Category: Mario

Nearly all of last weekend was spent playing Super Mario Odyssey. I also took a few breaks to mash in two-thirds of Stranger Things season 2, and I was forced to sleep a little bit here and there. But mostly I just played Super Mario Odyssey.

AND WHAT A GREAT WEEKEND IT WAS!

Super Mario Odyssey is just packed – PACKED – with content and charm and fun and surprises. To the point where I think that its biggest shortcoming is how in the world is Nintendo ever going to make a worthy follow-up to this? But that concern is for like ten to fifteen years from now. Until that time, we can just bask in the perfection of the game we have.

For as much content as Nintendo showed off in various trailers over the year (that’s right, it was less than a year from reveal to release), there were still so many wonderful surprises in store that I was constantly grinning and constantly experiencing something new. There were so many unexpected gameplay twists in the assorted kingdoms that I cannot even begin to list out the best of them.

What struck me the most, however, is that once you collect enough Power Moons to get to the end of the story and defeat Bowser (which is a mind-blowing sequence of events, starting from the moment you set foot in the “final” kingdom), you’ve really only experienced like half the game. Maybe even less, if other accounts are to be believed. In fact, as soon as you boot up the post-game, you’re plonked into a new kingdom that I love to death. Absolutely wonderful and even better than the Throwback Galaxy that I adored from Super Mario Galaxy 2. I spent hours bopping around in this new kingdom alone, and there was still tons of other new content that I had unlocked that I had yet to start exploring. Really, I have no idea how many more massive secrets this game has yet to reveal.

One of the more questionable elements is that Super Mario Odyssey has honest-to-God achievements. Which is fine in and of itself; I don’t even mind that they count towards your in-game completion rate. What irks me is how they’re handled. Unlike system-level achievements on other game machines, you don’t just get them as you go. You need to beat the game to access them in the first place, and then you need to talk to Toadette, who will dole out a Power Moon for each one you’ve earned. And she hands them out one-by one. It’s a tedious process no matter which way you approach it.

As I said before, there is still plenty of game left for me to absorb. I have roughly 300 Power Moons out of… I think the official number is 905 or so? But then you can also collect up to 999 of them, so that’s a thing. Anyway, there’s a lot of game left! I’m excited! And I’m excited to see if this one is as timeless as Super Mario 64. In 2007 I thought that Super Mario Galaxy would overtake it as my favourite Mario, but I still haven’t ever replayed that game even as far as the credits, whereas I’ve 100%ed Mario 64 many times over those years.

But enough rambling. Super Mario Odyssey is really, really good! I’m probably going to spend most of this weekend playing it, too.

I have a cubic buttload of games already in my 3DS backlog, and there are a fair number of big ones coming out before the end of the year. This means I’m in huge trouble, because all I want to do on that system right now is play Chicken Wiggle.

A cute little game that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, Chicken Wiggle is the newest game from Atooi, one of the development studios that split off from Renegade Kid. you may or may not recognize that name from Mutant Mudds, which was one of the first truly stellar games to show up on the 3DS eShop (and is now on everything). To nobody’s surprise, Chicken Wiggle bears more than a slight resemblance to Mutant Mudds.

Not only are the two games visually similar, they both feature the same kind of challenging platforming. They move at a more measured pace than say, your Marios or Mega Mans, and each is gifted with very tight, responsive controls. Chicken Wiggle takes the base set by Mutant Mudds and expands on it by switching out the gun and jetpack for a grappling hook. This means the game is far less action-oriented, but adds in more exploration to make up for it.

Also the grappling hook is a worm.

While the story mode in Chicken Wiggle is a fun and moderately challenging experience, the real meat of the game comes from the expansive stage creation mode. It’s incredibly impressive, and lets you use every single tile, object, and monster in the game to design whatever kind of crazy stages your twisted mind can come up with. It’s actually even better than the 3DS version of Super Mario Maker, because while the editor isn’t quite as whimsical, you can share stages with other players online. There’s also a robust system for finding other players’ stages, which makes it much more user-friendly than the Wii U version of Mario Maker’s bare-bones stage discovery features.

There is one massive feature missing, and that’s Mario Maker’s ability to just jump into your custom stage at any point to see how something works. Chicken Wiggle instead forces you to load up the stage each time, rather than having the ability to test seamlessly. Sure, you can move the starting point around to make sure you begin at the point you want to try out, but it’s not quite as handy as being able to jump in and out of the stage while still in the editor.

I am still super happy that Chicken Wiggle came around though, as it has re-ignited my love of stage design. And it’s nice to be working in a game that’s so mechanically different from Mario, too, because it makes you think completely differently about your stages. The only sad part is that I know very few people IRL who own a 3DS, and none of them give even the slightest flip about games like Chicken Wiggle. So I have nobody to share ideas and stages with. Sad face. My fault for not having friends, I guess.