Topic: Super Mario Bros Wonder

@Magician It's Nintendo. Anyone expecting them to have a logical online option was only setting themselves up for disappointment.

According to Eurogamer, Martinet is not featuring in Wonder. Looks like the Twitter speculators were right after all.

On a side note, if that was the new voice actors we were hearing in the trailer, fair play to them because I couldn't notice any real difference. Im still super sad to see Charles go, but I feel like we're in good hands for the future.

Heres the link: https://www.eurogamer.net/nintendo-says-charles-martinet-no-l...

@FishyS
Sorry, I am super late to this, but I would actually welcome a Mario game that gets back to the challenge rating of something like Mario Bros. 3.

I think a lot of people forget how 3 was a good, honest challenge. I just went back to it on my NES Classic, and I consider myself a darn good platformer gamer, but beating 3 without using save states is not a walk in the park. I would say the Mario games started getting easy with Super Mario World, not with 3. But I will say, I was pretty shocked at how much I forgot/misremembered the challenge that 3 provides.

I also think a lot of people haven't actually played Mario Bros. 3, so there is that lol

@rallydefault I recently ( a year ago) went back to smb3 on NSO for a near-100% run which was the first time I played since childhood and I found it very easy. I don't think I'm an especially good Mario player, but 100s of hours of Mario Maker 2 may have skewed my perspective on challenging levels slightly. I recently went back to 100% nsmbu and also found it much easier than I remembered.

That said, I think Nintendo actually did great on difficulty with, for example, nsmbu Deluxe and 3D World. Many levels are pretty easy but there is variety and getting every single collectable can be a decent challenge. Plus both those games have a lot of comparatively harder post-game and optional challenges. Super Mario World was an easier game largely because of the over-powered inclusion of capes and Yoshi, but it also has some reasonably challenging levels like Tubular. I honestly think most Mario games have had a nice difficulty mix. I would put smb3 right in the middle of the pack. Of all the Mario games available on Switch, I would say Super Mario Land 2 is the only game which feels extremely easy (mainly because it's too short to ever feel hard) and Lost Levels is the only one which feels kind of hard (although more because of awkward physics combined with questionable level design than intrinsic difficulty).

I'm not too worried about Wonder difficulty. If Nintendo is willing to make Mario games with excruciatingly hard parts like Mario Maker and Mario35 and also add pretty decent challenges like New Super Luigi U into their normal games, Nintendo clearly hasn't forgotten the part of their fan base which wants a bit of challenge.

@FishyS
Dang, you must be quite the skilled gamer, in all honesty. I really do think 3 is a decent difficulty for most players, basically meaning it's not a cake walk. It's not as difficult as 1, for sure, but it certainly wasn't a breeze for me. Again, I've been off in Zelda world and other non-Mario games for awhile, so perhaps my reflexes and intuition were off.

(I'm also talking about not having to use any continues to beat the game.)

@rallydefault I didn't personally need continues in my replay, but the unlimited continues aspect is a legitimate part of the game and one of the reasons smb3 isn't all that hard of a game. You can always add optional challenges like 'no continues' or 'no deaths' to any game, but that's your own choice.

Honestly the 'easily lose tons of progress' which you get in games like smb1 is really just a holdover from the arcade quarter-eating days and feels like a pretty lazy and repetitive way to add difficulty to me. I'm glad modern games don't really do that. I'm sure Wonder will add difficulty by making some levels or collectibles difficult rather than removing progress (maybe they'll remove a little progress with a continue but I bet it will have max 999 lives. 😝 ). If you ignore artificial restrictions with continues, there are significantly harder parts in nsmbu deluxe than there were in smb3.

Also, I think Zelda is way harder than Mario. I died an unbelievably large number of times in BotW 😝 But that is subjective and a very different type of difficulty than level-based games.

@FishyS
Yea, for me, a good run of 3 is to try and beat it without continues. But I get your point. They are a part of the game meant to be used.

I both like and dislike the arcade and renting facets that increased the difficulty in a lot of older games. Companies didn't want kids to beat their games right away, and because most games were short due to the hardware of the time, usually the only recourse was to make the game pretty tough and unforgiving.

So, when it comes to Mario 1, there's nothing worse than getting to like world 7 or 8 and running out of lives and having to start all over. But then again, the game is only half an hour long in the first place, so taken as a whole it's not that big of a deal. I'm of two minds on it, really.

Like, when they added Super Worlds in Mario Maker 2, I wanted at least the option to make my world give an actual game over where the player would have to go back to at least the start of the land they were in, maybe even the very beginning of my world. It would have been punishing, but it would have truly tested who could make it through under the life parameter.

Anyway, my feeling on that is kind of pointless because almost no modern, mainstream game is going to adopt that model again, it's just for retro gaming now. It's nice to go back to every now and then, but also nice to play more relaxed, modern games.

@rallydefault Mario Maker super worlds have plenty of levels where you may need 50 or 100+ lives for just one level so game-overing and losing 2 checkpoints in such a level can actually be pretty painful. I doubt Wonder will have levels that hard, though if they just kept having harder and harder post-game levels it would be neat. I definitely agree Super Mario Maker super worlds should have more interesting options for game-overs. There should always be some difference of losing a life and losing all your lives or 1-ups become kinda pointless.

@FishyS
Yea, between insane kaizo stuff and some troll levels, it would be punishing. You would hope that creators of those Super Worlds would not opt for the actual game over option (which totally doesn't exist, just in my reality lol).

WOWIE ZOWIE

@Fizza That was a good thing to wake up to. Looking forward to it.

Certainly one of the best news today. I'm so gonna watch it. But I do understand those who don't wanna watch it so they can REALLY be excited.

But for me, even I still would be stoked after watching. Good thing I choose to put money down for Wonder instead of Sonic Superstars. Cause that game I'll get during Winter. I wanna procure some money to be safe.

The fact this game warrants a direct in itself makes me so hyped!
Takes me back to the Mario Maker 2 days

I really hope they show off more new powerups!

The online features look interesting, they haven't just been added on since the recent controversary of it being local multiplayer only.

I thought the direct made the game look better the more it went on, the first few minutes I thought it didn't look that much different to the New Super Mario games, but some of the new features look great, I'm really looking forward to this!!

The animations and art style are the best the 2D Mario series have had.

Although I didn't need more convincing, the presentation was mighty fine.

Recent controversary of local co-op...? I don't remember any...I mean...I know folks were disappointed with the lack of online co-op. But still...

Um...er...anyways! The Direct was great either way. Definitely glad I put my money towards it instead of SuperStars. But yeah, ya'll get the idea.

I’m in all over again love!

PEAK direct.

The elephant peach model is gonna make the internet go crazy though 😭

The online features look fun but the omission of direct online co-op in favour of interacting with shadows is an odd choice. It's like assist mode in New Super Mario Bros Wii U, an odd way for players to assist someone playing the main game and making the overall game easier.

It turns online play into a difficulty switch.