Super Mario Galaxy

Fact: every hero needs a good rival. So what could possibly make better rivals than the heroes themselves? With that in mind, here’s a look at some of gaming’s most memorable doppelgangers and opposite numbers…

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...

Whether they’ve advanced menacingly toward our camera lenses, hidden their faces when we look at them or just sort of hovered aimlessly, ghosts have been a semi-constant threat in videogames almost since the medium was invented. One of the great things about games, however, is that they’re a way to explore unusual viewpoints – and every once in a while, they give us a chance to see through the eyes of these undead phantoms, and find out what it’s like to flit insubstantially through an earthly plane that’s perpetually, almost comically afraid of us.

Only a handful of games have actually offered a chance to see things from the proverbial Other Side, but these are our favorites...

Earlier this month Nintendo announced four new games for its budget-priced Selects line. Not long after, it sent copies of each newly packaged game to our doorstep – and today we wanna pass ‘em on to you!

So the era of the Wii, and with it the first wave of Nintendo's glorious gaming revolution, is drawing to a close. After overnight world-domination and five years of hardware sales so big they'd send the Moon running to the gym to bulk up, this generation's first motion-control heavyweight now finds retirement beckoning as a successor bites at its ankles in the form of the still slightly confusing Wii U. 

But how successful was Nintendo's all-encompassing, caring, sharing experiment in accessible gaming, really? Did it deliver on its promises to evolve games, gaming and gamers beyond what they had been before? Hell, was there even really a revolution at all, or have we just been fooled into thinking there was? And how much has any of this really helped Nintendo? It's the end of an era, and it's time to take stock. So take stock I very much have.

This time next week we’ll be buried under an avalanche of E3 news. Every outlet (including GR) will be tripping over itself to get news posted first, to be a part of the biggest announcements of the world’s premier videogame show. But in just a few weeks, all that hustle and bustle will fade away, and all that breaking news will be replaced by even newer headlines. The cutting edge reports, the reveal trailers, all of it will be commonplace and old.

With that in mind, we thought it’d be (moderately) entertaining to look back five years and recall those moments from E3 2006. Back then, these stories lit up the internet and fueled speculation for months – today, they’re ancient relics most of us barely remember...

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...

Super Mario Galaxy gave gamers a real reason to turn on their Wiis, outside of party games that were already showing their age. Super Mario Galaxy 2 showed that Miyamoto and his cadre of developers still had the fight in them to make a sequel worthy of the original’s brilliance that stood on its own. The Galaxy games have taken Mario to new heights, and if you don’t think Nintendo is already planning the next follow-up, you must have taken one too many star bits to the head. And while whatever it may end up being is shrouded in mystery, we’ve got our own wish list we hope gets fulfilled...

Seems like it's doing just fine with the same ones we've been playing with for the last 20 years .