Platformer: New Super Mario Bros vs Yoshi's Island

I finished New Super Mario Bros this week. As it fell a little on the short side, my platformer bug needed a little more sating, so I went ahead and completed Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island for GBA too. Even though Yoshi's Island is only six worlds of eight levels each, it doesn't feel short in quite the same way as New Super Mario Bros does.

While New Super Mario Bros is a return to form of the original formula—there's not a flying power-up at all—Yoshi's Island is a real retro experience: it originally came out for the SNES in 1995 as Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The main thing I missed when picking Yoshi's Island back up after finishing Mario was wall jumping. I always like wall jumping, and it's used to great effect in New Super Mario Bros. Besides not having as much flexibility, the level design in Yoshi's Island is a bit more challenging. While even the secret parts of levels in Mario seem custom designed to hint and guide, Yoshi's Island feels unpolished, with challenging jumps and platform puzzles (at least in world 6). On the other hand, if you thought Mario was generous with the 1-ups, Yoshi's Island is silly with them. I had naturally collected around 120 extra lives by the time I finished.

Generally, Yoshi's Island has a bit of unpolished wackiness missing from New Super Mario Bros. There have been enough Mario games through the years that they have their own conventions and feel, their own sort of pattern language from which new games can be assembled. It's been refined through the vast series of Mario platformers, such that New Super Mario Bros is the current end product of twenty years of product design and evolution, smoothed like a river stone. Yoshi's Island, on the other hand, came only half as long into that cycle, and wasn't even a proper member of the series (at least according to Wikipedia). The special block powerups that turn Yoshi into vehicles like a helicopter don't fit anywhere in the rest of Mario. Yoshi also incorporates some elements from Super Mario Bros 2, continuing an attempt to retcon it into Mario canon. While Mario has such embellishments as the mini and mega mushrooms, they could be seen as homage to the "giant" world 4 of Super Mario Bros 3, and the similar play elements in Mario 64.

Altogether they're both excellent platformers. Yoshi's Island feels like the better, more classic platform jumping game to me, but that it took me this long to complete it probably shows how fun they made New Super Mario Bros by breaking the formula in the right ways.

Comments

[Steve Litchfield]

Great comments and mini-reviews. I agree totally with the NSMB vs YI entry.

Why only one blog entry a month though? We want more! 8-)

Steve

[BDU]

How do you jump into a connon!!!!! ^o)

[super mario]

thanks admin. very nice work...

[I love mario]

I tried to finish the new super Mario game but it was more complicated at the end . I'll try to finish it this month . I'm pretty sure that you are a very talented player but I don't think I will play Yoshi's Island .