At the weekend I finally caved and bought Super Mario Bro’s Wii, I loved the older Super Mario on the SNES and the Wii version seemed to go back to Mario roots with this new game – at least, the advertisements made it look like it did so I would have been royally pissed if it didn’t – but it did and man, it’s great. Below are screenshots from the old SNES Mario and the new Wii Mario, the Wii is clearly improved graphics wise, but the key thing to note here is the fact the new version still plays the same as the old version, horizontal scroller style.
There are 9 worlds in total, the first 8 are standard do a level to progress, occasionally with alternative routes from A-B, but mostly linear. One thing we found out, that I did not like, was in several worlds there are shortcuts to future worlds, for example you can jump from half way through world 1 to world 5 if you find one secret exit (that was not that hard to find.) We just went back and did worlds 2,3 and 4, but I know people will be tempted to skip ahead for now, just to rush to the end – don’t do it!
The 9th world is different, you only get access to it after clearing the first 8 worlds, and then can only do levels there as you collect special large coins (star coins) from the previous 8 worlds. So to unlock 9-1 you have to go to world 1 and collect all the big star coins from all 8 levels there.
The powerups are very similar to other Mario’s, again, very welcome. Things like the mushroom, star and fire flower all make welcome returns. Powerup’s like the ‘copter hat are great for some levels where the primary purpose is balance – of which there are several.
I would recommend to anyone who wants to relive the good old SNES days to try the new version; I guarantee you will love it and want to play it repeatedly.
