out. Not just on the focussed-to-perfection gameplay, not just on the 100 levels of action running you about 8 cents per, but on one of Nintendo's biggest dips into the fledgling world of user-generated content yet, giving players 140 slots for their own content and a server where players can share those creations with the world.
While Minis March Again is certainly an anomaly in this regard among Nintendo's more tradtional titles, if you look around a bit more you'll find more going on. Only available in Japan thus far but coming stateside soon is DS title WarioWare D.I.Y., letting players create their own microgames, sharing them with friends, submitting them for contests, and even playing them on Wiis. Teaming up with Hatena, the DSi also brought us Flipnote Studio this year, giving us the tools both to make flipbook animations and share them with the world.
Outside DSiWare and probably also the field of interest for many of our readers, there's also been Style Savvy, which is a bit more gameplay-focussed in its creativity, allowing players to set up their own shops by creating outfits—any player can then visit these shops. There was also last year's Wii Music which, though it lacked any kind of public showcase, allowed players to piece together their own arrangements of the game's tunes and share them with friends. Finally, Band Brothers DX expanded on its predecessor's music-creation mode, leading Nintendo to set up an entire licensing regime to let players make their own arrangement of copyrighted works and share them publicly. These are not the moves of a dabbler.
As such, it's not such a huge stretch to think this may eventually come to New Super Mario. Preparing for this article, I found that just three months ago, Joystiq pinned down Shigeru Miyamoto on that very topic. "This is an area that I have a lot of interest in, and I think that the side-scrolling Mario games in particular are well suited to that idea," Miyamoto said. He's particularly spot-on about the series' suitability: New Super Mario, for all its 3-D effects and animations, is still a grid-based 2-D game at heart, and as such very easy to build creation tools for.
I think such a capability, delivered with a New Super Mario Bros. 2, would feel most at home back on the DS, perhaps even on the DSi (or, if a few more years out, a brand-new DS) to gain some extra horsepower to get more going on as well as readily available storage space. While the Wii Remote is definitely up to the task and the Wii Message Board could be leveraged for some community features, I suspect DS's emphasis on personal use, rather than shared, probably makes it a better fit... plus, it's pretty much a no-brainer that Nintendo would be working on a sequel to their original sales wunderkind. But it really could appear in either place.
While I don't expect you'd see the capabilty for players to actually put their own artwork or customized enemies into the game, I'm sure there's a ton that could be done simply by letting them into the toolbox to build their own platforms, doorways, pipes, gimmicks and such, mixing and matching attributes from some of their favorite official levels into a creation that is wholly their own. The quality of a level may be based on its building blocks, but its final quantification is in the sum of its parts.
But what could really set this theoretical title apart is giving these creative minds access to a toolset that lets them easily create the kinds of levels that many only began to realize the true genius of when watching NSMBW's Super Skills videos. Tools that allow them not just to place an enemy or time its firing from a cannon, but illustrate jump arcs if an agile Mario is bouncing off it, whether he's motionless, moving at normal or dash speed, or even Spin-Jumping. Tools that easily let designers predict when an enemy needs to spawn in order for it to keep Mario moving or stop him dead. Tools that not just enable these things, but give budding level designers an understanding of what has made Super Mario great since the very first level.
Now, tie it together with some basic community tools, starting with Minis March Again's public server with peer rating and adding something like Flipnote's commands, which allow people to jump to a particular animation on their DSi with a sequence of d-pad and button presses that can easily be listed on any personal page, blog, or forum. Another idea: use the peer ratings as currency—cash in a five-star ranking on a level you've created to buy a new theme made from classic 8-bit Super Mario Bros. sprites, or maybe unlock some legendary powerups like Kuribo's Shoe. Nintendo themselves could seed the community with some of the delightfully devilish (and largely unpublished outside Japan) e-Reader levels from Super Mario Advance 4.
There's some real potential here. I hope Nintendo has a similar mindset. I'd love to see this game made, and I think it'd be a fantastic way to keep the "New" spirit going strong.
Two months ago, we got the excellent New Super Mario Bros. Wii, made in the new style that its predecessor sported on its way to wild success, but with a key feature that made it feel right at home on the family-room-oriented Wii: simultaneous multiplayer. While I—unlike some others—wouldn't call the DS NSMB a poor game by any stretch, it's clear that with NSMBW, Nintendo has hit its stride once again in producing great titles for this series.
But this all leaves the question: now what? Where can Nintendo take this not-quite-so-New-anymore Super Mario now? The answer, I think, lies not just in a look back at the series' history, but also at what today's Nintendo has been doing in its recent past.
While Minis March Again is certainly an anomaly in this regard among Nintendo's more tradtional titles, if you look around a bit more you'll find more going on. Only available in Japan thus far but coming stateside soon is DS title WarioWare D.I.Y., letting players create their own microgames, sharing them with friends, submitting them for contests, and even playing them on Wiis. Teaming up with Hatena, the DSi also brought us Flipnote Studio this year, giving us the tools both to make flipbook animations and share them with the world.
Outside DSiWare and probably also the field of interest for many of our readers, there's also been Style Savvy, which is a bit more gameplay-focussed in its creativity, allowing players to set up their own shops by creating outfits—any player can then visit these shops. There was also last year's Wii Music which, though it lacked any kind of public showcase, allowed players to piece together their own arrangements of the game's tunes and share them with friends. Finally, Band Brothers DX expanded on its predecessor's music-creation mode, leading Nintendo to set up an entire licensing regime to let players make their own arrangement of copyrighted works and share them publicly. These are not the moves of a dabbler.
As such, it's not such a huge stretch to think this may eventually come to New Super Mario. Preparing for this article, I found that just three months ago, Joystiq pinned down Shigeru Miyamoto on that very topic. "This is an area that I have a lot of interest in, and I think that the side-scrolling Mario games in particular are well suited to that idea," Miyamoto said. He's particularly spot-on about the series' suitability: New Super Mario, for all its 3-D effects and animations, is still a grid-based 2-D game at heart, and as such very easy to build creation tools for.
I think such a capability, delivered with a New Super Mario Bros. 2, would feel most at home back on the DS, perhaps even on the DSi (or, if a few more years out, a brand-new DS) to gain some extra horsepower to get more going on as well as readily available storage space. While the Wii Remote is definitely up to the task and the Wii Message Board could be leveraged for some community features, I suspect DS's emphasis on personal use, rather than shared, probably makes it a better fit... plus, it's pretty much a no-brainer that Nintendo would be working on a sequel to their original sales wunderkind. But it really could appear in either place.
But what could really set this theoretical title apart is giving these creative minds access to a toolset that lets them easily create the kinds of levels that many only began to realize the true genius of when watching NSMBW's Super Skills videos. Tools that allow them not just to place an enemy or time its firing from a cannon, but illustrate jump arcs if an agile Mario is bouncing off it, whether he's motionless, moving at normal or dash speed, or even Spin-Jumping. Tools that easily let designers predict when an enemy needs to spawn in order for it to keep Mario moving or stop him dead. Tools that not just enable these things, but give budding level designers an understanding of what has made Super Mario great since the very first level.
Now, tie it together with some basic community tools, starting with Minis March Again's public server with peer rating and adding something like Flipnote's commands, which allow people to jump to a particular animation on their DSi with a sequence of d-pad and button presses that can easily be listed on any personal page, blog, or forum. Another idea: use the peer ratings as currency—cash in a five-star ranking on a level you've created to buy a new theme made from classic 8-bit Super Mario Bros. sprites, or maybe unlock some legendary powerups like Kuribo's Shoe. Nintendo themselves could seed the community with some of the delightfully devilish (and largely unpublished outside Japan) e-Reader levels from Super Mario Advance 4.
There's some real potential here. I hope Nintendo has a similar mindset. I'd love to see this game made, and I think it'd be a fantastic way to keep the "New" spirit going strong.