This Nintendo Direct happened today and confirmed various rumors that we've heard over the course of the year: a Super Mario 3D World port, a new Mario Kart and a Mario 3D Collection. Here's the overview of the biggest announcements:
- Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. – a handheld version of the original Super Mario Bros. (and The Lost Levels) for true retro fans.
- Super Mario 35 – it's like Tetris 99, but you're playing Super Mario Bros. against 34 other players and defeated enemies will be sent over to your competitors. Only playable until end of March.
- Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury – the long expected Wii U port comes with another game attached to it, but we don't know much about it yet. Oh, and there will be Cat Mario and Cat Peach amiibo.
- Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit – an augmented reality game, where you can turn your living room into a Mario Kart track. Comes with kart toys that have cameras.
- Super Mario All-Stars – now available in the Super Nintendo collection of the Nintendo Switch Online service.
- Super Mario 3D All-Stars – a new collection, which is only available for a limited time. It includes Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy. However, these are not remasters, just plain ports with higher resolutions.
The latter seems quite underwhelming. When we first heard rumors about this, I had actual HD remasters in mind, but this would have been too good to be true. But this way it's something I'd definitely skip, because I can play Galaxy and Super Mario 64 just fine on my Wii U, while I never liked Super Mario Sunshine to begin with.
So, this somewhat reminds me of the The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the GameCube, which was also released under the premise of having as many Zelda games playable on the system as possible (which meant all of them at the time). But it's kind of weird that they didn't include Super Mario Galaxy 2 as well to have all major 3D Mario games on the Switch...
Super Mario 3D World was fun (except for 100% completion because of the final world) and I'm curious about the "Bowser's Fury" expansion. It sounds like "Ganon's Fury" and "Cucco's Fury" from Hyrule Warriors, so maybe it's a mode where you can play as (Cat) Bowser.
My favorite out of these items is probably the Game & Watch thingy and I would certainly buy a similar offer for Zelda, especially if that were to include the original Zelda Game & Watch game as well.
Mario Kart Live also looks like quite some fun, but it's probably not very practical and in the end you'll just go back to playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Overall I'm not very happy with the current direction of Mario Kart.
But anyways... this is a lot. A LOT! I personally didn't expect that Nintendo would do as much for a 35th Anniversary, because it's a rather odd number, but some of it is probably a result of 2020 in general and this gives me hope that 2021 will be a big celebration of 35 years of Zelda.
There are a lot of things that they could do here, other than releasing the sequel to Breath of the Wild in that year:
- Skyward Sword HD
- The Wind Waker HD + Twilight Princess HD + Link's Crossbow Training HD
- Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda
- Link's Awakening Chamber Dungeon DLC based on the first Zelda game
- Remakes of the Oracle games
- Hyrule Warriors 2
- New amiibo
- Something akin to the Four Swords Anniversary Edition
We can only hope. Of course they tend to do something different with Zelda's anniversaries compared to Mario's, so I wouldn't necessarily expect a 3D Zelda collection or the Game & Watch thing. I also wouldn't expect all of these things to happen in the same year, so some of this is definitely material for 2022 or later. And if we're really lucky, we will be getting something this year already. So, these are just possibilities and we'll have to see what of it will run under the Anniversary banner.
And there's also Metroid's 35th Anniversary, where they could offer the Metroid Prime Trilogy HD, along with a collection of 2D Metroid games and the next 2D Metroid. But it would be the first time that Nintendo is celebrating Metroid's anniversary in any form, so it's best to not expect anything here...
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