After Super Mario World there really wasn’t a good side-scrolling Mario game. We had Yoshi’s Island, Paper Mario, and Yoshi’s Story, but these weren’t classic Mario games. Yeah, a few of the 3D games have been good, but nothing like the classics. Finally Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros. DS which did a great job of bringing all that back…but I wanted something on my TV. Now we’ve got NSMB Wii and it’s awesome.

As awesome as it is, let me go over a few things it could have: A real world-map. NSMB DS and Wii do the Mario 3 style of sub maps of an over-world. Super Mario World had the huge over-world that was fun to explore. On top of that, it had crazy hidden levels to find, and other super extra-secret stuff like Star Worlds. The DS game didn’t have these mysterious places, and so far I’m not seeing it in the Wii game. Hopefully there will be some crazy secret places hidden throughout.

Other than that, Assassin’s Creed 2 started getting awesome with all the different things that you can do. After trying a bit of all the different things, I kind of fell back into boredom with it. I still love the story though, and I’m sure I know in my mind I won’t complete it since I’m going to different forums and reading the spoilers.

There’s not really much in gaming coming out for the rest of the year that I’m crazy about, so for the holidays I’ll probably focus on Modern Warfare 2 and NSMB Wii. Due to being a longtime GameFly member, I got a good deal on Bad Company, so I’d like to complete it before the sequel next year. If time permits, I’d also like to play through the GoW Collection on PS3 to snag the trophies. The games are good enough for multiple play-throughs.

The funniest thing last week was between Penny-Arcade and Kotaku. Giant Bomb did a review of the new Tony Hawk, Kotaku posts it and advises they haven’t got their copy yet. Penny-Arcade slams them for waiting for their review copies instead of buying it like everyone else. Kotaku then defends themselves by saying they are waiting for the copy they ordered.