Super Mario 3D World video games + New Overal mario games

The most effective theory I've have you ever heard regarding 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 all the time, aside from 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 in to the mix.

That certainly explains a casino game like Super Mario 3D World - just one more Mario title where each new level may 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 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 a friendly 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 another thing you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We truly need to share 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 find a goomba stomping around in a large green boot - a trunk 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, looking forward to the perfect 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 in which a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles within an ice skate. An ice skate you can steal.

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

There are a couple of explanations why this really is noteworthy. Firstly, as it happens that a goomba in 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 in fact the single funniest thing you will dsicover this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is a stylish reminder that even whenever a Mario game looks a little underwhelming written down, even though some have suggested it seems a bit 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 in what feels like one of many greatest Mario power-ups of time. Cat Mario is just a near-perfect blend of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal attention to detail condensed by a wonderfully childlike amount of abstraction, its lock-on swipe attack solves the issue of close-up combat in complex 3D spaces, and that skittering, claws-out scrabble lets you scale the steep walls that could otherwise have hemmed you into these compact level maps. Like Yoshi or the cape in the first Mario World, Cat Mario makes you're feeling powerful. You can certainly do astonishing things whenever you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury once you lose your 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 each time you eat one, each new 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 can a cure for Nintendo related to this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of these and you will discover 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 by 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 like 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 some sort of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from a level that hides its first collectable behind the starting 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 plenty of'em, 3D World is just a creative blur. This is a game that's looked at as numerous ways for you really to scale that end-of-level flagpole since it has levels that end. Halfway through the entire adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst of this chaos, somebody's quietly altered the way in which 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. Pick a level randomly, and you obtain astonishing blink-and-you'll-miss-it invention. One stage I've just chosen pretty much blind provides a power-up that turned my head in to a cannon, a glimpse 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 full of lovely details that rise above mere hidden trinkets to search 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 as well as busy, too. While Nintendo stumbled on HD textures late, it's benefited significantly more than most - probably because it's rendering interests that rise above 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 produced from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.

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

Other nods to the specific strengths of the Wii U - whatever they may 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 can 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 pleasurable, actually, as multiplayer is once more nestled right near one's heart of the entire 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 might hope for: it's essentially the multiplayer systems of New Super Mario Bros. Wii brought into three dimensions. The game camera struggles somewhat when this really is hectic and you're all headed in different directions, however it doesn't matter around it will due to a range 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 related to 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's a similar impulse at the office here. This still isn't a grand reinvention in the style of Galaxy. Instead, there exists a more ad-libbed drive to see how stretchy Mario could be, and to explore how a variety of situations they can be squashed into without changing the basic 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 simply help start progress gates, and cute little icon-printing stamps you should 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 one minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel such as for instance a true series highlight - this really is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.

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