Tag: nintendo

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How’d It Age #9 – Banjo-Tooie

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Originally Released On: N64
  • Platform: Xbox 360

When I pulled this one off my random list I realized that I don’t think I’d ever played it. I played the original for sure, and I definitely played Donkey Kong 64, but this one missed me for some reason. Going back and playing these kinds of games given the progression of the platformer genre is always interesting, and this one is definitely not an exception. However, I do think it’s showing its age at this point for a few specific reasons.

Within the context of 3D platformer games, it’s important to remember when this one came out. With it coming out at the tail end of 2000, it came out a little bit after some big hitters in the Crash Bandicoot triology and the first two Spyro games on PlayStation and the first Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. However, it was also closely followed only a year later by the first Jak and Daxter and Sonic Adventure 2, and two years ahead of Super Mario Sunshine, Ratchet & Clank, and the first Sly Cooper title. Sitting where it is you can see it as a bit of a transition title where it showed off possibly the peak of what its hardware set was capable of. However, the 2001-2002 titles definitely show where Banjo was limited.

The first thing that really stands out is the act of traversing hrough the world. It feels absolutely glacial compared to modern games. It’s not even that it feels bad because it has plenty of weight and appropriate momentum. It just feels like there’s so much downtime going from important spot to spot. The games that came out immediately after it just had such better pace to their movement that really showed a generational leap in the act of traversal.

Jak leaned into a traditional collectathon platformer setup, but was just faster. You could rip through environments in a hurry collecting things at a high pace. Part of it was that the environments in Jak were just more visually crowded thanks to the hardware jump. However, they were also more vertical and more compact, so going to collect things had less down time. Sly Cooper on the other hand had larger levels, but encouraged the player to rapidly move in the shadows so more often than not the player wasn’t slowed down by interactions with NPCs. Ratchet and Clank had the slower movement but fed the gameplay with weapons to make moment to moment gameplay more impactful. Those three all took advantage of the better hardware to make different kinds of platformer gameplay that to me all have aged better than Banjo by simply having the player always be engaged in something.

The second thing that stood out to me was how much the game causes the player to spend time retraversing for small rewards. Obviously retraversing due to upgrades isn’t something I inherently dislike since I love Metroidvania titles. However, retraversal in those games often unlocks large swaths of new territory to run through. Retraversal here is because of small reasons that don’t necessarily feel rewarding. Talking to a mole to learn how to ground pound in a different way than your base ground pound just so you can break rocks to get jiggys feels like it’s just slowing your progress to make the game longer. Finding a magic spot that requires you to find and wander around as Mumbo Jumbo that simply causes a door to open feels like it’s significantly longer than necessary just to make the game longer. It’s all just low-reward ways to push progression that take longer than feels necessary.

Ultimately, newer games have really smoothed out things like this to increase game pace. The Mario games have always had individual stars be impactful. However, Mario Odyssey went inherently collectathon and smoothed things out by making sure the required powers were always incredibly nearby, reducing the need to run around. Ratchet & Clank literally just let you carry and swap everything at any time. Games like A Hat in Time kept some of the open nature of Banjo while reducing clutter to make the experience more streamlined. Even at the time, series like Spyro were compartmentalizing collecting into smaller more varied worlds that were less focused on powers and more focused on fun environmental interactions. These games have all resulted in better aging gameplay than the slow pace of Banjo.

All that said, it’s not like this game has aged to a place where it’s unplayable. It’s still a game that’s pretty easy to fall into. You can easily pop this in, play for an hour or two, and make meaningful progress. Playing at that pace – where you kind of come back to the game periodically – fits this game much better than treating it as a front to back experience. I think that’s the big distinction between Banjo and more modern experiences. This feels like a Sunday afternoon title, where modern games feel like they’re built as better continuous play experiences. I don’t think that’s all that accidental, and I think that’s ultimately a symptom of the industry’s growth out of the arcade. I think you can generally follow games from the NES to roughly the start of the PS2 era and see each generation moving further away from standalone or quick play experiences to something that can be played over longer continuous sessions. Games simply got better at being interesting for a continuous time, rather than being interesting in short bursts.

If this one does interest you, absolutely play the Xbox version. It’s on game pass, on the 360, on the Xbox One, on the Series consoles and it has a bunch of important improvements. Get it as part of Rare Replay and you’re going to have even more fun games to play alongside it. Framerate and resolution are the obvious boosts, but playing on something other than the N64 controller is a huge improvement on its own. Make this one your non-serious gap filler and you’re going to be in good shape.

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How’d It Age #7 – Super Mario RPG

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: SNES, Virtual Console, SNES Classic

It’s a bit surprising that I’m doing back to back remakes of old games that came out in the late 90s, but here we are. Where Pharaoh felt like it strayed too close to the original and could have benefited from more modernization, Super Mario RPG feels like it does a good job of maintaining what worked in the original and smoothing out some things for a modern audience while also adding a couple new features here and there that maybe don’t work as well.

I guess we’ll start out with combat, since it’s where most of the changes occurred that stood out in my head. In this case, I’ll start with the two things that didn’t necessarily work out well for me.

The first is the little meter in the bottom left corner of that screenshot. This is one of the new mechanics tied to action buttons, where you can get bonus offensive or defensive boosts if you time an A button press based on the action occurring. In this case, the meter builds up when you get good action buttons until you hit 100%. At that point you can activate a move based on the composition of your team, with each team combo having some different move. The problem I have with these is that situationally they can be very useful in a niche, but aren’t generally that useful in most cases.

For example, one of the moves heals all party members both on and off the field. It’s useful if you got nuked by a big boss move, but you’d have to have the right party combo (Mario/Peach/Mallow) be alive to activate it anyway. The big offensive combo of Mario/Bowser/Geno does a series of random attacks and buffs which can be useful in the start of a boss battle to buff your party, but it requires your healers to then skip out on the buffs. It then takes a fair number of turns to recharge the meter so often I’d be sitting there holding onto it considering whether it’s worth using only to then finish the fights anyway. It’s one of those ideas that on paper sounds good, but in practice falls to a lot of the classic JRPG problem of holding onto something for so long that you lose the chance to use it.

Another thing that didn’t work out as well for me was the inclusion of randomized special enemies. These are nice in one respect in that they drop frog coins, which makes collecting them much easier than in the original game. However, the special enemies have weird mechanics (ex: nearly immune to physical damage, faster move speed, etc) and very little other over the top reward, so it again feels like a case where the idea is good on paper but not really baked enough to be a fun feature.

However, new things are much more positive for me from there. There are three small changes tied to the action button mechanic that all end up summing up to a much greater whole for the feature.

The first is the inclusion of a little (!) symbol to teach you the timing. This will show up the first handful of times you have to hit the action on a new move, both offensively and defensively. It allows you to learn the timing on the fly without the guess work of the original game. The nice thing is that once you get the timing right a few times, it goes away. However, if you later start to then miss the timing consistently it will come back until you learn the timing again. This is a fantastic way to teach players quickly about new moves, while allowing timing to be wildly different for different types of attacks. It also removes the feeling of being hand holdy by going away and letting the player succeed through repetition or fail for a while before it comes back.

The second is that successful action button attacks now change the damage to be AoE, doing about 25% damage to all non-targeted NPCs in the attack. My initial instinct was that this was going to make the game much easier, and it certainly does. However, where that ease comes in is just making trash fights much quicker. Now if I’m not quite one-shotting enemies, I can still just move on and attack other NPCs. More often than not, I would be able to clear a normal 3-person trash fight in 3 attacks by simply focusing each target once and letting the AoE take over. It’s ultimately a huge time saving reward for getting your action timing right, and not something that necessarily is negatively impacting difficulty.

The third is the chain mechanic. Getting action button timing right will build up the chain, providing stacking buffs to the entire party. Each party member then has stats tied to them that apply to this. For example, Mallow increases magic attack while Geno increases physical attack and speed. What this allows you to do as the player is to mix and match your party for the situation beyond just what moves the member does. It’s again something that has the effect of making the game easier on paper, but also providing a strong incentive towards hitting your timing just right. This becomes incredibly important in the post-game when the player is fighting boss rematches on the way to fighting the ultimate form of Culex.

The final thing that I want to point out is how much better inventory management is. Rather than being a fixed list of 20 or so items that you can carry, you can now carry infinite items but with a limit per item type. For example, you can carry 10 mushrooms total or 6 pick me ups total. Anything over that amount is sent back to storage at Mario’s house. This just gets rid of so much hassle from the original game. You’re no longer keeping an empty slot just to pick up flower tabs. You’re no longer fighting with whether a revive is more important than a syrup. You’re no longer scrolling through the long unwieldy list for one specific thing. It’s such a small change but it modernizes the game incredibly well.

This is very clearly a lovingly crafted remake. It maintains the wonderful gameplay of the original game, completely revamps the visuals (because hoooooo boy the 2D didn’t age well on non-CRTs), reorchestrates the wonderful soundtrack, and does just enough to play the balance between nostalgia and modernization. It shows why the original game was so well received 25+ years ago and manages to still feel like a great experience now.

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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.