With New Super Mario Bros. Wii safely in stores and winning applause worldwide, Nintendo creative mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto sat down with Famitsu magazine this week to discuss some of the story behind the game's design.
According to Miyamoto, NSMB Wii (which he serves as general producer on) was the most closely he's been involved with a game for a while. "It's been a nostalgic time for me," he said. "I've been getting into the game and making the sort of fine-tuning adjustments that I made with Super Mario World and Mario 3."
The way he puts it, the fact NSMB Wii exists at all is a testament to Nintendo's willingness to take risks. "It was a courageous choice for the developers," Miyamoto said. "We went with a very orthodox Mario despite the capabilities of modern game systems. With this game, though, our only really overall goal was multiplayer. I figured that as long as multi-play was fun, then simpler would be better for everything else, both to players and to us creators. To put it bluntly, I would've been just fine with basically making a multiplayer Super Mario World. That's not too terribly interesting, though, so our goal was to create a new and serious 2D Mario, insert multiplayer into that, and make it enjoyable for all walks of gamer."
As Miyamoto put it, multiplayer was the watchword for NSMB Wii from the start -- and it all plays into Nintendo's philosophy of making its games accessible by young and old. "The directors' main goal here was to make the one-player Mario playable by lots of people without having separate modes for everyone," he said. "If Dad is really good at the game, he can start to take his kids along in the stages, or the kids can take Mom and Dad along. That way, anyone can make it to the end of a level no matter how bad they are. Even if they can't beat the game themselves, it's fun for them to experience the entirety of the game. That's why what you could call the 'story mode' is completely playable in multiplayer, although there are other multiplayer modes like Coin Battle."
That accessibility pledge makes itself particularly noticeable with NSMB Wii's Super Guide, a feature that optionally plays a movie of someone playing through a stage if you get stuck. "Originally I wanted it to be viewable after failing at a level three times, but that was too few," Miyamoto commented. "You'd wind up summoning the Super Guide block even when you're playing normally, and the testers and I both thought that was just annoying! So after some trial and error, we settled on eight tries. That's about the point when people start to think 'Man, this stage is kind of hard' and get a little frustrated. If they watch the Super Guide, maybe then they realize it's easier than they thought. We want people to get though this on their own power first, so that's how we decided it in the end."
Despite the uproar this Super Guide feature caused in some corners of the Internet, Miyamoto claims that the idea behind it is nothing that new. "In Mario 3 there was an item, the P-Wing, that basically let you skip a single stage at any time," he recalled. "I figured that since that game has 80 levels or so anyway, it'd be nice to let gamers take a pass on at least one or two of them; then, once they beat the game, they could go back to those stages and try them again. In New SMB Wii, we took that to another level."
Still, as Miyamoto is quick to note, this line of thinking doesn't mean that NSMB Wii is a pushover. "I do think the game has a lot more oomph to it than the first New SMB," he concluded. "World 1 and 2 are pretty forgiving, things ramp up starting with World 3, and it gets even harder at World 6. I think by the time you master World 6 you'll have all the skills you need. You could say this game is a challenge to gamers, to see if they have the perseverence it takes."
Miyamoto is a genius. although I still wanted online.
Pixel Art can be fun.
