Introduction

Nintendo has a very well refined game design process. They take all their old ideas, put them on a bingo board, and play through a round. All the squares that got covered on the winner's bingo sheet end up in the next game they make.

Some time ago, this process went wrong, and a rogue employee jammed some new ideas into a Mario game. The game was New Super Mario Brothers on the DS, and it included moving scenery and something likes a physics system. Nintendo knew that the only way to make things right was to create the same exact game again. So, they made New Super Mario Brothers Wii, which is nearly identical. They even shamelessly copied the title of the game.

At some point during the development of New Super Mario Wii, they decided to recycle that 4-player idea that worked out pretty well in the Mario Kart games. The result is the most amazingly rage-inducing game ever made. With four players on screen, the chaos can be impossible to follow, and actually making progress is usually harder when your friends are "helping".

This brings on the yelling.

THE VIDEOS


So, alterna-source.
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Or individual files here:
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NSMB Hackpack 1
NSMB Hackpack 2
NSMB Hackpack 3 + 7-6

If you want to play these levels yourself, you can. You need a Wii hacked for homebrew and a legal copy of NSMB. Download the hackpack here and unzip it into the SD card you use for homebrew, then use the Riivolution app to get going. This method will not get you the altered title screen or text edits you see in these videos. Oh well.

THE PLAYERS
With so much happening in the game, you might want to just pick one character to follow. Or, pick each character, one at a time, and quadruple your rerun value!

Maxwell Adams as Mario

If there were some kind of space-faring phallus that went around humping gas giants it might be as big of a dick as this guy.

Pipes! as Luigi

Pipes! is pretty good at video games, but not as good as Maxwell Adams.

Ferr as Blue Toad

Let's just get this out of the way: Ferr doesn't find the "Run" button.

Evek as Yellow Toad

I think Evek was just pressing buttons at random and enjoying the show.




If you're playing New Super Mario Wii with four players, two of those players have to be Toads. This is bullshit. There are tons of characters in the Mario franchise who could be in this game. For example there's...



Princess Daisy

Princess Daisy is a unique character, completely separate from Princess Peach. She is the princess who Mario rescues in Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. Since then she has appeared in many Mario games, mainly sports titles.

Daisy is usually shown as a strong, almost tomboyish kind of lady. In a related matter, she has only been kidnapped once. This is one princess who stays rescued. She is also seems a lot more friendly than Peach.



Look at this. Rescued once, and right away she's on a first name basis with Mario. Princess 'Peach' didn't allow herself to get so familiar with the help until she had been rescued four times. Mario saved her in Mario 1, Lost Levels, Mario 3, and Super Mario World before she finally told Mario her first name.

Things are a bit different in Japan*. She was always called Peach since the first game. In America, most players didn't know her name until the intro to Mario 64.



HOWEVER, the first time America got to see her real name was in Yoshi's Safari, an unpopular rail shooter game that utilized the Super Scope accessory.



Yoshi's Safari is interesting because it uses Mode 7 to make it look like you're riding on Yoshi's back as you shoot at enemies with your awkward plastic bazooka. The best part of Yoshi's Safari, though, is they way you can lose at it.

*understatement of the century



GENO

Geno was a party member you could get in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. He was some kind of wooden puppet that was animated by star magic, or something. Geno always seemed like the coolest character in the game. Maybe it was because he got some of the most damaging moves in the game, or maybe it was because his victory dance was just a solemn nod. Magus from Chrono Trigger did the same thing. Geno is really a lot like Magus, except not evil.



The graphics in Super Mario RPG were done with pre-rendered 3d models. As you see here, the translation from polygons to pixels did Geno a lot of favors. His model looks like crap. While playing the game I never thought of Geno as a puppet, I just saw a guy in a cape with a glowing red eye.

Nintendo would probably have some trouble giving Geno a starring role in a new game, though. He is legally the intellectual property of Square-Enix. It's doubtful that he'll ever be in the spotlight again.



THE PENGUIN FROM MARIO 64

You might be thinking that New Super Mario Wii already has enough penguins in it. It has penguin powerups and penguin enemies. I say that there can never be enough penguins. I also think they would be perfectly suited to being a playable character.



Look, they already have plenty of experience at being thrown off cliffs. Plus, there's something else to consider. At some point the penguin character would get a penguin suit. This would result in...



A PENGUIN IN A PENGUIN SUIT! Just think of the benefits. You would be so adorable that your friends wouldn't attack you.



Miis

I don't need to tell you how cool this would be. You can easily imagine your Hulk Hogan Mii riding a Yoshi and dicking over Blue Toad and the awesomeness of this notion is pretty rad. From Nintendo's perspective, though, this presents nothing but trouble. In order to put Miis into New Super Mario, Nintedo would have to... put human beings into a video game.



There are a lot of human beings in video games these days. Game developers are going out of their way to create photorealistic models and use motion capture technology to create the most convincingly realistic people they can. Nintendo has done the opposite.



Nintendo has a policy of not putting human beings into video games. The coach in Wii Fit is the best example of this policy. They had to put a human figure in there to show people how to do yoga poses properly. Rather than make a convincing, realistic person, though, they make a weird unblinking mannequin.



I believe this is the one time a human was in a Nintendo game. At the end of Metroid Prime 1, Samus takes off her helmet, and we see that she's just a regular person. This game was developed by Retroware, which is probably how this slipped through. In later games in the Metroid Prime series, Nintendo made them change Samus into an anime.

You may be wondering what this has to do with putting Miis into a game. Miis don't look anything like people, so what's the problem? The problem is voice acting. The characters in NSMBWii are constantly hooting and blorting as they move around. How could you make the work with Miis?

Nintendo has made several games with Miis as playable characters, but none of those games have had voice acting. The Miis have always been silent. How could you possibly create voice acting for every possible character they player might think up?



There are a few games out there, like Worms Armageddon and Saints Row 2, that have found a solution. They present the player with a list a crazy stereotypes and let them choose the one they like. I think this kind of thing is great, and maybe if Nintendo had some more balls they would do something like this too. They've already got Charles Martinet providing wacky Italian voice acting for Mario. The Wii Punch-Out game was full of wacky ethnic caricatures. Will Nintendo ever work up the nerve to tell the player they they are wacky ethnic caricature? No. Of course not. Somebody would complain.

Update:

My Nintendo trivia, it is worthless. In Mario Kart Wii, you can unlock Miis as playable characters after you beat just about everything. They also have voice acting that varies depending the the size and gender of the Mii.

So basically Nintendo already had everything they needed to put Miis into this game, but they didn't.