So Super Mario Run finally showed up on my phone Thursday night, and I did the thing I said I wasnt going to do, which is drop real money on a mobile game before Ive even tried the whole thing. Ten bucks. $9.99 exactly, one-time purchase, no ads, no gems, no energy meter counting down while you wait for a timer to refill. In 2016 that alone feels like a strange throwback.
I want to get the price complaint out of the way because its all anyone on my Twitter feed was talking about Thursday and Friday. People were furious. Genuinely furious, like Nintendo had personally wronged them, over a game that costs less than two movie tickets and doesnt nickel-and-dime you afterward. I get it a little bit. Weve all been trained by five years of free-to-play mobile garbage to expect the download to be free and the actual game to be a slow drip of ninety-nine cent gem packs. Candy Crush lives rent-free in everyones expectations now whether we like it or not. So when a company asks for the money up front and then just... gives you the whole game, it apparently reads as outrageous. Ive got no patience for that take. Id much rather pay once and be done than get guilted into microtransactions every time I lose a life.
The free version gives you World 1-1 through part of 1-4, which is maybe fifteen minutes of actual play if youre not obsessing over getting five stars on every level (I was obsessing, so it took me closer to forty). Thats enough to know if you like the feel of it before you commit the ten dollars. Feels like a fair trial to me, though I know some people wanted at least one full world free.
The actual game is good, for what its worth, and I almost forgot to say that part. Mario runs automatically, you just tap to jump, and the levels are built entirely around that one input, which means the level design has to do a lot of heavy lifting to stay interesting. And mostly it does: theres a real rhythm to the good stages, timing double jumps off enemy heads to chain into wall bounces, that kind of thing. It plays less like a "real" Mario game and more like its own thing wearing a Mario costume, which is fine. I didnt expect Super Mario World in my pocket and I didnt get it.
The thing that actually annoys me, and I havent seen enough people talking about this, is that it requires a constant internet connection. Not just to download — to play, at all, every single time, even in the single player mode where none of that data should matter. I tried playing it on the subway Friday morning and it just sat there on a loading screen refusing to do anything because I dipped out of signal for two stops. Thats not a pricing complaint, thats a design decision, and its a bad one. Nintendo has said its to prevent piracy and to support the asynchronous multiplayer Toad Rally stuff, which fine, I understand the reasoning, but it makes the game meaningfully worse to actually own on a phone, which is a device that spends half its life in dead zones and elevators and my basement.
No Android version yet either, which is its own whole conversation Im not going to have right now because Ive had it four times already this week with different people and Im tired of it. It's coming eventually, presumably, the way most Nintendo mobile stuff does a staggered rollout.
Anyway. I unlocked World 2 last night around eleven, sitting on my couch instead of doing literally anything productive, and I dont regret the purchase. I do regret how quickly Toad Rally turned my competitive brain on — I spent forty-five minutes trying to beat some strangers ghost run last night for absolutely no reason other than my own pride, and thats a special kind of dumb even for me. If youve been holding off because of the price talk online, thats a bad reason to skip it. If youre annoyed about the always-online requirement, thats a completely fair reason, and I hope somebody at Nintendo is reading complaints about it, though I doubt an update fixes that particular decision anytime soon.