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There are those who wait for SuperMario as if it were the first time. He gets excited about each new power of the plumber, knows all the animations by heart and appreciates the construction of the levels. For me it’s not like that. It’s not a personal matter but a gender issue. Platform games, of which the plumber is the spiritual inventor, are those where you generally have to go from left to right, jump and overcome puzzles. As if that wasn’t enough, the Super Mario video game series has more than 300 titles, including main games, spin-offs and smartphone titles. The first was from 1985 and I was in my late teens.
When you get over 50 and you have a son or daughter or a minor who doesn’t hate video games, Super Mario becomes interesting again. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a Nintendo Switch exclusive released on October 20, was designed from the start for multiplayer mode. He claims that it was designed to be played by two, or rather to accommodate up to four friends in the same game.
It’s been eleven years since a new Super Mario came out. So for the review I tried to involve my eight year old son. Playing with a pre-teen is not easy for Generation Xers: they run around too much and don’t enjoy anything. This Super Mario, however, managed to slow them down. And it’s all thanks to an almost perfect level design. Then: Multi-player games are usually chaotic. There’s the one who pops into your head, the one who takes all the power-ups and the one who never waits for you. Super Mario Bros. Wonder brings order and solves some solutions.
The basic chaos remains but it’s never annoying. It is also well studied in the narrative because it is absurd in the animations, full of ideas and damn fun. An example of all the talking flowers that are hilarious, unexpected and finally a new idea. Almost perfect because there are no unforgettable boss fights, sometimes some animations are lost and then more characters could have been added. In any case, we are faced with perhaps the best 2D horizontal scrolling adventure of recent years. Can also be played in single player.