I like to think that every gamer, on some level, has a soft spot for Mario. Ranging from his early appearances in Donkey Kong and Mario Bros to recent efforts like Super Mario Galaxy, a new Mario game almost always promises some amazing new way of thinking about the basics of playing video games. All Mario ever has to do is travel from Point A to Point B, but this task tends to become increasingly demented as a game wears on.
Mario stopped being just a character who appeared in flagship platform games a long time ago, though. These days Mario has diversified his gaming portfolio by appearing in dozens of games created by numerous developers and even giving his sidekicks the spotlight from time to time. Some of these games have been terrible, but today we're here to talk about the best.
Many of these you've probably played, as they've become part of the Nintendo gamer's lexicon. Others have grown a bit more obscure over time and may only be known to die-hard Nintendo fans. Regardless, all of these games are worthy and all expanded the way gamers regard Mario. Not all of Nintendo's spin-off ambitions for Mario would work out so well, but these all went for the brass ring and caught it.
8. Yoshi's Island
Yoshi's Island shipped with "Super Mario World 2" in the title, but it shouldn't have. Yoshi's Island may be a side-scrolling platformer, but it has little in common with Mario's games. Where Mario's platformers are about high-risk, high-reward acrobatics, Yoshi's Island is about aim and persistence. Without warp zones or much in the way of power-ups (besides a weird ability to briefly turn into vehicles), Yoshi is tasked keeping track of Baby Mario while attempting to rescue Baby Luigi from the inevitable bad guys.
It was sort of insane for Nintendo to expect Yoshi's Island to work on any level. Every basic concept of the game runs counter to the time-tested marketing formula that's been used to appeal to a mostly-male, mostly-teenage gaming demographic for decades. Yet playing as Yoshi made for quite the satisfying platformer, something refreshingly unlike Mario despite all the familiar faces. The crayon-and-marker graphical style Yoshi's Island introduced has persisted through numerous Yoshi-focused spin-off titles. Most are inferior to Yoshi's Island, but it's easy to see why Nintendo wants to keep reminding people of this game.
7. Mario Tennis
Often Mario gets together with a bunch of his pals, even the likes of Bowser and Wario, to organize some good old-fashioned group entertainment. Usually it's athletic competition or party games. Mario Tennis wasn't the first iteration of this formula for Mario spin-offs but it is the only one that can claim to have its roots in a Virtual Boy game. Mario's Tennis is sometimes characterized as the only truly good game on the system, so it's not surprising Nintendo wanted to continue the idea on non-disastrous hardware.
Possibly the best iteration of the Mario Tennis series was the N64 version, which was one of many games introduced to the system explicitly to play up its then-unusual four-player potential. Other firsts from Mario Tennis include one of the first console/handheld connectivity schemes from Nintendo (the Transfer Pak let you move data to a Game Boy Color version of Mario Tennis) and one of the first times Princess Daisy got solidly established as a supporting character.
6. Mario Golf
Mario is quite the sportsman, with his golf habit going all the way back to Nintendo's first NES version of Golf in 1985. Since then he's appeared in countless golf games, ranging from the quasi-realistic to exercises in rainbow-colored arcade insanity. Much like Mario Tennis-- in fact, the two series share a single developer, Camelot Software Planning-- Mario Golf is another series that really came into its own on the N64, when it was showing off the potential of four-player gaming.
There are plenty of surrealist fantasy golf games available to a player these days, but Mario Golf is in its way sillier than all of them. Its courses feature Piranha Plants and lakes of magma are valid course hazards and brutes like Bowser are often valid choices of player character. Simple controls invite players to try and master play that can become very complex, since despite the craziness terrain and wind still matter when you line up a shot.
5. Mario & Luigi RPG
The mythos of the Super Mario games wouldn't seem to be a good fit for RPGs. Somehow, Nintendo had ended up publishing multiple lines of games based that premise. What is perhaps even more surprising is that, for the most part, all of Nintendo's Mario RPG efforts have been good. Some are really good games, among the best Mario's ever appeared in. The Mario & Luigi series is the standard-bearer for portable Mario RPGs and it's a credit to the character.
Like most other Mario RPGs, the combat system is built around precision timing. Mario & Luigi adds a clever twist by mapping control for each brother to a different button. The games tend to feature quite a bit of casual platforming that calls for you to control Mario and Luigi simultaneously, pressing both buttons at once to jump. If Mario or Luigi move too far independently they both freeze, which has a real impact on both how you play and ultimately how you think.
.jpg)
4. Super Mario RPG
There's only one Super Mario RPG, developed by Squaresoft for the SNES. It's a truly excellent game, clearly the inspiration for what Nintendo would do with the idea of Mario-based RPGs in later years. It is sadly the only Mario RPG Square ever cared to develop and to this day you sometimes hear fans wistfully talking about how they'd like to see certain characters from this game return in a future Smash Bros. game or a full-on sequel.
In Super Mario RPG players could use Mario, Bowser, Princess Toadstool, or original characters Geno and Mallow. The game was structured quite similarly to Chrono Trigger in some ways, with overworld encounters you could avoid and battles that called for a more than usual in the way of reflexes. Where Super Mario RPG shone was in the way it reinterpreted Mario tropes into RPG tropes (as they existed in the 16-bit era), making it clear how much of people's video games expectations are totally arbitrary.
3. Super Smash Bros
I went back and forth on considering this a Mario spinoff, since it features a much crazier cast than any of Mario's get-togethers. In Super Smash Bros you can use characters drawn from a broad spectrum of Nintendo's history. Eventually the series even featured cross-company appearances like Sega's Sonic and Konami's Solid Snake. On a basic level, though, I think Smash Bros. passes muster as essentially taking Mario-like mechanics into a whole other genre.
Just as the Mario RPGs turn leaping into way of dealing turn-based combat damage, Smash Bros turns platforming and gathering power-ups into a key mechanic for survivng a four-man fighting game battle royale. The result is that Smash Bros is not quite like any other fighting game on the market. Established fighting game fandom can't make heads or tails of it. All that can really be conclusively said about Smash Bros is that it's crowd-pleasing fun that hits a lot of different buttons for a lot of different gamers.
2. Paper Mario
Super Mario RPG is a very good game that blazed a whole new genre for Mario, but Paper Mario is just kind of better when it comes to the Mario RPG game. Its elegant paper-thin graphics played with the absurdity of 2D objects in a 3D world when such out-of-the-box thinking was far less common. Super Mario RPG wasn't a bad-looking game by SNES standards, but next to Paper Mario it just looked crude. Paper Mario's sequels further refined the game's unique look and added in lots of new gimmicks, some good and others not so good.
Paper Mario's is a perfect balance of whimsy and comedy, where the gameplay has enough depth to feel engaging without ever becoming hardcore enough (for lack of a better term) to demand a lot of repetition from the player. Beating Paper Mario isn't a mindless task but most people will be able to do it on their own, sooner or later. In the years since Paper Mario's release, design trends have begun to routinely call for blending RPG and action mechanics into games richer than their ancestors in either genre. Paper Mario did that back before it was cool.
1. Mario Kart
Mario was once thought of as a platforming character who occasionally did other things. Now platformers are a genre that appear to be on the way out, sales softly declining. There's no danger of Mario becoming an irrelevant character, though As long as he continues to star in Mario Kart, new generations of young gamers will be sure to learn who he is and what his world is about.
The enduring popularity of the Mario Kart series is well-deserved. Mario Kart Super Circuit and Mario Kart DS even perfected handheld racing for their respective eras long before more "serious" racing games were even managing playability. Mario Kart is at heart a simple arcade-style racer that features wacky weapons the racers can use to help themselves or hinder opponents. This simplicity has made for shocking variety over the years, as the franchise grew from using simple sprites and Mode 7 effects to hosting full 3D online multiplayer tournaments.
