Mario

     I was recently in a discussion about the best game of all time, predictably the name Mario was thrown around quite a lot. My friend immediately said Super Mario Bros for one of those consoles from before time and I said – without thinking – Mario 64. As the conversation went on it was revealed that in both cases these were our first games.

     After cooling off and thinking about it, it’s a little ignorant to call any Mario game the best game of all time (that title would probably have to go to Banjo-Tooie or Metroid Prime 2: Echoes – oh or Dead Space!*) but for now I’d like to make the case that Super Mario 64 is at least the best Mario game to date.

     An invitation for cake you say? I’m game for that. I remember when Mario first popped out of the green pipe and I made him hike up the small hill in slight awe as the white walls and red roof of the castle towered before me. I tried to cross the bridge when lakatu on his cloud descended and explained some of the basic controls to me. I read every word. Then, inside, it transpired that there would be no cake and that the princess had been abducted, by someone called Bowser.

     “What now?” I asked, intrigued as I ran around the first floor and up the stairs. “What do these coins do?” – “How do I open these doors?” – “What are stars and where do I get them!?” Eventually I found the painting to Bomb-omb Battlefield – and ignored it! Just a painting – where is everything? What do I DO!?

     I concede the mystery and frustration probably came from the fact I hadn’t played any video games before (except Tetris but does it really count?) but when I finally noticed the wobble in the painting as I tried wall kicking the pay off was huge. I found myself in a battle field – pink bombs versus black bombs (I’ve just noticed some racism there) and some of Bowser’s minions in between. The pink bomb-omb tells me the emperor bomb-omb has gone rouge and employs me to deal with him. Going for my first star immediately felt like an adventure, as you run past chain chomps and squash goombas and dash from safe-spot to safe-spot as huge cannon balls roll slowly towards me. Then, at the top of the mountain, I came face to face with the moustachioed emperor and the battle of facial hair ensued! Throwing him on his ass three times seemed to do the trick and I soon learned that three was indeed the magic number (for every Mario game before or since and a great deal of other games inbetween).

      Then re-entering the painting to collect more stars returned me to the same battle field but with cannons you could launch yourself out of and red coins to collect and Chain Chomps to free. It was a playground where you could explore and even do things out of order. There were fifteen of those spread throughout the castle, plus power-cap levels and secret slides and don’t forget the castle itself! Working your way through that and exploring places had its own rewards – did anybody else discover level six, seven and eight, and wonder where the hell five was? Did anybody else try and catch that fucking basement dwelling rabbit again, just for fun?

       No Mario game has been as involving.

       The old side scrolling games were little more than animated tapestries. You jumped through them avoiding, occasionally eliminating passive enemies. It was little more than a dash to the end. Which is kinda fun to drop in and out of, and I guess you could challenge friends to set a better time than you, but it’s little more than an exercise in caution-over-speed. There’s no immersion. There’s no character.

     If we go to the other end of the spectrum i.e. post Super Mario 64, then I believe we arrive in the region of Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, which for me is a close second. It had a story, I’m sure, even if I can’t remember it. It had unique puzzles involving your flatness and folding thereof. I recall a good sense of humour and a bitch of a difficulty curve. It failed too because of the distinct feeling that it didn’t need to be a Mario game. It could easily have gone the extra mile and brought us some new characters. Imagine for a moment destroying Splicers in Rapture as our moustachioed friend is being manipulated all the while by Bowser...

      Further along Mario’s time line and, via some GBA and DS games and a really ugly remake of 64, we arrive at Super Mario Galaxy. (For those of you who are asking “what about Sunshine?” well there’s a special place in hell for that game and I’ll take you there later).

      In galaxy there was a sort of space platform thing that held the gateways to each System, of which I think there were about six. In each system were a few tiny levels, or annoyingly named Galaxies – Galaxies have solar systems in them not the other way around For fuck’s sake have you never heard of cosmology!? While at first I enjoyed the fact there were more environments you never had to spend long in each one and there was less to do. They were frequently very linear despite its obsession with balls and things cut from balls or balls with bumps or balls erupting lava... Some had some really cool things about them but seemed only to exist for that cool thing. And it had less character than a margin in a school textbook. Mario wuz ‘ere.

     There wasn’t enough to do in each ‘galaxy’ and because you never had to spend much time in each galaxy you never got to know them and so they never gave any lasting impression, unlike, say Tall Tall Mountain or Tick-Tock Clock. The setting often repeated, too. Like Boo Mansion-ish levels and Space War Ship stuff. I can’t help but feel if they’d consolidated these into meaningful arenas they’d have really been on to something with the gravity warping adding some new game-play elements.

      For Galaxy 2 please see the above paragraph – although it was worse: you no longer even had the space platform. You had a floating rock thing that (coincidentally) looked like Mario. Sure as you progressed through the game it’d pick up some new objects and stuff but in order to enter the levels you had to go through a fucking menu screen. And your purple mentor was constantly trying to get you to stop playing – every half hour it tries to get you to take a break – go for a run, meet someone nice and make or find some children to hate this game instead.

     One last game before we go to the seventh circle. Mario Land 3D, for the 3DS (of course because it has “3D” in the fucking title). This manages to take everything that was bad before Mario 64 and everything that was bad after it – completely by passing all the good stuff; like someone buying cheese for all its milky qualities.

      And now for Mario’s sunshine adventure, lamentably the closest thing Mario 64 has ever had to a sequel. I so nearly loved this game. Delephino Plaza was a great hub and the levels that branched off of it, like the hotel, harbour and beach were all huge but they were never complete – they were never all there at once. Instead of being allowed to explore the beach resort rather than kill the caterpillar boss you had to kill the caterpillar boss. Then perhaps you were allowed to explore up the cliffs. Unlike in ‘64 the level loading screen gave you an ultimatum rather than a hint. It was the first backwards step that lead to the cheese of 3D Land. FLUD was kind of a good idea, fun at first. You got to interact with the world in a positive way but then that was all you ended up doing! It hated you doing anything other than squirting water at things until they went away (and if your thinking of telling me about the bits where water Mario stole FLUD to do god knows what with then you can listen up – those pre fabricated jumping bits were nothing other than tricky exercises in caution). The fact that minions could be dealt with from such a range neutered them too and over all it felt like a flaccid, uncaring version of 64.

    

     Super Mario 64 isn’t perfect either. Banjo-Kazooie did everything Mario 64 did except Rare did it 64 times better. I mentioned Banjo-Tooie as one of my favourite games of all time and that is because it looked at its predecessor and made it better. This is what games are good at – unlike other media – and so it infuriates and puzzles me why Mario games have gone so colossally wrong.

* But then everything I liked about Metroid Prime 2 was in Dead Space except Dead Space was scarier and slightly better textured – anyway that’s another essay.