I recently sat down and started to play through New Super Mario Brothers Wii with the intent of putting up a review.  As I progressed through the game, however, it occurred to me that while the game is, in fact, excellent, and a great addition to anyone’s Wii library, it’s still “just a Mario Bros. game.”  There isn’t anything particularly innovative in the single-player version of the game that would warrant a full review.  With that in mind, I turned to the “new” in the title and decided to try out the “simultaneous multiplayer” that had been touted as one of the game’s main selling points.  I picked up the hotline and assembled a crack team of Mario players to tackle this game the way it was meant to be played.  I had, unfortunately, forgotten one key problem with my using my friends as a multiplayer “team”:

My friends are jerks.

While progression through the first couple of maps in the first world went smoothly enough, as soon as someone died for the first time, it was like a switch was flipped and the assholery began.  Immediately, the two remaining players realized that they could torture the “dead” player by forever trying to avoid the bubble he was trapped in, leaving the poor bubbled toad to bleat impotently as his comrades grabbed one-ups and powerups, all while deftly keeping him sequestered.  This lead to several amusing scenarios, in which a player would scream in defeat at the mere “failure” of releasing the dead player from his bubble, and freedom would carry more of a victory yell than actually finishing the level.

In addition to that, since the score and coin totals are shared, the number of lives in your stock became your defacto “score”, and holding onto your lives while others lost theirs became a badge of honor.  Not content to be the person that simply played the level the best, we all began to actually come up with ways to try to kill the other players.  At first, this was simply “innocent” crimes, such as advancing vertical levels far enough that the other players would die from falling off the bottom of the screen. As the levels progressed, though, a seeming “homicidal mania” set in, with players bouncing on each others’ heads to hinder their jumps, throwing shells at each other, and ultimately, grabbing each other and tossing “friends” into pits.  Once it was discovered we could pick each other up, every moving platform became a tense standoff, all of us waiting for each other to make the first move; to start the chain reaction that would leave only one person on the platform, laughing maniacally as the other players floated around helpless.  The game was full of shouting, fighting, and tense situations.  The competition was incredibly intense, in a game that was meant to foster an environment in which the players can work together.  It was torture.

And we loved every minute of it.