Leave no Toad behind! Not only is this game very pick up and play, but you can pick up and throw your friends into power-ups and secrets, at enemies, or off cliffs.
Today I got a chance to get my grubby hands all over New Super Mario Bros. Wii, just a few hours after it was announced.
Nintendo's giant booth had at least 8 kiosks for the game, so there wasn't even a wait when I got there. Somebody was quitting while I walked up, so I grabbed the first remote and started a game. I demanded that two onlookers play with me, so when the Nintendo rep joined in as well, we started a 4 player game.
There were ten levels available for the demo, and the Nintendo rep pointed out which level had the Propellor Suit, which had Yoshi, and which had the Penguin Suit. I played all 3 levels with a rotating cast of partners. The first level was the one shown in the debut trailer, but we didn't even find the Propellor Suit. One player wasn't much of a team player, and kept running really far ahead, which stretched the screen out and forced us into many awkward situations and deaths. Once they even hit a question block and released 4 mushrooms, but collected all 4 of them instead of sharing them. Luckily they got bored quickly and didn't haunt the rest of my games. But this did show how fun the game could be in a competitive fashion when you're all in the same page, racing towards the flag and intentionally leaving each other in the dust.
Power-Ups
The Penguin suit was available in an ice level, and it allowed you to shoot ice balls (which bounce just like fireballs) at enemies to freeze them. They turn into ice cubes which you can use as platforms to get to hard to reach areas, or you can do a butt-stomp on them to smash them into icy bits. Penguin Mario Bros. and Toads can also slide downhill on their bellies to defeat enemies.
We played through a level with one Yoshi in tow, and fought over him like crazy. After we calmed down, and let one person ride Yoshi, they ate everybody and spit us out. Then we started fighting over it again. After we calmed down again, we found a red Yoshi, and then a yellow Yoshi, for a totally unstoppable team of three dinosaurs and one foot soldier with fireballs. At this point we completely dominated the koopa troopas, goombas, piranha plants, and dry bones we encountered in the demo.
And of course....
No Toad Left Behind!
One player dropped out and left us with 3 players. Somebody asked if we should restart as 3 players, and the Nintendo rep said we could just leave them there and run off without them. I was surprised that a Nintendo employee wouldn't be a team player, and let him know that we should leave no Toad behind. I carried that yellow Toad through an entire level, which made it much harder as it made wall-jumping impossible. When picking up your partner, you can throw them wherever you'd like, so you can throw them up onto a platform, and then make the jump afterwards. But if you accidentally throw them into a pit, they better be ready to wall-jump their way back out.
However, when you're actively trying to cooperate instead of racing around or fighting, you can really help each other jump to some really high secrets. With 4 characters onscreen at once, you're jumping all over each other, which gives you a little bounce. If somebody jumps on your head and you stand still, they keep bouncing repeatedly, so you can jump to bounce them higher. If they hold their jump button while you do this you can basically launch them across the screen to find all sorts of secrets.
The final level we played was a dungeon level, full of sliding and swinging platforms. It was vertically designed, so if you went too far ahead all your partners would fall off the screen and die as it scrolled up, making cooperation even harder than the horizontally designed levels. When we reached the top, we got to battle our first boss, Iggy Von Koopa. The Koopa Kids are back in their first platformer since Super Mario World! That's the real megaton right there, folks.
That was the extent of my playtime today, which was coincidentally also the extent of my free time today. And if it wasn't apparent from reading this, yes, it's fun and really really chaotic, which can be good or bad depending on who you're playing with.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii hits consoles this Fall
