I got stuck on a puzzle in Super Paper Mario this evening. I had to match the color of three blocks to some pattern that was supposed to be in the room. I tried several likely combinations (made maddeningly tedious by all the dimension-flipping and ladder-climbing I had to do to get to the blocks), but all of them failed to trigger whatever cute little page-turning animation I needed to get to the next room. So I turned it off. Put away my laundry instead.

I probably would have tried harder if I thought there was something worthwhile to get to beyond that puzzle. But there isn’t. Super Paper Mario sucks.

Earlier in the evening, I ran across this guy who offered to give me a tip. He didn’t want anything in return except for me to say “please.” So the game gave me a text-input box, like what it gives you when asking you to name your save or something. I’m like, OK, weird. I type in “please” (using the D-pad; no Wii remote pointer capability here) and press Done. The guy’s like, “I didn’t hear you. Say it again.” So I type it again. He’s like, “I’m not feeling it. Say it three more times.” So then I had to type “please” three more times. Is this supposed to be funny? Is there some joke or reference here that I’m not getting? Because it seems like you just made me type the same fucking word five fucking times so some guy would give me the information I needed to move on. That’s not fun. That is shit. And this game is full of it.

This is kind of a major tragedy. The previous Paper Mario games were excellent, even if their RPG elements scared off a portion of the potential audience. But the bigger issue is that the Wii needed this game to be good. The gulf between decent titles for the system was already unacceptably wide, and this is like trying to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with a made-of-toothpicks shop project. With Mario Galaxy and Metroid still months away, I have little reason to keep my Wii plugged in.