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Super Mario 3D Land
Super Mario 3D Land was Fine. It was Fine! It was a perfectly Fine way to sit down and pass half an hour at a time before the game was like "don't forget to take a break! :D" like fuck off Mario you're not my real dad.
I bought this game three years ago when I first bought my 3DS and I played it for like an hour and it was Fine so I lost interest in it in favor of things that were Good. Actually, as it turns out I am learning in this moment that the 3DS keeps DETAILED USAGE LOGS THAT NEVER EXPIRE? Holy shit why doesn't every device I own do this. I LOVE RECORDS!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway it looks like I bought the 3DS, tried this game for about fifteen minutes a couple of times in the first three weeks, then picked it up for another fifteen minutes three months later, and then didn't touch it again until three days ago.
It's just not interesting or challenging! It felt like a mobile game! The worlds don't have themes and the maps are generic - calling them maps actually feels wrong, they're just menus. It really does just feel like A Game With A Series of Levels as opposed to a world that you're making progress through. It was also SUPER easy - one of the only points of friction was when I realized at the halfway point that you occasionally had to have collected a minimum number of star medals to progress, but it was time consuming more than it was difficult to go find the extra ones I needed, and after that point I just put in the extra 10% effort to collect them as I went so it never became an issue again.
The other point of friction was the two or three points where I actually died a lot, and honestly they felt more like bullshit game design than challenges. I was happy to finally start spending some of the billion lives I'd racked up, but it was never "how do I nail this series of jumps," it was always "I keep falling off this thing like a fucking idiot because the fixed camera fucks with my depth perception" or "I never figured out what the Intended Strategy of the Bowser fights is because I keep just bullshitting my way past him."
The way difficulty is handled in this game is so WEIRD, none of the stretches I found difficult had any power-ups or anything but once you die FIVE TIMES they give you a special invincibility leaf to help you out? (And I think a permanent P-wing if you die ten times? I saw the box but never used the item so that's my best guess.) Like I understand that I don't HAVE to take the power-up and I often didn't, it's there to make sure the game is manageable for children, but it just felt weird that instead of taking difficulty into consideration with level design (like "let's put the checkpoint after this particularly difficult sequence" or "here's a mushroom right after this section where you'll probably take a beating"), they were just like "well if you die five times we'll just let you switch into easy mode." Again, it was super manageable because I had LITERAL DOZENS OF EXTRA LIVES, but it just seems weird that that was the strategy. "The rest of the game was so fucking easy we're sure you have lives to burn for the final 4% of the game which has suddenly increased exponentially in difficulty. That saves us from having to really think about helping you manage your resources." Usually I'd keep trying without taking the invincibility, but then eventually I'd just be like nah this is bullshit, I don't feel like I'm progressing towards overcoming a challenge, I'm just getting frustrated by this fucking level design, so I'd take it in the end.
Once you beat the game and save Peach you find out that Luigi is ALSO captured, and there are a bunch of Special Worlds to complete to save him, but they're just levels from the base game that have been remixed to be harder. I was actually 50/50 on whether I'd do those (the average time on How Long To Beat being 13 hours instead of the 5 hours the game took me suggests that people are including the special levels), but the way the game is set up you get credits and go back to the main menu so I was like nah, the game itself is admitting that I've beaten it, the Luigi stuff is extra content, I'm good.
I played two Special levels, and they were noticeably tougher, but I was still able to just bolt through and finish them each in under a minute and a half. There were some new concepts but nothing that really made me engage with it. No thank you to 46 more of those! I'm good! Sorry Luigi you can stay lost!
I bought this game three years ago when I first bought my 3DS and I played it for like an hour and it was Fine so I lost interest in it in favor of things that were Good. Actually, as it turns out I am learning in this moment that the 3DS keeps DETAILED USAGE LOGS THAT NEVER EXPIRE? Holy shit why doesn't every device I own do this. I LOVE RECORDS!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway it looks like I bought the 3DS, tried this game for about fifteen minutes a couple of times in the first three weeks, then picked it up for another fifteen minutes three months later, and then didn't touch it again until three days ago.
It's just not interesting or challenging! It felt like a mobile game! The worlds don't have themes and the maps are generic - calling them maps actually feels wrong, they're just menus. It really does just feel like A Game With A Series of Levels as opposed to a world that you're making progress through. It was also SUPER easy - one of the only points of friction was when I realized at the halfway point that you occasionally had to have collected a minimum number of star medals to progress, but it was time consuming more than it was difficult to go find the extra ones I needed, and after that point I just put in the extra 10% effort to collect them as I went so it never became an issue again.
The other point of friction was the two or three points where I actually died a lot, and honestly they felt more like bullshit game design than challenges. I was happy to finally start spending some of the billion lives I'd racked up, but it was never "how do I nail this series of jumps," it was always "I keep falling off this thing like a fucking idiot because the fixed camera fucks with my depth perception" or "I never figured out what the Intended Strategy of the Bowser fights is because I keep just bullshitting my way past him."
The way difficulty is handled in this game is so WEIRD, none of the stretches I found difficult had any power-ups or anything but once you die FIVE TIMES they give you a special invincibility leaf to help you out? (And I think a permanent P-wing if you die ten times? I saw the box but never used the item so that's my best guess.) Like I understand that I don't HAVE to take the power-up and I often didn't, it's there to make sure the game is manageable for children, but it just felt weird that instead of taking difficulty into consideration with level design (like "let's put the checkpoint after this particularly difficult sequence" or "here's a mushroom right after this section where you'll probably take a beating"), they were just like "well if you die five times we'll just let you switch into easy mode." Again, it was super manageable because I had LITERAL DOZENS OF EXTRA LIVES, but it just seems weird that that was the strategy. "The rest of the game was so fucking easy we're sure you have lives to burn for the final 4% of the game which has suddenly increased exponentially in difficulty. That saves us from having to really think about helping you manage your resources." Usually I'd keep trying without taking the invincibility, but then eventually I'd just be like nah this is bullshit, I don't feel like I'm progressing towards overcoming a challenge, I'm just getting frustrated by this fucking level design, so I'd take it in the end.
Once you beat the game and save Peach you find out that Luigi is ALSO captured, and there are a bunch of Special Worlds to complete to save him, but they're just levels from the base game that have been remixed to be harder. I was actually 50/50 on whether I'd do those (the average time on How Long To Beat being 13 hours instead of the 5 hours the game took me suggests that people are including the special levels), but the way the game is set up you get credits and go back to the main menu so I was like nah, the game itself is admitting that I've beaten it, the Luigi stuff is extra content, I'm good.
I played two Special levels, and they were noticeably tougher, but I was still able to just bolt through and finish them each in under a minute and a half. There were some new concepts but nothing that really made me engage with it. No thank you to 46 more of those! I'm good! Sorry Luigi you can stay lost!