Super Mario 3D World games console * Updated Top Review super mario games

The very best theory I've ever heard about the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs like this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are 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 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 game title 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 includes a story, but as ever, it drifts to 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 something else you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We 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 boot 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 an ideal moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And the right moment - outside 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 the place where 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 when you have it.

There are always a handful of reasons why that is noteworthy. Firstly, it turns out that the goomba within an ice skate - serious, self-contained, frowning with lofty pride as if all too alert to the vital role he plays in Bowser's master plan - is clearly the single funniest thing you will see this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is a stylish reminder that even each time a Mario game looks a little underwhelming in some recoverable format, even if 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 casino game, and it starts with what is like one of many greatest Mario power-ups of most time. Cat Mario is 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 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're feeling powerful. You can do astonishing things once you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury when you lose your brand-new toys fumbling over a dumb 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 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 can split them up and fan them out by bumping them, tactically, to the environment. Everything you might expect Nintendo related to this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of them 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 visits 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 starting point to others that drop you into the center of the action with only 100 seconds on the clock.

With shortish stages - for probably the most part - and a lot of'em, 3D World is really a creative blur. This is a game that's looked at as much ways for you to scale that end-of-level flagpole as 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 just how 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. Select a level at random, and you get 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 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 up with lovely details that rise above mere hidden trinkets to locate out. Listen hard in World 2 and you'll hear cats singing combined 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 as well as busy, too. While Nintendo stumbled on HD textures late, it's benefited more than most - probably because it has 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 made 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 must be.

Other nods to the specific strengths of the Wii U - whatever they might prove to be - are relatively few. There are always a couple 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 can even draw on the screen to highlight things for other players (or to annoy them).

By and large, though, you'll have equally as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more pleasurable, in fact, as multiplayer is yet again nestled right near the center of the entire 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 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 somewhat when it's really hectic and you're all headed in numerous directions, but it doesn't matter around it will as a result of range of levels that provide large, open spaces at the beginning or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters a lot more than precision team-work, anyway. It's in regards to the plummet around the jump.

If there's an overarching theme to a casino 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 is a similar impulse at the job here. This still isn't a great reinvention in the type of Galaxy. Instead, there exists a more ad-libbed drive to observe stretchy Mario can be, and to explore how a variety of situations he is able to be squashed into without changing the fundamental rhythm of play. There exists a level that employs stealth mechanics, like, and another where you're cast, from time to time, as a Mario shadow-puppet. You can 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 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 while the agenda: Ealing Comedy 1 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 still packed with bountiful secrets, underneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies among the strangest Mario games in years - or one or more of the very most random in its influences and its moment-to-moment indulgences. And that is a very, excellent thing. The Wii U sees Nintendo's mascot racing into venerable middle age by going wonderfully loopy - by dialling up the power, even when the outcome is frequently absolutely insane. After each one of these years, who could blame him?