The Wii U gets a Mario launch title with New Super Mario Bros U. But it wasn't quite what the fans meant...

I picked this up shortly after getting my Wii U, being a consumate fan of all games Mario and this made for quite a quick-fire succession of New Super Mario Bros. action after playing the 3DS New Super Mario Bros. 2 barely even a month beforehand. But this is hardly a problem because even despite being relatively samey, the New Super Mario Bros. series always delivers plenty of enjoyable 2D Mario action harking back to the original pre-3D Mario Bros. games and this one is no exception.

Things start as usual with the princess being kidnapped yet again by Bowser. And it is your job to save her yet again. The Koopalings again return here acting as the final bosses for most worlds before you fight Bowser in the final world. Power ups remain mostly unchanged from previous New Super Mario Bros. titles, but do introduce a few new ones. The Super Acorn being the main one here which turns you into a flying squirrel able to glide like the racoon or caped Mario can as well as cling to walls. He can not fly however, unless you pick up the P-Acorn which is similar to Super Mario Bros. 3's P-Wing allowing unlimited flight throughout the level you use it on.

Mario in his new flying squirrel get-up

Baby Yoshis also make a return appearance not having been seen in a main Mario game since Super Mario World. As before, there are a few different colours each with different abilities such as bubble attacks, lifting you into the air and acting as illumination. These new power ups help to mix things up and the majority of the older ones are still there as familiar old friends.

The multi-player from New Super Mario Bros. Wii returns allowing up to 5 people to play the game at once. 4 of these control on screen characters with WiiMotes and the 5th can act upon the world using the Wii U gamepad to either help or hinder the other players by moving platforms, disabling enemies and the like. Hilarity always ensues as players can bounce off each other and steal power ups so this can lead to some quite insane messes occurring with more people sometimes making the game harder than easier.

You progress through the game again in the usual way going through various worlds with themes like grass, ice, fire etc, but I was particularly glad to find some of the levels dedicated to my favourite world in Super Mario Bros 3., Big Island, where all the enemies are gigantic creatures towering over Mario. This game seems to contain a lot of references to Super Mario Bros. 3 in particular including others like battle tank levels, Boom Booms and airship levels. I found this to be fantastic nostalgia as this is still my favourite 2D Mario game.

Big Island, or Giant Land as it was originally called in the NES original Super Mario Bros. 3

New Super Mario Bros. U proved to be yet another fantastic Mario game in my opinion. And while the New Super Mario Bros. series can seem quite samey from title to title and never gets the same applaud as the full fat 3D titles these days, each one is always guaranteed to be extremely worthwhile for fans of Mario and both platform games in general. You know who you are. So buy it if this is you!

The Wii U finally gets a fully fledged 3D Mario game in what is now the best reason to own the machine

Many other reviews I saw for this game before getting to play it were hailing it as the best Mario game for a long time and the best Wii U game and the reson to own a Wii U. And being a long time fan of the core Nintendo games, especially Mario ones, I was quite understandably quite excited to get playing this one for myself on my shiny new Wii U console. So when I got this game as a gift, I was very excited to get into it.

And I was not disappointed. From start to finish, this game was pure enjoyment and made me feel like I was a kid again experienceing the pure joy of Mario platformers. It's pure old-school action just like Mario Galaxy, Mario 64 or Mario 3D Land. But where 3D Land was very vertical to make good use of the 3D, 3D World is much more horizontal to give huge spread out levels that can take full advantages of the Wii U's power now that we can finally see Mario and friends in proper 3D.

Many old power ups turn up like the fire flower, ice flower, giant Mario and boomerang Mario. But as always, there are some new ones to mix in. The main new ones are multiple Marios. Collecting cherries will make clones of Mario and you can end up having several of them all running around the screen at once. They all respond to your controls in the same way so getting them all to line up and behave at once. The other main new power is the widely publicised Cat Mario where you don a cat suit. This give you the ability to do scratch attacks, lung attacks, float in the air and most importantly, run up vertical surfaces using your claws. This greatly expands the areas that you can reach and really adds a lot to each level giving you lots of new ways to attack challenges and power through levels. I found this cat power up to be far and away my favourite power up in the whole game, but it does tend to make most things a lot easier and sadly, the power up was very scarce in the later portions of the game probably for that exact reason. Cat Mario can also ascend the flagpole at the end of each level always netting you a 1-UP which is a good bonus if you can hang on to it.

The layout of the game is a familiar map world system which has been in most Mario games since Super Mario Bros. 3. However in this one, instead of just being routes that you follow, you are free to walk all over the map and explore. It doesn't add a lot because you still have to go to the levels in the end, but there are small hidden bonuses hidden around world maps that you can find if you explore. There are the usual mix of normal levels, ghost houses, castles, toad houses and moving tank/train levels a la Super Mario Bros. 3's tank levels. There is one new addition to the level type though in the form of the Captain Toad levels. In these, you take command of Captain toad and must walk around 3D isometric cube levels to find stars. As Captain Toad, you cannot jump, so you must use the layout of the terrain and viewpoints to navigate around. These are very different to the normal platforming action and are much more puzzle based, but are a lot of fun nonetheless and I think Nintendo could easily make a whole new game out of these kind of levels.

The mighty Captain Toad in action

There are also a number of other variety and themed levels including ones where you ride a giant dinosaur down a flume, a Mario Kart themed level where you run across booster pads to go at the speed of a kart, theme park levels and many many more. Up to 4 players are also supported through various multitudes of controllers. I have yet to experience this madness myself, but it looks like a lot of fun.

I could go on and on about how great this game is, but I'm sure you get the point by now. I can scarcely think of one negative thing about this game and needless to say, if you own a Wii U and haven't played it, go get it and play it. And if you don't have a Wii U, go get one and this game and play it. Now.

Lots of fun but nothing really new in this second portable entry in the New Super Mario Bros. series

I’ve been interested in this sequel to New Super Mario Bros. for a while now, but due to my 3DS being American and it being region locked, I preferred to wait until I was back in America again to pick it up. 

I did greatly enjoy New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros Wii, the later I played co-op with Big Phil and it was an insane mess.  But apart from the madness of bouncing off each other in co-op, and the series’ trademark Mega Mario power up which allows you to destroy everything on screen, I have never found anything terribly remarkable or memorable about the NSMB series.  They all seem quite samey and like they’re just going through the motions of a 2D Mario game.  They all also have the usual grass, fire, ice, sky etc world that Super Mario Bros. 3 was the first to pioneer.  The first half dozen or so 2D Mario games were all very distinct, different and memorable because they were changing and evolving alongside the hardware platforms that they appeared on.  Super Mario Bros. was very limited by the NES’s small technical abilities, but Super Mario Bros. 2 pushed them a bit further and looked very different (because it was originally a different game).  Super Mario Bros. 3 returned more to the old form, but introduced the world map and retainable power ups and many more conventions that are now standard.  Super Mario World introduced secret worlds, multiple exits to stages, saving etc.  Each of these games evolved and changed the Mario games with each new one adding in new features and abilities and each one being notably different.

But now it feels like all that can be done has been done and there is not much left to add other than the occasional new power up.  So the end result is that all the games in the NSMB series have a feeling of disposability and will never be as memorable or distinct as the older games.

All that being said, this was still an extremely solid and fun 2D Mario game.  It’s just more of the same, but when it’s this good to play, you don’t mind that as much.

The one new twist that this entry in the series does add is an obsession with coin hunting.  The game keeps tracks of total coins and you unlock small rewards at milestones.  There is also a new Coin Rush mode where you race through 3 stages as fast as possible to get as many coins as possible.  A kind of coin score attack if you will.  There are also various new methods to gathering coins such as the golden block which makes your head into a golden block with Mario’s face on it that will keep dishing out coins as long as you’re running until the timer runs out.  And a gold hoop which turns all enemies gold giving extra coin rewards for killing them and any kicked Koopa shells leave coins in their wakes.  I’m sure there are plenty of other new ways to farm coins, but these are just some of the ones I found.

I would definitely recommend this to any fan of the Mario games because Mario games are always a lot of fun and the coin hunting aspect does add a small new twist.  The only caveat would be the aforementioned feeling of overall sameness in these games.

First game beaten of the new year!  The end of the backlog creeps ever closer.

Hitting the greens again with Mario and friends. And enemies.

Yet another long forgotten entry to clean up. Not much to say about this really except that it's very similar to Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour that I played earlier in the year only it doesn't look as good. Controls and gameplay are pretty much identical bar one large annoyance: to unlock all the courses, you need to rack up huge numbers of points and the quickest way to do this is to just play the courses over and over again so it gets very repetitive. I much prefer the style of getting a gold cup to unlock the next one as is traditional with most golf games.

One other notable feature that makes this golf game different is the ability to use the little known Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak with it. If you were fortunate enough to own a Transfer Pak (which I did after hunting down a copy of Pokemon Stadium on eBay that included it in the box) and if you were also lucky enough to have had played the much more awesome RPG-like Game Boy version of Mario Golf, (which I did extensively after purchasing it one summer in France because....well, what else are you going to do in France?) you can transfer your buffed up character onto the N64 version and use them on there. But while this seems good in theory, your GB characters take a hit in the number of points they can earn so it isn't actually that much of a perk.

All in all, a sadly forgettable Mario Golf experience far outshadowed by it's younger portable counterpart. If you want Mario Golf, just play the Game Boy one instead. Seriously, it's got RPG stad building and special unlockable clubs and permanent choices you have to make about your swing statistics and everything. It's great. I hear the GBA one, Mario Golf: Advance Tour is also awesome and like a more advanced version of the GB game. Maybe I will have to try that one some day....

Man that was short. Barely 90 minutes. Got this as a free download for the 3DS for registering enough games on Club Nintendo although it was originally a part of the small and exclusive DSiWare series. These Mario and Donkey Kong games have been evolving since the new Donkey Kong back in 1994 (which is still my favourite) but I think it's gone too far now with only the Minis and no actual Mario in it now. Fun enough, but gone too far from the original now and has declined a bit. Decent enough but I was expecting it to be more like the Minis game on GBA.

Another long forgotten entry from the vast backlog. This is from 2003 (10 years ago now) which was played briefly when it first came out and now finished. A charming little Mario RPG game, but I still think the Paper Mario series is more enjoyable. My main complain in this one is that the counter attacks were quite difficult to execute as well as figure out and the cost of not regularly performing them correctly would be quite high. Quite a lot of grinding was involved to get to the levels required to progress a few times. But apart from these rather unpleasent difficulty spikes, it was overall a very enjoyable trip through the bean bean kingdom. But still probably not good enough to warrant me playing more in this series sadly.

Did not care for this one as much as I did the Mario Golf on GBC. Might have been the bone-shattering difficulty and fiddliness of actually getting the shot to go where it's pointing. Enjoyable in the early courses, but the later ones just got maddeningly difficult with way too many hazards and tiny islands to aim for. Also preferred the way you built up your own character in the GBC one rather than just using a stock character. But apart from those problems, still an enjoyable golf game. As long as you can stay on the fairways...

Another one left by the wayside. Only 8 years ago this time. But finally finished. Although I could remember none of what I had done in it 8 years ago... Still classic Paper Mario action. Charming and funny and lots of fun.

first ever 3d game. very nice. but can cause mild eye-strain. feels like christmas with an awesome new system and game. while being sweet mario action and 3d makes depth perception makes it much easier to judge distances, the levels themselves seem...unremarkable and easy to forget