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Super Mario 3D Land 2011
Log Status
Completed
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Time Played
16h 40m
Days in Journal
14 days
Last played
June 9, 2024
First played
February 26, 2024
Platforms Played
3D is one of the biggest technological promises never kept. The stereoscope was developed around the same time as photography, but although both inventions were combined early on and found repeated periods of mainstream success together in mediums such as the Kaiserpanorama or the View Master, these inventions were never able to establish themselves in the long run. Cinema only started to embrace 3D on a large scale in the 1950s as one of the many technologies mobilized to distinguish the movie-going experience from the rising competition of television. It quickly grew out of fashion once the initial novelty started to wear off. More refined versions of the technology would resurface again in the 1980s and late 2000s only to fade into the background each time after a couple of years. Nintendo’s 3DS appears to be the newest example in this long list of untimely demises. Released in early 2011 at the height of the latest 3D craze after the record-braking box-office success of Avatar, its selling point of stereoscopic 3D without the need for those annoying glasses never seemed to pay off. The console was not a commercial failure, especially compared to the financial disaster of the Wii U, but its technological innovation neither impressed the hardware competition nor did it inspire many software developers outside of a select few titles. Among them, Super Mario 3D Land was supposed to be the flagship title to showcase the unique capabilities of its system. Yet despite its critical acclaim and millions of sold copies, it has largely been overshadowed by other Mario games, in particular its sequel 3D World.
The reasons behind the recurrent rises and falls of 3D technology are plenty, but economic considerations aside, what seems most apparent to me in retrospect is that the trends were largely uninteresting aesthetically. Put simply, the vast majority of 3D-works were either unwilling or unable to explore the perception of space in new ways compared to what the visual arts had already been doing for hundreds of years. At least since the discovery of linear perspective, most painters have worked with the question of how to represent a three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin has even called the opposition between plane and recession one of the central principles in the evolution of art history. The point is not so much that each picture emphasizes either the perception of surface or depth in its composition, rather that this choice is possible in the first place. Both tendencies can be pushed to the extreme where they virtually exclude their opposite (see trompe-l'œil at one end of the spectrum and many forms of abstract art at the other), but the majority of artworks live from the unresolved tension between three- and two-dimensionality: their compositions can be viewed both in relation to the receding room of the represented space and the flat surface of the canvas, without either one erasing the other perspective.
Both photography and cinema have inherited this fundamental ambivalence from painting and discovered new technical means of aesthetic expression for it, for example through the use of different focal lenses or parallax movement. There is even an argument that the tension between 2D and 3D is more essential for film and photography than other visual arts because it is not the result of a particular style of figurative painting, but rather the basic condition of capturing an existing physical space onto a flat image. For German-born film theorist Rudolf Arnheim, the fact that film images are neither completely three- nor two-dimensional was already a central aspect in his understanding of "Film as Art", as the title of his book from 1932 programmatically stated. Arnheim saw the many alleged shortcomings of early film as a means of documenting reality – lack of color, sound or three-dimensionality – as the true reasons for why film could be considered an artform. Instead of merely reproducing its object, the film image had to creatively interpret it through the use of shot composition, light and shadow etc. This is why Arnheim was highly skeptical of the prospect of stereoscopic film and even held similar reservations against the introduction of sound or color. These latter objections might seem absurd in retrospect, but in the case of 3D-film, I think that history has mostly supported his argument. While sound and color quickly became irreducible components of almost every film, stereoscopic vision is not even relevant for most movies that were explicitly marketed as 3D-experiences, as exemplified by the common practice of only converting the footage to 3D in post-production. The 3DS seemed to have suffered a similar fate of being perceived as a flashy but ultimately superfluous gimmick, at the latest with the release of the 2DS in 2013. If even Nintendo treats the supposedly central feature of its console as a now completely optional feature, why should anyone bother to care about the 3D at all? And so Super Mario 3D Land simply another 3D-Mario title, both outclassed by the Galaxy-games before and 3D World after it.
As justified as this perception may be for the console as a whole, it has led to an unfortunate misrecognition of 3D Land, a game which I would not hesitate to call one of the most accomplished 3D-works, period. Though the 3D was applauded by reviewers upon release, the praise remained mostly concerned with how well it worked technically and its gameplay implications. Yes, the 3D effect makes jumping more precise at times without the need to rely on Mario’s shadow as much for positioning. But if that was all, then the feature would really only be a gimmick, because it fixes a problem that didn’t even exist in the first place. When was the last time you heard someone complain that the controls of 3D-Mario were too imprecise? In terms of design, 3D Land adheres to the same four step philosophy that was succinctly analyzed by Mark Brown for the sequel 3D World. Albeit the former did it first, it would be hard to convince anyone that the latter didn’t do it better. 3D Land definitely deserves credit for perfecting the brilliance of the flagpoles of the first Super Mario Bros., which were brought back before in the New Super Mario Bros.-series.
The game’s true ingenuity lies neither in the gameplay nor the presentation, but the unique interplay between them. Rather than simply amplifying the perception of depth in order to compensate for the reduced screen size, 3D Land draws just as much of its identity from the tradition of 2D-Mario games as it picks up the recent trends of the 3D console titles. Like in the Galaxy-games, every position of the camera is entirely mapped out in advance, but since the camera is placed a lot closer to Mario, your positioning is much more dependent on the current field of view. Your character’s mobility in its three-dimensional environment is strictly bound to his visibility from a limited linear perspective. In other words, 3D Land’s design embraces the same ambivalence between plane and recession, two- and three-dimensionality that informed art history as outlined above, while discovering novel ways of expressing it through its game design.
As with any great Mario game, 3D Land’s reliance on familiar themes, enemies, and items should not be mistaken for unoriginality. Every level is distinct, just not by virtue of its individual components or challenges, but as a composition of movement and perspective. There are levels about ascension or descension, movement into the depth and lateral side scrollers, free roaming levels as well as maze like progression from room to room. Likewise, the camera moves from a profile shot to behind the back of Mario, zooms out to a removed isometric view or closes in like a third-person perspective. Similarly, the Star Coins don’t function like the usual collectibles in a Collectathon where you must actively explore each stage from every possible angle. Most of them are hiding in plain sight, but only at the fringes of the perceivable space. Thus, the placement of the camera always fulfills a dual purpose: it carefully guides you towards the goal through a linear sequence of obstacles while at the same time encouraging you to constantly test out the outer limits of the level’s navigable architecture. Each level finds new and surprising ways to make the tension between these contradictory perspectives productive. No matter how freely the level lets you explore its three-dimensional spaces, your perception of its worlds always remains bound to the linear perspective of your screen. And no matter how much the game flattens its explorable space into a two-dimensional plane, you always have some three-dimensional wiggle room left to exploit. There is a sort of dialectical mediation to 3D Land’s usage of both its two- and three-dimensional elements: a 3D-Mario as seen through the lense of 2D game design and vice versa.
__________________
More Super Mario reviews
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Land
The reasons behind the recurrent rises and falls of 3D technology are plenty, but economic considerations aside, what seems most apparent to me in retrospect is that the trends were largely uninteresting aesthetically. Put simply, the vast majority of 3D-works were either unwilling or unable to explore the perception of space in new ways compared to what the visual arts had already been doing for hundreds of years. At least since the discovery of linear perspective, most painters have worked with the question of how to represent a three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin has even called the opposition between plane and recession one of the central principles in the evolution of art history. The point is not so much that each picture emphasizes either the perception of surface or depth in its composition, rather that this choice is possible in the first place. Both tendencies can be pushed to the extreme where they virtually exclude their opposite (see trompe-l'œil at one end of the spectrum and many forms of abstract art at the other), but the majority of artworks live from the unresolved tension between three- and two-dimensionality: their compositions can be viewed both in relation to the receding room of the represented space and the flat surface of the canvas, without either one erasing the other perspective.
Both photography and cinema have inherited this fundamental ambivalence from painting and discovered new technical means of aesthetic expression for it, for example through the use of different focal lenses or parallax movement. There is even an argument that the tension between 2D and 3D is more essential for film and photography than other visual arts because it is not the result of a particular style of figurative painting, but rather the basic condition of capturing an existing physical space onto a flat image. For German-born film theorist Rudolf Arnheim, the fact that film images are neither completely three- nor two-dimensional was already a central aspect in his understanding of "Film as Art", as the title of his book from 1932 programmatically stated. Arnheim saw the many alleged shortcomings of early film as a means of documenting reality – lack of color, sound or three-dimensionality – as the true reasons for why film could be considered an artform. Instead of merely reproducing its object, the film image had to creatively interpret it through the use of shot composition, light and shadow etc. This is why Arnheim was highly skeptical of the prospect of stereoscopic film and even held similar reservations against the introduction of sound or color. These latter objections might seem absurd in retrospect, but in the case of 3D-film, I think that history has mostly supported his argument. While sound and color quickly became irreducible components of almost every film, stereoscopic vision is not even relevant for most movies that were explicitly marketed as 3D-experiences, as exemplified by the common practice of only converting the footage to 3D in post-production. The 3DS seemed to have suffered a similar fate of being perceived as a flashy but ultimately superfluous gimmick, at the latest with the release of the 2DS in 2013. If even Nintendo treats the supposedly central feature of its console as a now completely optional feature, why should anyone bother to care about the 3D at all? And so Super Mario 3D Land simply another 3D-Mario title, both outclassed by the Galaxy-games before and 3D World after it.
As justified as this perception may be for the console as a whole, it has led to an unfortunate misrecognition of 3D Land, a game which I would not hesitate to call one of the most accomplished 3D-works, period. Though the 3D was applauded by reviewers upon release, the praise remained mostly concerned with how well it worked technically and its gameplay implications. Yes, the 3D effect makes jumping more precise at times without the need to rely on Mario’s shadow as much for positioning. But if that was all, then the feature would really only be a gimmick, because it fixes a problem that didn’t even exist in the first place. When was the last time you heard someone complain that the controls of 3D-Mario were too imprecise? In terms of design, 3D Land adheres to the same four step philosophy that was succinctly analyzed by Mark Brown for the sequel 3D World. Albeit the former did it first, it would be hard to convince anyone that the latter didn’t do it better. 3D Land definitely deserves credit for perfecting the brilliance of the flagpoles of the first Super Mario Bros., which were brought back before in the New Super Mario Bros.-series.
The game’s true ingenuity lies neither in the gameplay nor the presentation, but the unique interplay between them. Rather than simply amplifying the perception of depth in order to compensate for the reduced screen size, 3D Land draws just as much of its identity from the tradition of 2D-Mario games as it picks up the recent trends of the 3D console titles. Like in the Galaxy-games, every position of the camera is entirely mapped out in advance, but since the camera is placed a lot closer to Mario, your positioning is much more dependent on the current field of view. Your character’s mobility in its three-dimensional environment is strictly bound to his visibility from a limited linear perspective. In other words, 3D Land’s design embraces the same ambivalence between plane and recession, two- and three-dimensionality that informed art history as outlined above, while discovering novel ways of expressing it through its game design.
As with any great Mario game, 3D Land’s reliance on familiar themes, enemies, and items should not be mistaken for unoriginality. Every level is distinct, just not by virtue of its individual components or challenges, but as a composition of movement and perspective. There are levels about ascension or descension, movement into the depth and lateral side scrollers, free roaming levels as well as maze like progression from room to room. Likewise, the camera moves from a profile shot to behind the back of Mario, zooms out to a removed isometric view or closes in like a third-person perspective. Similarly, the Star Coins don’t function like the usual collectibles in a Collectathon where you must actively explore each stage from every possible angle. Most of them are hiding in plain sight, but only at the fringes of the perceivable space. Thus, the placement of the camera always fulfills a dual purpose: it carefully guides you towards the goal through a linear sequence of obstacles while at the same time encouraging you to constantly test out the outer limits of the level’s navigable architecture. Each level finds new and surprising ways to make the tension between these contradictory perspectives productive. No matter how freely the level lets you explore its three-dimensional spaces, your perception of its worlds always remains bound to the linear perspective of your screen. And no matter how much the game flattens its explorable space into a two-dimensional plane, you always have some three-dimensional wiggle room left to exploit. There is a sort of dialectical mediation to 3D Land’s usage of both its two- and three-dimensional elements: a 3D-Mario as seen through the lense of 2D game design and vice versa.
__________________
More Super Mario reviews
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Land