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Game Ramblings #178 – Super Mario Bros Wonder

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

It’s not that I thought the New Super Mario Bros series were bad, but they were incredibly safe. The platforming was fun and solid, but it wasn’t necessarily anything new and interesting. NSMB and NSMB Wii were clearly outclassed by the two Galaxy games. NSMB2 and NSMBU were clearly outclassed the also safe 3D Land and 3D World. It wasn’t really a bad thing that the series then went on effective hiatus while Mario Maker took over and Odyssey wowed the world. Wonder finally feels like the 2D series’ Odyssey moment.

If I was just going to sit here and talk about how Mario feels to run and jump and whatever, it’s basically NSMB for me again. The core physics still feels a bit slower than I’d prefer, at least to a point. There is a couple noticeable small changes that really help this feel snappier than the older titles, and they both have to do with stopping.

One of my biggest problems with NSMB physics is how slow stopping is. If I’m trying to hit a tight platform it was usually safer to jump when I landed in order to reset using air movement, because if I was to just let go of the stick I would generally fall off. Wonder has drastically faster stopping allowing me to usually just land. It’s a small change but makes the game feel incredibly better in precise spots. Reversing direction is similar. In NSMB reversing from a sprint would slide you for a while, then you’d reverse direction and accelerate normally. Wonder combines the quicker stopping with what I can only describe as a speed boost to make sure that if you’re reversing direction you are quickly reversing direction. It makes things like vertical segments hopping between platforms incredibly better.

However, the thing about Wonder isn’t so much that it ultimately feels all that different, but it embraces fun for the sake of fun. The key around all of that is the Wonder Flower system they’ve setup. What it basically is is a system that changes the level for a short period of time – typically 30 seconds or less. The media I’m posting in this rambling are all examples of that. Sometimes it’s just turning the level into a musical number for the sake of it. Sometimes you have fundamental shifts in the mechanics of the level, like the long Mario above. At some points you’ll take over the bodies of an enemy in segments very reminiscent of Mario Odyssey, such as taking over a Goomba who can’t jump but can hide behind foliage in the background layer. The thing about all of these changes is that they aren’t fundamentally changing the game away from being a platformer, but they’re providing a fun change of pace in a way that is entirely unique to the level. You never really know what you’re going to get into when you activate one of the Wonder Flowers, but what you do know is it’s going to be entertaining.

The other part of all this that is incredibly impressive is how much variety there is in this system, and that extends across the whole game. Besides the core platforming mechanics, most levels have unique mechanics that you might only see two or three times in the entire game. One flower that sticks out in my head is a segment in which you’re thrown into a box sublevel that rotates periodically, forcing you to keep up with the rotation as walls become floors and ceilings. The screenshot above transforms the entire game into a near direct copy of the SNES title Smart Ball and is only used in maybe three levels. There are segments where you’re floating in the sky avoiding lightning and enemies. There’s a spot where Mario literally becomes a walking piece of a platform that can bounce things away. There are a couple sections where you’re platforming around on a flying dragon. There are a couple levels where there is specifically an enemy that will eat things like powerups if you don’t get to them in time.

The list here can go on and on because there’s a ton of variety in the roughly 70 main levels you run across. However, the point I guess is that across that you might be seeing 30 or 40 mechanics that are used two or three times and seem like they were created simply because they thematically fit with the level they belonged in. It’s such a rarity for any game to have mechanics simply for the sake of it enhancing the rest of the surrounding experience. It’s even more rare for there to be such a wide array of low-use mechanics and still have them be both fun and quick to learn on the fly. Mario Wonder manages to pull that off to an amazing level of quality that just isn’t seen by most other studios.

That attention to detail extends to the visuals as well, and that’s hugely important coming off of NSMB. Visually I could only describe those games as being at best sufficient. They were generally overly safe and overly boring. Everything served a functional purpose, but it didn’t really feel alive. Animation was kind of stiff, the backgrounds were pretty static, and overall it felt kind of lazy,

Super Mario Wonder is so much the polar opposite that I can’t believe we didn’t see any of this before. It’s easy to look at Mario’s core animations and be impressed with the level of quality given to him. A lot of this is thanks to them switching from a pure side view to more of a three-quarter view, giving him a ton of facial detail that they use. However, it’s the little things that really caught my attention. There’s fun little moments everywhere, such as Goombas being asleep (with the requisite snot bubble) if they come in from off screen. There’s stuff like enemies emoting panic if they fall off a ledge or if a nearby enemy gets hit by a fire flower. There’s entire scenes like the first video where the entire world is singing and dancing. It all has just a ton of life that was missing from 2D Mario. And that’s all to say nothing of the backgrounds, which are full of color and full of a ton of depth. This feels like a modern gaming experience now, rather than the pretty safe and boring NSMB levels.

I really didn’t think that this game was going to be as good as it turned out. Early trailers gave me some hope that it would be fun, but it’s still surprising to me that this game isn’t just a much better visual treatment of NSMB‘s core gameplay. This feels like a studio that was given an incredible amount of time to deliver something fun, and really took that to heart to give players a game that is just packed to the brim with things serving that core goal.

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Game Ramblings #177 – Cyberpunk 2077

More Info from CD Projekt Red

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC

I know. I’m spectacularly late on this one. In general I was weary of the original release since I tend to not really find long-form FPS games that appealing. The genre is something that I want to play for a few hours, destroy hordes of enemies, and be done with. However, three years and a big 2.0 patch later I figured it was time to get around to playing this one. What I found was a AAA experience that matches a lot of what I’ve seen in a lot of AAA games in the past decade or so. It does a spectacular amount of different things to a reasonably good standard, but I found myself really struggling to find something that it does to a great standard, and that was something I found across the board.

The city visuals themselves are done to a high level of polish and it’s honestly probably the standout feature of the game as a whole on PS5. The story is a bit of take it or leave it for me, but it was effective enough – at least until the end. Those things are typically not really something that get me to put down a game early, so they kind of hit enough of a mark to be strong for me. I suppose I’m ultimately a gameplay guy, so that’s where my real focus was. The gameplay is really the thing where I kept going “why isn’t there more polish here?”

The most obvious flaw to me playing on console is that it just felt like they didn’t consider the gamepad experience when they were putting it together. It’s not necessarily that the gamepad experience is difficult, but that the depth of assists is just not there. There’s a single setting to manipulate that to the best I could tell only affected an angle of aim correction, as well as typical ADS lock. It didn’t feel like there was any real aim adhesion – where the camera is pulled towards targets based on either the player’s or their movements. It didn’t feel like there was any aim friction – where the movement of the camera slows when panning across a target. For what I expect out of a AAA experience, there was just no depth to modify how the game felt to play on a gamepad.

I know some of you are screaming “just play it on PC” and I don’t necessarily disagree. However, I’ve made these systems for console shooters recently and it’s just not a difficult thing to implement. What it does give you is an ability to craft combat on a gamepad that isn’t spectacularly easy due to aim correction without making it impossible for the player to effectively aim. It also gives the player a much wider range of potential for tweaks to their experience to match their skill level. As implemented in CP2077, it just feels like they slapped aim correction in, said “screw consoles”, and went about their day. It’s a really weird thing to see in this level of budget when the reality is that the console market is a huge revenue driver.

Outside of the core shooting experience, the RPG aspects also had weird things to them that kind of made me question some decisions here. One of the things that really bugged me early on was that weapons were tied to specific parts of the skill tree. My preferred play style as I went through was to go full stealth, inevitably fuck it up about half way through a mission, then go full shotgun chaos. However, stealth and shotguns were in different skill trees. The weapons in the stealth tree weren’t my preferred play style, and the skills in the shotgun tree weren’t my preferred play style. I’d have generally preferred to keep them entirely separate.

However, about half way through I sort of realized that I was no longer actually using the skill tree and I had about 10 points unused. It dawned on me that they really didn’t feel like they were modifying my power curve at all. The only thing I ended up really using the points for was to directly pass skill check requirements to do specific things (ex: open doors with technical knowledge, overpower things with strength, etc). Maybe it’s something that is more relevant to higher difficulties, but on the normal difficulty it was a weird thing to be suddenly wrapping my head around. The power curve was entirely in finding whatever weapon had bigger numbers, and not in applying skills to craft your perfect character. They were irrelevant. For a game that is theoretically trying to be an RPG, having your main RPG system not feel powerful or useful is just weird. It makes me think that separating weapons and skills would have been useful, both to allow players to build in a more weapon-focused direction as well as to allow the skill trees to be made more singularly useful.

All of this is compounded by a bunch of really weird UX decisions that made navigating information really obnoxious. Why can I not get to the crafting screen from the inventory menu? I have to go out a menu, scroll to inventory, scroll down, then go to crafting. Why is the default sorting of the inventory some seemingly random horseshit? At least make it something immediately useful like type sorting. What relevance does the sorting in the journal have? Other than the immediate story mission being at the top, I could never figure out what order the rest is since there’s a mix of basic chores intermingling with stuff that could become story relevant later on. It’s just a bizarre set of menuing that I don’t see working with keyboard/mouse, let alone with the setup on a gamepad.

I guess that sounds like a lot of ragging on the game, and I guess I kind of am. I’ve sounded similarly negative about some other AAA titles that I’ve played in the past few years – Final Fantasy 16, Halo Infinite, Horizon: Forbidden West, or Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla are a few that come to mind. I think ultimately what my frustration is in a lot of these cases is that the games are doing so many things in them that they just don’t need to do, and in going wide on systems they’re losing depth and polish on important things. This game did not need so many skill trees. This game did not need the 8 or 10 categories of player mods. This game did not need as many categories of weapons. This game did not need pages and pages of writing for little journal entries you pick up everywhere. It all feels like things done for the sake of filling a budget that I can only ever dream of working with. However, in going so wide they never really got any system to a place where it was simply great.

That amount of stuff ultimately does mean that as a whole the game is good enough to be fun to play and even recommend, but it also means that the game will never really be at a point where it’s anything other than a footnote as something I’ve played through. I’m not going to remember the writing like I will a game like Spiritfarer, where the journey of death is so crucial and specific that it becomes the core focus of the entire game. It isn’t going to be something like Tears of the Kingdom where they built an entire game around one core idea of sticking things together and letting that one feature breathe. It isn’t going to be like a Ratchet and Clank where they are so focused on making sure their weaponry is fun to use that anything outside of that is basically unnecessary.

I just don’t think these sort of do everything open world scale games are generally that necessary, and I’m hoping we’re starting to turn a corner on it. Ubisoft just released a shorter Assassin’s Creed game that is no longer open world. Some of the common complaints about this year’s big title in Starfield is that it’s effectively unnecessarily too big. I expect that we’ll keep seeing a lot of large open games (hell, Spider-Man 2 is about to come out), but I also hope that companies will start crafting tighter experiences that focus on making a small set of features spectacularly good, rather than making every feature under the sun simply good enough.

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How’d It Age #5 – Blinx: The Time Sweeper

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Xbox

When I play older games, I like to think of them with respect to their contemporaries. Sure, part of it is just in seeing how they age generally, but also to see how they were compared to what came out at the time. The problem for Blinx is that it’s entirely outclassed by its contemporaries. While the game tried to do some interesting things, it really shows its age compared to other things that came out at the same time that I still continue to occasionally play today.

Blinx came out in October 2002, presumably to be both a mascot for Microsoft’s new console and a way to enter the Japanese market with something more familiar than Halo. The problem is that it was a very busy year for platformers. Looking at the list of big entries we’ve got:

  • Rayman Revolution in January 2001
  • Jak and Daxter in December 2001
  • Ape Escape 2 in July 2002 for Japan
  • Super Mario Sunshine in August 2002
  • Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus in September 2002
  • Ratchet and Clank in November 2002

Each of those games has something I can point at that simply did things better than Blinx, and that’s ultimately the problem with playing this game now. It’s obvious that even at the time it wasn’t doing anything well so much as doing things simply adequately.

For pure platforming, you could easily pick Jak and Daxter or Sly Cooper as the obviously better targets. In both cases, it simply comes down to speed. Movement in Blinx is excruciatingly slow in a way that really surprises me. It often feels like I’m moving at about half the speed I want to. It basically results in jumps being only for vertical purposes. They often play into that with the time control powers (ex: a bridge falls, you can’t double jump the gap – you have to rewind to rebuild the bridge), but that gets into another core problem with the game.

The collection aspect of time powers is a weird thing where you have to build combos of symbols from items dropped in the world. If you match 3 or 4, then you gain some time powers. However, if you don’t match that many before you’ve collected 4 total items, you lose them all. It’s a needlessly complicated system that simply serves to do two things – makes me go slower to avoid picking things up by accident, and makes me backtrack when I figure out the core conceit of the level and what specific time power I require. It serves to loop back to my point that the platforming feels slow, because the mechanics are simply reinforcing that.

The other core mechanic in place is a vacuum to suck up and eject trash at enemies. This is where Ratchet and perhaps Luigi’s Mansion come into play a bit. Sucking up trash is another thing that is excruciatingly slow. It requires you to stand still, suck up a thing for a while then move on. However, you can also suck up the time power items from above, which again reinforces going super slow to be careful to not screw up your combo. This would have been so much better served being a move that lets you passively pull things in that are weaponry and ignore the time powers, as well as not requiring you to stop moving to do so.

Ratchet and Clank is definitely the comparison for the shooting end of things, though perhaps it’s more the second or third game in that series that are better comparisons. In this game, it’s extremely easy to just miss your shots entirely. This game would have been better served with aim assist that later Ratchet titles had to make shots more reliable, but even against the first entry this just doesn’t feel like it spent enough time letting the shooting mechanics cook. It feels hard to aim and doesn’t really feel powerful. Enemies have pretty weird immunity frames – particularly for long periods after they’re hit – that just break the pace of whatever combat was being attempted. Overall this is just a case where it feels like the weaponry aspect is just unnecessary against a more traditional stompy platformer setup.

The final game in that list then is Super Mario Sunshine, and in this case I think the comparison is in the friction of taking damage. Blinx suffers from two problems in this case. The first is that taking damage simply breaks the flow of action in a negative manner. When you take damage, the action pauses, you rewind 5 or so seconds into the past, and lose ALL progress that had happened during that time, even if it was killing some other enemies. In large combat scenarios, it’s pretty frustrating to lose that progress to a hit. You also have a pretty limited set of hits that you can take (start at 3, expandable with in-game currency purchases) that can only be recharged via the time power matching system above or via a shop between levels. It’s slow to regain the retries and frustrating to run out of them.

Compare this against Mario Sunshine’s damage mechanics, where you can take a bunch of hits before losing a life, can easily recharge that with coins scattered all over the place, and time doesn’t stop if you take damage. This results in another case where the mechanics reinforce the game feeling slow, since it felt like I was being pushed to fundamentally avoid damage, rather than just minimize it.

It’s one thing to be frustrated by a game that simply feels old. Billy Hatcher from a couple posts back is a good example of that. However, this game is frustrating because it landed in the middle of a 3D platformer golden age and simply couldn’t keep up. Other games for other platforms were simply doing its core set of mechanics better. All that said, it’s available on Game Pass and you could do worse than free.