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 such as this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, you will find people working on Mario stuff constantly, 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 into 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 into the ether the moment 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 all you encounter in a Mario game reminds you of another thing you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We need to share the goomba shoe. You understand, 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 large green boot - a shoe you can 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, awaiting the right moment to remind everyone about that weirdo footwear. And the right 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 simply undertake pine forests and over deep drifts before venturing onto a frozen lake 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 certainly a handful of explanations why this really is noteworthy. Firstly, it turns out a goomba within an ice skate - serious, self-contained, frowning with lofty pride as though all too aware 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 a classy reminder that even whenever a Mario game looks a little underwhelming in some recoverable format, even though some have suggested it appears a little phoned-in, well, even then it's still far better reserve judgment.

Like Super Mario 3D Land, then, 3D World is an endless freewheeling treat of a game, and it starts using what feels as though among the greatest Mario power-ups of time. Cat Mario is really a near-perfect blend of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal attention to detail condensed by a wonderfully 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 would otherwise have hemmed you into these compact level maps. Like Yoshi or the cape in the initial Mario World, Cat Mario makes you feel powerful. You can do astonishing things whenever you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury once you lose your brand-new toys fumbling over a dumb 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 every time you eat one, each new addition moving in sync as you race across a map. You can chain double cherries until you're wielding a little Mario dance troupe, and you are able to split them up and fan them out by bumping them, tactically, to the environment. Everything you may a cure for Nintendo to do with this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of them and you will find they produce a strangely socialist image: a quartet of punchy little comrades bobbing along in braces.

The art direction's still brilliant, and multiplayer's enlivened by a little gentle rivalry as you fight for the crown that goes 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 into a game that gives a type of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from an even 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 plenty of'em, 3D World is a creative blur. This can be a game that's considered as many 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 this chaos, somebody's quietly altered the way in which Mario accelerates, offering a kind of two-speed gear change with a burst of nitro in the middle.

It's typical of Mario's designers, really. Choose a level at random, and you receive astonishing blink-and-you'll-miss-it invention. One stage I've just chosen more or less blind provides 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 with lovely details that exceed mere hidden trinkets to search out. Listen hard in World 2 and you'll hear cats singing combined 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 as well as busy, too. While Nintendo came to HD textures late, it's benefited more than most - probably because it's rendering interests that go beyond 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 created from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.

Even Cat Mario's walking animation is ideal - body bouncing gently, head looking at 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 could come out to be - are relatively few. There are certainly a handful of levels where you have 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 should have just as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more fun, actually, as multiplayer is yet again nestled right near the center of the whole experience, letting you pick between the line-up from Super Mario Bros. 2 (Peach still 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 rather than 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 bit when it's really hectic and you're all headed in numerous directions, but it doesn't matter as much as it will as a result of selection of levels that offer large, open spaces in the beginning or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters significantly more than precision team-work, anyway. It's concerning the plummet around 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 normal 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 work here. This still isn't a grand reinvention in the style of Galaxy. Instead, there's a more ad-libbed drive to observe stretchy Mario may be, and to explore how many different situations they can be squashed into without changing the basic rhythm of play. There is a level that employs stealth mechanics, for example, and another where you're cast, from time to time, as a Mario shadow-puppet. You will find 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 greatly help open up 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 whilst the agenda: Ealing Comedy one minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel just 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, underneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies among the strangest Mario games in years - or at least one of the very most random in its influences and its moment-to-moment indulgences. And that's 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 if the result is usually absolutely insane. After every one of these years, who could blame him?