Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [60]
Before being dumped, Panasonic had gained rights to produce its own Legend of Zelda and Mario games for the nascent CD-i. And like e-mailing embarrassing love letters postbreakup, it released them to the world in 1994. Well, it released them to whoever was watching TV at 3:30 A.M.: with no better avenue of getting the CD-i into stores, Philips shilled them via infomercial. Philips saw it as a bargain: a game system, stereo, karaoke machine, and video player all in one. The few insomniac viewers, thou0gh, just saw a seven-hundred-dollar game machine, and passed.
Much has been made about how terrible Philips’s sole released Mario game, Hotel Mario, is. Bowser has taken over the Mushroom Kingdom, and kidnapped the princess. So far, so standard. He’s turned the whole place into a series of themed hotels, which is admittedly odd. But every Mario game introduces new elements: riding a dinosaur and turning into a statue seem odder than Bowser’s Donald Trump ambitions. The sole feature of Hotel Mario, though, is a series of single-screen boards filled with open hotel-room doors. Mario has to shut them all, while avoiding obstacles and enemies and finding ways to go from floor to floor. Miyamoto clearly had no role in producing this. It was, as one Internet wag put it, the NES game Elevator Action without the action. Or, a puzzle game without anything too puzzling: you simply walked to a door to close it.
Even odder was that Hotel Mario, whose mechanics would easily be playable on an Atari 2600, was used to launch a new seven-hundred-dollar console that was touting enhanced graphics and unparalleled game play. To make it seem more complex, animated full-motion video segments were added between levels. Previous games had a pixelated Mario with a line of word-ballooned dialogue over his head between levels. Now there was broadcast-quality animation cut scenes of Mario and Luigi traipsing through a tree hotel, an underground hotel, and a cloud hotel, between what seemed like levels of a lesser Game Boy puzzle game.
As with a lot of flops, Hotel Mario is nowhere near as bad as critics say. Still, it’s a fair shake to call it one of Mario’s worst games, if not the worst. If Philips hadn’t pulled the plug on its game system, it would have seen some much better Mario games. Mario’s Wacky Worlds was a traditional side-scroller featuring Mario in ancient Greece, an Aztec temple, an all-neon world, an all-plaid world, and so on. Mario Takes America was going to merge real video footage of American cities and landmarks and allow a computer-generated Mario to fly around them like Superman.
This was nothing compared to what happened to poor Link. He was stuck in three bad games: Link: the Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda’s Adventure. The first two games, developed in concord, used the side-scrolling format from Zelda II: Link’s Adventure. Where exactly to begin? The subpar animation? Casting nonactors for live-action sequences? Game play that supposed took two entire years merely to play-test for bugs? Choppy, disappointing level design? The games’ plots at least showed promise: Faces of Evil starts off with a bored Link practically begging for some adventure; he gets it when a villain kidnaps Zelda. The other two finally make Zelda the star of the show, instead of Link.
But Zelda was never about plot. Indeed, one’s head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don’t dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook—kidnap the princess—and this time it’ll work! He’s utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management.
Nintendo deserved the mess of Hotel Mario after its poor behavior in the CD-ROM debacle. It