New Super Mario Bros 2 review

[Dogg Thang]

I had been away and expected to come back to many impressions here. And yet... no first play thread. So here it is, although they really are just very first impressions as I have only played to the end of the first world. And at this point in the game, it's almost identical to NSMB on the DS. I'm hoping what that means is that they're just treating the first world kind of like a recap and it will really develop from here because, if not, that will result in a severe lack of progress. Given there was a Wii game between these two which I never played, I'm hoping for at least some surprises along the way.

So there's not much to say at this point. Even the music is the same. The levels haven't been all that interesting so far.

The one difference that stands out is the quality of the backgrounds, or lack of. Blurry smear-o-vision background graphics with fewer layers of parallax than the 16-bit days. Given the character graphics are in 3D and the console sells on its 3D, the backgrounds are shockingly flat. And the blur looks godawful. I had to go back to the DS game to compare in case it was like this in the DS game but no, it wasn't. The DS game actually looks better than the 3DS version. I can only assume they wanted to reuse DS assets and had to blur the ass out of them to stop the pixelation from showing. Lazy and rubbish.

I'm hoping those words won't sum up the whole game. Many reviews are positive so I am expecting the game to pick up from here.

Edit: Gah! Forgot the poll. Can a mod add one?

[djtickle]

I have been waiting for a 1st play thread from this. All the reviewed didn't convince me and I managed to stop myself over the weekend picking this up. Will leave it for now though after that, hopefully it will pickup a little further in. Don't fancy a blurry mess!

[briareos_kerensky]

I've playing this for a week or so, a world or half at a time and I'm already at World 6, final showdown (I think) with Bowser. Haven't bothered with any of the secrets and never when for coin hunting. I think this is the first 2D Mario game I find tiring to play.
Not boring (the two previos NSMB were) but tiring...there's little to no incentive to play, level design isn't particularly good and boss fights are over before you know it; incredibly basic, though I was kinda surprised of Mario's inertia, it reminded me more of the first SMB (NES) than the previous NSMBs, but memory might not serve me well.

In the non-secret levels/worlds the whole "tons of money" is somewhat lost, there aren't mnay gold flowers out there and every other power up feels underused, even the racoon suit: very little incentive to fly around levels and it's just used to glide around...not that there are many tricky jumps, NSMB2 tries very hard to be a new Super Mario World but fails miserably.

Looks good on a 3DS LL though, 3D effect is very subtle (probably even more than Starfox) and haven't noticed the blurriness Dogg is speaking about.

[Dogg Thang]

I was about to post 'how could you possibly not notice the blur?!!' with at least that many exclamation marks and then decided to look up pics. I found that the blurriness I saw is not in the pics. So thought I'd take a photo to show you. Turned off the 3D slider to photograph and the blurriness suddenly vanished. It's a 'feature'. Turn up the 3D and the blur increases. I had it at max.

It looks muck and the 3D of the system totally negates the need for any fake messy depth of field. Misfire.

[Geoff D]

I really like it, although rightly or wrongly, I don't think I was expecting much more than it is - a fairly basic 2D platformer. I'm pretty anal about collecting all the star coins in a world before moving onto the next, but I suspect if you're not going for collects, you can probably blow through this in a couple of hours.

Coin rush mode is loads of fun to play; 1-life, 3 levels, collect as many coins as you can as fast as you can.

Like all 3DS games I don't actually use 3D, so am ignorant of the smearing/blurring.

[Phantasmical]

Im not really a high score type of person but im loving coin rush, Ive got just over 10000 so far as a high score and im finding it great fun.

[Dogg Thang]

What I'm not quite getting yet is any reason to collect coins. Do they do anything?

[Phantasmical]

§ The big coins star world at the end, you also get unlimited golden flowers once youve done it all. §

[Phantasmical]

It gets suprisingly addictive. I think its a great addition.

[BIG EDD]

It's probably the first 3DS game I've played without having the 3d slider on max
detailed backgrounds are criminally blurred out as mentioned its sacrilege