I first picked up Super Paper Mario when I bought my Wii in about April of 2007, and I’m finally done! No, It’s not an epic^epic game, but it will run about 20 hours before you’re done, and that’s only if you so some of the optional stuff, so as Mario adventures typically go, it’s got some meat to it.

I’ll be blunt, the game is slow compared to Super Mario Galaxy (a real Mario adventure in my mind). This game is more text and dialogue driven than most platformers I know, and the difficulty level is also much lower. I imagine this is the Mario game that gamers get their girlfriends that “like videogames” but have never played or heard of Battletoads. 

The game starts off pretty exciting though, and the hooks are pretty fierce at that. Running, jumping, hitting blocks – all great Mario stuff. They even put new twists on old staples like the invincibility star. In SPM, collecting this powerup makes Mario grow to fill the screen, and he becomes his 8-bit sprite from the original Super Mario Bros.. While massive, Mario can plow through any obstacle and is unstoppable as enemies bounce off and a path of destruction is left in his wake. The first boss battle against a giant dragon is fairly epic too

Then world 2 starts, and there’s nothing really “new” until world 8. Along the way, you get additional powers like the ability to shrink and enter small spaces or become paper thin and float on the wind.  Most of the puzzles in the game use these new abilities, and while some of them are clever, most of them are fairly uninspired. I feel good for finding hidden chest and items though, so there’s a sense of accomplishment there – that’s good. There are also Cards for all the enemies and characters in the game. You can use Catch Cards to ensnare the soul of an enemy and place them on a card. Possessing a card doubles the amount of damage you do to that enemy, but other than that they are useless. Even more useless though is there are hundreds of enemies with a dozen types of  goomba, so the odds of having the right card in your deck is slim unless you’ve invested gold coins in buying Catch Cards.

There’s a level-up system that I wish was implemented in more games anymore. Your score increases as you kill enemies, and when it gets high enough, leveling up increases Attack, Defense, and Hitpoints. Nothing too deep or innovative, I know, but wish action and action-like games incorporated something like this more often. Also, as a Mariogame if you hop on a string of enemies without touching the ground, you get even more points – and more points still by shaking the Wii-mote a bit to add a flourish to your bounce.

Visually, this game is very clean and clear most of the time. Some things get muddy when flipping to the 3D, but 2D looks pretty damn gorgeous. Everything looks drawn in vectors with a turtle program and an Etch-a-Sketch, and is showcased upon entering a new world: The canvas starts blank, lines draw along outlines, the backdrop props up, colors fill in like a paint bucket, and then Mario enters the scene. I simply love the presentation there.

The controls work great in the 2D plane we’re all used to, but with the ability to flip into a 3D space, things get a little tricky. So very much of the game world is designed on a 2D plane (even though most of it is built and rendered as a projection from 3D to 2D), and the directional pad is only so versatile, movement here, especially jumping, is difficult.

Sound is what you’d expect from a Mario game – a lot of boings and smacks, so not annoying to the player as they’re all well-placed and paced. If you close your eyes though, the sound could get really annoying, so it might not be the best for a mix-tape. I’m not going to knock a lot of points off for this though – this game is a colorful platformer at heart. Charles Martinet once again reprises his role as Mario, so that’s pleasant.

I glossed over it before, but the chief complaint I have about the game is the story. This stilted mass of crap belongs in a bargain-bin RPG setting, not in my platformer thankyouverymuch. The scenes are long, the text windows are small so each speaker has several dialogs to click through, and the worst part is they’re unskippable. Gross, gross, gross. The most offending piece is, there are sometimes important clues for where to go or what to do next hidden in these sections, so if you don’t pay attention, you might wander around in the hub-level aimlessly.

A close second in my beefs with this game is the puzzle scripting and level design. I’m a huge proponent of figure-eights in level design – it minimalizes the amount of back-tracking required. Off the top of my head, Jak II  for PS2 (the sequel to Jak and Daxter) did it best in my opinion, but SPM is very poor in this regard. In one of the later worlds, the game has you searching for an item of an unspecified type from an unspecified set of items. Basically a needle in a haystack that could be of any size, and when a needle is found, I don’t know if it’s the right needle. Later on in the same level, game-progression relies on you remembering a previous wrong items’ effect. I Hope you remembered a item that went in the trial- failure bin; and if you did, hope you picked up two; oh wait, you only needed one before for the trial, so I hope you remembered where in the platforming maze you got it; No? hope you like annoying mazes, twice.

When I buy I game I usually keep it, as it has some redeemable value as a game. This one is going back to a retailer’s shelf for store credit.

You know what really grinds my gears? The widely accepted Game-ism of the “hitpoint.” The hitpoint was designed as a simple mechanism for how much damage a character could take before dying. In simple terms, if you have 10 hitpoints, and take 10 points of damage – leaving 0 hitpoints left – you die. Another example is, in the original Super Mario Bros., Mario starts with one hitpoint, but if he gets a super mushroom, he now has two hitpoints. Maybe Mario is not the best example as I’m shoe-horning a new-ish game into a an old concept.

Dungeons & Dragons has been around for more than 30 years and is the source, if not the primary inspiration, for much of modern computer and video game design. As Uncle Ben would say, “With great power comes great responsibility.” With D&D, comes the hitpoint. Fighter type characters have more of them than spellcasters. This makes sense that someone trained in combat is better at taking a hit than an old man in a robe who reads all day. As characters level up – tiers or plateaus of skill and ability – they gain hitpoints, meaning that as their experience broadens, deepens, et cetera, they become even better at taking hits. Of course, over time, my warrior is going to have 100 hitpoints while your wizard will still have 25. This might be fine if your typical monster only hit for 5 damage, but in reality, as your characters advance, so do the type of monster you face. No longer do these characters face rats and little goblins, but huge dragons and even the gods themselves. The hitpoints become relatively meaningless to lower-level creatures, and really, it becomes a question of economics. Let’s shift gears.

Let’s say a loaf of bread costs $10. “That’s expensive bread,” you say, but who cares? It’s an arbitrary number for an arbitrary item. Let’s say you take home $10 for every hour of work you do. This means it takes you one hour to pay for a loaf of bread. The bread may seem expensive to you now, but how much did bread cost 50 years ago? For the sake of argument, $2. That seems cheaper, but how much did you make in an hour? One dollar, so in reality, that bread costs 2 hours 50 years ago versus the 1 hour it takes you today. The dollar may have inflated, but your hour earns you more dollars, so the bread is actually cheaper than it was 50 years ago.

So why not do away with dollars and just use units of time? This very quickly degrades into dollars again, but let’s break it down. For your eight-hour day, you get 8 chips. If we were a communist society, everybody would get 8 chips regardless of they were a janitor or a surgeon, but we’re not. For their work day, surgeons actually end up getting 80 chips, with gradations across the board from fluffer to CEO. We’re right back to where we started with different types of work being valued differently.

Now why did I tell you all that and what does it have to do with the hitpoint? Warriors (surgeons) are much better at taking damage (buying things) than other adventures (professions). Hitpoints are simply another resource, like money, except if you go broke, you die. The problems with scale apply in both scenarios too. At low levels, the 7-11 store clerk and the pre-law student have trouble buying bread at $10 at 1 chip. At higher levels, the 7-11 shift manager is better at buying bread because he now gets 20 chips in a day, but the legal aide gets 40 chips a day, so he’s still more able to buy that bread.

The exact same goes for hitpoints. This inflation is like providing adequate subdivisions so we can still keep track of rat bites, but if we have enough of them we can survive dragons’ breath. From an economics perspective we can’t really get rid of the hitpoint. Economics is the lesbian step-sister of sociology though, what can we do with reality thrown in?

“Strongest man in world do push-ups – one finger! One bullet, all over!”

My friends in High school worked in a Chinese restaurant for a Chinese immigrant and they asked him why he didn’t learn martial arts, and that was his response. In a world of one-hit kills, what good do hitpoints serve? You can’t give that bullet a damage value other than 100%. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 hitpoints or 1000, you will be dead. One thing that hitpoints don’t keep track of is vital areas. It isn’t specified where a hit takes place, just simply that you got hit. Think of Street Fighter when Ryu’s life-bar – hitpoint meter – is at 1%. He is perfectly capable of performing every move in his repertoire, but as soon as he so much as stubs his toe, he screams bloody murder and falls unconscious.

There is a solution for all this though. We can model every aspect of the body, and make sure we keep track of healing rates, and if a hit will cause a bruise, if this cut or that cut will cause blood-loss faster, and make sure we have a completely realistic experience, but to what end? Counterstrike players may like it, but it only serves to make a game more complex, and thus potentially un-fun. For now, let’s stick with the hitpoint as some sort of life-force in a jar; it’s simpler that way. I’ll keep thinking about this though, maybe I can come up with a partial solution. I know game systems like Fallout and 4th Edition of D&D are trying, and that’s admirable.