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Super Mario Bros. DS E3 2005 Preshow Impressions

We take a look at some Super Mario Bros. DS footage, and bring you our impressions.

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While Super Mario 64 remains one of the more popular DS titles, many purists maintain that Mario does best when restricted to frontal, planar space. Super Mario Bros. DS is still polygon-based, but it takes Mario back to his two-dimensional platforming roots. Wario World makes a convenient visual comparison, although Mario DS will hopefully qualitatively surpass that (merely fair) game. Most of our information thus far has been gleaned from the gameplay footage and developer interview videos located in our movie space.

Super Mario Bros. DS appears to move much faster than previous 2D iterations. It's almost as though the game has taken a late cue from a certain cobalt-blue rival. The old gameplay is intact, but it has been expanded to include jumps that originated with the three-dimensional Marios. Additionally, it seems that the mushroom-infused Mario can grow to monstrous sizes, and, with the aid of his Brobdingnagian legs, can run even faster than when he is his normal size. This looks a lot like Bowser's ham-powered rampages in Paper Mario 2: The Thousand-Year Door. Interestingly enough, Mario DS's goombas have been afforded the same growth ability and can use stray mushrooms for their own nefarious purposes.

Our official gameplay footage opens with a white-suited Mario, hurling his fiery flower power at marauding goombas. Apart from their newfound mushroom powers, however, these creatures don't appear to be especially more pernicious than in past years. Mario makes short work of these fiends, moving from left to right faster than an infomercial speed-reader.

Super Mario Bros. DS doesn't seem like it will make much use of the device's stylus, although no one knows for sure at this point, as the game has not yet been seen in playable form. What's clear is that Mario DS is both reminiscent of its NES progenitors, and it seeks to innovate within the context of that two-dimensional world.

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