Today’s game is Super Mario 3D World. Let me tell you. This game was an absolute nightmare to setup. I love having the physical cartridges, but holy fuck do I lose them easily when I have family members that borrow them. I managed to find it though, and then couldn’t find my switch 1. One of my family members has a Switch 2 they never use though that rots in the living room, so I swiped that and just played with that. Thankfully it’s backwards compatible with the Switch 1.
I don’t play this game often, mainly because the depth of the levels is hard for me to tell apart. I struggle with it. I did 100% 3D Land but that was offset by the 3D slider making it easier to tell the landscape apart.
I got some friends together for this one too as this game feels like a multiplayer game. The multiplayer is fun. They really knew what made the New Super Mario Bros game’s multiplayer fun: Being able to fuck each other over. We threw each other off so many cliffs. It was a blast.
Overall I enjoy this game. It was the first major brush I had with it. There’s something that feels a bit awkward about it though. Like they had the idea of making a 2D-3D Mario game but didn’t know how to execute it right. So they got really close and said “good enough”. I think it’s namely the camera angle, but i don’t fully know. I would like to do this more with friends though. Friends definitely make everything fun but this especially was a blast.
You know, I have really enjoyed seeing this every day. Thank you for doing your “this is what I’m playing” posts
This doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but when I first glanced at the thumbnail on my phone, I thought it was the characters Beth and Summer Smith from Rick and Morty looking away from the camera at a cliffside view. The treetops kinda looked like their hair.
The Switch version of 3D World is one of the best Mario games ever. It’s one of the best video games ever.
Super Mario 3D World is a fascinating game when you think about it.
When Mario moved to 3D, it simply wasn’t practical to make a lot of course-based levels like this, you can understand how intense that work would be. That’s what necessitated the move to the more open, star-based missions.
It’s only recently that the skill and tooling has allowed for this and 3D World/Land are the expression of that: an evolution of the Mario 3/World formula.
Personally it’s one of my favorites, I should go back and play it again.
As a family with 2 kids under 7, I can tell you that the fucking-each-other-over aspect is NOT very fun. 😆️ It’s the worst aspect of it for my kids, because everyone gets in each other’s way and you bump into each other and you can accidentally pick each other up and toss each other over edges and stuff.
Mario Wonder is a bit more forgiving with that because you can essentially pass through each other in the 2-D plane, but there you have the aspect of “waiting for each other”, otherwise you get ghostified. Also a source of emotional pain… 😭️
