Super Mario Games

Mario has been around for a long time. He first showed up in the Donkey Kong arcade game in 1981, when he was officially known as Jumpman; he was renamed Mario in the sequel, Donkey Kong Junior. While Mario was originally intended to be used as a minor character in many games, he quickly became popular with fans, leading to the explosion of Mario titles; as of 2010, he has appeared in over 200 video games in a variety of genres.

Mario has appeared in far too many games to list here; the interested reading is referred to wikipedia for an exhaustive list. Mario has appeared in at least 3 games in every year since 1985; the high was 19 games in 2005.

In recent years, each of Nintendo's platforms has been greeted with a new flagship Mario game, resulting in great excitement among fans. Perhaps the most anticipated Wii games outside of Zelda: Twilight Princess were Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii, while the big news in 2009 was definitely New Super Mario Brothers Wii.

Mario's abilities were originally pretty simple: he could move back and forth, jump, and (in Donkey Kong) swing a hammer. Once he got his own game, he lost the hammer but picked up the abilities to become Super Mario (needing an extra hit to kill and able to break blocks) and Fire Mario (being able to throw fireballs to defeat his enemies). In later games, Mario continued to pick up new powers; the Mario universe now includes an astonishing variety of power-up items.

Of the top 20 best-selling console games of all time (counting games that appear on multiple consoles as different games), all but two are Nintendo games (the Playstation 2 captures positions 12 and 14), and six are Mario games, with Super Mario Bros 3 (NES), Mario Kart (DS), New Super Mario Bros (DS), and Mario Kart Wii all making the top ten. Overall, the Mario franchise has sold over 222 million games, making it the best-selling video game franchise of all time.

As usual, the last few years have seen a number of new Mario games, many of which I unfortunately haven't been able to play yet! Here's a quick look at what's come out recently.

There were four Mario games in 2009, of which the only one I've played also got the most hype (and deserved it): New Super Mario Bros Wii. This ranks as one of my favorite Mario games of all time, with Nintendo abandoning 3D to put out a good old side-scroller game that players very similarly to Super Mario Bros 3.

New games in 2010 included the sequel to Super Mario Galaxy and a limited edition repackaging of Super Mario All-Stars for the Wii. The latter was released in mid-December and was already impossible to find by January; Nintendo did a second printing in March, which sold through fairly quickly as well. This is basically a copy of the Super Nintendo cartridge that contained the four original Mario games from the NES (with updated graphics and a few bug fixes), along with a few collectible items. (The games are downloadable individually from the Wii Shop channel for $5 each, but those are the original NES versions, so it's probably worth shelling out the extra $10 to get the upgraded SNES versions, a physical disk, and the extras)

So far this year we've seen yet another sports game (Mario Sports Mix, which includes basketball, volleyball, dodge ball, and hockey, and has mostly five star reviews on Amazon), and 3D versions of Mario Kart and Paper Mario have been announced for the 3DS.