New Super Mario Bros. Wii Co-op is garbage

It's not a very clever title, but this isn't meant to be a very long post. I would love the game if not for the insanely awful cooperative mode. The new mechanics of picking up other players and jumping off of other players are completely ruined by the new mechanics of picking up other players and jumping off of other players. I'll pause to let that sink in.

What sounds good in theory does not work in practice. My wife and I have played up to World 4 cooperatively, but there have been a few instances where we have both wanted to kill each other. It's not exactly the happy Wii family from the marketing, and I blame the way player avatars interact. If I am walking from left to right, I should be able to walk past Luigi instead of push him. Yes, do that to a Goomba and the game is ruined, but constantly having to worry about pushing the other player off platforms or ice kills the fun as well. Why couldn't Nintendo just let the characters pass through each other when they're walking or running on the same plane? This is the single greatest frustration I have with the cooperative mode, and it makes me even madder because the fix is so obvious.

I'm not a fan of the incessant head-bouncing that goes on in the game, but I understand the desire to include that mechanic. It would be ok if several of the more intense platforming stages didn't require both characters to stay very close together while making long series of jumps. We're both Mario vets, and given how frustrating some of these levels are, I really wonder how much thought went into designing the game for more than once player at a time.

Finally, what is the deal with Nintendo pausing crap when something happens? A player dies. PAUSE! Somebody gets a power up. PAUSE! Somebody powers down. PAUSE! Link is about to kill a enemy. PAUSE! Seriously, WTF is wrong with them? It doesn't make sense and it's another element that makes cooperative play stressful.

We loved the game at first, but we're only able to play in very small doses before the deaths make us quit. I also want to point out that it's not that the game is too hard or that we can't get past levels because of the broken co-op, but that the cheap NES style deaths aren't kosher anymore and we don't want to deal with it.

Tags: New Super Mario Bros. Wii, mario

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Brett Bates

November 17, 2009

Sorry you're having troubles with it, dude. I've been playing quite a bit of the 4-player co-op and having an absolute blast. The key to the chaos, I've learned, is to know when to manually go into the bubble. Master that, and hopefully you and your wife will have more fun with it.

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Jeffrey Sandlin

I worry about any coop game that sells the ability to make the people you are playing with angry over the ability to help them. So the fact that the game can be hard to enjoy for some is no suprise to me. Haven't had a chance to play it personally but it really didn't sell me. Also the fact that peach isn't a playable character and their are two toads is lazy lazy bullcrap. Nintendo confuses me these days.

Travis McReynolds

@Jeffrey What the hell is up with no Peach? We could have had the SMB2 line-up back! I still want to give this game a go, but Luke is confirming most of my fears. Looks like a rental.

Jason Wilson

I'm eager to give this a try. Oddly, I don't have a problem with your characters pushing each other. That would theoretically happen in a 2D world, after all!

@Travis Miyamoto, if I remember correctly, actually said they just didn't want to spend the time animating peach's dress and making her move differently from the plumbers. So basically the only reason we don't have the SMB2 lineup back is that team admits it's lazy. Pretty sad.

Bryan Glynn

@Jeffrey Wow, really? That seems very unlike Nintendo to pass on a re-visitation of a classic line-up of characters out of sheer laziness. I'm still really torn on this game. The impressions of players have run the gamut from love to disgust. And I mainly wanted the game for some fun mutli-player with my roommates, but...

A lot of what nintendo has done with it's core franchises lately has struck me as kind of lazy. Having 2 toads in new super mario brothers is just the most blatantly obvious offense. Seriously. How is the game in any way improved by having a clone character as the fourth player? Their is no game design reason for it other then an unwillingness to model and animate another character. It doesn't even have to be peach. theirs plenty of other characters you could throw there. It's kind of goofy to get so up in arms about but it's an obvious and disappointing misstep.

Luke Flora

@Brett - I couldn't disagree more. Actively not playing is not a solution to the problem that I find agreeable. We did have to do that last night on a vertically scrolling level, and it's not fun to sit around in a bubble waiting for the level to be over. Also, the whole bubble thing is actually another pain because I've lost several lives when the bubble (that I cannot control) hits Luigi as he's jumping over a bottomless pit and I die for no good reason. @Jason - We'll see if you change your tune when you get pushed off a platform that's meant to have one person on it at a time.

Yeah, sitting through the level in a bubble is no fun -- but we don't use it that way. It's just a way to save yourself from falling in a pit (say, when someone bumps you or throws you) or to keep past a part that would require an insane amount for coordination for 4 people.