For a long time I just have not been able to sit down and play a fun game. I thought my cure for this game-less illness would have been Scribblenauts. Unfortunately the controls in that game are rather awful. I was going to buy Batman or Halo 3: ODST, but I just do not have the funds for a full priced game right now. This led to be just playing an hour of one game here and an hour of another there. To my surprise I looked at the recently realized games and saw a Mario RPG title for the Nintendo DS. Now the last Mario and Luigi title (which is the name of the newest Mario RPG series) was bad. You had too many characters to control at once and the baby versions on Mario and Luigi could possibly be the most annoying characters ever created. On the contrary the first title for the Game Boy Advance was extremely good. Well I hoped for a game more in line with the first game and bought it.
This game goes right were most games go wrong. The game play changes constantly. Each part of the game seems to be treated with lots of care and make sense in the context of the game. Mario and Luigi are eaten their arch-nemesis Bowser and that is all you need to know. Bowser does not remember doing it so Mario and Luigi are trying to escape before he realizes what happened. The DS is a two screen for you to play on. On the top one you control Bowser and on the bottom screen Mario and Luigi. The idea is that anything Bowser does affects Mario and Luigi inside his body. When Bowser is trying to lift a really heavy object, Mario and Luigi have to pump up is arms and make him strong. When Bower eats to much they have to break up the food in their path. In Bowser’s world you can move in any direction you want and explore the world around you. Mario and Luigi’s world is 2-D, so you get the classic Mario feel.
The point I am trying to make is that games now a days are based on one idea that is repeated throughout the whole game. With just one idea repeated, you cannot play a game for too long without getting extremely bored. It is like the difference between Gears of War and Gears of War 2. They added different ways to play; riding on creatures and using a turret. It made the game feel fluent and different from other games. Not enough games do this. To make a game you need more than one idea, or you need co-op to get you though the mindlessness.
~ Jeff Silva
Pierce Arrow Blogger
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