Its a me! Agony!

[Segaholic2]

In other words, it felt like a quick cash in, which is unusual for Nintendo.

lol

[Blount]

If I may object to the following:

The game has "friendly fire" on ALL The time. When you run into another player, you cause them to bounce in some way. In a tricky platforming game, this just makes most levels simply Hell to play through with more than 1 player. Playing with four people allows you to keep playing through the level as long as one of your friends remains living, but you'll be dying so much more. This game will ruin friendships instead of encouraging teamwork, as playing through the game shortly devolves into a blame game of who ruined who's jumping or pushed who off a platform.

Whenever I play with 3 other people, we actually enjoy all the rivalry and friendly fire. Maybe it's because we like being asses to each others, or maybe it's because no one really cares about getting to the end of a level when there are this many people playing. Whatever it is, there's just something incredibly funny about 2 people running under a long chain of Thwomps while the other 2 bounce on their heads. It's not cooperative, but damn, is it fun.

For true cooperative experiences, 2 players at max should be playing. Any more than that and you're begging to wreak havoc. A couple of players can get through most obstacles with ease, with both people helping each other out if necessary and without two Toads occuping a significant portion of the play area. The way I see it, this game is a good single player experience if you play it alone, a great (and potentially cooperative) platformer with 2 people, and a really fun competitive party game with 3 players or more.

Incidentally, I thought the spin was cleverly done for a very simple reason. There are many people who, at the thought of missing a jump, will instinctively shake their hands (and sometimes yell obscenities in the process). I don't know if this was Nintendo's goal, but when you do that in this game, your character does gain a little extra boost that might just save you from losing a life. On the other hand, it's a piss-poor excuse to not let people use the Classic Controller.

[FlashTHD]

Food for thought: I found out the other day that the game quietly supports the nunchuck if you plug it in, and will change the button mappings to compensate (analog to move, B to run, ect.). Yet very few of the button prompt graphics ingame will change, so anybody who doesn't know better and is, say, prompted to do 1+Shake is gonna feel pretty awkward!

[Green Gibbon!]

I like the game myself, but it's very obvious that this was the easiest, fastest, cheapest game Nintendo's made in a decade and it's going to make them more money than anything else they've done in the same span of time.

[Zeta]

I think I will enjoy New Super Mario Bros 3 when it inevitably comes out in 2 years, because by then Nintendo will have actually worked itself back to where it left the franchise in 1994.

[Zeta]

So it turns out Yoshi is only available in six out of about 90 stages.

NSBWii basically gave me the video game equivalent of blue balls. It got it as a gift and I still feel like I was charged too much.

[Opa-Opa]

I finally got to play it yesterday and it was a lot of fun. Friendly fire is actually a good thing in this game, and since lives are practically given away for free, there's no problem at all about that.

[Zeta]

When I played it with 3 friends, after world 2, the results of every level was the same.

1 person would be left alive at the end of the stage, everyone else is dead. Not enough lives to go around, except for the very best player in a group.

By the time we got to world 7, most people would just put themselves into a bubble and let the best player do all the platforming while the others watched and only came out during the rare instances when there weren't any bottomless pits around.

World 1-3 are great for multiplayer and a lot of fun. After that, you might as well not bother because the friendly fire makes worlds 4-8 far too hard, and most of the stages feel like they were clearly not designed with more than just Mario in mind.