Nintendo DS Review: New Super Mario Brothers

Move from left to right on the screen, use a mushroom to grow, stomp on goombas and koopas, take various hallucinogens to make you grow or shoot fire, and save a princess in a final castle, and you've got a Mario game. The formula is a simple one, and deviating from it was risky, as was seen with the less than successful Super Mario Sunshine, but it has also paid off with Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 64, both instant classics in their time, even if the former has been met with a wide deal of controversy and some disappointment.

New Super MarioBrothers takes on the very basic Mario game design, in many ways simply enhancing the graphics of the original Super Mario World on the SNES - the problem, however, being that it brings very little to the table. It simply replaces rather than adds to the over all Mario scheme, with the use of new power ups like a mushroom that super sizes you, allowing you to simply knock whole bricks out of the way, or its inverse, a tiny blue mushroom that shrinks you to the point that you cannot actually smash any of your enemies.

Some have called it a "fresh new look at the Mario design", but truth be told, it's just the same old look, making it feel like a Super Mario expansion rather than a whole new addition to the entire franchise. No doubt levels maintain their typical charm, requiring a keen, pixel-based dexterity that not everyone possesses, and there's more than enough tubes for everyone to jump in and out of to content the most die hard fan.

But I prefer my DS games to be dreadfully long, rather than the frightfully short New Super Mario Brothers title, which caps out at a few hours at most. When I play a hand-held game, I do not play it with the kind of die hard consistency that I play a console game, but I want it to be there when I have to go on a long car trip, fly, or am just bored during a power outage. When casually playing this game, I beat it it only a couple of short days between said car rides.

This was due to largely defunct and poorly designed game play and balance. For example, at the end of every series of levels was a castle where you were required to battle Bowser Junior - three quick blasts of fire with the Fire Flower solidly put him in his place. This certainly cuts down on the nail biting factor, but it also dreadfully detracts from the overall length of the game.

I am not saying that the game is bad - it is certainly far from it, but it brings so little to the table, that it feels like a semi-graphically enhanced Super Mario Brothers 3, with the enjoyable raccoon feather removed, replaced by a micro-mushroom.

The other large problem is that the game is very front loaded. It's common for the first twenty minutes of any game to be heavily buried under the cream of the game's crop, so as to suck a player in and keep them in, but in this case, most of the joy comes from the first world, but it slowly drains with each subsequent world/series of levels.

Therefore, I'd give the game roughly an 8 out of 10 - it's enjoyable, without a doubt, but is certainly not revolutionary, or effective in advancing the Super Mario franchise.