Super Mario 3D Land

Bought Super Mario 3D Land early December, and while I played it a lot the first 2 weeks or so it's kinda gotten buried under the onslaught of 3DS games this month.

Super Mario 3D Land addresses some of my major complaints with the recent direction Nintendo has taken with their Mario games: particularly the "Play Guide" where they would give an option for a developer speedrun to completely take over the game if you let them. How can that possibly be fun? You fail a bunch of times and the only alternative to playing it until you pass is to let a programmer from the dev team play it for you. That really frustrated me because it seemed like Nintendo was going to put it in ALL their Mario games. I'm happy to say they tweaked this idea-- in Super Mario 3D Land if you fail a level 6 times they offer the white tanooki suit which gives the player invincibility except from falling off a level. So the player still gets to play the game. That's what they SHOULD have introduced 2 Mario games back.This feels like a direct response to my rants on their survey questionnaires... believe me, I filled out those text boxes pretty well with my thoughts on this subject.....

But Super Mario 3D Land is not a super hard game like previous... it seems easier to me, compared to the last DS game. The first 8 worlds are relatively easy to get through but there's more content than that.... and the challenge level can ramp up in some of them too.

But the game still plays VERY conservatively; not taking risks and minimizing innovative ideas. The levels are very short, again they seem scared to make them too long because they want short burt gameplay because it's a handheld title. I'd rather they just improve the save system rather than shorten the level design.

As nice as Super Mario 3D Land is at times, I think Nintendo should have made it a Super Mario Galaxy game-- it would have had more interesting level design, and imagine walking all the way around planetoids like in the Wii games... only in 3D.... nice....




later
don