Super Mario 3D World video games * Updated User Review super mario games

The best theory I've have you ever heard concerning the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs such as this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, you will find people focusing on Mario stuff constantly, regardless of specific games. They're just toiling away in the Mario mines, churning out endless ideas for anything and everything - bosses, collectables, enemies, traversal gimmicks, ghost house hallways, the works. Mario is obviously being made, and practically any idea can lie within its remit. Mario is games, and all games - all toys, all play - can eventually be folded to the mix.

That certainly explains a casino game like Super Mario 3D World - another Mario title where each new level can be trusted to throw in a one-off idea that's forgotten seconds later. 3D World features a story, but as ever, it drifts to the ether the moment you take your first jump. It has world themes - desert, ice, grasslands - but they're largely ignored as you hop between pools of bizarre brilliance that defy easy categorisation. Autumn, water parks, the circus: each level takes you somewhere different, while every minute of play spools outwards in an agreeable 60fps jumble of nutty concepts - perhaps nuttier here than ever before. And yet! And yet that famous Mario coherency still rules - because everything you encounter in a Mario game reminds you of something else you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We want to share with you the goomba shoe. You know, the goomba shoe from Super Mario Bros. 3, a single-shot power-up that appears only in level 5-3, where you will find a goomba stomping around in a sizable green boot - a trunk you are able to steal.

Hardly anybody remembers the goomba shoe, but, behind the scenes, Mario's custodians were playing the long game. Nintendo was just biding its time, twiddling its thumbs, looking forward to the perfect moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And the perfect moment - not in the odd cameo in the RPG spin-offs - is level 3-1 of Mario 3D World: a snowy playground in that you move through pine forests and over deep drifts before venturing onto a frozen lake the place where a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles within an ice skate. An ice skate you are able to steal.

The ice skate's a one-hit deal, but it's great as you have it.

There are always a number of reasoned explanations why this is noteworthy. Firstly, it turns out a goomba in a ice skate - serious, self-contained, frowning with lofty pride as if all too conscious of the vital role he plays in Bowser's master plan - is actually the single funniest thing you will dsicover this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is a stylish reminder that even each time a Mario game looks only a little underwhelming in some recoverable format, even if some have suggested it appears a little phoned-in, well, even then it's still better to reserve judgment.

Like Super Mario 3D Land, then, 3D World is definitely an endless freewheeling treat of a casino game, and it starts with what is like one of the greatest Mario power-ups of most time. Cat Mario is a near-perfect blend of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal awareness of detail condensed by an incredibly childlike degree of abstraction, its lock-on swipe attack solves the situation of close-up combat in complex 3D spaces, and that skittering, claws-out scrabble lets you scale the steep walls that will otherwise have hemmed you into these compact level maps. Like Yoshi or the cape in the first Mario World, Cat Mario makes you feel powerful. You certainly can do astonishing things once you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury whenever you lose your brand-new toys fumbling over a silly risk.

Cat Mario's the stand-out, but the double cherry, another 3D World debut, may be the craziest power-up ever. Double cherry chucks in another Mario every time you eat one, each recent addition moving in sync as you race across a map. You are able to chain double cherries until you're wielding only a little Mario dance troupe, and you are able to split them up and fan them out by bumping them, tactically, in to the environment. Everything you may hope for Nintendo regarding this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of these and you'll find they create a strangely socialist image: a quartet of punchy little comrades bobbing along in braces.

The art direction's still brilliant, and multiplayer's enlivened with a little gentle rivalry as you fight for the crown that would go to the victor of every level.

The cat and the cherries mingle nicely alongside old friends such as the tanooki and the fire flower, the boomerang and a scattering of new weirdo asides that are too good to spoil in advance. They're all slotted in to a game that offers some sort of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from an amount that hides its first collectable behind the kick off point to others that drop you into the middle of the action with only 100 seconds on the clock.

With shortish stages - for the most part - and lots of'em, 3D World is a creative blur. This can be a game that's considered as much ways for you yourself to scale that end-of-level flagpole as it has levels that end. Halfway through the whole adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst of the chaos, somebody's quietly altered the way in which Mario accelerates, offering some sort of two-speed gear change with a burst of nitro in the middle.

It's typical of Mario's designers, really. Pick a level at random, and you get astonishing blink-and-you'll-miss-it invention. One stage I've just chosen just about blind offers a power-up that turned my head into a cannon, a view of some goombas relaxing in rubber rings, and a frog that expels huge gobs of coins when stepped on. Moving outwards, the chunky snooker-felt-and-hard-plastic overworld maps that bring these levels together are filled up with lovely details that exceed mere hidden trinkets to locate out. Listen hard in World 2 and you'll hear cats singing along with the whistling sands. In World 3, your feet ring out a musical tinkling effect as you shift from running on snow to racing down frozen train tracks.

It's beautiful in addition to busy, too. While Nintendo came to HD textures late, it's benefited more than most - probably because it has rendering interests that exceed rust and gunmetal. Mario's world has always been scattershot in its materials, but 3D World really revels in sending you from an assault course built of quilting to another created from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.

Even Cat Mario's walking animation is perfect - body bouncing gently, head embracing left and right - a pet out and about with nowhere it needs to be.

Other nods to the precise strengths of the Wii U - whatever they could come out to be - are relatively few. There are certainly a number of levels where you've to prod the GamePad screen to smash crates and raise or lower platforms (or move them about by blowing), and there's off-screen play and Miiverse integration. You can share ghost Mii runthroughs, Trackmania-style, and you may also draw on the screen to highlight things for other players (or to annoy them).

By and large, though, you'll have equally as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more pleasurable, actually, as multiplayer is once again nestled right near the heart of the whole experience, enabling you to pick involving the line-up from Super Mario Bros. 2 (Peach really has that hover move, although this has been reined in a little) and turn each level right into a ceaseless, primary-colour barroom brawl where life expectancies are measured in seconds as opposed to minutes. The implementation's as straightforward as you may a cure for: it's essentially the multiplayer systems of New Super Mario Bros. Wii brought into three dimensions. The game camera struggles a little when it is hectic and you're all headed in various directions, nonetheless it doesn't matter as much as it would as a result of array of levels that provide large, open spaces in the beginning or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters a lot more than precision team-work, anyway. It's about the plummet around the jump.

If there's an overarching theme to a game title as nutty as 3D World, though, I suspect, like Mario 3D Land, it's regarding variation. Mario's glorious 3DS outing would interrupt the conventional flow of programming every now and then to tilt the camera down and saddle the plumber with the mechanics of Zelda, say, and there is a similar impulse at the job here. This still isn't a grand reinvention in the design of Galaxy. Instead, there is a more ad-libbed drive to observe stretchy Mario can be, and to explore how many different situations he can be squashed into without changing the fundamental rhythm of play. There exists a level that employs stealth mechanics, for instance, and another where you're cast, from time to time, as a Mario shadow-puppet. There are rhythm action sequences, lock-and-key tasks, and Captain Toad levels where you can't jump at all.

Stealth! No jumping! Mario, inevitably, copes with everything thrown at him, while each stage still manages to stuff in the requisite collectables - in this instance, three green stars to greatly help start progress gates, and cute little icon-printing stamps you can use in Miiverse posts. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is arguably the series'greatest yet - and that's including Super Mario Galaxy 2. It's as lavish and quick-changing while the agenda: Ealing Comedy one minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel like a true series highlight - this is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.

Compact by the standards of the Galaxy adventures but still loaded with bountiful secrets, beneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies one of many strangest Mario games in years - or one or more of the most random in its influences and its moment-to-moment indulgences. And that is clearly a very, great thing. The Wii U sees Nintendo's mascot racing into venerable middle age by going wonderfully loopy - by dialling up the energy, even when the end result is often absolutely insane. After all these years, who could blame him?