![]() Thousand Year Door shines for me in a cluster of quite specific ways. It's still the first game I pop into my broken Gamecube whenever I forget that it's broken, which seems to happen more and more these days. Of all Mario's adventures in papercraft it's surely Thousand Year Door that has best endured the test of time. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island - from Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3. Monkeys each watermelons and machine gun the pips, and that push-pull of advancing forward while keeping hold of Baby Mario gives the whole thing a rigour in amongst the chaos. Enemies zoom into and out of the screen, devouring platforms or sending out sprays of water. The levels themselves! Never has a 16-bit game been so in love with texture, from the bouncy bodies of bosses to the crunchy, crumbly destructible yellow clay you find in levels, and the sharp, glinting gems down in the mines. Yoshi takes the limelight here, with an egg-flinging attack and a lovely fluttery long jump, while the papercraft levels create a truly timeless look and the levels themselves? Somehow, a Mario game without Mario - or rather, with Mario cast as a baby, slung on Yoshi's back or floating in a balloon - turned out to be one of the most inventive Mario games of all time. SNES, Game Boy Advance (Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3), Virtual Console, Nintendo Switch Online. Thousand Year Door might be the cleverer game, but this is just a colourful delight - pure Mushroom Kingdom confection. Throw in some glorious turn-based battles and you've got a cracker. It's a rich game even before you get to the ingenious two-character traversal mechanic that sees you leading Mario and Luigi around as a single unit, each with their own jump buttons. Mario and Luigi share a house, travel around and meet fans who all want to see the famous jump, and at one point indulge in a bit of Peach cosplay. It's also some of the most sustained character building in all of Mario, if that's a think that can be said in any serious way. I played this for the first time back in the days when I still went home for Christmas, and it's the kind of game that I was constantly itching to get back to. Mario & Luigi is a game of constant gimmicks and surprises, but it also has a truly beautiful colour palette, alive to pinks and purples and golds. ![]() PSA: this may be the best Christmas game ever. Game Boy Advance, 3DS (Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions). It's secretly kind of brilliant in its own right. Play it on Switch to get the fascinating open-world experiment Bowser's Fury included. A lovely felty-feeling to the places you rush through. Series-best power-ups in the form of the cherry, which duplicated Mario until you're running a whole little army through the candy-coated worlds. ![]() The same short levels, the same wild levels of invention, the same desire to put Goombas in footwear - this time, an ice skate. ![]() Mainly remembered for the cat suit, this is, in truth, the long-awaited spiritual successor to Super Mario 3. Wii U, Nintendo Switch (Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury). This game is a gym for the mind as well as the fingers, and if that's your kind of Mario, then its appeal is truly endless. It gets really tricky! More than that, it requires an engagement with every part of the Mario moveset. But play it again, particularly the challenge modes, and it's the absolute apex of Mario as a technical platformer. Sure, on first playthrough it's a loveable Mario romp with a few new power-ups, a nice world map, and a sweet line in creative enemies. U has always felt like the summit of a certain kind of Mario game. Okay, not everybody's choice for a list like this, but hear me out. Here's the one and only Shigeru Miyamoto talking to Eurogamer about the making of the iconic 1-1 level. So to celebrate the success of the Mario movie, we've tried to bring together a list of our favourite Mario games - not including the many, many spinoffs. Mario always weighs the same - he's always that lovely piece of elastic to fling around colourful levels - but even before you get to kart racing and golf games, each Mario adventure always takes him somewhere new. Super Mario is video games to a lot of people, but behind the brand awareness - and the blockbuster animated movie that is currently breaking records in the cinemas - is a series that never settles into a rut.
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