The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

A markedly different experience from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite sharing directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (co-directors Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack, as well as screenwriter Matthew Fogel, are back too), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dispenses with any of the tiresome, relatability scaffolding previously applied to this Nintendo juggernaut. Judging by the first instalment, the decision makers behind that film were convinced that audiences wouldn't be able to swallow the adventures of a stout, video game plumber unless the character overcame some trivial personal difficulties within your standard ('90s vintage) big screen adaptation. This galactic chapter though discards similarly shallow attempts at insight, the film instead constructed as a rolling incident machine that does a better - or perhaps just more honest - job of repeatedly showcasing forty-odd years of iterative, Kyoto design. In that sense, Illumination and Nintendo's film is completely given over to the presentation of obsessively layered and rendered landscapes that suggest some, faltering means of progression. So, the industrialised swamp of Peter Jackson's Isengard is transformed into a volcanic theme park that sears cheering lackeys to the bone; and a repulsive golden casino - perhaps a nod to Nintendo the company's beginnings as a playing card manufacturer - becomes an Escher etching that can be traversed in every, counter-intuitive direction. Plotted to be little more than diverting noise, this Mario Galaxy simulates something of the proudly illogical progression seen in the vintage video games that inspired it. A mode of communication in which relentless invention trumps a more careful means of ascension. 

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Even setting aside the Famicom-era nostalgia and a licensed song selection that leans heavily on the dwindling decades of the twentieth century, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a still a feature dripping with throwback thinking. Specifically, the film makes it its business to explain (or attempt to bring some kind of logical order to) the deliberately surreal flourishes that 8-bit video games are built out of. Matthew Fogel's screenplay is pointedly pre-Marvel then, in the sense that it doesn't trust the audience to not get caught up on the minor details that power this technicolour fantasy. So not only is Mario's beloved Brooklyn a building site riddling with rising platforms and gloomy pipes - the film even adopts the flat two-dimensional perspective of a buzzing CRT television when Mario begins hurdling through one set of hazards - but the mushroom power-ups, that we know Mario will soon have to gobble up, are given an apprehensive dimension. In this way Chris Pratt's pixelated plumber is given an opportunity to overcome the minor fears associated with dinnertime fussiness - a note that may well have some resonance with the film's intended audience of children - as well as the more obvious peril associated with an enormous, fire-breathing dinosaur. 

E3 - Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Under no circumstances should Nintendo release Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild under any name, no matter how well it has tested with focus groups, other than Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. 

E3 - Metroid Dread

Originally announced as a Nintendo DS game back in the mid-2000s, Metroid Dread finally becomes a reality, courtesy of Nintendo and Metroid: Samus Returns dev MercurySteam. Dread, a side-scrolling shoot-and-explore, sells itself here with a robotic stalker character who pursues Samus through the game's fracturing stages. Big fan of the camouflage ability, seen in the latter half of the trailer, that has Samus' armour take on the colour and texture of her metallic surroundings as a way to evade the laser scans of her roaming enemy. 

E3 - WarioWare: Get it Together!

Due September on Nintendo Switch, WarioWare: Get it Together! promises dozens upon dozens of perfectly judged input instances, each absolutely seething with the same wit and character displayed by Wario, the game's in-universe designer. WarioWare is a consistently delightful series that, this time out, promises players opportunities for co-operative prodding. 

Super Mario Bros. - The Morton Jankel Cut

Released to the Internet Archive in an interim edit that splices together an open matte VHS with a one-of-a-kind cassette containing an earlier, baggier, edit of the film, Super Mario Bros. - The Morton Jankel Cut proposes, by dint of existing, a rejuvenation for this notoriously troubled production. Liberated from the estate of producer Roland Joffé, this interlaced assembly runs twenty minutes longer than the film as originally screened, offering (at best) trace elements of directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton's initial, more overtly dystopian, vision. Massaged to a legibility appropriate for the video tape rental era by Garrett Gilchrist, a professional artist and illustrator with a gift for film restoration, these timecoded additions offer punctuation rather than axis. They provide clarification at a detail, rather than conceptual, level. 

Almost unbearably dull, especially in its latter half, this longer Super Mario Bros delivers a brief fizz of ideas and lopsided imagery - particularly when considering the ways in which the film's central, dinosaur-derived, metropolis differs from our own world - then tanks itself with a plot that bumbles back-and-forth, never quite engaging. Like Highlander II: The Quickening before it, Mario Bros is world-class production design in search of a story, or even a consistent tone, to anchor it. The film is physically built around the strangeness of a technological society created by cold-blooded lizards rather than tribal mammals. Muggings are rife in this pollution-choked city. Brightly coloured pedestrians crash into each other, dressed for aggression displays and loaded down with weapons designed to jolt anyone who strays too close. Commuters, packed into sparking dodgems, rush around in an unheeding, almost suicidal, rush. 

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo make for a charming pair of dunderheads, especially in early scenes where the two actors are allowed the space to react to bizarre circumstances rather than tedious plotting. Hoskins, on occasion, even summons up the same righteous, barking, frustration that underpinned his brilliant comedic performance as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film's most exciting sequence sees the Mario brothers picked up then processed by the fascist, gun-obsessed, stormtroopers that pass for police in this universe. Fleeing in a squad car so absurdly souped-up that it requires arresting gear to park, a blood-boiled Mario Mario crashes around the city's highways, using the vehicle's bulldozer blade to overturn incoming traffic. The sequence isn't just successful because it transforms a future shocked joyride into a destruction derby, it's also the only time that the film's madcap plotting, ace visual design, and pre-release deletions coalesce into something purely entertaining. 

GoldenEye 25 / Spies Don't Die

Hit with a cease and desist from MGM several years into their recreation, the team behind this Unreal Engine 4 remake of GoldenEye 007 have decided not to junk all their hard, but legally actionable, work. The developers are forging ahead with Spies Don't Die, an original piece indebted to 90s first-person shooters, using their already completed assets.

UPDATE 14/08/2020: Gameplay video of a recreated GoldenEye Silo level replaced with a statement from GoldenEye 25 dev Yannick Zenhäusern after the former video was delisted from YouTube.

UPDATE 18/07/2026: Zenhäusern's delisted statement replaced with a release date announcement trailer for the latest iteration of this project, Agent 64: Spies Never Die. 

E3 - GAME BOY

Link's portable 8-bit adventures return with a cutesy makeover that copies the tilt-shift trickery of 3D Dot Game Heroes to make the game's environments read as beautifully sculpted, scratch-built dioramas. Players of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening looking to get in on the hobby can muck in with the Chamber Dungeons feature, arranging tiles together to create their own bottomless pits.

E3 - MASTER QUEST

To be honest I wasn't expecting another adventure for Link so soon after the release of Breath of the Wild. Thankfully Nintendo had other ideas. Given the eerie atmosphere of this trailer, the wonderfully titled Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks to be the Majora's Mask to Wild's Ocarina of Time.

JUMP COMPUTER

Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers Tournament - WNF 2017

A short extract from an Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers tournament that shows off, among other things, how utterly broken the new Violent Ken character is.

E3 2017 - Super Mario Odyssey

What can you say? Limits are, quite obviously, completely meaningless to Nintendo. Based on this charming little infomercial and the hat mechanic it promises, Super Mario Odyssey is quite simply magical, allowing the player almost infinite opportunities to experiment and, above all, have fun. Stunning.

WORLD 1-1

Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka talk us through the design process when creating the first stage in Super Mario Bros. Miyamoto explains how they used a sense of weight and momentum to forge a link between the player and their on-screen character, as well as detailing how World 1-1's basic layout acts as a dynamic tutorial.

E3 2015 - PEPPY

Shigeru Miyamoto's ode to flying under torii gates returns with Star Fox Zero, a multi-level scrolling shooter co-developed by Platinum Games. Zero will be an episodic adventure with a structure based on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Thunderbirds as well as a transformation gimmick on loan from the cancelled SNES Star Fox 2.

E3 2015 - COMIC MISCHIEF

Not too sure about that release date but everything else about Super Mario Maker speaks to pure, unadulterated joy. Never mind that this level editor lets you drag in power-ups that summon Link and other 8-bit Nintendo dudes, you can actually change the entire graphical style on the fly. What's better? The bleak simplicity of Super Mario Bros or Super Mario World's chubby, primary colours?

E3 2015 - MOTHER

Famicom classic Mother makes the leap to the Wii U as EarthBound Beginnings. Presumably, given Nintendo's reluctance to get under the hood and tinker with legacy releases, this is a straight port of the 8-bit game. For people who struggle with embedded videos, Mother is an obstinate, surreal jab at the Dragon Quest formula, set in the United States as seen through the eyes of Japanese software developers.

E3 2015 - NEW CHALLENGER

Nintendo are getting the jump on E3 with a couple of big announces. First up is Street Fighter stalwart Ryu being added to both the Wii U and 3DS versions of Super Smash Bros. Ryu makes the crossover with the majority of his movelist intact, apparently you can even use old Street Fighter II negative edge techniques to store up inputs for special moves.

E3 2014 Mario Maker - PIRANHA PLANTS

The most purely wonderful thing at E3 not called No Man's Sky or Batman falling off a building, Mario Maker lets players build their own 8-bit Super Mario Bros levels. As a design tool Mario Maker looks pretty straightforward, using the touchscreen on the Wii U gamepad for some dragging and dropping. This trailer shows off player designed levels overstuffed with enemies in easy, point hoarding positions. Presumably it'll be equally easy for sadists to design their own impossible, Shobon Action style nightmares.

E3 2014 Hyrule Warriors - PRESS Y

Hyrule Warriors fuses Tecmo Koei's Dynasty Warriors with The Legend of Zelda. When you think about it RPGs provide a good frame work for a roaming beater - they tend to be full of distinctive, mass-produced enemies, usually tackled in groups, with bosses hanging around on the periphery. Joining Link is an armoured version of Zelda. Fingers crossed we get to play as big bully Ganondorf.

E3 2014 Bayonetta 2 - SCHOOL RUN

Platinum Games serve up another exciting title on a console I do not own. Thanks guys! In the first Bayonetta, the titular character beat up the Heavenly host, Bayonetta 2 dumps her in hell to battle a series of bosses that could have sprung from the first Devil May Cry. I wonder if there's been a push to tone down the stripper pole sexuality of the original now that Nintendo are publishing? Bayonetta's new haircut and outfit are borderline respectable.