Super Mario Sunshine
- July 22, 2002 17:44 PM PST
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Mario, with his new water-pump thingie and all, is finally out in Japan. Our first hands-on preview is but a click away.
After a good six years or so of waiting, Super Mario Sunshine is finally complete and available in stores across the nation. The nation of Japan, that is. It doesn't come to America until August 26, but that didn't stop us from grabbing a Japanese copy and giving it a good poke or two.The game begins with Mario, Princess Peach and a legion of mushroom retainers as they go on holiday to Dolphic Island, a tropical paradise populated by a bulbous group of multi-colored islanders. Their plane almost crashes, though, when it veers into a giant pile of icky pudding-like sludge flowing from a little pile on the runway. This stuff is coming up from underground all over the island, engulfing the island's Shine Sprites and making it very tough to live the good life down under. The guy behind the ooze, unfortunately, looks like a semi-transparent version of Mario (and is also into the habit of painting giant Ms on the walls), so Mario gets thrown in the clink and is forced to do his part to clean up the island.
Despite the big move to the GameCube, Mario Sunshine is very close in structure to Super Mario 64, the game that virtually defined the 3D platformer genre six years ago. Instead of the Princess' castle, your home base is the town on the island's coastline; instead of finding stars to unlock new levels, you have to look for the aforementioned Shine Sprites. Mario has all the moves he used in the last game, with a few more additions and modifications?there's a snazzy new spin jump, and wall jumping isn't nearly as difficult as it was in the Nintendo 64 game.
The big difference lies in your water pump. Water is the only thing that can wash away the piles of gunk laid about the game, and some enemies require a combination of water blasts and stomping to fully dispatch. You start out with two nozzles for the pump?a basic blaster, and a hover nozzle that lets you navigate through the air in certain situations. You'll find more nozzles later in the game, all of which are necessary to find every sprite the evil Mario-doppelganger has hidden away.
While Mario Sunshine isn't breathlessly beautiful the way other platformers are, there's very little to complain about with the graphics so far. Perhaps "pretty" is the best word for them. Each level is packed with stuff to explore and grand vistas to stare at, and there isn't a single dropped frame or bleeding polygon to be found anywhere. It takes a moment to get used to the water pump (which is controlled entirely through nimble R-button pressing), but once you do you'll have Mario bouncing about the landscape like the proverbial Mexican jumping bean.
Although we're sure that Mario Sunshine will do well saleswise no matter what we say, it appears so far that the game more than deserves the initial high praise it got at E3. We'll have the full review of the American version next month.
