The Wii U's weird lop-sidedness in terms of controllers - we still haven't seen a game that supports more than one tablet-style Game Pad - might seem to give the first player an unfair advantage. New to the Mushroom Kingdom: Old-school PVC pipes have been replaced with clear acrylic. Your friends are as much a hindrance as a help most of the time, and in fact 3D World promotes backstabbing and infighting by scoring players' performance at the end of a stage, not unlike The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. Four people can play together to complete goals, with the most impatient player dragging everyone else along get left behind and you'll find yourself floating back to the action in a bubble, though this time you can pop your own bubble to escape. If you've played the console-based New Mario titles, you should have a pretty good sense of how multiplayer works here. And with a shared screen comes multiplayer. With greater processing power comes larger, more intricate level design. With higher resolution comes broader vistas. Much as with the New Mario games, 3D World may have its roots on portables, yet it feels more complete - more at home - on a console. Yes, it is basically an upscaled take on 3D Land, but. Just be glad they didn't foist yet another New Super Mario title on us.Īs soon as I played 3D World, though, my cynicism melted away. Alas, Nintendo's strategy this year consists of being as safe and conservative as possible, and the sad reality is that the Galaxy games haven't sold nearly as well as Mario's more downsized adventures. Instead, we have a game that basically looks like an upscaled version of 2011's Super Mario 3D Land - a good game, no question about it, but nothing to turn your world upside-down. I think most of us expected EAD Tokyo's next project to follow in the footsteps of their Super Mario Galaxy games, upholding the grand, sweeping tradition of Super Mario 64. Like a lot of people, I found myself a bit underwhelmed at my first glance of Super Mario 3D World.