Nintendo's tentatively titled Super Mario 3D includes a level that pays tribute to The Legend of Zelda's silver anniversary. This stage wasn't featured on the E3 2011 show floor, unfortunately, but producer Yoshiyaki Koizumi demoed it at Nintendo's Developers Roundtable for an audience of press and developers. Frankly, it looked amazing, putting a twist on the idea of the platformer that feels as new and interesting as Koizumi's Super Mario Galaxy did when it debuted a few years back. And all with a simple twist in perspective.
Like the original Legend of Zelda, this single stage of Super Mario 3D is seen from a top-down perspective -- but it works like a typical Super Mario game. While this sounds like a decidedly terrible idea, playing a game about platforming and jumping from a bird's-eye view, it seems a perfect fit for Mario thanks to the use of 3D imaging. Granted, I've only seen the game presented on a large, standard projector, but anyone with the most rudimentary mental synthesis abilities should be able to put the demo I saw together with the capabilities of the 3DS and come out with an equation that suggests Super Mario 3D's Zelda tribute will be incredibly fun to play.
The tribute also works because of the decidedly old-school design of Super Mario 3D. Despite being developed by the Galaxy team and containing three-dimensional play, Super Mario 3D is structured more like the classic NES games. Stages are linear, compact, and timed, and the camera system isn't shy about locking players into a 2D perspective when it suits the needs of a level's design. So while a top-down stage traipsing through a dungeon would have felt out-of-place in any other 3D Mario game, and it would have been impossible in a pure side-scroller, here it seems like a natural fit -- a logical extension of the game design.
So how does a Zelda stage work in a Mario game? Well, besides being viewed from an overhead perspective, the level is broken into standalone rectangular rooms. Each room is its own action puzzle of sorts, with moving floor elements and enemies patrolling the area. There's even one room with a locked door which can only be opened by lighting four torches with a Fire Flower. Familiar elements like moving platforms take on a different feel from this angle, though judging attacks and jumps seems as intuitive as it would be from a side perspective. And the level designers didn't scrimp on challenge; there's one particularly tense moment at the end of the stage where Mario has to navigate a thin plank of wire mesh with fire pillars rising and falling beneath. Meanwhile, a pair of spinies is closing in on him, making for a real sweat-inducing moment.
The designers also didn't hold back on showing off; at one point Mario drops into a pit and trampolines into the camera, which is clearly just wanton and reckless abuse of 3D imaging. Koizumi demoed another, more traditional, side-scrolling stage in which massive spiked pistons blast out from the stage's background, forcing players to hunt for small gaps between the pistons -- a new, 3D-enabled take on the classic falling ceilings of Super Mario Bros. 3. Another level had Cheep-Cheeps and other watery hazards leaping into the screen from the background, an eye-popping new take on the classic Mario/Mario 3 stages where you had to dash along a bridge as the fish leapt upward from the water below. This time, they leap out at the player -- something Koizumi admits is traditionally taboo in a platformer, but which works beautifully here.
Click the image above to check out all Super Mario 3D screens.
In a sense, the Tanooki downgrade could be seen as a nod to its heritage. According to Super Mario Bros. 3 director Takashi Tezuka, "The idea for the Tanooki suit came from wanting to put a tail on Mario. We wanted to use tail for spin move as an attack. But we thought, well, we've got this great tail now, can't we do anything with it? So we added a flutter motion was like a propeller... once we started doing that, it felt so good we said, well, let's just make him fly!"
Mario may no longer fly -- a design decision that really does make sense within the context of the hybrid 2D/3D level layouts -- but Super Mario 3D nevertheless seems to be a game centered around free use of power-up. Though the E3 demo contains only two powers (the Tanooki Suit and the Fire Flower), they're not limited in use as they were in the team's Galaxy games. Once you grab a Fire Flower, you can pelt bad guys with fireballs until you either take a hit and lose the power or swap it for the Tanooki Suit. Fireballs in Super Mario 3D bounce as they travel and reflect off of walls, opening up interesting strategic possibilities. Piranha Plants that shoot fireballs at Mario can be outsmarted by positioning yourself at corners of pits in a way that causes their fire to fall into the hole while yours bounce over the corner.
Nearly every moment of Super Mario 3D feels like a reshuffling of previous Mario games -- not in a rehashed way, but rather in the sense that the familiar has been rearranged to feel different and new, creating new challenges and ideas with a well-defined tool set. "I had the opportunity to research for Mario Galaxy: what is the tempo that makes a Mario game?" Koizumi says. "In making this game, we asked ourselves, what are the fun elements that we can use? We want to make the most Mario game possible." So, here Mario moves a little more slowly than he did in Super Mario Galaxy, with physics that feel more akin to those of Super Mario 64. You can tilt the camera angle slightly to the right or left with buttons on the touch screen, much like the shoulder-button functions in Super Mario World. The Tanooki Suit is joined by other Super Mario Bros. 3 concepts, like an auto-scrolling airship filled with cannons and pitfalls and a giant Boom-Boom Koopa at the end. Boom-Boom perfectly reinvents an 8-bit element in 3D, as he spins around the room flailing his arms and caroms off walls when hit.
The most charming 8-bit nod, however, is the fact that every single level appears to end with a staircase next to a flag pole, just like the original Super Mario Bros. These don't necessarily make sense in the context of the game world, but each one is presented in the general style of the level. It may be nicely integrated into the layout, or it may be a standalone stair stack off to the side. On one level, the stairs are actually constructed on the fly from the temporary green blocks that appear throughout the demo. With these, Mario steps on a switch and thin green platform square unfold from one another to define new pathways that disappear after a few seconds. In many cases, multiple switches need to be activated in the proper sequence in order to activate block combinations that create staircases and shafts for Mario to climb or wall-jump his way up to new areas.
Each of the four levels playable on the 3D show floor give a tantalizing taste of what Super Mario 3D has to offer. They vary in structure from open to focused, sometimes within a single stage. They're tough, demanding plenty of precision platforming, but they're hardly impossible. And at every turn, the game offers new things to do with the old, familiar Mario game mechanics. Super Mario 3D is due out by the end of the year, and if the entire game manages to maintain the creativity and sheer sense of fun contained in the E3 demo, it'll be a standout title in a year already packed with great software.
No comments:
Post a Comment