The elephant in the room.
I’ve been playingSuper Mario Bros. Wonderfor about a week now, and my head is full of it.
What’s more - and slightly less convenient - is that my house is full of it too.
And all of this brings us today.
Let me look around.
Stuck to the back of a shirt in the closet is a Post-it with “Platforms of Doom!”
Down by the cactus lamp is a piece of paper talking about Ice Block Tennis.
Two pages of my diary are filled with huge letters spelling Young’s modulus.
What to make of it?
Super Mario Bros. Wonder preview
Let’s make something of all that first.
This was a discovery from an early level in which you face small enemies with largish boots.
Surface area and tension and where does everything go and all that jazz.
Actually, let’s get this out of the way here.
Super Mario Wonder is all about a lot of stuff.
It’s endless variety.
It has themes, but lots of themes, too many for any to stand out.
Even its organising conceit is actually something that just sends the game exploding outwards in every direction.
Power-ups are fun here!
But Elephant Mario is the star.
Elephant Mario is an object of great poise and I am deeply curious about them.
Last night I wondered: what does Elephant Mario look like going through an in-game door?
Turns out the developers got there first - of course they did.
Elephant Mario getting through a door is sheer drama.
Mario’s off to the Flower Kingdom.
They’re the organising principle I mentioned above - the one that does the opposite of organising.
Where to start with this?
You generally get a Wonder Seed for completing a level.
The Wonder Flower (Event) has two steps to it.
Maybe it’s trapped in a block somewhere.
Maybe it’s buried in the ground or carried by an enemy.
That is the first step.
Find the Flower and trigger it.
And the second step?
The second step is that something will happen.
And it could pretty much be anything.
So maybe something big starts to chase you!
Maybe invulnerability stars start raining down and the speed cranks up!
So again, Mario Wonder is 2D Mario in principle.
Start at the left, head to the right, stomp stuff and move on.
It was Mr Driller in the middle of Mario!
I died a few times just because I was taking the transition in.
Even that’s a pretty vanilla outing by the standards of the game.
I’ve got more of this stuff written down, but this isn’t the place for it.
And I also can’t read my own handwriting.
It works because of what Dorothy Parker referred to as the disciplined eye and the wild mind.
(She was talking about Mario 3.)
Mario Wonder throws in bizarre ideas but it always absolutely nails the implementation.
I don’t really need to tell you this, do I?
It all just works.
Is it a game that you enjoy once, twice, and then shelve?
Pretty much every level here has a one-shot conceit that exists outside of the Flower Event stuff.
One will have needle-nosed birds that dive at you.
Another will have gas bag balloon animals that make for uneasy allies.
Another will force you to learn how to make use of sentient boulders.
Mario Wonder has no shortages of ideas.
They’re collectables you find and can have equipped - only one at a time.
They’re partly a way of making the game a little more forgiving.
One badge will allow you to fall off the screen once a level and return safely, say.
Do I want to be able to swim really well or have a cap that works as a parachute?
There are badges for all of these.
Then there’s a badge for finding secrets - it acts as a kind of radar.
And there’s my favourite badge, which I still can’t really believe exists.
It’s a grappling hook.
Use the badge and Mario gets a piranha creeper grappling hook.
You get a bit of Just Cause in the middle of Mario.
I am still getting over it.
All of these badges change the ways that levels work and the options you find in them.
And then the levels keep coming up with new forms that turn things on their head.
Throw in multiplayer: it’s tense roguelike fun with two, and absolute mindless carnage with four.
It’s a rush.
Whenever I tell someone I’m playing the new Mario, they ask what the angle is.
Is it space, like Galaxy?
Is it retro stuff like New Super Mario Bros?
Is it coins like New Super Mario Bros 2?
Is it just really, really hardcore, like New Super Mario Bros U?
Certain badges modify gameplay by allowing you to fall off the screen once before dying, for example.
The answer, I think, is that there is no one angle.
They called it Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
They could just as easily have called it Super Mario Bros. A copy of Super Mario Bros. Wonder was provided for review by Nintendo.
