Super Mario 3D World video games * Lastest About super mario games

The very best theory I've have you ever heard regarding the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs similar to this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are 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 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 could be trusted to throw in a one-off idea that's forgotten seconds later. 3D World features a story, but as ever, it drifts in to the ether the minute 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 all you encounter in a Mario game reminds you of something different you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We want to fairly 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 big green boot - a start 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 an ideal moment to remind everyone about that weirdo footwear. And the right moment - outside of the odd cameo in the RPG spin-offs - is level 3-1 of Mario 3D World: a snowy playground in which you undertake 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 as you have it.

There are certainly a handful of explanations why this really is noteworthy. Firstly, as it happens that the goomba in an ice skate - serious, self-contained, frowning with lofty pride as if all too aware of the vital role he plays in Bowser's master plan - is actually the single funniest thing you might find this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is an elegant reminder that even whenever a Mario game looks only a little underwhelming on paper, even though some have suggested it appears somewhat 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, and it starts in what feels like one of many greatest Mario power-ups of time. Cat Mario is a near-perfect mixture of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal attention to detail condensed by a wonderfully childlike level of abstraction, its lock-on swipe attack solves the problem 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 original Mario World, Cat Mario makes you are feeling powerful. You are able to do astonishing things when you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury whenever you lose your new toys fumbling over a foolish risk.

Cat Mario's the stand-out, however the double cherry, another 3D World debut, will be the craziest power-up ever. Double cherry chucks in another Mario everytime 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 can split them up and fan them out by bumping them, tactically, in to the environment. Everything you can expect Nintendo to do with 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 by a little gentle rivalry as you fight for the crown that visits the victor of each 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 which can be too good to spoil in advance. They're all slotted in to a game that provides 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 probably the most part - and plenty of'em, 3D World is just a creative blur. This is a game that's thought of as much ways for you to scale that end-of-level flagpole since it has levels that end. Halfway through the complete adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst with 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. Pick a level randomly, 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 locate out. Listen hard in World 2 and you'll hear cats singing along with the 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 stumbled on 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 long been scattershot in its materials, but 3D World really revels in sending you from an assault course built of quilting to some other produced from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.

Even Cat Mario's walking animation is ideal - body bouncing gently, head turning to left and right - a cat out and about with nowhere it must be.

Other nods to the particular strengths of the Wii U - whatever they may turn out to be - are relatively few. There are always 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 even draw on the screen to highlight things for other players (or to annoy them).

By and large, though, you will have equally as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more enjoyable, actually, as multiplayer is once more nestled right near one's heart of the whole experience, enabling you to pick between 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 in to a ceaseless, primary-colour barroom brawl where life expectancies are measured in seconds rather than minutes. The implementation's as straightforward as you can expect: it's essentially the multiplayer systems of New Super Mario Bros. Wii brought into three dimensions. The overall game camera struggles a little when this really is hectic and you're all headed in various directions, nonetheless it doesn't matter as much as it would as a result of range 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 about 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 related to 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 exists a similar impulse at work here. This still isn't a grand reinvention in the design of Galaxy. Instead, there's a more ad-libbed drive to observe stretchy Mario can be, and to explore how numerous situations they can be squashed into without changing the basic rhythm of play. There is a level that employs stealth mechanics, as an 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 instance, three green stars to 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 as the agenda: Ealing Comedy 1 minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel such as a true series highlight - this is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.

Compact by the standards of the Galaxy adventures but nevertheless laden up 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 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 vitality, even if the outcome is frequently absolutely insane. After all these years, who could blame him?