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, you can find people taking care of Mario stuff constantly, 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 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 has a story, but as ever, it drifts to 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 goes 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 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 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 discover a goomba stomping around in a big 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, awaiting the right moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And the perfect moment - not in 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 where a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles in an ice skate. An ice skate you are able to steal.
The ice skate's a one-hit deal, but it's great while you have it.
There are a couple of reasoned explanations why this really is noteworthy. Firstly, as it happens 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 really the single funniest thing you will dsicover this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is an elegant reminder that even whenever a Mario game looks only a little underwhelming written down, even when some have suggested it seems a little phoned-in, well, even then it's still far better reserve judgment.
Like Super Mario 3D Land, then, 3D World is definitely an endless freewheeling treat of a casino game, and it starts using what feels as though one of the 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 an incredibly 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 allows you to 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're feeling powerful. You certainly can do astonishing things whenever you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury when you lose your toys fumbling over a silly risk.
Cat Mario's the stand-out, but the double cherry, another 3D World debut, will be the craziest power-up ever. Double cherry chucks in another Mario every time you eat one, each recent 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, into the environment. Everything you might hope for Nintendo related to this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of these and you will find 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 with 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 which are too good to spoil in advance. They're all slotted right into a game that provides some sort of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from an even that hides its first collectable behind the starting place 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 a creative blur. This can be a game that's looked at as much ways for you yourself to scale that end-of-level flagpole because it has levels that end. Halfway through the whole adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst of the 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. Select 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 supplies 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 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 a lot more than most - probably because it's rendering interests that exceed 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 a different 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 pet out and about with nowhere it needs to be.
Other nods to the precise strengths of the Wii U - whatever they might prove 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 as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more pleasurable, in reality, as multiplayer is yet again nestled right near the heart of the complete experience, enabling 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 as opposed to minutes. The implementation's as straightforward as you can a cure 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's really hectic and you're all headed in numerous directions, however it doesn't matter around it would as a result of array 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 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's a similar impulse at the office here. This still isn't a great reinvention in the type of Galaxy. Instead, there's a more ad-libbed drive to see how stretchy Mario may be, and to explore how a variety of situations he can be squashed into without changing the essential rhythm of play. There is a level that employs stealth mechanics, for instance, 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 simply help open progress gates, and cute little icon-printing stamps you need to 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 just like a true series highlight - that 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 at least one of the most random in its influences and its moment-to-moment indulgences. And that is clearly 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 power, even if the result is frequently absolutely insane. After all these years, who could blame him?
