If someone buys a Lacoste shirt because it says Lacoste on it rather than it being a shirt they like, I reckon I'm better than them. Same if they buy their holdall because it says "HEAD" and has a boomerang on it. Nike, Reebok, Nissan, Sony - whoever. If you're buying the brand rather than the design and specifications of your purchase... I reckon I'm better than you. Smarter than, more sensible than, better than.

It's a nasty, tiny thing in the backs of our minds, isn't it? That urge to sneer, to feel superior. There's some squitty little ganglia that harks back to Ag and Thak trying to bring home the bigger Australopithecus or whatever to make the other one's mother in law whack him over the head with a bone and say "Why can't you get it right like Ag over there? Look at the size of early herbivorous quadruped he brought home for his family? I told our Thuk she shouldn't of married you!" et cetera et cetera.

Consequently, I have the arse over Licensed Computer Game Characters. Mario was fine in Donkey Kong. Hell, Donkey Kong was fine in Donkey Kong. But, having realised that Donkey Kong (and concomitantly, Mario) were selling well in the arcades and making a bunch of money, Nintendo (and countless companies besides) seized with both hands a death-grip firmly on the wrong end of the stick - that it was the characters that sold the games, rather than the other way around.

Commenced a twenty-plus-year cavalcade of shite that made my Hype Allergy break out in simmering hives - Mario Kart, Mario Golf, Mario Colonoscopy - there was nothing that was safe from this increasingly irritating mustachioed wanker, pimped out for no other reason than he was in a 1980s arcade machine. Yeah - Mario Kart and Mario Golf are great but did they have to be Mario____? Mario Golf, especially is even better when it's not Mario Golf but Everybody's Golf instead - a new set of characters, without the baggage of recognition, to play with.

Last year some dear friends clubbed together to spring a DSLite on me as a lovely pressie. And, bless 'em, they included New Super Mario Brothers in the gift. Well, I accepted the Mario-part of the present in good spirit, in the same way that you smile graciously when someone close to you buys you, for example, a pair of gold lamé jogging shorts.

I fired up NSMB, rictus-grinning and politely nodding at everyone around me, reeling one way from the simple glory of my mates being fucking brilliant, and the other way from them buying me A FUCKING MARIO TITLE, FOR SHIT'S SAKE! But as it was them, and I love them, I sit there and learn all six controls and play the bloody thing. Inwardly, of course, my inner Australopithecus was muttering. Oh for shit's sake. A Mario game. The DSLite - well, hell, this is a gorgeous bit of kit. But... Mario? Why?

Because it's insanely fucking playable - that's why.

I wasn't expecting it to be fun. I was expecting derivative die-stamped shite. I wasn't expecting a brilliant balance of reflexes and level-learning. I was expecting some kind of sanitised, committee-approved codswallop. I certainly wasn't expecting the best platform experience I've enjoyed in years, a romp of fluid, bouncy, clever, entertaining buttonology.

But that's what I got. A rock-solid modern classic. Maybe I've been a bit hard on the smug little cunt?

February 2007

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