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Mario's latest outing does some clever stuff with the Wii U's multiple screens, but it's worth taking a moment to appreciate what it gets up to with good old-fashioned maps, too. The plumber's new 2D adventure sees the return of the fully-fledged world map, last seen in the 16-bit era. Islands, forests, babbling brooks and tidy oceans: the Mario atlas is back in fine, charismatic form, ditching the mostly-linear corridors of recent over-worlds in favour of a cluster of colourful, interconnected continents. It stitches dozens of scattershot stages together into a mad, sprawling and yet oddly convincing whole.Does 2D Mario require a proper map? Not in the traditional sense: it's hard to get lost when you're en route from Acorn Plains to Frosted Glacier, so long as you take that crucial right-hand turn at the Layer-Cake Desert. This particular map isn't there to limit confusion, though, it's in place to pull the motley collection of gimmicks, in-jokes and nutty one-off ideas that make up a Mario game - especially one that comes on odd new hardware - into some kind of shape. Its job is to offer choices, junction points, alternate routes and secrets to hunt for as you move deeper into the adventure.
The map's riddled with playful surprises. One section here sees you ducking penguins as they slide along on their bellies and another sees you advancing across a wooden lattice with various Mushroom Kingdom critters matching you, move for move, on the opposite side. Occasionally there will be a mysterious level-sized gap that your nagging brain won't quite allow you to forget. Frequently, Nabbit, a thief with a distinctly Miyazaki-esque design, will raid a nearby Toad House and you'll have to chase him through a stage you've already completed. All the while, the world map gives Mario's latest adventure room to breathe, providing a fresh collection of 2D stages with a sense of identity that other New Super Mario Bros. instalments have sometimes lacked.
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