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I was stuck on a level last night for ages - I must have lost over ten lives, but luckily there were loads of coins available to rack up extra lives, particularly in the room with the second star coin. Getting to that wasn't that easy - you had to go up the second green pipe in the screenshot, which involved waiting until the platform had raised to its peak, avoiding the waves of lava, and bouncing off the dry bones. I did that many times in the end, dying later in the level or on the boss.

The sign of a great game though - at no point did I think it unfair or want to give up.

I've continued through Soda Jungle, and found a level called Painted Swampland.  The backgrounds and some of the foreground elements to this level have a very stylistic look to them ...


This is a really pretty game.

This whole area was a little confusing at first.  I had initially found a secret exit on stage 2, but I didn't follow that path and instead replayed the level to get the proper exit.  The secret path seemed to disappear off the bottom of the screen.


After I'd played stage 3 and the tower, I found myself on the previously mentioned painted level (4) and another level (5).  Each time I exited one of these levels, the path led back up in a loop.  In order to progress, I actually had to find the secret exit in stage 5, which then took me down to meet the other end of the secret path from stage 2.

Nintendo fixed my Wii U in a very efficient manner indeed, although unfortunately the game saves weren't carried across so I'll have to restart collecting ornaments in Nintendo Land at some point.

For now, however, I've started to play through NSMBU, even though I've not yet completed the Wii game.  I'm not sure why I stopped playing NSMBW, but it seemed a bit too much hassle to actually start it up, and I think I was bizarrely put off by the fact that I found a warp from one of the towers to the start of world six.  I was finding the game pretty tough as it was, and so being catapulted through the game like that was a bit too intimidating, and I also felt like I was missing out.  I tried to travel back to world four, and then had difficulty in the tower level getting to the proper exit.

I'm sure I'll go back to it at some point.  It was jut a bit tough at times, and felt like there was too much content for me to actually get a grip on giving the limited time I get in front of the TV.

Perversely, NSMBU has more content, has a more varied and labyrinthine map, and at times is a little tougher (but generally seems a little easier), but I find that I can easily understand where I'm going and how much of the game is left to do.  Because of this I've played it a lot more; I've now defeated the boss in three worlds (Acorn Plains, Layer-Cake Desert, Sparkling Waters) and have half-completed two other levels (Soda Jungle and Frosted Glacier).  I found it a bit annoying having to choose a path after Layer-Cake Desert, but at least I knew I could go back at any time.

The game, as with all the NSMB games, is really well designed and playable.  Something that's new here and works well is the Miiverse integration.  You can see messages from other players before and after a level, and if you die then you also see things posted by other players who died at the same point.  It turns a single-player game into a social experience, even if half the messages are from people you've never met!

The other benefit of Miiverse, and its new webportal, is that getting screenshots is much easier than it used to be!  I just need to be a bit quicker in pressing the home button ...