Super Mario Sunshine

E3 is a bit like a tornado. It destroys lives, wrecks homes, and there’s a cacophony of information passing by at all times that you can’t possibly soak it all in. You just stick your head in the center of it, look for as long as you can and take in whatever info flew by your eyes in the last five seconds. Thanks to that chaos, many things happen that can’t be covered in time. Sure you heard about the Wii U, BioShock Infinite, and PS Vita, but missed some of the little things. Think of this feature as a chance to catch up, to stop and smell the videogame news roses. Take a whiff…

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...

Yesterday we reminisced about the best Game & Watch games in the countdown to the 3DS’s launch, but today we look at the system that made the handheld world wholly Nintendo’s. In the years between creating Game & Watch (1980) and 1989, Nintendo had gone from arcade hopeful to ruler of the home console market with the NES/Famicom. At that time Nintendo had decided it could take its next logical step into the world of pocket games, marrying the tech of the NES with design aspects of G&W, and what they came up with was the Game Boy...

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...

Sometimes, it's just easier to take the half-assed approach in life. Why tidy all of that crap clogging up your room when you can just stuff it under the bed? Why bother putting yourself through six years of baffling questions and migraines on Lost when you can just read a synopsis of the ending on the nets? And why go to the effort of designing an original, inventive game character when you can just borrow ideas from other developers or stick a shiny pair of shades on your protagonist?

Inside, you'll find some of the worst offenders of this noble, half-assed philosophy

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.

Holy effing s-word! Was it really 20 years ago when we first opened the distinctive yellow package in our living room and carefully placed the cartridge into the NES in front of the TV? When we made our first return trip to the Mushroom Kingdom? When we discovered the power of flight? When we could actually choose levels off of an overworld map? When we met Bowser's children?

Is Mario doomed to a life lived exclusively in pixeldom? In 1993, the answer should have been “yes.” Why 1993? That was the year the Super Mario Bros. movie was unleashed upon the world.

Every Fourth of July, Americans proudly celebrate the casting-off of British oppression by doing what we do best: staring at explosions.