With Super Mario Galaxy 2 delayed to accommodate the release of this “smaller” 2D platform game, it’s easy to feel a little resentment toward New Super Mario Bros Wii, but only until you’ve actually played it. And after getting our hands on the first ever four-player co-op Mario platformer, we’re actually finding it difficult to decide which of the two we’re looking forward to the most.

Everything that makes a 2D Mario game so much fun is here, of course. Like the DS game before it, New Super Mario Bros Wii is fun to play right down to the basic act of moving Mario around the screen. But that quality, which has existed in the series for decades, takes on a whole new life when multiple players get involved. Nintendo has designed the multiplayer so that it can be co-operative or competitive, depending on your taste, but that doesn’t mean there will be two separate modes. Instead, there are constantly two aims at work – first to simply complete the level and second to be the one who finishes with the highest score, with the behaviour of each participant naturally dictating which objective takes priority.

When most people start out, we’re inclined to assume that they will naturally co-operate to help reach the end of the game. This is can be done in the obvious ways, such as dealing with all the enemies as weaker players hang back, or showing someone how to clear a tricky jump before they try, but there are other ways that are specific to this title. Ride a Yoshi, for example, and you can grab a friend with his tongue and temporarily swallow them to protect them from harm or carry them through a dangerous area. Helpful players can also carry each other, or even act as a springboard for someone else to bounce off.

As new players grow accustomed to the basics, though, they’ll become much more likely to take on the competitive element of the game, actively going out of their way to score more points than their friends. Take the series’ familiar question blocks, for example. Hit one from below and the block will dispense a single power up for each participant. Play nice and there will be enough for everyone, but if you’re feeling a little bit evil then you could try to collect every item for yourself, boosting your points total and depriving the others of a power up. Similarly, if a friend is riding a Yoshi, you could ground-pound onto them and steal their dino steed, giving you the upper hand and setting them at a disadvantage.

Striking a balance between hardcore and casual play styles is obviously important in a multiplayer Wii game and, even at this early stage, New Super Mario Bros is doing a very fine job. We’ve sampled a selection of levels all the way through the game, right up to the final world, and though the difficulty increases significantly towards the end, it never feels unfair or unforgiving like certain other co-op platformers. Nintendo has even found a way to tackle the problems that occur when people of different skill levels play together, effectively diminishing the frustration of death without doing away with it altogether. If a player now dies, a continue will eventually appear on screen as a floating bubble, which, when popped by a friend, will revive the dead player. Game Overs are still possible but only occur when every single player dies before a continue bubble is popped.

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