Super Paper Mario (Wii)
 At it's heart though, Super Paper Mario is a platform game. There are eight different worlds for you to explore, each with 4 chapters. Each world has a different theme and feel to it. There's grassy plains, trips through clouds, prehistoric caves and even the depths of space. Some of the chapters work brilliantly and bouncing across platforms feels as good as ever, with your character's movement and inertia coded using that trademark Nintendo 'feel'. This is definitely enhanced by the Pixls and flipping: many of the chapters are giant puzzles, requiring constant movement through the third dimension and changing of your Pixl 'powers'. During the best chapters, you will find yourself slipping into a happy rhythm of assessing the surroundings, jumping, flipping, selecting, reassessing, jumping, etc. Perhaps not surprisingly, it's usually the more 'traditional' platform levels that succeed the best at this. Where the game falls flat on it's multi-dimensional face is when the developers have tried to mix things up a bit. One whole world sees you foraging through space for one of the Pure Hearts (your primary goal is to collect 8 of these). This plays out like a kind of tedious side-scrolling shooter (think of a crappy Defender-like game), with a few sparsely-placed bad guys, featureless backgrounds that mean you have no landmarks so get lost, and a huge number of identikit portals. The 3D flipping does nothing but highlight the odd power-up here and there, and the endless traipsing through portals makes you disorientated and frustrated. Unfortunately, the boredom and frustration of the space level is indicative of another, more deeply-rooted problem with the game. Each chapter is made up of small individual sections (maybe 5-10 screens long). Some chapters make up for the shortness of each section by stringing scores of them together with identical doors and then making you wander backwards and forwards through them to complete goals. In contrast to the originality of the levels themselves, the goal for each section is usually a key to open a door (wow! never heard of that in a game before!), or to go and fetch something for an NPC. In places it is obvious that the developers have placed the goal, and the item required as far apart from each other as possible to make each section take longer to complete. For instance, start at point A, make your way to point B 5 paces away where you speak to a kindly old man/samurai/rockman; proceed throughout the entire level to the end until you reach a locked door at point C; find out you have to see the man at B again, walk to B and back to C to open the door.  I haven't seen level design this lazy or sadistic for a while and is the major reason why this game won't find itself on the pedestal alongside the likes of New Super Mario Bros or Super Mario World. Other notable instances of poor design include having to type 'please' in five times to get an NPC to help you, earning at least 10,000 coins by constantly pressing right on the d-pad for approximately 10 minutes and memorising a 20-jump sequence of blocks which you can't make one mistake on. You get the sense that the developers were trying as hard as possible to be funny, and to create humorous puzzles to solve and characters to interact with. Sometimes this works, especially if you are a connoisseur of the Nintendo universe. There are lots of little spoken and visual references to Ninty products, Mario and Luigi start the game by being bored because they haven't had to rescue Princess Peach for ages and Bowser laments his lack of success at nabbing Peach. The level of wit however, is aimed squarely at the level of fart gags and constant jokes about people with moustaches and stupid names. As an adult be warned, the constant forced silliness and childish humour might start to grate, but if you happen to be a 10-year old gamer, you will probably be rolling around on the floor in hysterics!
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