2011 Post: Is Super Mario Sunshine sea punk?
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I always thought SM64 was the best of the genre it created ā subsequent open-world platformers missed the point and were all about collecting stuff, while SM64 was all about freedom of movement. Sunshine nailed that, but had worse actual levels (meauxdalās right, itās super front-loaded and thereās just not enough going on in most levels (though imo, what the hub loses in magic and mystery, it gains in just being a blast to jump around in)).
I didnāt play much of the Galaxies but they seemed like a retreat away from open levels and an attempt to refine the much-beloved, linear, FLUDD-less levels (which, tbh, i could take or leave) into something less punishing and more varied. Iām thinking Odyssey will try to be a seamless combination of those two styles, and the bits of video weāve seen seem to bear that out. I can only hope the levels end up being as dense and vertical as they ideally should be.
Do not at all care for the submap/mission screen/fast-travel but i suppose thatās Nintendo treading the same open-world path as nu-Zelda did, only via GTA instead of Skyrim. I mean, those are pretty logical features of a 2017 take on SM64/Sunshine, sureā¦
super mario sunshine rules, the haunted beach house is amazing
super mario odyssey is not a sequel to mario 64, itās a sequel to mario sunshine yāall
there is a level where you have to use the hat to clean up patches of purple poison spat out by piranha plants, itās a very āsuper mario sunshineā dynamic
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I got to get a Switch. Like, next paycheck or the one after. Marioās coming out in a few months and I should at least make an attempt at getting those 900 koroks before diving into the donk.
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Man, I would play Sunshine over 64 any day. 64 is the more important breakthrough innovative game, but that only really mattered at the time. I think the actual stage by stage design is about the weakest a (non-New!) Mario game has offered, which wasnāt really an issue at the time because it was the first 3d game to actually control and feel ārightā. I played the first few stages when the game was new and was utterly blown away; I only got to play the whole thing years later and after having completed Sunshine andā¦ itās alright? Uneven?
Sunshine has its own set of problems (hiya camera) but the actual layout of the areas is just dramatically better and more interesting. I can see the argument that it is trickier to handle becauseā¦ well it is, and some of the random things they tossed out there felt barely playtested. I think the main reason it has a bad rep is because it wasnāt 64 again, and no game could be. That was kind of a one time only deal.
Anyways, more so than Geist Odyssey reminds me of Space Station Silicon Valley. That was a solid enough kinda-platformer, a bit more puzzley than what I would associate with Mario but Iām not sure how else youād build around a character who can possess things with different abilities.
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fffffffffuuck
I didnāt think of this
Iām even more sold than I was before
Holy shit! Space Station Silicon Valley was DMA Design?! The same people who did GTA. You only ever hear about Body Harvest when people reference their N64 years. Why is this the first Iām hearing about Space Station Silicon Valley?
SSSV is a game that sorta fell through the cracks (the fate of too many third party Nintendo exclusives) which is a shame. I could point out several problems with it if I really wanted to (there is a long lull for much of the middle of the game) but itās such a wacky thing that it feels a bit mean to do so. Plus I mean, at times it is almost a 3d puzzle platformer; that is fairly uncommon today, much less back in the late 90s.
Fun fact: my PC shutdown music for years was the āyou diedā jingle from this game.
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My dudes and dudettes, Iāve been talking about Silicon Valley for years. Itās one of my most favourite games! There was a Playstation port, too, but itās terrible. Itās such a great game.
Itās so good
Body Harvest is less fun to play but the atmosphere and concept is strong enough that I like it more. The little tinkling piano when you enter the Greek boatmanās cellar dungeon and press the LEVAR
I loved Body Harvest but the terrible save system and clunky controls sure make me never want to go back to it
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Hmm.
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Is this the one with the manta ray ghost boss battle? That was cool. I liked that and the sky manta battle in Minnish Cap something about manta rays seems to make for cool boss battles.
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And Demonās Souls!
Huge, regal, oblivious to your presenceāmakes for good environmental boss fights
yeah! Itās essentially a boss battle, except its the first challenge for that stage. Then after that you go inside the haunted hotel and bash drooling ghosts
Thereās a whole sequence in there where you have to jump through trick walls and ceilings and stuff, it feels almost like a level built around deliberately implemented clipping glitches
(you go into the bathroom and see water dripping from the wall, if you jump directly up from there you will pass through the ceiling and end up in a bathtub in the room above you)
also it has this really gnarly brown sunset vibe that is totally ugly in a beautiful way
I really like that the gamecube entries for both Mario and Zelda (wind waker, not tp which i consider a wii game) have weirdly tonally specific, ocean-based settings. everyone at nintendo must have been feeling a deep tropical vibe those years
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when sunshine first released, i was pretty high on it
i feel like my dislike for the game is correlated to how many hours iāve put into it
last time i tried to play it, every level felt like a slog, and i realized there was nothing to look forward to. the game is just busywork all the way through. itās actually boggling how inferior the shine placement/puzzles are in sunshine compared to 64. sirena stands out for at least being creative, but it just isnāt fun, especially after the novelty wears off.
sunshine finds so many ways to grate on me that it actually distresses me. i considered the super mario series to be virtually unimpeachable before sunshine, so my deteriorating appreciation from the game reverses and defies my extremely considerable willingness to give the game passes.
iāve probably put at least 60 hours into the game but have never finished it (those later levels are abhorrent, even on first blush). i would be OK never playing it again.
also holy shit they could not have implemented yoshi more poorly than they did
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Kinda surprised and disappointed we havenāt seen a 3D World DX re-release for Switch yet.
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