Gamelab's Charles Wheeler examines some of the design concepts in Nintendo's recent Wii title, Super Paper Mario.

Super Paper Mario is a good game. It features colorful worlds populated with clever and memorable characters. It features an excellent localization script full of jokes and pop-culture references that are delivered with delightful ease and wit. Both the gameplay and the script are full of winks and nods to both genre and series conventions; the fundamental gameplay mechanic is a play on the conventions established by the original Super Mario Bros. It is a game full of meta-commentary about both games in general and itself, yet it is playful rather than ponderous. It is, in summary, a game that delights in being a game. However, it is also marred by a number of questionable design decisions, which range from unavoidable oversight to perverse abuse of the player.

The aforementioned fundamental gameplay mechanic in Super Paper Mario is the ability to “flip” the camera from a traditional 2-dimensional platform game view (e.g. Super Mario Bros.) to a traditional 3-dimensional “on-rails” platform game view (e.g. Crash Bandicoot). Most of the time in the game is spent navigating 3d worlds with the aid of this flipping: barriers that are impassible from the 2d viewpoint may be easily sidestepped in 3d, while platforms with no width to stand on in 3d become perfectly solid from a 2d viewpoint. This mechanic is not without its difficulties. Designers must essentially design 2 different levels for each level in the game. Additionally, since the player may “flip” the camera at inopportune times, the designers must consider the level from every possible location to prevent the player from getting accidentally killed or trapped as a result of an errant button press, while still creating the complexity necessary for interesting puzzles! In this regard the designers had an incredibly difficult job, which they performed, by and large, with great success.

A game in which the designers can precisely predict the outcome of every situation is generally not a very good game at all, so the developers of Super Paper Mario added a few fail-safes: when “flipping”, if the player flips the ground away from underneath Mario’s feet, he will freeze for a Wile E. Coyote mid-air moment, during which the player can attempt to jump to a place with more substantial footing. To eliminate the problem entirely would be to remove too much interesting and desirable complexity from the level design, so this “air jump” is an excellent example of sound game design: identifying a specific problem and finding a solution that fits within the existing structure.

Not all design problems are so neatly resolved. At some point, the designer chose to implement a timer on the 3d camera view. That is, they decided that the player could only remain in the 3d view for up to XX seconds at a time, otherwise Mario would begin to take damage and eventually die. Resetting the camera to 2D mode allows the timer to gradually refill. There are many good reasons to implement such a timer. The designers may have wanted the primary player experience to be that of the 2D view. Perhaps the designers found that the game’s puzzles or enemies were simply too easy if they could be approached from an unlimited 3D viewpoint. Whatever the problem it was designed to address, the limitations imposed by the timer don’t provide the player with interesting choices. The “air-jump” described above limits the dangers of forcing the player to flip out of the 3D view, limiting the use of the timer as a source of interesting puzzle design. As mentioned above, the camera flip can be performed by the player almost without restriction. However, the lack of camera flipping limitations means that an expired timer can always be rectified by simply switching to the 2D view, waiting approximately XX seconds, and then returning to the 3D view, further limiting the possibility of using the timer as a basis upon which to create an interesting gameplay experience. Thus, the flip timer allows little room for opening up new decisions to the player, while in many cases forcing the player into an unsatisfying staccato rhythm of switching viewpoints while playing. While there may be any number of reasons to include limitations on the user’s abilities, the flip timer seems to be of dubious utility, and its excision from the game could arguably improve the player’s experience without damaging any other aspect of the game.

The discussion thus far has been entirely focused on individual core game mechanics, and how they contributed to the player’s enjoyment with varying degrees of success. Of course, the overall experience that a player has when playing a game is not limited just to the core mechanics, but also depends on the environment in which those mechanics are put to use. This is the realm of level design, and it is in this realm that the designers of Super Paper Mario made decisions that completely flout common-sense principles of user interactivity. On two separate occasions, the player is expected to move the player towards the right side of the screen for over a full minute with absolutely no feedback to indicate that the player is approaching his goal. To provide the player with no feedback, either positive or negative for such a long period is unheard of in modern user interface design, and is especially absurd when one considers the foundation of fast-action based platform games upon which Super Paper Mario is built. One could argue that the principles of user feedback are so fundamental that they must have been violated knowingly and intentionally. That these segments satirize historical platformers’ imperative to constantly move to the right. I would counter the arguments simply by noting that the context of these actions does not lend itself to such interpretation. Nearly all historical references and criticisms contained within the game are obviously self-aware, and highlighted to the player. To have two such sequences with no accompanying acknowledgement from the developers suggests that they were simply unaware of the tedium to which they were subjecting their players.

Examples of such amateurish experience design abound throughout the game. In one sequence, the player is expected and explicitly instructed to write down a sequence of 25 commands to echo back to the game at a later time. While there is context for knowing self parody in this example, in this case the context doesn’t justify the frustration. Acknowledgement of failures may mitigate them, but it seldom transforms those failures into successes. In another sequence, the player is instructed to rescue the members of a group without any indication how many rescues must be performed. These aren’t, generally, sins of commission so much as omission, the developers apparently simply didn’t consider the challenges they were presenting to the player sufficiently to discover these fairly apparent problems.

I began by saying that Super Paper Mario was a good game. Despite the critiques leveled here, I still maintain that it is a good game. The mistakes described above are generally incidental, not fundamental mistakes, the sort of mistakes one might expect from rookie developers. It would not surprise me to learn that said portions of the game were developed by a young and inexperienced team. Super Paper Mario is a good game, but it’s a rookie’s good game. Maybe next time the team can make a veteran’s good game. That’s something I’ll be anxious to see.

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By Charles Wheeler, programmer.