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Super Mario World: lost in chocolate

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I have got further than ever before, but that’s not saying much. I own Super Mario World on multiple systems – SNES, GBA, Wii, Wii U, 3DS – as well as having emulated it on the Raspberry Pi, the iMac, and (shh) my work laptop. I have played the start of it many times over, knowing to go left at the first map screen and turn on the yellow switch, then progressing right up the map to Donut Plains. I know about the secret exit in Donut Plains 2 to get to the green switch palace. I have, very often, given up at the ghost house in Donut Plains because I just hate the way the enemies move and the need for constant vigilance.

Not this time, though. Playing on the Switch (and then the Switch 2), I pushed through, and found new life beyond the ghosts in Vanilla Dome, Twin Bridges, and then the Forest of Illusion. And at this point it became really annoying.

In an effort to actually finish the game, I tried to ignore the red blinking dots that told me there were alternative exits to the levels. I went straight through each level, to the obvious end, making progress. And then in the Forest of Illusion, taking the obvious exit no longer worked; I ended up going around the overworld map in circles. I did find a secret exit in Forest of Illusion 1, but that just took me to the ghost house which I had already accessed from Forest of Illusion 3. The ghost house exit took me to FoI4, and then the exit from there went back to FoI2. I was frustrated for ages until I found the secret exit from FoI3 which was hidden in a pipe I was sure I’d been down multiple times before, just before the normal end of the level.

Keeping a Yoshi seems to make life a lot easier.

Through Roy’s castle, and onto Chocolate Island. I was doing fine until Chocolate Island 3, when I found that the exit led me into a loop which took me back to Chocolate Island 3. I explored CI2 for ages, because there was a sign at the start indicating that if I collected a certain number of coins or finished at a certain time I would get a different exit, but no amount of experimenting gave that result. There didn’t look as if there could be a secret path leading from the ghost house or CI1. And then, met with a facepalm, I realised that the arrows at the end of CI3 were pointing to the right, showing me where I had to go. I rode Yoshi along, swallowed the blue koopa to give me wings, and then made my way over to the other secret exit.

I’ve left it at CI4, which has a lot of diagonal platforms to slide down. Hopefully I won’t get lost again.

Luigi’s Mansion (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Nintendo were kind enough to give this GameCube game out to people who pay for the top tier of their online subscription service. Back when it originally came out – at the GameCube’s launch – it was perceived to be a disappointment. Indeed, I eschewed it in favour of Super Monkey Ball and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 because it wasn’t the follow-up to Super Mario 64 we all hoped was happening. Of course, I did eventually play it and yes, it turns out it was great after all. But still very different to a Mario game.

Another complaint levelled at it at the time was the length. Nintendo had reportedly “done some research” and found that people wanted “shorter games”. Luigi’s Mansion is, by modern standards, pretty short at about 5 or 6 hours, but that’s still plenty long enough as far as I’m concerned.

Now, some twenty-something years later, how does it stand up?

Perfectly, it turns out. Nintendo’s art still looks great now, even though it’s all 4:3 and SD and running on a toaster. The gameplay is as great as it ever was, and very little has actually aged. One thing that has, I found, is I could not longer control it with the default “invert Y” setting. Why this is, I don’t know. Maybe in time I’ll be unable to cope with anything but the definitely backwards “natural scrolling” mouse/trackpad setting that computer operating systems default to these days. Sad times if so. Anyway, with the Y setting changed I was away.

Everyone knows how to play Luigi’s Mansion – find ghosts, scan their weaknesses, suck ’em up – so I won’t spend time on that. Needless to say, it’s still fun. Luigi’s Mansion 3 obviously improved so many areas of the game (such as everything being more interactive – here Luigi just grinds up against most things going “unngh unngh oohyeah”) but the core mechanics are still sound.

One negative I have, which presumably I had originally but my diary doesn’t go back that far, is the Boo chasing. To properly complete the game you have to find 50 hidden Boos, one in most rooms, and when you do they float off and you have to suck them up. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to escape the hoover and fly through walls. Chasing them when they do this is a bit tedious, but there are some that run off to rooms that although next door, can only be accessed via a full loop of the mansion so it takes ages – especially as they tend to escape again back to where they came from.

That’s all though. Everything else is excellent.

Super Mario Odyssey: completed!

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It seems a little contrived to say it’s completed, really, since I can see that there are over half the moons I am yet to discover, and the game is still throwing new ideas at me each time I play. However, Peach has been rescued, Bowser is defeated, and the world is a better place. I stopped the wedding, which I hasten to add wouldn’t have been legally binding in any case as Peach was not entering it of her own free will. I’ve seen the credits. I have explored the Moon, and I have travelled back to the Mushroom Kingdom.

The inside of Peach’s castle is a clever nod to Super Mario 64, although many of the doors are missing (and my daughter was disappointed we couldn’t go upstairs to see where she sleeps). I have found a number of other rooms around the kingdom, which again look similar to the rooms from SM64, which enable me to fight the bosses again, but I haven’t because I’m more interested in finding new stuff.

I had travelled between previous worlds a fair bit, exploring and finding hidden moons, before deciding to go to Bowser’s kingdom to finish the game – only to find I was diverted to a ruined kingdom, and it turns out that Bowser’s palace wasn’t the end point in any case. I played through the last few areas over the course of contiguous days, not wanting to stop until the story was complete; and then I had to keep playing, to find out what Peach was up to, to talk to Toadette, and to see what those silvery cubes were all about. It turns out that they’ve roughly doubled the size of the game after the credits roll – and I’ve not even been to the dark side of the Moon yet.

I very rarely engage in character dress-up in games, but Mario’s outfits are fun to experiment with – and you need to get changed to access some moons, as well as seeing the 2D representations

With that rush to finish, I’ve taken a bit of a step back in terms of playing the game, because I want it to last a bit longer. A fantastic game, which looks even more amazing on the Switch 2.

Super Mario Odyssey: a variety of treats

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The game is so expansive in its scope that it’s hard to know what to write. With Breath of the Wild, and then also Tears of the Kingdom, the game felt huge because of the size of the world, the enormity of the task, and the freedom you had to approach it how you wanted. Breath of the Wild actually prevented me from posting on here for a bit. Odyssey is different – the worlds are smaller and disconnected, the tasks are short and targeted. It feels ideal for a handheld game in many respects, where you can turn it on, explore for a bit and find a couple of moons, and then put your Switch back in the bag as your train arrives at Charing Cross. Yet it also works as a large open world, where everywhere in sight has something that makes you think there’s something new to do, and very often there is.

I’ve been to the city, and formed a band – the 2D sections here were fantastic. I’ve been to a pink kingdom where they make stew. I’ve been back to revisit worlds I passed by quickly before, looking for new moons. There are a few staples in each world – the note paths, the tower of goombas – but even these have idiosyncrasies to vary the game. There are so many ideas packed into every area that I cannot even choose what to highlight.

I have around 350 moons now, and have opened Bowser’s Kingdom. I can’t quite bring myself to go there, though, because it feels too final – I don’t want the game to end, and even though I know I’ll be able to carry on moon hunting afterwards, the fact that some of my lists are barely half full makes me want to skulk around the existing levels just a bit more.