Though New Super Mario Bros. Wii is now available in North America and other parts of the world, it still has a couple of weeks to go before its big Japanese launch. And as a result, that means that Nintendo and their EAD General Manager Shigeru Miyamoto are still saying many things about the game to promote it.

The latest batch comes from the new issue of Japan's Famitsu magazine, where the man behind the Mario talks about how the game's design came to be.

Miyamoto, who served as General Producer on the title, says that it's the closest he's worked on a game in a while, and that "[i]t's been a nostalgic time for me. I've been getting into the game and making the sort of fine-tuning adjustments that I made with Super Mario World and Mario 3."

He goes on to applaud the developers' decision to take a risk with the game, calling it a "courageous choice."

"We went with a very orthodox Mario despite the capabilities of modern game systems," he said. "With this game, though, our only really overall goal was multiplayer. I figured that as long as multi-play was fun, then simpler would be better for everything else, both to players and to us creators. To put it bluntly, I would've been just fine with basically making a multiplayer Super Mario World."

"That's not too terribly interesting, though," he adds, "so our goal was to create a new and serious 2D Mario, insert multiplayer into that, and make it enjoyable for all walks of gamer."

Miyamoto goes on to discuss the creation of the Super Guide system, noting that he originally wanted the option available after three lives had been spent, but "that was too few."

"You'd wind up summoning the Super Guide block even when you're playing normally, and the testers and I both thought that was just annoying!" he explained. "So after some trial and error, we settled on eight tries. That's about the point when people start to think 'Man, this stage is kind of hard' and get a little frustrated. If they watch the Super Guide, maybe then they realize it's easier than they thought. We want people to get though this on their own power first, so that's how we decided it in the end."

Since the start of the year and the uncovering of the patent which led to what would be known as the Super Guide, there has been an uproar in the gaming community about how this feature would ruin gaming, but Miyamoto points out that this is actually not anything new, especially not in a Mario game:

"In Mario 3 there was an item, the P-Wing, that basically let you skip a single stage at any time," he would recall. "I figured that since that game has 80 levels or so anyway, it'd be nice to let gamers take a pass on at least one or two of them; then, once they beat the game, they could go back to those stages and try them again. In New SMB Wii, we took that to another level."

But even with the Super Guide in place, Miyamoto doesn't think that New Super Mario Bros. Wii is the mere walk in the park that people found its predecessor to be. "I do think the game has a lot more oomph to it than the first New SMB," he commented.

"World 1 and 2 are pretty forgiving," he continued, "things ramp up starting with World 3, and it gets even harder at World 6. I think by the time you master World 6 you'll have all the skills you need. You could say this game is a challenge to gamers, to see if they have the perseverance it takes."

So far, the wife and I are to World 6, and haven't encountered any real difficulty (except with each other). What do you guys think of the game's challenge?