Nintendo Okie

Demos do a lot to make or break people’s opinions about a game. They’re designed to get people excited about a new release and give you just a taste of what to expect if you buy the full version of the game. Nintendo just began offering demos for retail 3DS games as downloads through the Nintendo eShop. The first did available did a lot to make me interested in picking up Resident Evil: Revelations. How does the demo for Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games do in making me want to buy that game?

I played the first Mario & Sonic game when it released back in 2007 in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. It was also remarkable in that it was the first game to feature Mario & Sonic together in a game after spending so many years as “rivals” on competing consoles. That game ultimately proved to be little more than a waggle-fest that I got tired of very easily and I skipped the second game in franchise for the Winter Olympics. Given that this demo was free and it was on the 3DS I decided I’d pull the demo down and see if anything had changed in the time since those two previous releases. I was worried that it was going to be a game where I spent more time scratching up my touch screen or wearing out the A button by hammering on it unmercifully.

The demo version of Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games offers up five different events for you to play through. You’ll be given a different random character for every event, but the events are always the same; 25m Rapid Fire Pistol, Football, Trampoline, 100m Backstroke and BMX. Each of the events plays very differently from each other and shows off a good variation of the different ways that you’ll play each of the events in the full version of the game.

25M Rapid Fire Pistol has the screen automatically scrolling from right to left and you’re asked to press the R Button at the appropriate time to shoot the targets. There are three rounds and the scrolling gets faster every time. Football is a penalty shooting style event where you use the Circle Pad to aim your shots by pulling back and either right or left and then releasing it to kick the ball. You can add some spin to your kicks by rotating the Circle Pad at the last minute. Trampoline is a rhythm game style event where you press the A button in time with a shrinking circle to get as much height as possible. You can adjust your position in the air by moving the Circle Pad around. 100m Backstroke has you using the stylus to patterns on the touch screen. The pattern you have to follow is on the top and you try to get as close to that shape as you can. The more accurate you are the faster your character swims. BMX uses Circle Pad, A button and the tilt functionality of the system to move around an off-road style biking course against other racers.

Based on this demo there are plenty of different ways that you’ll be playing through the events and they all seem to make sense and are fairly intuitive in how they are controlled. It will be interesting to see how the controls fare over the 50 different events that are supposed to be in the retail game. If they all work similar to this demo and have as much variety I can see this being a game that would be a lot of fun to play. There wasn’t any repetitiveness to the controls.

Visually the game is on par with any of the games that have been released for the Wii. The 3D effect adds some subtleness to the characters and brings some depth that adds to the overall visual look of the game. It’s not in your face in anyway, but it also wouldn’t be missed if you played with the 3D turned off.

Has the demo sold me completely on the game yet? Not completely. I’m very curious to know about how many different control methods you’ll be using to play the game and how much replay value there really is to the game once you’ve played through it a couple of times. The Mario sports games had a tendency to get to the point where it wasn’t fun to compete against the computer after a while. Handheld games are mainly single player experiences with some games having online play that can give you some replay ability. If the game turns out to be another scratch fest or just mashing a button over and over it will get boring pretty quickly. The demo was fun and I played through it three or four times trying to beat some of my previous records. If there is as much variety to the main game as there is in the demo then I can see it being a game that could get quite a bit of play time.