If you don't know what Super Mario Crossover is, you should do yourself a favor and try it right now. It only takes a minute to get the gist (although you'll want to take longer). Go ahead, I'll wait.
Back already? If you didn't play the game (and apparently hate fun, happiness, and the finer things in life like Ninja Turtles), let me fill you in: Super Mario Crossover is the latest in a never-ending stream of fan-made crossover games. The catch here is that the most memorable characters on the Nintendo (NES) are playable in Super Mario Bros. 1, and it's pretty good.
Super Mario Crossover is a remarkable tribute to old-school NES gaming. And this tribute is beyond the “hey-nice-job-on-the-pencil-drawing-that-looks-kind-of-like-mario-or-maybe-luigi” level and approaches “oh-wow-that-is-definitely-a-painting-of-mario-and-luigi-murdering-shy-guys” and all of its brilliance.
Definitely.
What makes this crossover so great is how true to the original games it is. The source material is represented well here. All of the sprites are lovingly ripped from the original NES games, meaning the clouds are still floating, white bushes.
Or are the bushes low, green clouds?
I think the sprite dimensions are even the same. (This results in an incredibly short Link. Before playing the game, I expected to see the taller Link from the side-scrolling Zelda II.) Keeping the 8-bit roots has the effect of making all the characters look strangely at home in the Mushroom Kingdom. (Then again, if a squat plumber doesn't look out of place, who would?)
You got: Princess Toadstool
And with sprites come animations, which are also handled well. The jumping, shooting, and even the unique death animations for each character are kept intact. Unique music tracks and sound effects for each character have also been included. Throw in some controls and mechanics that do a reasonable job of emulating the original games (painfully so in some instances), and you have an impressive package.
The real draw in Super Mario Crossover is experimenting with the characters' abilities. I don't think you've truly experienced the game until you have:
- Shot a lakitu out of the sky
- Captured a mushroom with the boomerang
- Denounced Castlevania's Simon Belmont and his rigid jumps
- Unleashed a charged shot through a line of goombas
- Cleared out a screen of bricks with the spread shot (the most overpowered weapon in the game)
- Seriously, Castlevania had the worst controls
- Drained a coin box with rapid fire
- Long live Dracula
The only way to collect coins.
The problem with having a great foundation for a game is that it's tempting to smother the game with cool ideas. As impressive a task creating this game is, I'm almost more impressed with what Jay Pavlina, the creator of Super Mario Crossover, didn't do with this game.
Everyone who plays the game is going to have some interesting ideas of what could make the experience even better. But instead of adding a bunch of half-baked features, he managed to hit the most important parts, handled the original games well, and kept the overall premise very simple. Adding all of the weapons from the Mega Man series would not even approach penance for spotty hit detection and having characters occasionally fall through the floor.
Jay also adhered to the Rule of Fun. Quoting him from his interview with Popten:
“Well… I did include an ability even though it screws up the game’s balance. And that’s Bill Rizer’s spread gun of course. I tried to balance it as best I could by making the bullets weak, but it’s still by far the strongest weapon in the game and makes everything a breeze. But like I said, my goal was to make the game fun, and who wouldn’t want to mow down enemies with spread? I knew I wanted it, and I knew everyone else would want it, so I put it in anyway.”
Wisdom. Now that I've touched on how games need to keep their concepts simple, let me disregard my own advice and splurge about what I want from the next iteration of Super Mario Crossover.
When I first heard of this game, I expected there to be a sample level from each of the NES games. I was looking forward to Mario jumping on alien spiders from Contra and Samus power bombing Mets from Mega Man.
"Mamma mia! That's-a one big koopa!"
I understand that Super Mario Bros. 1 was ideal because the levels are pretty simple and essentially only require moving from left to right. But if you're able to pick and choose levels from different game series, there's enough variety that it would definitely be possible to offer up levels that all the characters could run through (barring Simon).
The other thing is that rehashing the first Mario game over and over could get old quick. I would like to see the next game take Super Mario World and use everyone's sprites from the Super Nintendo era. (Not surprisingly, all the characters in Super Mario Crossover are characters that survived to the next generation of game consoles.) The graphics would be a little prettier, but the nostalgia would still run thick.
The graphical upgrade goes hand-in-hand with my desire for level variety. Trying to recreate every level of Super Mario World would be suicidal, but taking a level from each represented game would provide some quality over quantity.
Fan-made crossover games can certainly feel very derivative, but Super Mario Crossover has won me over. I wonder if, years from now, people will recreate our more modern games as crossover games. Imagine the Quake Guy fragging some Covenant Elite into glorious gibs. Holding more than two weapons is so overpowered.
0 comments:
Post a Comment