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

The most effective theory I've ever heard about the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs such as this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are people focusing on Mario stuff constantly, 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 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 to the mix.

That certainly explains a game title like Super Mario 3D World - yet another Mario title where each new level could 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 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 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 need to talk about 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 find a goomba stomping around in a big green boot - a shoe 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, looking forward to the perfect moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And an ideal moment - outside the odd cameo in the RPG spin-offs - is level 3-1 of Mario 3D World: a snowy playground in that you simply move through 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 are able to steal.

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

There are always a handful of explanations why that is noteworthy. Firstly, as it happens that the 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 in fact 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 only a little underwhelming in writing, 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 title, and it starts in what is like one of the greatest Mario power-ups of all time. Cat Mario is a near-perfect blend of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal awareness of detail condensed by a wonderfully childlike amount of abstraction, its lock-on swipe attack solves the problem 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 are feeling powerful. You can do astonishing things once 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 silly 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 fresh 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 might hope for Nintendo related to this concept is well and truly covered. Control four of these and you'll find 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 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 in to a game that offers a kind of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from a level 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 the absolute most part - and a lot of'em, 3D World is really a creative blur. This is a game that's considered as many ways for you to scale that end-of-level flagpole because it has levels that end. Halfway through the entire adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst of the 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. 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 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 exceed 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 along with busy, too. While Nintendo came to HD textures late, it's benefited more than most - probably because it has rendering interests that exceed 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 some other produced from cake batter. It's gorgeous stuff.

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

Other nods to the precise strengths of the Wii U - whatever they may turn out to be - are relatively few. There are always 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 are able to 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 should have just as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more pleasurable, in reality, as multiplayer is once again 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 into a ceaseless, primary-colour barroom brawl where life expectancies are measured in seconds rather than minutes. The implementation's as straightforward as you might expect: 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 as much as it might as a result of array of levels that offer large, open spaces at the beginning or end. Multiplayer Mario's about hilarious disasters more than precision team-work, anyway. It's concerning the plummet around the jump.

If there's an overarching theme to a game title as nutty as 3D World, though, I suspect, like Mario 3D Land, it's to do with 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 the job here. This still isn't a great reinvention in the type of Galaxy. Instead, there exists a more ad-libbed drive to see how stretchy Mario can be, and to explore how numerous situations he is able to be squashed into without changing the essential 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 case, three green stars to help open 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 whilst the agenda: Ealing Comedy 1 minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel like 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, under the warm familiarity of 3D World lies one of 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's a very, great thing. The Wii U sees Nintendo's mascot racing into venerable middle age by going wonderfully loopy - by dialling up the energy, even when the result is often absolutely insane. After each one of these years, who could blame him?