There are a couple of reasons why this is noteworthy. The ice skate's a one-hit deal, but it's great while you have it. And the perfect moment - outside of the odd cameo in the RPG spin-offs - is level 3-1 of Mario 3D World: a snowy playground in which you move through pine forests and over deep drifts before venturing onto a frozen lake where a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles in an ice skate. Nintendo was just biding its time, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for the perfect moment to remind everyone about that weirdo footwear. Hardly anybody remembers the goomba shoe, but, behind the scenes, Mario's custodians were playing the long game. 3, a single-shot power-up that appears only in level 5-3, where you find a goomba stomping around in a large green boot - a boot you can steal. You know, the goomba shoe from Super Mario Bros.
Because Mario is games.Įxhibit A: We need to talk about the goomba shoe. And yet! And yet that famous Mario coherency still rules - because everything you encounter in a Mario game reminds you of something else you encountered in another Mario game. Autumn, water parks, the circus: each level takes you somewhere different, while every minute of play spools outwards in a friendly 60fps jumble of nutty concepts - perhaps nuttier here than ever before.
It has world themes - desert, ice, grasslands - but they're largely ignored as you hop between pools of bizarre brilliance that defy easy categorisation. 3D World has a story, but as ever, it drifts into the ether the moment you take your first jump. That certainly explains a game like Super Mario 3D World - yet another Mario title where each new level can be trusted to throw in a one-off idea that's forgotten seconds later. Mario is games, and all games - all toys, all play - can eventually be folded into the mix. Mario is always being made, and practically any idea can lie within its remit. They're just toiling away in the Mario mines, churning out endless ideas for anything and everything - bosses, collectables, enemies, traversal gimmicks, ghost house hallways, the works. The best theory I've ever heard regarding the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs like this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are people working on Mario stuff all the time, irrespective of specific games. Beneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies one of the strangest Mario games in years - and that's wonderful news.
0 kommentar(er)
