The reason you play this game differently than any Mario before is a lesson in psychology, an experiment of the absurd: The challenge to collect 1,000,000 coins.Ī small counter on the bottom of your screen accumulates every coin gathered after every level, whether you reach the flagpole or fall in a pit. Which makes this question, the one that kept popping into my head as I played, all the more surprising: What if New Super Mario Bros. The problem with a winning formula is just that – the product comes from past and known results, repeated and perfected, until inspired creativity gives way to formulaic, calculated risk. Three years after that, this sequel arrives on Nintendo’s new handheld, looking suspiciously un-new. Wii brought the formula home to critical and sales success. The game went on to sell over 20 million units. And yet none of this mattered, because: Look! I’m eating mushrooms and jumping atop flagpoles, just like I used to.

The DS game was too easy, with a non-descript plasticine art design and music that veers far too close to annoying for a series with perhaps the more recognizable theme in all of gaming. Fifteen years of anticipation brew a potent brand of forgiveness. games began in 2006 on the Nintendo DS, the first brand-new 2D Mario platformer since 1991’s Super Mario World for the SNES.

I take a step and a coin erupts from my golden block-head. No-my head is the block, with a block-nose and block-mustache. I jump again and the block covers my head. Then I jump and punch another block stuffed with coins until it turns golden. Musical trampolines bounce me skyward, dancing quarter-notes trailing behind like jetstream: an acknowledgment of action-as-rhythm, playing-as-music. Coins hang in the air, directing my line of movement through a familiar candy-coated exotica. A sentient fungus waddles forward and I stomp it. A single hit, a rush of dopamine-pa-ding! That two-tone chime, an echo of itself, the sound of finding something once lost.

The block asks me a question I answer with a jump and a punch.

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