E3: New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Four from the floor.
What's the best Nintendo game you've never played? Probably a full four-player session of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, 2005's 2D multiplayer excursion for the Zelda series. Its devious and riotous spirit remain a mystery to most because you'd need to assemble a GameCube, four GBAs and four link cables to play it as nature intended, something which was difficult for even games journalists to manage.
But it remains a landmark piece of multiplayer game design, a game that achieved the rare feat of seeing that co-operation and competition, cruelty and kindness, mischief and high adventure could co-exist. Virtually none have followed it, save Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, in its friendly, woolly kind of way. Now, Nintendo has finally decided to resurrect the idea - but this time, in a form that almost everyone will be able to access and understand.
The result is New Super Mario Bros Wii, and it's fantastic fun.
After romping through a few levels with three others at Nintendo's plush and airy E3 booth, I was left grinning from ear to ear. The game doesn't look like much - well, it looks like a New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, exactly like it in fact. But you need to play it for mere minutes to tell that it's got the perfect balance of order and chaos Nintendo's platformers are famous for, mixed with the sugar-coated mean-streak of Mario Kart and the mischievous invention, sharp tuning and secret surprises of the developer's best.
Players start out as Mario, Luigi and a couple of coloured Toads - who knows if more characters might be available later? - and start the time-honoured scroll from left to right. The Wii remote is held laterally and the game uses NES-style controls - d-pad, 1 to dash, 2 to jump. That's it, save a shake that performs a spin-jump or, if you run into another player with dash also held down, picks them up. But as ever with Mario, a simple control scheme doesn't mean a simple move-set. We discovered the wall-kick and ground-pound, and we're sure there are more.
As with Four Swords, physical interaction between the players is at the core of the game - chucking each other around, bouncing off each other's heads, getting Yoshi to gobble up your friends and spit them out. Yes, Yoshi's in it, along with his multicoloured dinosaur tribe, flutter jumps and fixation with eating everything in sight. Opportunities to mount Yoshi are carefully seeded through the level we play, and always an object of scrambling competition between players.
It's bopping other players' heads that makes the real difference in to New Super Mario Bros Wii, though. You friends essentially become a set of wildly unpredictable moving platforms that can be used to grab coins or items - often found floating in bubbles, or produced in fours from blocks - first, or with a bit of co-ordination, to access secret or hard-to-reach objectives. Although it's unlikely to be an essential part of gameplay - New Super Mario Bros Wii will need to be playable solo, even if it's hardly the point - it's a simple stroke of genius that defines the game: it has huge potential for both co-operation and competition, and more importantly, it's really funny.