OMG Nintendo

It's one of the major tenets of gaming that, if given the opportunity, a player will take any chance he can get to be a cock to the other guy. Nintendo made sure to emphasize the fact that you can play New Super Mario Bros. Wii (NSMBW) cooperatively.

You also can brush your teeth with Preparation H. That doesn't mean you're going to do it.

If you played New Super Mario Bros. on your DS, and you probably did, you're set to play NSMBW. It's that, with three more players to worry about. You will be griefing the other three players constantly.

You don't even really have to try. The screen expands and contracts as you get further away and closer to one another, so it's difficult to scroll somebody off the stage, but you can jump on their heads. This propels you straight up and stuns them for a second, allowing you to set them up for incoming Koopas if you want. In the vertically-scrolling stages, you can quite easily bounce to victory off the other players' heads, leaving them to die helplessly on a ledge that no longer has an escape route.

Each power-up comes in blocks of four, including the brand-new penguin and propeller suits; the former lets you freeze enemies in blocks of ice and skid along on your belly, and the former lets you shoot yourself into the air by shaking the Wiimote.It's very easy to go ahead and steal power-ups from the other players, depriving them while inflating your score.

This is also NSMB, so the game itself isn't exactly easy. There were ten stages available for play at E3, of which I got to see three before I was kicked off the system. The ice stage requires some very fancy and precise jumping, which would be tricky even if there weren't three other guys trying to punch your ticket, while the vertically-scrolling underground stage turns into a Darwinian struggle for survival.

Like The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, NSMBW really comes alive when you have other people to play against. Alone, it's still a Mario game, of course; it'll probably be okay. With three other people, though, it's crazy. I suppose you could team up with your family and have a grand old time bouncing your way through the Mushroom Kingdom together, and then you could roast marshmallows and sing campfire songs and enjoy being unrealistically wholesome together, but man, the first time you stomp Toad's face into the dirt, I don't think you'll be able to stop doing it.