So I’ve been playing the new Mario game for iOS on and off since it came out a few weeks ago, and I’ve got to say that despite some of the negativity that I read, I personally found it to be pretty enjoyable.
I’ll admit that when I first heard the news, the idea of seeing a Mario game on a platform other than one created by Nintendo did seem very weird, and I can’t help but wonder if it was more or less published in response to Pokemon Go – a game that was immensely popular, though I can’t see making a lot of revenue for the company because they only charged for add-ons and not for the game itself.
Super Mario Run, on the other hand, cost a whopping $9.99 after a relatively small number of trial levels, which is more than I’ve paid for almost any of my apps except for maybe business-oriented ones, but I was curious and I haven’t bought a new Mario game since that weird cat one, so I figured I’d give it a try…
The look and feel is identical to The New Super Mario Bros, with the only real difference being the continuous running aspect, which took a while getting used to but after a while I found really grew on me. At first it seems weird playing a game with literally only one action – tap to jump – however a lot of my complaints about other iOS games is that they try to cram in a full controller’s worth of buttons onto the screen and it ends up looking just like the console version, but essentially unplayable.
I didn’t get that with SMR and although I sped through World 1 pretty quick, the worlds to follow offered quite a bit of challenge – I certainly didn’t just blow through them all in the course of an hour!
Lately I’ve been going back to the earlier levels and trying out the various coin challenges where you have to collect five pink, purple, or teal coins from each level, with each color getting increasingly difficult. I’ve gotten all of the pink and purple for several levels, but I don’t think I’ve cleared all teal for any one level just yet – they’re pretty tough, even at the very beginning.
But it’s nice to see that challenge in an otherwise pretty simple game. In a way, it almost has a Lemmings quality to it, or maybe that Mario vs Donkey Kong puzzle game for the DS … they’ve taken the Mario universe and put an interesting spin on it to make a new experience for the purely touch-oriented iOS world, which is kind of what they do if you look back to the likes of Super Mario Galaxy, or Mario 64, or whatever the new Mario title was for each Nintendo console on down the line.
Again, it’s a little odd for Nintendo to release a game from their flagship brand for a platform other than one of their own, but maybe that’s ok. I don’t really play the Nintendo DS simply because I’m getting older and the screens don’t work for me anymore, but give me a simple Mario game that can entertain me for a few random minutes here and there on my phone and I’ll play it, and I’ll like it, too! 😉