If you've been holding off on taking the PS VR2 plunge, today's the day to leave crappy old crud-reality behind. 132 bucks off the headset, Sense Controllers and one helluva good showcase title for the tech is a very enticing deal. Take it from the guy who's played everything worth playing on the system—it's awesome and well worth a spot in your collection.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong is fine, but Nintendo remade the wrong game
14.02.2024 - 13:01 / polygon.com / Nintendo
We’ve reached that stage in the Switch’s life cycle when Nintendo — never averse to raiding its back catalog for material in the first instance — is liberally pulling old titles off the shelf to remake and pad out the aging machine’s release schedule, while its core development teams presumably focus on software for the hybrid console’s successor.
In the wake of last year’s Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario has been a particular focus of Nintendo’s old game reclamation department. Late 2023 saw a remake of Super Mario RPG, while this year will bring a new version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Sandwiched between these two we get something a little more esoteric: Mario vs. Donkey Kong, a remake of the compact 2004 puzzle-platformer for Game Boy Advance.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong belongs in a curious lineage of Mario platformers, almost an alternate history for what the games might look like if 1985’s revolutionary Super Mario Bros. had never happened. In these games, the original Donkey Kong arcade game is the template: Mario has a limited moveset and much less momentum, and runs back and forth on tight, one-screen levels that are densely packed with puzzles and tricksy challenges. After Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the series mutated into something else again, a sort of auto-platformer for the DS consoles in which the player controlled marching mechanical Mario toys called “Minis” with the stylus.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong is where those Minis made their debut. The conceit is that Kong, in troublemaking mood, has raided a Mario toy factory and stolen a sack full of the cute clockwork plumbers. In each themed suite of levels, Mario must rescue six of the toys individually, then lead them, pied-piper style, back into a toy chest, before facing Kong in a barrel-chucking boss battle.
After Super Mario Bros. Wonder so perfectly captured the freewheeling delights of the 2D Bros. games, Mario vs. Donkey Kong’s precise, constrained gameplay takes a little acclimatization. Mario has a few useful moves — he can jump higher from a handstand, or from a skidding direction-change — but controlling the plumber in a 2D platformer without a dash button or wall-kick initially feels like playing with one hand tied behind your back.
Acrobatics are not what Mario vs. Donkey Kong is about, however. This is cerebral platforming where puzzling out the route to the goal — whether that be a Mini in its capsule, or a key which needs to be carried to a locked door to reach the next screen — is just as important as making the (sometimes very precisely timed) leaps. The game constantly throws new mechanics and enemy types at you, though “enemy” is something of a misnomer here, as most of them serve some other purpose in the interlocking
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