Eurogamer's Game of the Year Winner...

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It's often said that Mario games dream up, execute and discard cool little ideas from level to level in a way that makes other platform games look like they're bringing knives to a gunfight, but in the imagination stakes Mario 3D World rocks up with a bazooka.
Super Mario 3D World is a cathedral, but it is far from empty. I could see the sheer effort that has gone into its construction when I met with its makers, days after its completion. They looked positively thinned by the work. You can see the sheer effort in the frame-rate, locked at cream-smooth 60 frames per second, and the physical size of the thing, so carefully distilled down to 1.6GB (you could fit 23 copies of svelte Super Mario 3D World into one bloated install of its PlayStation 4 rival, Knack). But most importantly, you can see the sheer effort in the playfulness and creativity on display in every one of those skittish frames.
The icons and genre are as familiar as they come, but the way they're utilised makes the first hour of 3D World more fresh and exciting than most games manage in 10 times that.
The cat suit, the cat suit, the cat suit. Yes, it's adorable, and it's hardly a surprise it was the toast of every review and the star of Nintendo's campaign. But spare a thought for the Double Cherry, the other all-time classic Super Mario power-up introduced in Super Mario 3D World, here relegated to also-ran. In any other game, the Double Cherry would be... well, it would be the whole game.This is what Nintendo's breakaway Tokyo studio does. The studio's ceaseless, almost careless invention is often remarked upon.
But just look at what else was compromised in Super Mario 3D World: nothing at all. Raw invention and fun, delivered at an inviolable 60 frames per second, without a single glitch, stutter or lull. In a very real sense, there's not another game released this year than can match that.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-30-eurogamers-game-of-the-year-2013

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