Super Mario 3D World games console * Updated About mario games

The most effective theory I've ever heard about the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs like this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, you will find people taking care of Mario stuff all the time, irrespective 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 always 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 - just one more Mario title where each new level can be trusted to throw in a one-off idea that's forgotten seconds later. 3D World includes a story, but as ever, it drifts in to the ether the minute you take your first jump. It's 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 goes 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 whatever you encounter in a Mario game reminds you of something different you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We need to share the goomba shoe. You realize, the goomba shoe from Super Mario Bros. 3, a single-shot power-up that appears only in level 5-3, where you discover a goomba stomping around in a big 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 right moment to remind everyone about that weirdo footwear. And an ideal moment - outside of 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 in which a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles in an ice skate. An ice skate you can steal.

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

There are a handful of reasons why that is noteworthy. Firstly, it turns out that the goomba in an 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 see this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is an elegant reminder that even each time a Mario game looks a little underwhelming in writing, even though some have suggested it appears a little phoned-in, well, even then it's still best to reserve judgment.

Like Super Mario 3D Land, then, 3D World is definitely an endless freewheeling treat of a game title, and it starts using what feels as though among the greatest Mario power-ups of all time. Cat Mario is just 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 problem of close-up combat in complex 3D spaces, and that skittering, claws-out scrabble enables you to 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 are feeling powerful. You certainly can do astonishing things whenever 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 stupid risk.

Cat Mario's the stand-out, but the double cherry, another 3D World debut, could be the craziest power-up ever. Double cherry chucks in another Mario everytime 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, into the environment. Everything you can a cure for Nintendo related to this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of these and you will discover they develop 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 just like the tanooki and the fire flower, the boomerang and a scattering of new weirdo asides which are too good to spoil in advance. They're all slotted in to a game that offers a type 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 absolute most part - and a lot of'em, 3D World is really a creative blur. This can be a game that's considered as numerous ways for you 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 just how Mario accelerates, offering a type of two-speed gear change with a burst of nitro in the middle.

It's typical of Mario's designers, really. Select a level randomly, and you receive astonishing blink-and-you'll-miss-it invention. One stage I've just chosen pretty much blind offers a power-up that turned my head right 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 with lovely details that go beyond mere hidden trinkets to locate out. Listen hard in World 2 and you'll hear cats singing combined with whistling sands. In World 3, the feet ring out a musical tinkling effect as you shift from running on snow to racing down frozen train tracks.

It's beautiful along with busy, too. While Nintendo came to HD textures late, it's benefited significantly more than most - probably because it's 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 a different made 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 particular strengths of the Wii U - whatever they might prove to be - are relatively few. There are certainly a couple 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 are able to 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 should have equally as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more fun, in fact, as multiplayer is yet again nestled right near the center of the whole experience, allowing you to pick involving the line-up from Super Mario Bros. 2 (Peach really has that hover move, although it's been reined in a little) and turn each level in to a ceaseless, primary-colour barroom brawl where life expectancies are measured in seconds as opposed to minutes. The implementation's as straightforward as you can a cure for: it's essentially the multiplayer systems of New Super Mario Bros. Wii brought into three dimensions. The game camera struggles somewhat when it's really hectic and you're all headed in various directions, nonetheless it doesn't matter around it will as a result of selection of levels offering large, open spaces at the start or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters significantly more than precision team-work, anyway. It's concerning the plummet as much as the jump.

If there's an overarching theme to a game as nutty as 3D World, though, I suspect, like Mario 3D Land, it's regarding variation. Mario's glorious 3DS outing would interrupt the standard flow of programming every now and then to tilt the camera down and saddle the plumber with the mechanics of Zelda, say, and there exists a similar impulse at the office here. This still isn't a great reinvention in the design of Galaxy. Instead, there's a more ad-libbed drive to observe how stretchy Mario can be, and to explore how numerous situations he can be squashed into without changing the fundamental rhythm of play. There's 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 case, three green stars to help start progress gates, and cute little icon-printing stamps you need to 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 since the agenda: Ealing Comedy 1 minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel like a true series highlight - that is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.

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