New Mario Game Will Test Players

The upcoming Mario game for the Nintendo Wii will offer something of a challenge to long-term fans of the popular gaming character, says  game designer Shigeru Miyamoto.

“I think what we’ve created this time is in fact pretty difficult,” he told Wired., adding that attempting to create a game that would bring in new gamers but still “satisfy the needs of longtime Mario fans” was a taxing task for the development team at Nintendo.

“The premise was that because it’s going to be on Wii console, and it’s a console for the most part that resides in the living room that everybody in the house interacts with. We needed to design the game in a way that would be appropriate for that,” he continued.

Miyamoto said that one aspect that the creation team addressed was making Mario a multi-player experience again.  He said the version of Mario released for the DS system was a single player edition and that this new version would take Mario and company back to their roots.

“There are two dedicated multiplayer modes, one of which is free-for-all, which lets you select the stages from story mode in a menu-based system with images from each stage so you can easily find the stage you like,” he said.  “And then there’s also a coin battle mode which is a competitive multiplayer mode, in which you’re actually competing for points and you’re getting ranked based on how many points you’ve collected.”