“Man, remember when games were good?” said my fiancée as she waited for a blue Yoshi to eat a Starman so she could exit the level and go cheat her way through a tougher one. We were of course playing Super Mario World, a game that came out when she was 9 and I was 11.
Nintendo had re-released Super Mario World on its fledgling Wii U console. You can download the 22-year-old (oh God I am so old and will die someday) game for 8 bucks; if like us you have already purchased a digital version of Mario World for the old Wii, you can pay $1.50 to upgrade it to the Wii U version. Said upgrade entails four distinct advantages: You can play the game on the Wii U GamePad controller’s screen as well as the television; you can save your game at any time; you can reconfigure the button layouts; you do not have to boot into the abysmal Wii Menu and dig out your old Classic Controller to play it.
This is worth a buck fitty. Especially in the case of a true classic like Super Mario World. As I may have noted before, Super Nintendo collecting is all the rage these days, with prices spiraling impossibly upwards on what used to be dirt-common games, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that many of the games still deliver what players today are looking for. In most cases they generously allow you to save your game progress without cumbersome passwords. The difficulty levels of the games are more embracing of casual players – Final Fantasy on the 8-bit NES is a real pain in the ass, exempli gratia, but Final Fantasy II on Super Nintendo is downright relaxing.
Not to mention that the pixel aesthetic is making a comeback – this specific pixel aesthetic. Top-selling iPhone games use a deliberately 16-bit aesthetic – they might call it 8-bit, but it has too many colors and too small dots for that.
So as of right now creaky old Super Mario World is rivaling NintendoLand and New Super Mario Bros. U for hours logged on our Wii U. In fact, prior to this we’d barely even powered the damn thing up in 2013. After releasing a handful of games for Christmas and promising many more before the end of March, Nintendo delayed everything forever; ostensible “launch” game Pikmin 3 now won’t be out until August and additional ostensible “launch” game The Wonderful 101 has gone AWOL. Third parties are releasing jack.
On a recent 8-4 Play podcast, I said that Nintendo should immediately institute some kind of App Store-like development environment, mobilizing the combined efforts of the world’s indie developers to generate lots and lots of Wii U content more cheaply. Ryan Payton, formerly of Metal Gear Solid and Halo fame and now of the indie game Republique, offered that Nintendo could do something similar but by looking inward rather than outward: Make Wii U a “Nintendo paradise,” he said, a one-stop shop for Nintendo’s entire history.