Now available for the Wii: the legendary sequel to Super Mario Bros., never before released outside of Japan. A Nintendo spokesman once suggested that Shigeru Miyamoto might have been depressed when he created it, a claim also made about Shakespeare at the time of King Lear. Chris Suellentrop in Slate:
Again and again, the game uses your familiarity with Super Mario Bros. to subvert the playing experience.... In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it—I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me?Or this, from a review on a gaming site:
That sadistic torment, however, is central to the game's appeal.... The Real Super Mario Bros. 2 isn't just hard—it's "difficult," like a book or a movie that initially rebuffs you but becomes rewarding as you unlock its secrets.
You must stay alert, concentrated, and you absolutely have to be open to the forced evolution of your style of play. The game designers are out to screw with your head and if you keep the right attitude about you, you’ll find yourself entering a hilariously intimate unspoken conversation with them.... What the game does expertly is lull us into a platformer complacency where we’ll speed along at top clip expecting the game to provide openings and landings for our jumps. Just when you’re at your most comfortable and you’re straddling that controller and spanking its side like you own the world, it’ll slam your face into a brilliantly placed yet avoidable enemy. It shows you the aporias in your game playing philosophy that you didn’t even know existed.
