Super Mario Sunshine

Six years. Six long years we've had to wait for a new Mario game and finally it's here. And even considering the ridiculously unfair expectations, Super Mario Sunshine is almost entirely as good as you'd hope and expect.

The premise of the game is that Mario's tropical holiday is ruined when he's stitched up by an evil lookalike for daubing graffiti all over the island. Rather conveniently there's an extremely useful water pump waiting for him to use, which not only washes away the mess but also doubles as a handy jet pack. The jet pack aspect means that whenever you fall off something you have the chance to immediately recover yourself; this built-in safety net means the game can afford to be far more ambitious in its level designs than ever before, with massive levels filled with trampolines, tightropes, water-powered windmills, huge coral reefs and mountains and mountains of platforms.

The whole thing looks amazing, too, with the most realistic water ever seen in a video game and a near infinite draw distance. And that's without evening mentioning the rideable, fruit juice-spewing Yoshis, the extra water nozzles, the super-hardcore platform levels where Shadow Mario nicks your jet pack, or the goop-generating bosses who seem to live to make Princess Peach's laundry a nightmare.

After the sweet but rather short pleasures of Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin, you need have no fear that Mario Sunshine is of a similarly brief nature. There are a total of 120 shines to collect--the same number of stars as in Super Mario 64--and the game world is at least as large and far more interactive. This is without question the best game on the GameCube yet; that may be no more than you'd expect from a Mario game, but it's certainly more than most of us mere mortals deserve. --David Jenkins

"Mario reclaims his crown as the king of the 3-D platform adventure. Your GameCube simply isn't complete without it. 95%."

If you picked the GameCube over the Xbox and PlayStation 2, this man is likely on your list of reasons why. You'd need an abacus to count the number of games Mario has appeared in over the last two decades, yet Nintendo has been very careful to back up the plumber with high-quality gameplay at every turn. While Mario excels at kart racing, tennis and golf, Super Mario Sunshine offers his speciality: platform adventure. In this game, Mario and Princess Peach take a vacation to a perpetually sunny island where Mario is framed for vandalism. Armed with a water scrubber, Mario has to clean up the graffiti, catch the impostor and restore his good name. Maybe those Jet Set Radio hooligans are involved...

Super Mario Sunshine will be a 3-D action/adventure game packed with classic Mario gameplay and plenty of new surprises. Developed under the watchful eye of Mario's legendary creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Sunshine is destined to break new ground and give players a gaming experience unlike anything they've encountered before.

The storyline is much different than what you might expect. This time, things are much more complicated than simply rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser. The adventure starts when Mario and Peach decide to take a well-deserved vacation to a beautiful island in a remote location. Since the island is perpetually sunny and inhabited by friendly locals, it seemed like the perfect choice at first.

In typical fashion, though, poor Mario never gets a chance to relax. When he arrives on the island, he notices ugly scribble marks covering the walls throughout the community. What's worse, the person responsible for the scribbling has disguised himself to look just like Mario! Mario is falsely accused by the locals, so he decides to get to the bottom of things. Armed with a new water-pumping backpack, Mario sets out to clean up the scribbling and reveal the identity of the true villain.