Super Mario 3D World games console - Updated Overal super mario games

The best theory I've ever heard concerning the mysterious way that Mario games get made runs like this: deep inside Nintendo's development structure, there are people taking care of 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 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 in to the mix.

That certainly explains a casino game like Super Mario 3D World - just one more Mario title where each new level can 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 as soon as 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 else you encountered in another Mario game. Because Mario is games.

Exhibit A: We want to fairly share 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 will find a goomba stomping around in a large green boot - a start 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, awaiting the perfect moment to remind everyone about this weirdo footwear. And the perfect 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 undertake pine forests and over deep drifts before venturing onto a frozen lake where a goomba awaits, turning dreamy circles in a 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 reasoned explanations why this is noteworthy. Firstly, as it happens that a goomba within 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 really the single funniest thing you will see this year. Secondly, the goomba ice skate is a classy reminder that even each time a Mario game looks a little underwhelming in some recoverable format, even if some have suggested it seems a bit 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 game, and it starts in what feels like one of many greatest Mario power-ups of most time. Cat Mario is really a near-perfect mixture of all Nintendo's skills: its animations reveal attention to 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 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're feeling powerful. You are able to do astonishing things whenever you wield that fluffy uniform, but you're vulnerable too, and you'll wince with fury once 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 can chain double cherries until you're wielding a little Mario dance troupe, and you are able to split them up and fan them out by bumping them, tactically, to the environment. Everything you might expect Nintendo regarding 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 by 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 just like 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 provides a kind of antic, hyperactive cheekiness - from an even that hides its first collectable behind the starting place to others that drop you into the center of the action with only 100 seconds on the clock.

With shortish stages - for the most part - and lots of'em, 3D World is really a creative blur. This is a game that's thought of as much ways for you really to scale that end-of-level flagpole as it has levels that end. Halfway through the entire adventure, you'll suddenly realise that, in the midst of this chaos, somebody's quietly altered the way 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. Choose 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 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 go beyond 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, 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 stumbled on 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 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 turning to left and right - a cat out and about with nowhere it needs to be.

Other nods to the specific 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 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 should have equally as much fun with remotes and nunchucks or pro controllers - more pleasurable, actually, as multiplayer is yet again nestled right near the center of the entire experience, letting you pick between 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 right 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 might 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 this really is hectic and you're all headed in different directions, nonetheless it doesn't matter as much as it would due to a range 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 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 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 grand reinvention in the design of Galaxy. Instead, there exists a more ad-libbed drive to observe how stretchy Mario could be, and to explore how many different situations he can be squashed into without changing the basic rhythm of play. There's 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 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 one minute, risqué 70s gameshow the next. The mournful, yawning strings of a ghost house feel just like a true series highlight - this really is pastiche at its most skilful, its most panoramic.

Compact by the standards of the Galaxy adventures but still full of bountiful secrets, under the warm familiarity of 3D World lies one of many 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, 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 though the result is often absolutely insane. After all these years, who could blame him?