New Super Mario Bros. Wii Hands-on Preview

Mario bounces back for a second shot at 2.5D platforming - can Nintendo get it perfect once again?

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The most arduous I tackled on my lonesome was a sky level dominated by slowly spinning blocks and platforms, which had me frantically leaning this way and that in my chair as I fought for purchase. Mario's wall-jump (first seen in Super Mario 64) more than earned its keep at this stage, bouncing him back from suddenly-vertical surfaces.

Replaying this level a couple of times in the company of (a) a disgracefully noobish (bless her) PR lady, and (b) a comparably skilled fellow journo switched things up considerably. The most telling of the multiplayer mode's complications also seems, at first, to be the least worthy of remark: you can't move through other players. This makes racing to the finish hazardous, as characters accidentally (or not so accidentally) barge each other into pits, and bounce off each other's heads. If one player loses all their lives it's game over when the other one cops it, irrespective of how many lives he has left, so allowing a little breathing space is key. On the other hand, if you let your partner beat you to the exit flag he'll take the lion's share of the points (not to mention any power-ups and coins along the route).

As we play on, it becomes evident that Nintendo has balanced things quite brilliantly between cooperation and competition - between the camaraderie you used to share with your brother/sister on surviving a tricky floating platform segment, and the festering, bed-before-supper antagonism that once made you bury his/her prized SNES/Polly Pocket in the cat litter box.

Respawns, for instance, rely on another player's intervention. On dying, your character floats back onto the screen encased in a bubble. You can jolt yourself towards your friends by shaking the remote, but you'll need somebody to burst it before you can rejoin the party. If that somebody is feeling greedy, they might leave you hanging while they steal all the coins; if malicious, they might pop you loose right over a crevasse.

Get a capable (and most importantly light-hearted) band of like minds together and the game's a riot, with all the whimsy and sociability of a LittleBigPlanet session but cleaner, tighter, more intuitive. Towards the end of the session, my journalistic comrade and I braved a white-water raft ride along an eerie underground river. A solitary lamp cast a little light into the gloom, but not far enough to give us much advance warning of the critters sneaking up on the raft. Platforms overhead led to caves filled with juicy question mark blocks, presenting us with a textbook gaming dilemma: should we scramble up into the darkness to retrieve the treasures, and risk being left behind?

Mario's more-or-less uninterrupted success makes him easy to take for granted, in trad/hardcore/core/purist (delete as appropriate) circles at least. "Oh yeah, him," we might say distractedly, refreshing Peter Molyneux's twitter page for the nineteenth time in two minutes, or nosing around Epic's forum. "Yeah, he's a dear. Just carries on doing his thing." In fairness some of this disaffection is owing to Nintendo's wildly successful shift towards the odious mainstream, but ultimately that's no excuse for forgetting just how superb classic Mario can be. So let me wind up in the most memorable terms I can think of: New Super Mario Bros. Wii is shaping up to be the casual gamer's Left 4 Dead.

The game's out in Japan and North America later this year.

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