Power Ups

Alright today we take a look at the new power ups available in Super Mario Bros Wii. We do not spend time on mushrooms, invincibility stars, Yoshi or the kick ass fire flower because those are not exclusive nor new to this game. Sure its very much the case that the fire flower is the greatest power up ever, and it remains so in this game, but for now we take a look at the three new upgrades.

The Ice Flower - Like the fire flower but instead of throwing little fire pellets Mario, Luigi and their unnamed fungi cohorts throw (get ready for it) ice. The ice freezes enemies but it does not eliminate them automatically. Instead the player has the ability to pick up the newly created ice block and hurl it at someone or something. This does come in handy sometimes but I'd rather just have the baddie gone for good. The other upside to the ice is that some baddies that are immune to the fire pellets are frozen by the ice (bones, bullets, thwomps come to mind). I'm happy to report that Boo remains immune to just about everything.

Penguin Suit - Well its tradition that Mario turns into some sort of animal and for this game that animal is a penguin. When dressed as a penguin Mario walks funny, is able to throw ice projectiles like with the ice flower and is able to swim faster and more easily. Underwater it basically serves the same purpose as the frog suit did in Mario 3. Its great for swimming, its as good as the ice flower but it unfortunately does not help with the slippery floors in the ice world. This severely devalues this power up, its sparse availability devalues it even further.

Propeller Suit - The best new power up in the game. It comes in a form of a mushroom that flies up when it pops out of the power block. Once caught Mario dons a red speed suit with a pretty cool helmet (with a propeller at the top of it) that allows Mario to fly up and then float down in a semi controllable fashion. Yes previous games allowed full on directional flight while this only lets you basically jump really long distances but its still really useful in certain situations. This game has an unusually large amount of platforms and shit that moves, if you have a propeller mushroom you can just fly from safe spot to safe spot. Ii you're playing multiplayer you only need one suit to get through. The amount of awesome in this powerup is truly difficult to quantify.

So there it is. We've seen weirder stuff in previous games, flying raccoons, Terminator Mario, Giant Mario, Tiny Mario (which returns in this game) so a flying suit and ice flowers really arent out of the ordinary. Poweups have always added to the individual charm of each Mario game, these new additions represent the Wii version well.

Loser of the Week: The American people in 1998. Turns out Mark McGwire used steroids for the longer part of his career including the Home Run chase of 1998. In other news the Earth is round, the sky is blue. In retrospect we were duped into thinking we were witnessing history, in fact we were witnessing the apex of the steroid era. I don't have an issue with the whole "cheating" thing because technically steroids were legal at the time but it still kinda sucks when we consider that even though Babe Ruth and Roger Maris were doing it in simple times they were also doing it on nothing but beer and hot dogs.