My bad...I've just been playing it and Oblivion quite a bit, so haven't really spent much time writing much.
Although the last SMB game that I played was Super Mario World for the Super NES, many many years ago, I have very fond memories of the Mario series and have played every one that I could get my hands on. In fact, I plan to backtrack a bit and pick up all the remakes that they did for the DS and GBA, so that I'll not have missed out on any of them.
I was of 2 minds when I heard that they were coming out with NSMB...on the one hand, I wanted it to be a very good game and do extremely well, but on the other hand, I was thinking that I didn't want to hype myself up for it too much in case it should turn out to be simply mediocre. I'm glad to say that the 2D platforming genre is by no means dead, and in fact, Mario kicks it up a notch, as usual
It's simply put, a fun game, and one that any DS owner should include in their library. Although, it can be completed fairly quickly, as evidenced by the good MasterChief above, doing so will surely leave many paths untouched. At this point, I've only completed the first 2 worlds, but I've made sure to unlock every path and grab every one of the big coins for each stage within those 2 worlds.
Speaking of the big coins, without them, you simply cannot open every path, since often you are required to spend said coins to gain passage. So even if I complete a stage, as long as I haven't found all 3 big coins within it, I will replay that stage until I do find them all. This often means looking about for hard to reach pipes, wall jumping to high up secret doors, grabbing the mini mushroom to get into the mini pipes, or grabbing a nearby koopa to bust some doorway bricks. There's always some alternative path to run along, and therein lies much of the replay value of this title. Cos if you're like me, you wanna make sure that you find and traverse all those paths, which means replaying many of the stages multiple times. It also means dropping into tons of bottomless pits, or running into some other untimely demise many times along the way.
Fortunately, they are quite lax on the 1Ups...they're literally a dime a dozen in this title. Hell, there's even a little toad house that pops up from time to time where you can enter and pick up quite a few. In fact, simply grabbing the super size mushroom almost guarantees you at least 2 1Ups...once you super size yourself, there's a bar at the top of the screen, and the more damage you dish out (you're just about invincible, with the exception being bottomless pits), the more that bar lights up, thus increasing your 1Up reward once your run of tyranny comes to an end. At this point, I've got over 60 lives to play around with, and believe me, they come in handy, especially with my desire to find all the hidden bits. I can easily spend 5 or 6 of them on 1 stage alone. But in the process of finding stuff, I often pick up a couple 1Ups along the way.
About the only thing that I can knock are the boss battles, which are relatively underwhelming. But then again, the Mario series has never really been about the boss battles, it's always been about the journey there, and to that end, they've done a fantastic job imo. The level designs are great, and have much to offer to the platform junkie.
So, without further ado, I'll wrap up by saying that it's well worth the price of admission. And now, if you don't mind, I'll be jumpng back in to settle a score with a certain hammer brother that just took me down with a rogue hammer.
