I finished Super Mario Land 3D completely, saving the princess and collecting all the star coins too and have moved onto Pullblox, a little puzzle-platformer on the online store.
I thought that Mario was really uninspired and just a quickly slapped together tech demo of the 3DS’ capabilities. It was impressive that the picture sunk into the screen with pillars jutting out at you, and there were some great vertical drops in the game that gave you that very sense of vertigo that Yoshi’s Island’s second cliff stage did. I’ll never forget that stage with how scary those pixel cliffs were.
Super Mario Land 3D is a short little game and when you compare it to the longer levels of New Super Mario Bros DS or the sweeping majesty of Mario Galaxy with its full orchestra and really out there level design, this 3DS launch title (close enough) isn’t all that. I guess the argument would be, it’s a solid little game on its own but judged by its contemporaries in the same franchise, it doesn’t rank very well. And then you have Rayman Origins which to me is a superior multiplayer platformer than New Super Mario Bros Wii.
When you finish the game, what happens is that you get a sort of mirror universe where the levels have been flipped and different enemies are plotted throughout. Its understandable why they did it because it doubles what would’ve been a disappointingly short game.
I can’t be bothered playing the same environments again but slightly altered and a bit more annoying, so I went onto the 3DS store, entered my credit card info like a good consumer and had a look around. Pullblox caught my eye because it seemed like Kororinpa, one of my favourite games that’s an unknown gem on the Wii. And just like Kororinpa, within an hour, Pullblox has cemented itself as one of my favourite little puzzle games. I won’t sit there and actively seek to finish it, but I will keep it there on my end table and slowly chip away at it on nights where I want to.
By pushing and pulling blocks that form the platform for you to scale, your little sumo can traverse the pixelated image obstacle and reach the goal. It’s a very charming little thing and with the level editor/sharing, it’s a very complete game. There are a lot of levels in it and the ability to make a level and then save the QR code as an image onto the SD card is brilliant. I was able to take the SD out of my 3DS, slot it into my Macbook and here I am uploading it online. I made a level out of my Binary Persona favicon. I am that fond of this little game that I bothered to do something so extraneous just for the sake of enjoying the process of it all.
I highly recommend Pullblox or Pushmo, as its called in other territories. I think Super Mario Land 3D is a given with the current barren state of games out and how its a good show case of the 3DS’ range of abilities. (Which include more than 3D) I’d be hesitant to recommend it though, when better titles are available.
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