New Super Mario Bros

A series filled with as much greatness as Mario makes choosing a best and worst in the franchise like splitting hairs. Fortunately we love hair splittery at GR, as we list why every core Mario game could be seen as the both a series high and low point...

Super Mario 3D Land has been well and truly inserted into my 3DS over the last week. It's been brilliant. Loved it. Tanooki Mario makes me so very happy. But while I've been playing, it has occurred to me that unless Bowser changes his game plan, he's never going to get the better of Mario. He's never going to get to keep Princess Peach so she can make him cake or marry him or whatever it is that Bowser wants her for. He's always going to be the loser. And this is why. Here are the 8 reasons that Bowser always fails.

Mario may be one of the most instantly recognized and universally beloved game characters of all time, but even by the standards of game characters, his whole mythos is pretty simplistic. Bowser kidnaps Peach, his soldiers get in the way, Mario stomps everything and rescues her, and that’s more or less all there is to it – unless you count all the times Mario, Peach and Bowser have gone kart racing. Or played tennis, or partied, or teamed up to fight gastric distress, or did any of the numerous things that have, in the past 10 years, become much more frequent and visible than their fights. Once you factor in that inconsistency, it all starts to get weird.

With that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that so many fans have felt compelled to fill in the blanks with their own works of fiction – and that some of those works have gone to some pretty dark places. Most of you have probably already seen Handre de Jager’s unspeakably manly Mario fanart, or the countless one-off parodies across the web that paint Mario in a nasty light, or his enemies in a sympathetic one. For the purposes of this article, however, we wanted to find fan projects that dove to the heart of the Mario universe and remade it around the dark, slimy things they found there – or, failing that, that at least put a uniquely sadistic slant on the whole thing...

Alright – after several days counting the best games on each of Nintendo’s handhelds, we’re finally at the toughest round. Narrowing down the 25 best DS games proved more challenging than we expected; obviously we knew the system had no shortage of top-notch software, but when asked to shave amazing titles like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance A2 and Rhythm Heaven from the countdown, we started to truly appreciate how fantastic the DS has been to us. It all began back in 2004…

Just what in the hell is going on with Mario and Peach? It was so simple back in the old NES days of Super Mario Bros. She got herself kidnapped, he went after her with the help of Luigi, and all ended happily ever after. Or so we thought. The thing is that it didn't really. It's become ever more apparent that since that first rescue things have only ever got messier, dirtier and more manipulative in their relationship. Far from the innocent damsel and hero set-up that appeared to be the case in 1985, the relationship between the two of them is now a complicated and twisted story of the user and the used, the ego and its victim, and the puppet-master and the slave.

It’s a frequently cited "fact" that Mario is more recognized worldwide than Mickey Mouse (whoever that is), meaning everyone everywhere should know what he looks like, even if his official look has matured over the years.

But in his near three decades of existing, not every official or officially licensed representation of the mild-mannered jumping guy has looked the same. History is rife with Mario drawings that are a little off, laughably bad or just plain wrong. Here's a trip down memory lane to see the Marios you’re supposed to forget...

Bosses are always hard. They require more hits than regular enemies, carry energy bars that turn out to be a clever disguise for yet more energy bars and go to work every day after a breakfast of spinach and girders. That's a high-iron diet if ever we saw one. And iron is HARD. Anyway, some games just like to be different and let you best their biggest baddies with one single shot. Here are the seven games that do so most satisfyingly…

In less than 48 hours, Microsoft's E3 2010 press conference will kick off four days of non-stop videogame insanity. We'll be there for the duration, reporting on all the latest news and announcements as fast as our withered fingers will allow, but before we fully dive into that madness, let's take a couple of minutes to look back five years at E3 2005.

Why? Because we still have the pictures. And because it's always fun to go "zomg I remember when that game came out."

After seeing the first US commercial for Super Mario Galaxy 2, we were a tad shocked to see just how expensive it looks. Nintendo must have dropped a pretty penny on this commercial. But that’s nothing new when you look at history and/or YouTube. Look there and it’s obvious that no matter the side of the globe where they market the mustachioed one, it’s rarely cheap or shoddy. But instead of wasting your time searching for the best classic advertisements on YouTube, the Mario experts at GR have collected them all here for you, in this list of the best Mario commercials of all time?

As the de facto figurehead of this little medium of ours, Mario is a tough dude to hate on. He’s adorable, his games are stellar, and he still stands proud as a shining beacon of everything that’s right in the land of vidjagames. But we take our Week of Hate responsibilities very seriously at GR… this must be done. We took a deep breath, poured ourselves another glass of Maximum Strength Haterade, and managed to unearth a few ghastly Dry Bones in the fat plumber’s closet.