Bonus levels include some Super Mario 3D World stages, pointlessly reworked for a character who can't jump. 2 - the black sheep of the Mario family, but a good game in its own right.) Furthermore, where Mario's games offer a fixed perspective on a diorama of action, Treasure Tracker allows you to rotate the camera freely around levels that have been bunched up into tight little knots, deliberately using perspective to obscure vital clues. (Delightfully, Treasure Tracker allows him to deal with enemies by rehabilitating the turnip-throwing mechanic of the US version of Super Mario Bros. For starters, he can't do the one thing Mario is most famous for: he can't jump. The systems, enemies and obstacles are mostly familiar from Mario's world, but Captain Toad's perspective on them is very different. There are gems and coins to gather too, as well as additional challenges to beat, such as finding a hidden golden mushroom or completing a level without taking damage. Captain Toad - an unusually adventurous specimen of Princess Peach's cute yet cowardly mushroom proletariat, as evidenced by his head torch and backpack - must solve spatial puzzles and avoid hazards to reach the star in each of the compact levels. The idea is just the same as it was in 3D World. Its UK street date of 2nd January having now been widely broken, it would make a fine Christmas treat - if a slightly disposable one for its £30 price tag. Based on the Captain Toad bonus levels from last year's Super Mario 3D World, this is a modest and none too difficult puzzle-platformer that offers half a dozen hours of amiable and adorably presented problem-solving. It's a pleasure the game offers up exactly 64 times: not too few, but certainly not too many either. So it is that the greatest pleasure in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is the moment you load up each cuboid level and spin the camera around it, studying it from every angle, looking for windows on secret chambers and piecing its puzzles together in your mind's eye. Nintendo has always conceived of video games as toys, but seldom so literally as in EAD Tokyo's games, which it's so easy to imagine coming in large, colourfully illustrated boxes with assembly instructions included, their components packed neatly together in little cellophane bags. It's present in the games' toothsome aesthetic, too: the shiny, candied surfaces, the plump solidity of the little characters scurrying about, the pleasing metallic clicks and clunks of their snap-to systems and clockwork mechanisms. This urge is expressed in the level designs, with their meticulous, playful, tightly condensed explorations of 3D space. Since Super Mario Galaxy's wraparound planets, the team has loved to create game levels as if they were tactile, toylike pocket universes that you could pick up and turn over in your hands. Nintendo's Tokyo studio seems to have a thing about making miniature worlds. As a way to turn the precepts of the Mario games upside down and inside out Captain Toad is a work of genius - though there are flaws.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |