The feelings that I had when starting up the Wii U in order to play my first game on it were decidedly mixed.
On one hand, this was a brand new home console, the first of a generation, designed to appeal to a large audience and introducing a touch screen enabled controller for the first time in the industry.
On the other hand, this was New Super Mario Bros. U, a new game featuring the one character in the history of Nintendo that had powered all its hardware launches and was responsible for incredible game sales.
The structure of the first level of the game is also very classic and there were sections there that I could almost remember from the first time I played a Mario game, on a counterfeit Chinese console during the early ‘90’s.
The core gameplay mechanics of the game are also second nature even to those who were never fans of the Mario franchise and I quickly found myself jumping around, gathering coins, launching fireballs at enemies, exploring underground caverns and cursing loudly when I lost an upgrade because of a badly executed move.
There are some nice new touches, even though the flying suit seems a bit out of place in the Mario universe.
New Super Mario Bros. U looks very good on the
new Wii U, with crisp colors, nice shapes and smooth motions both on the television set and on the touch screen of the GamePad controller.
It’s also comfortable to play and the second screen never distracted me from the action on the television screen.
The early disappointment is with the fact that New Super Mario Bros. U seems to lack many opportunities to use the touch screen in meaningful ways, other than simply navigating the menu structure.
Worth a full Softpedia review?
Yes.
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