New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS: Facts and Reception

New Super Mario Bros. is a side-scrolling platform game from Nintendo EAD that Nintendo released for the Nintendo DS in May 2006. It carries a Metacritic score of 89 and is the first of the New Super Mario Bros. line.

Overview

Wikipedia describes it as the first side-scrolling Super Mario game since Yoshi’s Island in 1995 and the first original 2D Mario platformer since Super Mario Land 2 on the Game Boy in 1992. The story is brief: Bowser Jr. kidnaps Princess Peach, and Mario chases him through eight worlds of Bowser’s territory.

The idea for a new 2D Mario on the DS dates to late 2003, shortly after Super Mario Advance 4. Hiroyuki Kimura produced the game, Takashi Tezuka acted as general producer, and Shigeru Miyamoto supervised. Nintendo showed it first alongside the DS reveal at E3 2004, where it was only a tech demo, and it was playable at E3 2005.

How it plays

The characters and objects are 3D models set on 2D backgrounds, a mix that gives the game a 2.5D look. Mario or Luigi runs, jumps and stomps as in earlier games, and moves borrowed from the 3D games appear in a 2D Mario for the first time: the ground pound, the triple jump and the wall jump.

Each world has between eight and twelve levels, shown on the touch screen’s map view, and every world ends in a boss. The Super Mushroom, the Fire Flower and the Starman return. Three newer power-ups were introduced: the Blue Koopa Shell, the Mega Mushroom and the Mini-Mushroom, which shrinks Mario enough to enter tiny passages and run on water. A spare power-up can be stored, a feature carried over from Super Mario World.

Music shapes some of the action. Wikipedia notes that enemies move in time with it, so players can read their timing. Koji Kondo wrote the main overground theme and Asuka Ohta and Hajime Wakai composed the rest. Charles Martinet voices both brothers, and this was the first original 2D Mario with voice acting.

The multiplayer side has two parts. In the versus mode, two players compete as Mario and Luigi in one of five stages to collect a set number of stars, and stomping a rival costs that rival one star while a ground pound costs three. There are also eighteen single-player minigames and ten for several players, divided into Action, Puzzle, Table and Variety groups.

Release and credits

Nintendo first announced a 7 May 2006 date, then moved to 21 May, and finally settled on 15 May for North America. Japan followed on 25 May, which GameSpot guessed was down to the company wanting extra stock. Europe received the game on 30 June, South Korea on 8 March 2007 and China on 6 July 2009, according to Wikipedia. Metacritic prints Nintendo as developer and publisher and the same North American date.

In Japan, more than 480,000 units sold on release day. Worldwide, sales reached 30.8 million by March 2016, which Wikipedia ranks as the highest total for any DS game.

Reception

Metacritic’s Metascore is 89 across 65 critic reviews. The A.V. Club gave it an A minus. Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot wrote that experienced players might get through it quickly yet still found it worth playing, and criticism in general targeted the low difficulty and the closeness to earlier Mario games. Praise went to the level design, the graphics and its faithfulness to the older titles.

Looking back in 2026, Nintendo Life said it had been difficult to see how large the release was once several “New” games followed, but that the original felt new in 2006.

Can you still play it?

The game card runs on a Nintendo DS, DS Lite or DSi, and a Nintendo 3DS plays it in DS mode. Wii U and Switch consoles have no slot for it. Because the card is not DSi-exclusive, Wikipedia’s region lock article indicates it is region-free, so a PAL, NTSC or Japanese copy all start on one handheld.

No online service was involved in the game, so the 20 May 2014 end of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection changed nothing here. Local versus and the minigames need only a second DS and a second player. The 3DS family was discontinued by Nintendo on 16 September 2020, and used cards are now the usual source.