Mario is Missing! is an educational game released by Radical Entertainment. I played the SNES version (on an online emulator). To find my game, I went to the Wikipedia page for SNES games, scrolled down to the list, sorted the list by US release date, and skimmed through it until I found an interesting title. Hovering over “Mario is Missing!” I could read the word “educational game”.
After Thursday’s lecture on Serious Games, I was awash in memories of my childhood. Most of the video games I played as a kid were some level of educational—between Type to Learn 4 (and its earlier predecessor in my typing journey, Talking Finger’s Read, Write & Type) on the computer in class and Stack the States on the family iPad over summer vacation. Most of them that I can remember I found frustrating, more often than not, because of the video game aspect. Especially with the typing games, the goal of these educational games was not just to help us learn a new skill in a fun way, but to get us comfortable with using computers—something they rightfully assumed would be an important skill in the future.
So I was curious how the iconic characters of Nintendo could be coopted to teach me something. Nintendo did very little in the development of the game besides licensing the characters to Radical Entertainment and this game is one of the few times poor poor Luigi gets to feature as the lead. And in this game he was recruited to teach children about iconic cities and landmarks.
I went in to the game armed with nothing besides the game’s wikipedia entry and a college student’s general knowledge of geography. I assumed that there would be a walk-through section in the game to go over basic commands, but there was not.
Initially, I was very frustrated. Luigi moves at a glacial pace through the 2D sidewalks on one dimension. Going “up” or “down” at crosswalks or streets allows him to go onto different planes, transporting him in a speedy little running animation into another 2D sidewalk of the same three or four buildings. The streets of the city are populated by the same five human NPCs who will give you little clues in a manner specific to their character (professor, little delinquent child, businesswoman, cop, and clueless tourist) about the city, a horde of koopa troopas who drop the three artifacts you must return, and Princesses manning information desks waiting for the artifacts to be returned.
I found the walking through the city fun at first—the small interactions with the NPCs gave us little glimmers of the city and the little pamphlets about each landmark in the city that the Princess would give us seemed both interesting and easy to a small child (which I am not—a bit more on that later). However, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get the artifacts. Yes, I knew I was in Rome, but where was I supposed to find the gladiator’s spear?
I had to look up a walk-through (used this one hosted on vizzed.com and this one hosted on ign.com) and I gave up on this game after two cities (two out of the five on floor one out of three floors), opting instead to watch a play-through from NintendoComplete. After turning to NintendoComplete for assistant and watching them somehow traverse quickly with Yoshi, I realized that perhaps some of my frustration was because I didn’t know how to play the game which I remedied.
In theory, the target audience for this game would not be a college student trying to write a retro game review who knows very little about Nintendo, but a small child in the 90s who loves Nintendo and video games with parents who want them to be learning instead of smashing keys mindlessly. The game assumes a degree of familiarity with both the controls and the concept of the characters. SO! I found the booklet that would have been in the case as a pdf and read through it. To obtain Yoshi, I just simply had to go to the menu and direct Yoshi on a map to the same city where I was (meaning the player had to gather clues to identify the city if they wanted to be able to navigate quickly and later escape the level), and then he appeared! I also learned that pressing “Z” would let me go very quickly.
Both these mechanics made the wandering around less tedious, but with my mind no longer focused on being annoyed at how slow I was, I realized the other flaws in the game.
The gameplay of Mario is Missing! is going to a city, finding the missing artifacts, (which requires) attacking the koopa troopas so they drop the artifact, returning the artifact to the right information station for the landmark, (which requires) answering two questions about the landmark, and (after completing all the five cities in the floor) a “boss fight”.
Just as we discussed on Thursday about educational (and serious) games that did and didn’t work and how educational elements were poorly merged in with gameplay, I think Mario is Missing! fails as a game.
I mentioned attacking koopa troopas and a boss fight, but I did not mention the fact that you take no damage from neither the koopas troopas in the city nor the boss. It’s a fight of no real consequences against a neutered opponent. In theory, these should be the fun reward for taking your medicine (learning facts about five cities), but a fight without real stakes is not fun.
So okay, the game aspect of the boss fight is flawed—what about the walking around the cities? Like I said, the biggest frustration with the city portions was how slow I walked around. That was not a fun challenge and was not “meant” to be a challenge (it was just a built-in handicap to incentivize getting Yoshi, which required the early-on identification of the city). So once I could get around quicker… the only real travel is through up, down, left, and right arrows (the D pad) only going right and left on the sidewalk and going up and down to change which sidewalk you are on. Basically, there are no fun platformer elements to the city, so the game aspect of that is nil. The environment is made up of the same buildings repeated again and again and it’s a very set map, so there’s not a grand open world of each city to explore and fully virtually immerse yourself in.
At best, this game functions as a quiz game with Mario characters asking you questions instead of the questions just appearing on a board and meaningless little tasks with no real fun challenges.
