

The music doesn’t stick around in your head for hours after you stop playing.

And in multiplayer, where four of you can leap around dementedly together, you help each other out.īut, though the running, jumping, Goomba-stomping and coin-collecting is fun, and the madcap landscapes that you tumble through are endearingly weird, the magic that animates Mario’s best adventures is missing. A loopy overworld connects them all together, offering a couple of different routes through each themed world. It has straightforward left-to-right levels set in castles, underwater, on top of giant mushrooms or in the clouds.

But New Super Mario Bros is more like the simpler Mario adventures remembered from an early-90s childhood. Recent Mario games have been wild and freewheeling, taking the little red plumber on galaxy-spanning trips and global tours, playing with the laws of physics as he jumps between planets or possesses weird creatures with his cap.
