Tag: gamecube

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How’d It Age #10 – Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Gamecube

It’s been long enough since the original came out that I only vaguely remember the feeling of playing this game, but not so much the specifics of playing it. I can remember the feeling of the combat being good. I can remember the feeling of the characters and story being funny. What I remember more are the places where newer entries in the series felt like they “fell apart” for me. However, replaying Thousand-Year Door is making me realize that a lot of what I don’t like about modern entries already kind of existed in this one.

Now don’t get me wrong; the combat is this game is still fantastic and was really the driving force behind me playing the game. I would still argue that the core Paper Mario combat is one of leading examples of how to make turn-based RPGs heavily engaging to the player instead of a passive activity. Tying each attack to a different series of inputs for better damage gives the player that little bit of action to keep them involved in combat in a way that keeps their interest and allows it to feel more rewarding to not skip combat. Tying a defense boost to learning and remembering the various enemy attacks gives the player that little constant reward for being involved in combat that makes fighting an enemy for the tenth time more than just a chore.

It’s such a little thing but it makes the combat so much more fun. Other JRPGs have tried different things to get similar feelings. The Persona and SMT series have used type weaknesses to grant the players extra turns to achieve a similar result. The Bravely Default series allows the player to manipulate turn order to stack attacks and blow away enemies. Heck, the combat in Paper Mario was a direct evolution of the standard set by Super Mario RPG. Just giving the player something to do other than pick the attack and fall asleep is such a better result than the norm for the genre.

However, combat is one of those spots where doubt started to creep in. One of the things that really bugged me about more modern Paper Mario entries was how odd the power curve felt. It always felt like it was going in really weird jumps because the numbers were always inherently small. You’d kind of get to a new area, be beat up a bit, then be given a magic power upgrade and suddenly be effectively overpowered by only gaining one attack. That absolutely exists in TTYD, and wasn’t something I really remembered.

The places that I really started to notice it were when the jump and hammer upgrades were not in alignment. I’d suddenly be in areas where one of the two attacks effectively did 2-3 less damage, which meant that it took trash fights from one to two turns per-enemy or would do so much less damage with flower point attacks that the weaker one would be effectively useless on bosses unless mechanics of the fight required the specific attack. This was likely exacerbated by the way I was building, which was to go all-in on badge points so occasionally I would just get a HUGE upgrade swath because I would stumble upon a badge or two that added attack power that would totally change the way I tackled fights. When a boss has maybe 50 HP, suddenly being able to do 3 or 4 more damage per-turn is enormous. It felt off in a way that made me realize I honestly kind of prefer the larger numbers and slower power curve style of the Mario & Luigi series to this, because that at least feels like I’m making consistent growth throughout the game.

The other thing that I really forgot about was just how much walking there is. Holy hell do they like sending you across the same environments about 10 times per chapter for no reason. Sticker Star and Color Splash were somewhat guilty of this in that you’d be walking around a lot simply collecting the right cards for combat. Super Paper Mario was definitely guilty of making the player re-traverse areas way too often. Thousand Year Door just does it too a level that I don’t remember, or perhaps just shut out of my brain. It was so jarring at points that I’d literally put the game down for the night because I was tired of going through the same areas. The island chapter in particular was egregious for this where the hub town for the chapter and the goal for the story were on entirely different ends of the world and you had to cross it at least 4 or 5 times for different reasons.

I guess all that is to say that while this game is still good, it definitely has rough spots. The remake is definitely a strong product, and it brings the game to modern consoles in a visually gorgeous package. However, this is still a 20 year old games with 20 year old problems that at this point hadfaded from my memory. The thing is though, this came out within six months of the Super Mario RPG remake and that game has aged so much better. That one has the nice combat advantages of this series, but was a lot less quirky in the remainder of its JRPG tendencies and has much better overall environmental flow. Like the Mario & Luigi subseries, I think up against this game it ends up being the victor because its mechanics have just aged so much better.

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How’d It Age #4 – Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Gamecube via Dolphin

This is such a Sonic team game. It’s a strange concept that could seemingly only come out in the early 00s. It’s a 3D platformer that completely skips the lessons that Nintendo was giving out with their own games. It has every single problem that the Sonic Adventure games have. But despite that, it’s still surprisingly fun.

The one thing that really stood out to me was how fun the egg mechanic was. Besides eggs giving you core abilities (faster movement, jumping, attacks, etc), it was just fun to see what would come out of them. Sometimes it’s little helper dudes with elemental powers that can help traverse levels (ex: a water-based seal that can put out fires). Sometimes it’s hats that can provide additional benefits to your eggs (Ex: iron egg that increases attack power). Sometimes it’s useful items (ex: TNT that you can toss at enemies). You can learn over time what the eggs are, but because they are sort of scattered around the levels haphazardly, you’re encouraged to rapidly grow and hatch the eggs and move onto the next one so you can build your arsenal up throughout a single mission. By the end of the level, you’ll typically have some partner animal, some hat, some item, and be able to use them to achieve whatever the specific goal of the mission is.

More often than not I was kind of ignoring where I was trying to go and just looking around to find eggs for the sake of finding new things to hatch, which is an interesting change from what is otherwise a pretty standard platformer setup. Each world has a set of missions that you do one at a time, where you kind of traverse different sections of the area during a specific mission. Disconnected from the egg stuff, it’s not really all that different from a Mario 64 pattern. However, the eggs provide a distraction and thing to go after that Mario or even Sonic Adventure really didn’t have.

However, it’s pretty obvious that this is a Sonic Team game because it has all of the hallmark problems of the rest of their 3D titles of that era. The game starts out pretty manageable, with simple flowing level designs that really encourage the higher pace egg rolling, but it starts to slowly go off the rails. Levels start concentrating more on platforming, which works fine but isn’t really a strong point. In a lot of cases, it just feels like there isn’t much flex room in the platformer timing. Gaps aren’t quite forgiving enough or platforms are a little too tall for the jump height to where it doesn’t necessarily feel hard but feels unnecessarily frustrating.

In particular, you start running into wonky physics issues as things get more complicated. Sometimes it’ll be that your egg gets on top of a platform but you don’t, causing you to fall to your doom. Sometimes it’s a slightly unpredictable way that your character’s speed works that causes you to roll off the edge of a platform instead of stopping. Sometimes it’s a set of rails that you’re trying to roll onto that you instead clip through. This is all distinctly not aided by a typical Sonic Team camera. It has a habit of turning when you don’t want it to. It has a habit of not ever being focused on the boss that is attacking you. It has a habit of clipping through the environment and completely blocking your view.

However, those were all things that I was expecting. I know it sounds weird to go into a game expecting some subset of bad things to be there, but with Sonic Team that’s just kind of the experience I know I’m getting into, for better or worse. Nights had these problems. Sonic Adventure had these problems. Post-Sega games like Balan Wonderworld still had these problems. It’s just one of those things that I go in expecting, so I was annoyed but not unhappy about it. The thing that kept me playing was the rest of the stuff around the known garbage, and that was fun. The core egg stuff was all just kind of fun enough for this to still be good 20 years later. It’s a weird little 00s with all those problems, but it’s still a totally fun experience despite the issues.

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Game Ramblings #119 – Super Mario 3D All-Stars

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: N64, Gamecube, and Wii

Replaying these three all at once is an interesting experience. They’ve each got their quirks, and to some extent some have aged better than others, but there’s still a lot to like here 15-25 years later. There’s a common mechanical thread that you can see through each of them and you can see the lessons learned in how the next game has improved. That process of iteration gave us three great games, and ultimately led to Super Mario Odyssey, which is arguably the best of the 3D series.

Of the three, Super Mario 64 has aged the worst. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, but it definitely feels like a 25 year old game. Mechanically it ends up just feeling kind of stiff. All of the new 3D moves are there – your triple jump, side somersaults, wall jumps, ground pound – but they aren’t quite there yet. Jump distance is still a little too dependent on your speed, the threshold for side somersault is still a little too tight, the difference between diving forward and doing a jump kick is still a little too vague, but the thread is there to future games.

The biggest problem at this point for Mario 64 is the camera though. It’s just not good. It wasn’t particularly good when it came out, and compared to modern 3d platformers it’s pretty rough. The mix of some camera control for the player and some forced rotation from the level just feels really bizarre. The games that do it best today are ones that either go full player control or full level control and stick to making those feel smooth. To some extent though, I think it’s hurt by playing on a modern gamepad. Playing on the N64, the different levels of camera depth and direction at least felt correct in that you press a button and a single action occurs. On a stick, there’s a large mental hurdle to get over when holding the stick off to the side doesn’t just smoothly rotate the camera. I don’t particularly care that they didn’t go actual remake on this one from an aesthetic level, but having the camera redone as a modern camera would go a long way to improving on the game as it exists.

Sunshine is where things start to really age better. The mechanics are just that little bit tighter across the board to where actions do what you want consistently without being either too loose or too tight on their requirements. The level goals are a little bit more clear, with a nice introductory cutscene before you start off giving you some clue as to where to head. The levels themselves also have a lot more variety, since each goal is tailored to the specific star, rather than having a sandbox level to get any star at any time.

On the other hand, there are definitely some things where it hadn’t quite reached modern smoothness. Kicking the player out of a level into the hub when they die instead of resetting the star is a weird point of friction to the experience that carried over from 64. The lack of checkpoints is similarly unfortunate, especially given they have checkpoints at the start of the handful of areas where they take away your water pack. This one is especially weird because giving more checkpoints would have allowed them to increase difficulty throughout instead of having sort of low difficulty with longer segments. As a whole though, Sunshine is still a really fun and really playable game.

Galaxy is where it all comes together. If this game came out today instead of 10 years ago, it would still be an instant classic. Mechanically, it’s extremely tight, having reached the peak of iteration on the core 3D mechanics at that point. Lives became so abundant that the stale mechanic of game over became near impossible to hit, which ultimately led to lives going away in Odyssey. There’s checkpoints all over, letting each segment of a goal be more interesting on its own, rather than having to be smooth enough for the player to marathon through the entire thing. The gravity manipulation added on top of it is still engrossing, and it’s something I wish we’d have seen used more often in the years since. Playing through this is one of the few times in recent memory that I’ve played a remaster or emulated port that I simply fell into, rather than seeing the warts.

It was also surprising to me how easily the Wii pointer controls moved over to the Switch Joycon. The pointing isn’t 1:1, but it still feels extremely natural. Given they also have a reset button, it’s also comfortable, which is a huge change. You find a comfortable resting point, hit the pointer reset button, and you’re good to go. The sort of flicking motions you do to grab stars is extremely natural, and now that the spin jump is on a button, you don’t accidentally do that all the time either. It’s a minor change to the overall gameplay, but it goes such a long way to improving the experience over the original.

When playing these, it’s easy to see how much Super Mario 64 influenced the future for the Mario series. The move set alone is in everything Mario related at this point. Triple jump, wall jump, and side somersault are instinct moves in Mario games, and not just in 3D. The New Super Mario Bros games inherited just as much of the bloodline of Mario 64 as it did Super Mario Bros 3. These games were hugely influential on release, and are just as worth playing now.

Would I have liked to see Nintendo do something more than an emulated port for these? Sure. Am I disappointed that we got these anyway? Not at all. Playing through these games is still a treat, even with some of the age spots that are showing on them. There’s been a lot of 3D platformers in the 25 years since Super Mario 64 came out, and the three in this package are still right up at the top of the list in terms of their pure playability. Having them in one spot, and more importantly, having them easily on the go is a great package to have out there, regardless of how little things have changed.