The best theory I've have you ever heard about the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs such as this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are people working on Mario stuff all the time, 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 definitely 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 game title like Super Mario 3D World - another Mario title where each new level may be trusted to throw in a one-off idea that's forgotten seconds later. 3D World features 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 amiable 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 want to speak about 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 boot 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, waiting for an ideal moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And the perfect 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 when you have it.
There are a number of reasons why that is noteworthy. Firstly, it turns out that a goomba in an ice skate - serious, self-contained, frowning with lofty pride like all too aware of the vital role he plays in Bowser's master plan - is obviously the single funniest thing you will dsicover this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is a classy reminder that even each time a Mario game looks a little underwhelming on paper, even though 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 can be an endless freewheeling treat of a game title, and it starts with what feels like one of many greatest Mario power-ups of all time. Cat Mario is just a near-perfect blend of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal focus on detail condensed by a wonderfully childlike level 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 could 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 are able to do astonishing things when you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury once you lose your toys fumbling over a silly risk.
Cat Mario's the stand-out, however 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 new addition moving in sync as you race across a map. You can 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 may expect Nintendo to do with 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 with a little gentle rivalry as you fight for the crown that goes to the victor of each 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 which can be too good to spoil in advance. They're all slotted in to a game that gives some sort of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from an amount that hides its first collectable behind the starting point to others that drop you into the midst of the action with only 100 seconds on the clock.
With shortish stages - for probably the most part - and lots of'em, 3D World is a creative blur. This can be a game that's considered as numerous ways for you really 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 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 receive astonishing blink-and-you'll-miss-it invention. One stage I've just chosen more or less 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 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 in addition to busy, too. While Nintendo came to HD textures late, it's benefited a lot more than most - probably because it has rendering interests that go beyond rust and gunmetal. Mario's world happens to be scattershot in its materials, but 3D World really revels in sending you from an assault course built of quilting to a different produced from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.
Even Cat Mario's walking animation is perfect - body bouncing gently, head embracing 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 might come out to be - are relatively few. There are always a handful 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 just as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more fun, in fact, as multiplayer is once again nestled right near one's heart of the complete experience, allowing you to 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 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 might hope for: it's essentially the multiplayer systems of New Super Mario Bros. Wii brought into three dimensions. The overall game camera struggles somewhat when it is hectic and you're all headed in various directions, however it doesn't matter around it would because of selection of levels that offer large, open spaces in the beginning or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters a lot 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 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 is a similar impulse at work here. This still isn't a great reinvention in the style of Galaxy. Instead, there's a more ad-libbed drive to observe stretchy Mario may be, and to explore how a variety of situations he is able to be squashed into without changing the fundamental rhythm of play. There's 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 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 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 is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.
Compact by the standards of the Galaxy adventures but nevertheless 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 very random in its influences and its moment-to-moment indulgences. And that is a very, very good 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 outcome is usually absolutely insane. After all these years, who could blame him?
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