Which is the most super of Mario’s adventures
This week featured the date of the year which has become something of a celebration of all things Super Mario. And it’s not because of an anniversary of a game or because Nintendo decided it was the fictional Mario’s birthday. Instead it’s because the date March 10th can be written for short as MAR 10 which reads as Mario.
It’s a very silly, but fun excuse to celebrate Mario and here on xstreamed.tv we’ve decided to mark Mario week with a break down of all of the 3D Mario games ranked in order from worst to best! Enjoy!
8: Super Mario 64 DS
When the Nintendo DS launched it’s big hitter was this update of Super Mario 64. It was a smart move by Nintendo as they had found huge amounts of success of recycling the NES and SNES era Mario games on the Game Boy Advance and didn’t actually create an original Mario platform adventure on the GBA. So when launching the DS you can understand why they looked to the game which had launched the N64 and was by many hailed as the greatest game of all time for a long period.
But Nintendo made a few decisions that meant that this game wouldn’t live up to the N64 original. Just as with the Super Mario Advance series, Nintendo were great in not resting on their laurels (pity they did with Super Mario 3D Allstars) and went back to the design table to add to or tweak the game in many ways.
Firstly the good news is that for fans of the original there were now an additional 30 power stars to collect not found in the N64 game. The bad news is that this didn’t bring any new full sized levels, but some bonus areas or extra stars added to existing levels. An issue with this is that these being secret stars meant they were harder to track on your progress screens.
More good news is that Nintendo added Luigi and Yoshi into the game, and even added Wario. The bad news is that this gave it a Donkey Kong 64 style system where certain characters were specifically needed for certain tasks and players of the original would now find that Mario could no longer collect certain stars or items that he previously had been able to collect.
And lastly Nintendo decided not to add an analogue stick to the DS, which meant that whilst Super Mario 64 had revolutionised the industry partly because of the 3D control method, this was a step back. You had two choices really. Either control Mario and pals in a similar way to pre-analogue PSOne games or attempt to use the touch screen as an analogue control stick.
This may sound ok at first, because Crash Bandicoot controlled fine on the PSOne right? Yes, but that game was designed around the limitations of a D-Pad whilst Mario was designed around being able to make Mario creep, walk or run at different speeds based on different scenarios. Also if you’re thinking of touch based analogue sticks like you’ll find on your iPhone think again. The DS touch screen wasn’t anywhere near as responsive unless you used the stylus and it was also located in the middle of the device which meant holding the machine to use your thumb was a problem.
The pro tip is to play the DS cart on the 3DS or play the download edition for the Wii U as both allow you to play using those consoles analogue sticks. This doesn’t reinstate analogue controls however and you’ll still need to hold down a run button, but it does make it better then playing on the DS.
