Cognition Dissemination: The Year I Learned How to Play Mario Games Again

As too old of a man who’s been playing video games since shortly after being born, I’m intimately familiar with the Mario series. I played video games before getting an NES for Christmas as a six-year-old, but Super Mario Bros. was the game I first truly enjoyed. There was a point where I didn’t think I’d ever finish it after my father was able to progress further than me, but I eventually I came to grips with the controls and platforming enough to make it through most of its levels to finish it.

(Confession: I didn’t finish it without using Warp Zones into later in life.)

But I kind of drifted away from Mario games over a little more than the last decade, though not because I actively wanted to avoid the eternally-young plumber and his reliable crew. I just wasn’t purchasing the Nintendo consoles the games released for, despite meaning to eventually. I grabbed Nintendo’s handheld systems and its Mario games, and played through titles like the first two New Super Mario Bros. games on DS and 3DS and Super Mario 3D Land on 3DS. I’d always heard that the better Mario games were on consoles, with the handheld variants being easier — considerably so with the NSMB games.

I now finally own a Nintendo Switch, my Nintendo console since the GameCube. It was time to slowly readjust to Mario games again after my skills waned over the years. It’s been more of a struggle than I expected.

Don’t let me mislead you, though; it’s been a very fun struggle.

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe was the first game I purchased for Switch, because I still feel that it’s wrong to buy a Nintendo platform without a Mario game to accompany it. Following the likes of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Land, Super Mario World, and Super Mario 64, I had to continue the trend. It didn’t take much time for me to adjust to the mechanics because it hadn’t been that long since playing New Super Mario Bros. 2 on 3DS. The level of challenge, though, was a hell of a lot higher than I was prepared for even after reading about it. We’re talking about the main quest for a Mario game here, so it’s a good challenge. Difficult, but not to an unfair degree.

The challenge made playing through the main NSMBU campaign and finishing many levels considerably more rewarding than doing so in the handheld games. The levels themselves could sometimes be difficult, but the combination of being fair with the challenge and the levels being short were enough to deter me from throwing in the towel. It was too much of a struggle to obtain all the Star Coins before the game’s end for my first playthrough, but I’m sure I’ll go back to do that one day.

This is the “Deluxe” version of New Super Mario Bros. U, which means it also includes New Super Luigi U, an upgraded version of the game originally released as a standalone expansion on Wii U. It’s also hard as hell, offering remixed version of levels with considerably shorter time limits that make it a Lost Levels version of the original game. This version, as much as it pains me to admit, beat ME instead. But I vow to beat IT back one day. Just… don’t go through this blog’s archives and look at all the promises I’ve made over the years, okay?

Since it’s been a little over two months since I’ve played NSMBU, I was fully ready to dig into Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury over the Christmas break. I remembered the complaints well from around the time Super Mario 3D World originally released on Wii U in 2013, where it was criticized for being an iteration of 3D Land for home consoles. I expected the game to be a lot of fun, in the way most Mario platformers are. But it’s incredible. The level of fair challenge is even greater compared to the aforementioned Mario games, and the level designs themselves never get old despite the large number of them within the worlds themselves. It’s so good, in fact, that it makes 3D Land feel like a prototype, a humorous turn of events given the old pre-release criticisms.

I relearned how to jump and stomp within a 2D plane in NSMBU, but redoing all of that in 3D is a different ball game. But there’s nothing like a good challenge to help a player easily readjust on the fly, when the difficulty feels fair enough and the levels themselves well-designed enough that it encourages retrying and replaying. It’s also good to play a game with areas that weren’t obviously made to take advantage of the 3DS’ glasses-free 3D capabilities thanks to being one of the platform’s earlier games, as a person with a visual impairment that makes it very difficult to see 3D. 3D World is a great game that comes packed with solidly-designed levels.

It feels good to return to the Mario games after too much time away, and the above should make it clear that I’ve very much enjoyed my time relearning how to play them, honestly, platformers in general. One challenge awaits: I’ve still yet to return to fully 3D Mario games, as I haven’t played one since Super Mario Sunshine in the GameCube days. In addition to getting around to Super Mario Odyssey, perhaps there will be a day when Nintendo releases an updated version of Super Mario 3D All-Stars that contains both Super Mario Galaxy games. For now, I might as well ease my way back into them with Bowser’s Fury.