As much as the quality of the series remained relatively high, I have to say that by 2017, Mario’s games had started to become a little predictable. Sure, there’d be a new power-up or something like that, but you’d know what you were in for with each new instalment. Standard platforming fun around the Mushroom Kingdom which you’d grown to know so well over the years. There were never any really exciting surprises, but it was nice, comfortable and familiar. This all changed with Super Mario Odyssey.

Yes, once again Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach and you have to travel across the lands in order to rescue her, but this time it’s a very different journey. Instead of simply kidnapping Peach, Bowser actually wants to force her to marry him this time and so has steals artifacts from all over the world. As you chase after them and retrieve these items, you head to many corners of the world into which Mario has never ventured before.

But before I get into the worlds that Mario explores, I need to tell you about an important new character: Cappy. Mario’s iconic hat is destroyed in the opening of the game, only for him to then team up with a spirit called Cappy who merges with his old hat. Cappy gives Mario the ability to throw his hat like a boomerang and use his hat in lots of other cool ways – most significantly, he can now throw his hat onto enemies to take control of them.

The ability to ‘capture’ enemies like this, provides a huge amount of variety in gameplay. You can posses a tyrannosaurus rex and go on a rampage, you can possess a Para-Goomba and fly around the stage, you can possess a Cheep-Cheep to explore the ocean without the need for air, you can possess a Bullet Bill and launch yourself into cracked walls to destroy them. There are quite a lot of things you get to possess and it’s really fun to get a feel for playing as all of these different creatures. Later in the game, this is used in some really significant and amazing ways – I’d not like to spoil it, but I was so excited when I first got to these bits…

On top of the new abilities that Cappy brings to the table, you get to explore huge, beautiful worlds quite unlike anything we’ve seen in the series before. There are expansive desserts, open forests, frozen landscapes, beautiful beaches and even a realistic city. It’s not one big open world, but instead you fly between them in a ship called the Odyssey. Each world is filled with Power Moons which you get by completing various tasks and these moons power the Odyssey, so the more you have the further you can fly – opening up more worlds. You can also buy souvenirs along the way to decorate the interior of your ship.

What I like so much about this game is that each world really feels like a ‘world’. You’re not just avoiding enemies and jumping across platforms to reach the end of an obstacle course, you’re exploring locations with a history behind them and interacting with a cast of wacky characters who are just getting on with their lives. It all feels so much more immersive and I love the excitement that exploring these places provides.

My favourite is New Donk City – this is the realistic city I mentioned above. It looks a lot like New York City and is full of references to the Donkey Kong series. There are streets named after Diddy Kong, Dixie Kong and even King K. Rool. Most excitingly, Pauline herself is mayor of the city and it’s implied that this city may even be the location of her kidnapping by the original Donkey Kong all those years ago… it’s a real treat for the fans.

And this whole game is full of delightful references for fans of the series. One other new feature is that Mario is now able to change his clothes. There are so many outfits to unlock and just about every one of them is a reference to one of his past adventures. I was particularly excited when I saw that one of his outfits was a reference to the game Qix – you may never have even heard of it, but it nicely highlights how comprehensive they were in choosing the outfits!

In the past, Super Mario 64 DS had been my favourite 3D Mario adventure. I thought that would probably always be the case, because it had nostalgia on its side, but it has finally been dethroned. This is the Mario game I always wanted. It has a lot in common with games like Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie and as I love them enormously, it was no surprise that I loved this too. I think what really says a lot, is that this is a game I can happily play just walking around the levels and doing nothing in particular. Only the best of the best can achieve that.

Rating: 9.8/10

Buy it here.

With a lot of long-running video game franchises, we really love the instalments we play as children and consider them our favourites. We then enjoy the games which come later, but never feel like the later games reach the heights of the earlier ones. This happens with me quite a lot and was certainly the case with the Zelda series. My number one favourite was either Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask and I honestly thought that was always going to be the case – in part, due to nostalgia. With this in mind, what I’m about to say is quite a big deal: Breath of the Wild is my favourite Zelda game.

But I have to admit, I wasn’t won over right away. When I first started playing it, I was overwhelmed. I was kind of having fun, but I thought to myself “This doesn’t feel like Zelda. This is too open. I don’t know what to do or how things work. This is unfamiliar and I’m not sure I’ll get used to it.” I see a lot of people whose final thoughts on the game are similar to my first impressions, but I am pleased to say that my opinion soon turned around.

This is the most open the series has ever been and it does take some getting used to. The first game was pretty open, but it still required you to collect certain items to do certain things and had general order to it. With Breath of the Wild, you could literally head straight to the final boss immediately after the tutorial. It would be ridiculously hard, but it’s possible.

At it’s core, the game is all about getting Link ready to face Ganon. You explore the lands and do everything you can to make yourself stronger. Maybe you try and find really strong armor, maybe you try and find the strongest weapon, maybe you create lots of potions so you can endlessly heal yourself, or maybe you do the game’s dungeons so that you can unlock powerful magic.

There are lots of things you can do, all of them geared around making Link stronger. There are ‘shrines’ hidden around the world and if you find one, you’ve got a small challenge to complete (some simply fighting an enemy, some complex puzzles) and the reward for doing so is a Spirit Orb – Spirit Orbs are exchanged for an increase to your maximum health, or an increase to your maximum storage.

You can also follow the path of the main story, which has you entering the four Divine Beasts in order to rid them of evil. These are four giant mechanical monsters and their insides are dungeons. Getting to them involves working with different groups of people, including the Gerudo, Zoras, Rito and Gorons. It’s nice that all of the main groups play an equally important role in the story.

Whatever you decide to do, there’s a whole fully fleshed out world to get to grips with as you do it. You can harvest vegetables and learn how cooking works, harvest other resources and learn how to make potions. You can even figure out how to tame horses and other creatures. But you’ll probably spend the most time experimenting with the physics – you can interact with the world by creating pillars of ice out of water, freezing items and enemies in time, creating bombs and moving things with a magnet. This allow for near endless possibilities.

I think what I love most about Breath of the Wild, is how beautiful and immersive its world is. There are times where I’d literally stop moving so that I could take in the scenery and listening to the ambient sounds of nature. Often there isn’t even any background music, just wind blowing, birds singing and insects chirping, but when there is it’s some wonderfully minimalist piano pieces. Just walking around and exploring is so relaxing. What makes this even more amazing is that you can literally go anywhere (other than past invisible walls at the far ends of the massive map) – you can look to the horizon in every direction and you can explore every inch of the land you can see.

There’s so much to see and so much to do. As well as the shrines that are hidden everywhere, there are mini-bosses scattered all around, ruins and treasures to discover, people in peril to protect, Great Fairies hiding away, towns and villages to discover, the remains of iconic locations from previous games in the series, forests and fields full of wildlife, mountains to climb, rivers to sail, resources and vegetables to gather and cook and so much more.

Overall, I’ve gotten 160 hours out of this game so far and I can’t remember the last time a game provided me with that much entertainment. Beyond the main game, you’ve also got DLC, which expands upon the story – it doesn’t continue the story, unfortunately, but adds more to what you have and provides lots of enjoyable new challenges and items to gather. Considering I loved all of it so much, I was happy to pay to extend my time with it.

If you’re an unsure Zelda fan, I recommend giving it a try or sticking to it. I realise my initial negativity was just a reluctance to accept change – but everything must change and this is definitely a change for the better. If you’ve never tried the series before, this would be a great place to start! I envy those who haven’t played, because I would so love the opportunity to discover Hyrule all over again.

Rating: 9.9/10

Buy it here.

Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog are two of the biggest icons in gaming history and, for a long time, had been rivals too. As the gaming landscape changed, Sega and Nintendo stopped working against one another and started to build a more collaborative relationship and eventually a game featuring both of these franchises coming together was possible.

But as much as Mario and Sonic meeting one another was highly anticipated, I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they’d first meet on the fields of the 2008 Beijing Olympics – but that’s what happened. I remember when I first saw some screen shots in a magazine and I genuinely thought that it was a joke. It was so absurd that I didn’t believe it could be real – but of course it was.

Essentially, the whole game is based around using the Wii Remote to play Olympic games as characters from both the Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog series. They’re mostly pretty realistic and have very few fantastical elements. Using the Wii Remote so much actually gets a bit tiring sometimes – it also is a bit annoying where certain movements don’t work properly. Sometimes no matter how hard I waggle, my character won’t run fast enough.

The controls in generally aren’t that great. Sometimes I just shake the Wii Remote to make them move (like in running or swimming) and other times I swipe it downwards to throw (e.g. a javelin) or upwards to jump (e.g. long jump). It doesn’t feel like there’s any skill or technique to these things – sometimes it works and you win, sometimes it doesn’t and you lose. The skeet event felt ridiculously hard to get right as well.

Some events make use of the more interesting elements of the Mario & Sonic universes. My favourite of these is Dream Race, which is essentially a footrace version of Mario Kart – the problem is that there’s only one track. I also enjoyed Dream Platform, which had you diving through the sky and collecting items and rings. Both were fun, but pretty basic.

In any of the events, you can play as either Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, Daisy, Wario, Waluigi, Bower, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Blaze, Vector, Shadow and Eggman – it’s a nice selection (though I was a little sad that Donkey Kong was not present) and this is really why I play the game. I love watching these strangely proportioned characters take part in realistic Olympic events. Watching Bowser or Wario sprinting and jumping over hurdles is hilarious – as is watching Eggman propel his body through the air for the high jump. Because of his awkward body shape, I actually think I love being Eggman the most. But if it wasn’t for these beloved characters, I wouldn’t be all that interested in this otherwise mediocre game.

Basically, this is just some Olympic events playable with the Wii Remote with some popular characters pasted onto it. I really like the idea that the Olympics bring people together and that’s why Mario and Sonic are playing together after all these years – but that’s all it is, a nice idea. I played until I had unlocked and played every event, but honestly you will probably get bored after the first hour or so. You never unlock anything that good (other than Dream Platform). It could have been a lot better and I love what they were trying to do, but I can’t really recommend this too highly. I wish we got to see more interactions between the characters, I wish there had been more overall substances to it. I wish the loading screens weren’t so slow and so frequent. I wish there wasn’t so much untapped potential in this game…

Rating: 5.7/10

Buy it here.