Friday, January 15, 2021

Super Mario 3D World: New Stamp Usage

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury will release next month on Nintendo Switch as the next enhanced port of a Wii U title. I'm on the fence about this title, where I had quite a lot of fun playing the game on Wii U and could see myself playing through it again on Nintendo Switch, but the last world, especially the Champions' Road, made completing the game and collecting all the Miiverse stamps a little bit too crazy for my taste.

Speaking of the Miiverse stamps, the Miiverse sadly is no longer... So, what purpose will the stamps even have in the port? Well, it turns out that Nintendo had a really cool idea for those:

Mario swimming through a tunnel decorated with block and squid stamps

You can actually use them to decorate the environment when you're taking screenshots in some sort of camera mode. This is really thoughtful and the stamps even have been colored for this, where in the original they used to be black and white.

Why is this of interest? Well, the Zelda series also had a Wii U game with Miiverse stamps in it – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD. And ever since Nintendo had started porting Wii U games to the Nintendo Switch, there has been the question of what would happen to the Miiverse features, if they were to port The Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD as well...

Now, at least for the Miiverse stamps we could have an answer: just use them for something else. And it would be really nice, if they kept them in a potential port, because collecting the stamps was a lot more fun than finding dozens of chests with only some Rupees in them.

(Check out my Stamp Location Guide for the many pointless Rupees that have been replaced. It's documented all inside.)

This only leaves the Tingle Bottles in The Wind Waker HD... But I'm sure that Nintendo will find an alternative use for them as well or replace them with a new Tingle feature.

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