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My favorite Mario Bros. is the SNES version. It’s not a fun issue. Super Mario Galaxy, Mario 64, and the other games in the series all have their moments. They just don’t inspire the same degree of fascination that Super Mario World has drawn out of me. I can usually plow through the game in a handful of sessions, unlocking every secret through muscle memory. I know the levels to milk for lives when you’re running low. The route to the Blue Yoshi is permanently burned into my mind. I’ve beaten the game’s 2-D predecessors without ever having much interest in going back. I play the 3-D ones, but by about the 50th star, I just want to get it over with. What is this game doing that keeps me coming back?
From a design perspective, Super Mario World is unique in the amount of options that you have when deciding how you want to begin a level. Unlike Super Mario Bros. 3, I can go back to beaten levels and snag power-ups before hitting start then select to immediately exit. There was a bit of dabbling with this in the third game with the inclusion of an inventory system, but it was always a finite resource. There are only so many treasure houses, and the results were usually random. In Super Mario World if I want a cape, I just go get one then try the level again. The DS version (calling it New Super Mario Brothers seems to just confuse people) also plays with this idea, but there were really only two power-ups to collect: big and fire flower. In the 3-D versions, you always start as Mario, and you can’t even carry powers into a level. The only time that you get the bee suit is if it’s an option that the designer includes. Likewise, the only time you get to fly is if the level is built for it in Mario 64. By contrast, the only constraint that Super Mario World imposes is in the ghost houses or castles, and even then, it just means dismounting Yoshi. You are free to bring whatever you like to most levels and engage with them on your own terms.
There’s also something to be said for the power-ups themselves. While the new Wii version of Mario Bros. lets you carry items like in Mario 3, they’re still limited in terms of power. Throwing fireballs or being able to slide around as a penguin isn’t really that empowering. On the other hand, the yellow cape is probably the most powerful costume that Mario has ever used. You can fly, spin, dive bomb, and make huge leaps using it. In a platformer, mobility is always going to be the real source of power. The raccoon suit or the beanie hat pales in comparison with their brief bursts of flight. Super Mario World expands this theme of mobility through the use of Yoshi and his various powers. While riding the dinosaur, you can eat anything, get abilities from turtle shells, step on any spikey surface, and even jump off if you miscalculate a leap. Best of all? Getting hit just means losing Yoshi, which can be fixed if you just catch the dinosaur.
Interestingly, Rus McLauglhlin says that Miyamoto would eventually claim that Super Mario World was a bit rushed and incomplete (“IGN Presents “The History of Super Mario Bros.”, IGN: Retro, 7 November 2007). I think that might be the inherent appeal of the game for me. This Mario game, more than any other, can easily be broken because of all the power-ups. It’s fun to just screw around sometimes. If I’m in a rush or uninterested with a level, I can just find a long enough stretch and then launch myself with the cape. There’s no pleasure quite like flying over the legions of canons, goombas, and piranha plants that the game clearly expected me to be struggling with. It’s like using the P-Wing from Mario 3 but for any level that gives you enough space. The Blue Yoshi, which can fly as long as you’ve got a turtle shell in it, only magnifies this ability. In most of the areas, there is usually a level where you can harvest power-ups, lives, and a Yoshi with ease. Getting a colored Yoshi to grow up means feeding it, but the blue one grows up immediately because a star drops right in front of it when it hatches. It’s almost as if the designers accepted that people were going to be returning to Star World for the special Yoshi and decided to speed up the process. The fun of Super Mario World is just figuring out ways to break the level.
The level design is interesting because of the way that it makes you come back down from your lofty powers. Any ghost house or point on the map marked with a red dot has a secret exit. You’re never going to find that exit without checking all the warp pipes or screwing around near something dangerous. Once you beat the first castle, you are no longer bound to a linear path. You can skip sections of a world or take a totally different route through it. The number of paths that you open up are all scored and saved, so that every time that you start, you see how much of the overall map that you’ve unlocked. This always drives me to keep compulsively playing until my score maxes out. The game ratchets up the difficulty in the Special Zone alone where every level is carefully designed to be unbreakable. The hellish one where you have to inflate Mario into a balloon and float across is easily the most difficult. The toughest secret to find is on the cheese bridge when you’re trying to open the path to Soda Lake. You basically have to float a Yoshi underneath the finish post and then jump off him at just the right moment so that you don’t accidentally end the level. There’s also a long line of moving chainsaws that you have to bounce across to even get to this point. For as much as you can skip the levels by flying overhead, a lot of them still work because the game knows that you have to come back down if you really want to unlock the entire map.
It’s the exact same concept that you see in the 3-D versions, which make star collection optional, but there the game only presents these events as a series of challenges. Mario 64 merrily tips you off to what Star you can unlock next when you leap inside a painting, letting you explore the level and figure out how to unlock it. There’s never really much of a sense of empowerment. If I’m doing something mobile and free in a level like flying, it’s because the designers intended me to. In Super Mario World, they let you bring your own toys to the level so that you can dance and jump around however you like. Only when I choose to chase after the trickier rewards do I have to play the way that the designers expected me to. For some reason, that makes all the difference.
cool story bro
Posted by Dan Brexel on February 16, 2010 at 1:13 pm
I’ve never actually used Yoshi to beat to beat the level you mentioned with the chainsaws. I always just take off flying from the platform with the checkpoint, and carefully stay above the chainsaws. Then you just have to properly time a nose dive, and pull back up from it before you go too far down and die, yet still making it under the first finish line.
Posted by Jacob on February 16, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Just yesterday I was discussing some of the reviews of Scribblenauts and Trine (and, come to think of it, Bioshock) with a friend specifically because I had read multiple people criticizing each for making it too easy to “break” them.
Reading this, it seems a difference worth discussing might be whether or not the game rewards the different levels of selective engagement on the part of the player. As you describe, you could bypass large portions of the level, but the game also tracked and rewarded the different degrees of engagement with each level. Trine and Scribblenauts and Bioshock all allowed the player to decide how they wanted to approach a level (and how deeply they wanted to engage with the intent of the level), but each only seemed to reward players for crossing the finish line, with no regard for how well they did it.
Players can, of course, impose self-limitations to increase their self-satisfaction at completing a challenge (avoiding Vita-Chambers, using the Thief when the wizard would let you skip something, refusing to use the basket+chain), but that relies on a player’s internal motivators. And, as evidenced by the discussion surrounding Vita-Chambers, not all gamers are content with self-limitation (perhaps because “it is not fair, my accomplishments mean less because you can’t tell me apart from the low-engagement players”, or whathaveyou), though some obviously are (speed-runners et al. who enjoy playing their own meta-game).
So, maybe, freedom of approach/level of engagement is something we value, but we also want the game to distinguish between different levels of engagement. Not necessarily to punish those that engage at a different “lesser” level, but simply to distinguish or recognize it.
P.S. Rock Band seems to me another good example of supporting and recognizing differing levels of engagement, without punishing or rewarding any in particular.
Posted by Geoffrey on February 16, 2010 at 2:40 pm
@ Jacob
That would take an insane amount of skill. Which is both awesome and scary to me.
@ Geoffrey
That’s one of the points Jesper Juul harped on as the primary feature of a good casual game. Rock Band got credit for having its no-lose mode for people who aren’t too sharp.
I like your distinction about how the games fall flat because it all boils down to the same finish line. A person who thinks the Vita-Chambers break the game is facing the same challenges as someone who needs them to beat each level. The problem still goes back to Juul’s critique, except instead of the only goal the game supporting being too challenging it’s now too easy.
So yeah, I agree, distinction is key. SMW really nails that with its secret exits and the Special World zone.
Posted by L.B. Jeffries on February 16, 2010 at 3:49 pm
I found that the cape, the ability to take powerups into levels and yoshi just made SMW too damned easy. If they’d had the same restrictions as in SMB3 then I might have returned to it more often, but as it is I just don’t find playing SMW rewarding enough, it’s not enough of a challenge.
Posted by Steve from UK on February 17, 2010 at 5:11 am
L.B. Jeffries, nice article. I have a theory about the series which runs in accord with your observations:
Mario platformers tend to fall into two distinct groups: fast-paced, skill-centric games (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario Land) and exploration-based games (Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Land 2). Now, it’s not really an absolute dichotomy, since each game has a good amount of both, but there does tend to be an imbalance, which is why the classification works.
Super Mario World represents an interesting point in the evolution, where Nintendo are still establishing what it means to be an exploration platformer, and the two points subsequently clash. Super Mario World mixes both skill- and exploration-based gameplay, yet Yoshi, the cape, item collection and special zones, as you say, subvert the pre-existing skill-orientated framework and leave some interesting results. Later Nintendo (R&D1;) realise the notion of an exploration platformer in Super Mario Land 2.
I’m interested then in what you make of Super Mario Land 2. It has similar quirks to Super Mario World.
Posted by Daniel Primed from Adelaide, Australia on February 17, 2010 at 6:09 pm
That was a Gunpei Yokoi game wasn’ it? I’ve never played it but it sounds like he brought his aesthetic to the game. I wish they’d put together some old school Gameboy stuff for the Wii or DS because there are a lot of titles I missed out on.
That imbalance idea is cool though, thinking of SMW as an exploration game with platforming elements makes a lot of sense since so much of how I play is just unlocking the map.
Posted by L.B. Jeffries on February 18, 2010 at 6:37 am
Yes, Gunpei Yokoi worked on that one.
Hmmm…I think exploration platformer is perhaps a better way to put it. But yeah, I’m surprised that Super Mario 64 didn’t interest you as much, considering that it is also quite exploration focused. I guess there’s just that deviant, game-breaking approach to exploration which Super Mario World nails really well (and I love it for the same reason), whereas SM64’s exploration is more free-form, openworld exploration. Super Mario World is akin to Super Metroid in that regard, teaching the player to exploit its world, and then continually 1UPing the player at every turn, makes for an irresistible challenge.
Posted by Daniel Primed from Adelaide, Australia on February 18, 2010 at 7:30 am
I think the problem with most of the 3d games is the lack of “meta-games”. I plays Mario Galaxy exactly ONE TIME! there is absolutely no reason to go back into one of those levels because there is nothing there to get/do. Yeah some games like banjo kazooii go abit far with the collectibles but galaxy is a basically a one way ticket. Playing as Luigi with his messed up physics is not for me at all.
I like games that are breakable and that you get better at the more you play them. IT gives a sense of accomplishment rather than just plowing through to the finish line.
Posted by owen on March 26, 2010 at 2:38 pm