Super Mario 2006

you… played it for 60 hours… just think about an imaginary stream of yourself doing that for, i don’t know, the first 20 hours or so?

i played it last year on my modded wii. it was bad

i played mario 64 a few days ago. it is still amazingly good!

the thing is, i’m not just trying to shit on the game, i want to know what people like about it and where they are experiencing joy when playing it. sincerely!

i like a lot of things that people hate; i’m really open to changing my mind on things. i wanted to like the game but as time goes on i find myself despising it and how frustrating it is. i’d like to enjoy it again if i can, but i need a new perspective on it

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I respect your opinion about it a lot and at this point I’m basically convinced that you are right and it isn’t good, but honestly if you enjoyed something at first, then played the hell out of it and started to hate it, I kind of feel like less engagement with it is more likely to change your opinion than more…

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I’m on the same boat of “struggling to find the fun in Super Mario Sunshine”

There are significantly fewer levels than in Super Mario 64 and what few levels there are are in less variety

The level variety in Sunshine is even further diminished by some of them being fuck awful (the casino level, haunted house level, the level where you climb the grates in Pinna Park while navigating the terrible camera controls)

I played it for the first time a year ago and I finished it because I became increasingly frustrated to the point where I would continue riding on the faintest hope that it would become the Mario 64 2 that I had imagined it to be

I think it’s a design failure in very similar respects to the wind waker – tried to make a lateral move on the grounds that there was only so much more that could be done with the core mechanics of the franchise, but due to early aughts design constraints and practices, you wind up with horrendous objective and level design (among other things) to complement the novel mechanics

then in the Wii era EAD overcompensated in the other direction, then they finally started getting good again with the Wii U

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that’s a fair assessment, and you’re probably right, but i always get swayed when i hear about other people’s enthusiasm for something. it’s almost like a fear of missing out; i want to experience the good things that other people are getting out of a given slice of media. it took me watching my friend no-death run Ninja Gaiden (nes) while giving commentary to upgrade my opinion of it from “pretty good game that is too hard for its own good” to “stone-cold classic”. idk, my way of doing business is weird - i am able to dig into things better when there’s validation and cross-discourse. sometimes when i take a stand, i second guess myself and feel the need to go back and steelman my opinions. that’s a factor, too

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But are any of you playing it co-op multiplayer at 60 fps?

A key part of the fun of Sunshine to me was it having the most fun wall jumps in a 3D platformer. For some of the floating space levels you could use some obstacles as a means to completely trivialize the rest of the segment and I just felt like a clever ninja pulling them off. Sunshine mario just felt the easiest to control to do fun precision stuff like hopping on wires and changing angles off walls. Sunshine did lose a bit of weightiness but I love acrobatic mario. I only have a vague memory of Galaxy but mario felt more like a cursor in that game stopping on a dot and the levels felt more guided and less open. I barely remember any good level geometry where I could bounce off walls.

Sunshine is probably my favorite of the “playground” style of mario games. Level design and objectives are up for debate but its where I had the most fun moving and controlling mario.

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I don’t know how substantially a commentated stream could modify an opinion of the game being unrelentingly awful to the core and the worst Mario game of them all. Someone else would have to take up the task though because I don’t have the technological means or desire

i may be confused, but my position is not that the game is unrelentingly awful to the core nor that it is the worst mario game (one of the galaxy’s would take that honor if we’re just looking at mainline games)

my opinion is that it is a game with incredible, brilliant movement abilities and an almost universally misguided application thereof. the level design is scattered, messy, feels unfinished, and doesn’t mesh with the apparent strengths of the engine. the game is buggy and the camera is infuriating.

but it’s not awful to the core, nor did i imply it was

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so did someone take the gif of Easter Island Sunglasses Mario and combine it with They Live yet

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this is also just reminding me how much worse the Wii/DS era was for nintendo’s core teams than the GC/GBA era

like, EAD was actually kind of bad for most of the decade, which is something I think still isn’t widely accepted (to the point where most people who accept it take for granted that the gamecube was bad), but during the first half of the aughts they still had HAL, R&D1, Intelligent Systems, Retro and Camelot (not to mention Sega AV) doing really good work to pick up the slack, and pretty much all of them had ruined their reputation by 2008

Yeah, this is pretty much what I liked about it! The misguided application is not something that stood out to me when I played through it the first time. I actually appreciated the weird awkwardness of some of the stages, like how strange it is to have a character as bouncy as Mario trying to exist inside a relatively cramped interior (in the ghost hotel level). Those stood out to me as quirks that made the game more interesting, but I can totally understand how they would just become unbearable missteps if you had to spend too much time in the world.

I also really liked that the atmosphere of the game was so weird and specific, it felt like a semi polished bootleg mario game that somehow managed to get the Nintendo seal of approval, and I always like it when big developers take risks with their huge franchises, even if it is a risk that proves to be unsuccessful.

Even thinking about replaying Mario 64 makes me feel bored, even though I get that it is technically a better game. But I can kind of see myself replaying Sunshine just to see if it is actually as weird as I remember it.

it’s totally the opposite for me. there’s only so much enjoyment i can get out of the movement options in mario sunshine because there are simply not any interesting areas to use them. the game ends up spending inordinate focus on finicky, fiddly gimmicks rather than leveraging its greatest strength. people remember the bonus, fludd-less stages fondly because they eschew the middling novelty set-pieces of the game proper, despite limiting the moveset (to their detriment, as the fludd’s traversal potential is easily the masterstroke of the game).

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[quote=“meauxdal, post:114, topic:3715”][…] putrid […] tedious […] poor […] dumbass […] always terrible […] really not great […] straight up inferior

fuck sunshine
[/quote]

Hard for me to not read this as “unrelentingly awful”

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well why do you think Sunshine is good diplo. i’d rather learn that than see you criticize someone else’s opinion in a kinda shitty way

me, i like the helicopter jump

that’s an incredibly selective reading, free of the contextual nuance. not sure how that’s relevant. you can just as easily pull:

mario sunshine’s traversal is godly
great movement
i love the summery theming
the movement is sublime
great movement
i actually sort of like the haunted mansion
i do dig the meaningful verticality
when sunshine first released, i was pretty high on it

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Sunshine was rushed to ship during the summer of 2002 and could have used a couple more months of polishing, but it’s a masterpiece of fluid 3D character controls and there are at least a few strong missions in every area that emphasize nonlinear platforming/routing or playful use of the mechanics that I think more than make up for the handful of annoying or redundant missions (the shadow Mario chases could have been really fun if they weren’t so easy).

The FLUDD-less areas just get better if you return with FLUDD’s abilities for red coins – these kind of missions are a common criticism of the game that I just don’t get; they’re a great way to structure goals in 3D that provide a lot of pathfinding freedom, and stuff like trapeze-ing across Bianco Hills’ high wires is a highlight moment in 3D platforming design. These missions are a joy to play; I can’t think of another platformer that fuses setting and objectives with the freewheeling fun in movement so well, and the game has a lot of underrated touches, like the atmospheric contrast between the bustling coast attractions and the quieter mountain backdrop (the lack of stock area themes is enormously refreshing), or how the missions parallel the chronology of the story in each area, often starting with an exterior conflict/boss and moving towards a celebratory final mission.

I love the running gag where a guy will forcibly hurl Mario in the air (with a different context each time), eventually concluding with an entire area of guys that throw you above a void (except by now you know how to handle them). I love how convincing water is as a consistent theme and property, how you naturally learn to slide on it to speed up and then find mini-challenges where you have to race to a location, and then race back the other way. Etc.

If anything, I think Sunshine feels more important or canonical now than when it came out… Other 3D platformers sort of dried up (and often had a misguided focus on collection elements over fun traversal anyway), and while I like the platforming in some open world games like Crackdown and Grow Home, it doesn’t feel as deliciously nuanced and structurally varied as 64/Sunshine, while later Mario games moved in a different direction driven by a desire to make them as easy to pick up and play as the 2D games and a fear that the player might get lost otherwise. A big reason for Galaxy’s planetoids was that the spaces were more compact and theoretically easier to read and navigate (of course, they opened up a lot of possibilities for level design that played with curvature, wrap-around, and multiple gravity sources as well).

But lo! Nintendo’s designers noticed some players were still getting lost on those spheres. Enter Galaxy 2, which has more top-down areas that keep you moving in one direction, sometimes with little fences to keep you from falling off (curiously this paradigm is front-loaded, perhaps the sections shown to Miyamoto when he stopped by the studio). And from there, it isn’t a big step to 3D Land/World, with their narrow, curated green lawns that are impossible to get lost on but often reluctant to use the Z space, with the width of hazards and hitboxes and direction-snapping and other adjustments carefully made so that 3D won’t be a liability (though I feel this sort of backfired in 3D World; in inheriting the isometric level design from the 3DS game, but not the stereoscopy, judging depth perception is much more ambiguous, and – to answer an above post – probably the most convincing argument in 3D Land’s favor, though I still prefer 3D World in spite of some cheap deaths).

But what’s funny in all this is Nintendo was sort of chasing an ideal that they already had achieved in the 2D games, and almost ended up back where they started. There’s even descriptions of early builds of Mario 64 that sound like 3D Land, which Miyamoto discarded at the time as being too similar to the 2D games.

This makes Odyssey’s direction all the more inexplicable to me. Perhaps along with Breath of the Wild, Splatoon, etc. it’s another sign of Nintendo’s younger designers having more creative input. Or perhaps they wondered where else to really go from 3D World without treading water like the NSMB line.

I guess my main concern with Odyssey is if it focuses too heavily on transform-themed sections or solutions rather than using them to accentuate the large world and exploration elements. It does look like there’s a lot of freeform platforming though, and each area seems to have a complex objective structure. I’m not concerned about the map or fast travel, though – the areas look pretty dense with a lot of landmarks, so it may be another sort of concession that some players might get lost no matter what you do.

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this is a great argument.

bianco hills, being by many many miles the best stage in my estimation, is not the best example. do you feel like the joy-to-play missions extend to pianta village (inevitably where i stop playing the game every time)? i can pretty unambiguously dig bianco hills, but i have a very hard time doing so for ricco harbor or pianta village.

going back to something i argued earlier, “there just doesn’t seem to be any element of goodness in this game that isn’t counterbalanced by bugginess, shoddiness, sloppiness, or just straight up poor design” - i think the unique themes for each stage are great… in theory. they largely draw from just a tiny few themes and motifs, and the instrumentation leaves a lot to be desired in most cases. the hub world music is fabulous, of course… until you hop on a yoshi.

i can’t defend this music:

e: hmm i just smoked and now this music sounds better. hm. koji kondo weed enthusiast confirmed?