Mario is fun. That’s pretty much my opinion at this point. As many others seem to have implied this is indeed an evolutionary jump akin to Super Mario Bros. 3 to Super Mario World.

Graphics are quite detailed, and the water looks better than Waverace: Blue Storm. The way the paint smears around and the effects from the Water Pack are fun to watch and made all of us “oooh” and “ahhh” in delight. Admittedly not everything is as ‘pretty’ as one would expect Nintendo’s flagship game title to be. There’s some particularly nasty textures on certain walls or cliffs. However, this doesn’t really distract from the game, as you really need to be nitpicking over such a thing to even care to notice.

Mario controls smooth and intuitively, running and jumping feels as natural as breathing. The Water Pack’s controls take a little longer to learn but after a few short minutes, one becomes quite used to it.

A few things seem a bit ‘odd’ for this incarnation of Mario. First of all, there are voice-acted cutscenes, (the quality of which is mediocre, but not anything close to being as bad as the original Resident Evil’s,) which struck me as rather strange. Secondly, you cannot skip the cutscenes. This is even odder.

There is so much hidden on Dolphic Island, I am curious as to how long it will take to actually get every item and treasure. Rimmer discovered a method to travel the underground pipe system beneath the town and there were all sorts of goodies to found. One can only wonder what else is to be discovered...

One thing that does bother me is how the game treats you when you are behind an object (such as a building). The game merely shows the silhouette of Mario and any items (whether they be enemies, coins or people) are marked as a question mark. We’ll see how annoying this gets in later levels, but I have a feeling that gamers would have preferred if the object became semi-transparent instead.

Quirks aside, I am having a complete blast and can’t wait to explore further. Too bad that the controller keeps getting stolen from my hands...