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Reverse Design #3
Reverse Design: Super Mario World
A book examining all the game design decisions that went into the making of Super Mario World, from mechanics to inter-level skill themes. We spent 65,000 words and more than 300 pictures, charts and diagrams looking at how Nintendo created and organized their material in many of their classic early works.
ebook
Published March 1, 2014
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September 25, 2017
A pretty good level-by-level analysis that's marred by some layout problems.
The main work of the book was theoretical: the author(s? I'll assume one) devised a framework of "skill themes" and their development through "cadences." The framework works well enough most of the time, but sometimes I felt like the author was more concerned with fitting each level into a skill theme than analyzing it. The divisions between themes are often arbitrary, and the author sometimes spends whole paragraphs discussion whether a challenge is an "evolution" or an "expansion" of a previous one. They also gloss over the Ghost Houses and completely omit Bowser's Castle for the reason that they don't fit into the framework.
Probably what annoyed me most while reading this was something simple: the author suggests playing through Super Mario World as one reads the book, but the book is organized by skill themes. This means that between every level, I had to scroll up to the table of contents, find whichever level I was playing, and scroll down to the page it was on. It didn't help that there were actually mistakes in the numbering of the table of contents, plus one level that's broken into two parts across the book (because it displays two different skill themes!) and another that's omitted from the ToC entirely. Between those problems and screenshots which weren't positioned to line up with the text (which would often refer to, say, a picture "to the right" which was actually on the next page), I have to wonder how much effort actually went into converting this from a website to an ebook.
Ultimately, the medium may be the undoing of this analysis: I can imagine a much better version of this book as a video series, or at least some kind of interactive online map. As it is, there's plenty of good stuff in here; it's just a pain to find.
The main work of the book was theoretical: the author(s? I'll assume one) devised a framework of "skill themes" and their development through "cadences." The framework works well enough most of the time, but sometimes I felt like the author was more concerned with fitting each level into a skill theme than analyzing it. The divisions between themes are often arbitrary, and the author sometimes spends whole paragraphs discussion whether a challenge is an "evolution" or an "expansion" of a previous one. They also gloss over the Ghost Houses and completely omit Bowser's Castle for the reason that they don't fit into the framework.
Probably what annoyed me most while reading this was something simple: the author suggests playing through Super Mario World as one reads the book, but the book is organized by skill themes. This means that between every level, I had to scroll up to the table of contents, find whichever level I was playing, and scroll down to the page it was on. It didn't help that there were actually mistakes in the numbering of the table of contents, plus one level that's broken into two parts across the book (because it displays two different skill themes!) and another that's omitted from the ToC entirely. Between those problems and screenshots which weren't positioned to line up with the text (which would often refer to, say, a picture "to the right" which was actually on the next page), I have to wonder how much effort actually went into converting this from a website to an ebook.
Ultimately, the medium may be the undoing of this analysis: I can imagine a much better version of this book as a video series, or at least some kind of interactive online map. As it is, there's plenty of good stuff in here; it's just a pain to find.
Displaying 1 of 1 review