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Friday 25 January, 2008
Super Mario World – Part Two
After playing “Super Mario World” for a second forty-five minutes I came to notice all of the little things that made it so enjoyable to play. Not only is the actual character of Mario sweet and endearing as a mustached hero with an Italian accent but also I remembered all of the “secrets” about the game. The pipes that you can slide down into alternative universes filled with uncountable gold coins and the invisible question mark boxes that you can only find with luck or experience are only two of the game’s many subtleties. The greatest part of this aspect of the game is that you never know everything; each time you play you discover new secrets.
Another awesome aspect of “Super Mario World” is the social interaction that comes along with it. After playing for two rounds of forty-five minutes I came to see that whether I am playing on the single-player mode or the two-player mode there is a lot of social interaction. With the two-player mode you do not compete with your friend, you work together to save Princess Toadstool. And even if you play in the single-player mode with a room filled with people there is a tremendous amount of yelling, jumping around and general helping out. Other people predict the next obstacle or level and you definitely do not feel like you are playing a solitaire game.
The design of “Super Mario World” is simple but affective. The bright green grass, white clouds and perfectly red Mario bring you back to your childhood. Without the modern graphics and details I am not distracted from the goal of the game. Playing “Super Mario World” is all about the task at hand, and perhaps at one point the graphics were cutting edge, however now it is simply about getting from one level to the next.
In addition to being aesthetically pleasing the game has a very straightforward and predictable design in that each level is relatively similar with a few additional challenges or dimensions. Each level has you jump over obstacles, jump on “bad guys” and face a harder “boss” at the end. Whether you are underwater, in a dungeon or in the sky it follows a predictable scheme pretty well. With its increasing difficulty, this design is fairly effective and allows the player to improve their skills by easily getting through the already mastered levels and working through the more challenging ones. And with the extra feature of the world map that shows you all of the levels from a glance it is reasonably easy to keep up with what is occurring in the game, which is not so easy for non-gamer with more current games.
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