Hands On New Super Mario Brothers Wii

By Spencer . June 4, 2009 . 5:32pm

New Super Mario Brothers Wii is just like classic Super Mario Brothers. At E3 I joined a game with three other people, playing as one of the two Toads. The first level had what you would expect in a Mario game, super mushrooms and pits to jump over. One quirk about New Super Mario Brothers Wii is if one person shrinks the game briefly pauses. At first I thought it was slowdown, but it’s not. The game pauses to show the shrinking animation for a second. The same thing happens when someone dies, which might take some time to get used to.

When you get the propeller suit you can shake the remote to make Mario, or in my case, Blue Toad, slowly drift to the ground. You can’t fly like if you had a racoon tail so if you want to collect out of reach star coins players have to work together or bounce off another person’s head.

Since New Super Mario Brothers Wii supports four players the screen can’t scroll backwards and if one person jumps in a pipe everyone automatically goes in. This can actually save your life. If you’re about to get hit by a koopa jumping in a pipe cancels that. When you haphazardly fall into a pit and die you respawn in a bubble. You need another player to pop a bubble to get back in the game. Shaking the remote makes the bubble float towards other players.

The other stage I played had Yoshi. When you hit a mushroom block usually four mushrooms appear, but you only get one Yoshi. Luckily, I grabbed Mario’s dinosaur friend and started spitting goombas at the hammer brothers. By mistake, I also ate another player. If you eat someone they’re stuck in your Yoshi until you spit them out. I imagine this can be pretty amusing in a group of friends. Not wanting to spoil someone else demo I spit them out right away. On second thought I should have tried spitting a player at a goomba to see if the game had tandem spitting attacks.

New Super Mario Brothers Wii is scheduled to come out this holiday.

TAGS: E3 2009, New Super Mario Brothers Wii, Nintendo, Wii

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Kuronoa

hmm...
I'm assuming the game will be made with 4 players in mind, so perhaps single player alone will be challenging then?

Also why isn't the 2nd toad Toadette? Would we even have more characters?

Still, it looks like fun and I'm glad there's more 2D Mario. ^_^

Lucky

Should have been Peach so it could be kinda like a throw back to SMB2.

Serge73

I've seen complaining elsewhere too on the use of 2 Toads, though, as some other people pointed out too, the two toads could very well be placeholders because they didn't want to show all the characters or potential unlockable characters.

When you think about how many Mario characters are out there, especially in all the Mario spin-off/sports games, and that seems pretty likely, to me anyways...

pressstart

Good call. I'm up for unlockable characters. Hopefully there's a mode where they actually have differences, if they're actually all the same right now. It would be nice to have 2 separate modes for that, one would be balanced for sure since they're all equal.

And since some people keep thinking Little Big Planet, might as well add a level creator while they're at it. Unless that's going to make it look much worse than LBP and it's robust creations.

jarrodand

Yeah, I figured the same. I hope Wario makes it in.

Chow

I think the Toads were there because they can be interchangeably replaced with the remaining "basic" colors that Mario and Luigi aren't associated with (Red, Green, Yellow, & Blue). That probably means Peach is a no go for this, though Wario and Waluigi would be good shoe-ins for the remaining colors.

Serge73

Um, couldn't they just make a "pink" for Peach?

daizyujin

Well also Blue, Red, Yellow, and Green are all pretty easy to distinguish. If you are somewhat color blind (like me) then pink and red can sometimes be hard to distinguish. If the action is fast, a person might follow the color more than the design of the character.

Chow

I meant the "basic" colors to mean the main RGB light spectrum colors merged with the Red, Blue, & Yellow primary colors to make the four players.