The cat that got the cream
Oli Welsh continued to be the best dressed man in the games industry, and he also handled the site's review content during an exceptionally busy year. In between all that, he also found time to write some of the year's best reviews.
The cat suit, the cat suit, the cat suit. Yes, it's adorable, and it's hardly a surprise it was the toast of every review and the star of Nintendo's campaign. But spare a thought for the Double Cherry, the
other all-time classic Super Mario power-up introduced in Super Mario 3D World, here relegated to also-ran. In any other game, the Double Cherry would be... well, it would be the whole game.
This is what Nintendo's breakaway Tokyo studio does. The studio's ceaseless, almost careless invention is often remarked upon. But what I love particularly about the Double Cherry is not that it's one of the best gameplay ideas in a gamethat possesses hundreds of them, but the kind of idea that it is; what it represents.
The Double Cherry adds an extra Mario on screen and its effect stacks, so you can keep copying and pasting our hero as you pick up more cherries - and you stay in full control of all of them. Like the ability to fly granted by Super Mario Bros 3's Tanooki suit and Super Mario World's cape, it's an outrageous move: the kind that shouldn't work, that should break the level design. It doesn't, of course, because this is Nintendo, but it lets you feel like you're breaking the rules of thegame world even as the designers stay one step ahead, inventing new rules around it and then inviting you to break
those. Now that's what I call classic Super Mario: a conceptual hall of mirrors masquerading as a children's plaything.
The Double Cherry is exactly the sort of feature I feared this game wouldn't have. As much as I loved its 3DS predecessor Super Mario 3D Land, ever since Galaxy 2 I have been worried that Mario has been getting a little too comfortable in his own skin, following the rules rather than always seeking to break them. This concern was not at all alleviated at E3, when I saw that EAD Tokyo's first work on Wii U would be a straight sequel to the 3DS game with New Super Mario Bros' multiplayer added. Yet how wrong I was, as I freely admitted after viewing
the year's best game trailer, a couple of minutes of astonishing footage that served up a new gameplay idea
every five seconds - and yet kept plenty in store to surprise us in the game itself.
3D World is not destined to rank among my all-time favourite Mario games; it's almost too quickfire, the levels too succinctly articulated. I like it when the series stretches its legs a little and really starts to warm to a theme, as it did in the incomparable World, 64 and Galaxy. I also prefer the elastic momentum of the fully analogue controls of previous 3D Marios to the more taut eight-way directional controls used here so the game could support the Wii remote's d-pad. A fair compromise to allow easy local multiplayer, perhaps, but it still stings.
But just look at what else was compromised in Super Mario 3D World: nothing at all. Raw invention and fun, delivered at an inviolable 60 frames per second, without a single glitch, stutter or lull. In a very real sense, there's not another game released this year than can match that.
