![]() ![]() I think the series, with New Super Mario Bros. NSMB2 isn't some crazy change, but it's been tweaked in all the right ways, and the style actually looks nice and cohesive overall now. Sorta anemic, often artistically defunct. The foundation's been polished up, at the very least. "This is what it is," but familiarity is a positive in this context. ![]() You know what you're getting, it's like picking up another of the four billion published crossword puzzle books down at the CVS cause you feel like busting through a few word games. Maybe 2D Mario has been around for long enough, and by virtue of only appearing once per piece of hardware it's okay to just be a recurrence of the "same old"-your chance to experience new content within those Solid Mario Rules. Brandon talked about it a bit before, in the context of Tetris. There's an argument to be made about 2D Mario these days, that maybe it's okay that the structure remains rigid. It's yet another surface embellishment upon a basically unchanged foundation. There are so many secret little caches, so many bundles of scratch that you can cause to materialize, so many powerups that fold the very foundation of spacetime to reveal arcane simoleons from an otherworldly plane, that it's easy to get carried away by it. If you accept that the coins are basically their own reward, though, they're pretty fun to get. You don't get anything for them besides the usual 1ups-you just get to watch a running total get larger and larger and finally top off approximately 5% of the way to the humanly unattainable one million goal. Despite their emphasis, collecting coins doesn't really matter at all. The much ballyhooed "WHOA COINS" twist is the real hook here, though you sorta have to make an effort to sell yourself on it. Just like that Famicom Disk System original, NSMB2 recycles much of its predecessors' visuals, music, and gameplay structure, but uses that solid foundation to do more interesting things in the contents of its levels. But NSMB2 here feels more like a game commonly ignored in those comparisons: The Lost Levels, the true and original Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 were super different from the original Super Mario Bros.-and each other-and how the New Super Mario Bros. I hear people talk about how Super Mario Bros. If you get that phrase that basically means nothing. But it's kind of a different sameness, if you get me. Lots of impressions of this game have not been kind, writing it off as just a soulless retread that accomplishes nothing and serves only to dilute the Mario brand. I was a little worried about it beforehand, you know. Crazy! Now, scant hours later, I am like two-thirds of the way through the whole thing. ![]()
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