New Super Mario Bros. Wii has the Super Guide, in case you ever want the game to autopilot for you, but it also has a whole collection of video tips you can view before a gaming session.

The “hint movies” are all located inside Peach’s Castle and have to be unlocked with Star Coins. Here’s a sample.

Be warned, this does show an entire level in the game.

If you’re intrigued, check out our full game review here.

In my review of New Super Mario Bros. Wii I talk about how the Super Guide works, and how important it could be to gaming. Now take a look at how the guide works while playing.

Be warned, this does show an entire level in the game.

There’s the Aussie packshot too.

Finally, a month before it comes out, the biggest game of the Wii for the fall makes sense and we know its component parts:

New Super Mario Bros. has a campaign and a pair of multiplayer challenges. The campaign is spread across eight worlds, each laid out as a landscape of levels networked by forking paths. As with New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, the world maps include mushroom huts that offer bonuses. A mid-map fortress and a world-ending castle stand in the way of players on each world.

The plot is as simple as ever. Bowser has claimed Peach. Mario needs to rescue her. Solo players can run through the game’s side-scrolling levels as Mario. Up to three other players can join locally—no online support here—before entering a level. Players two through three will control Luigi, a Blue Toad and a Yellow Toad.

I played a few levels with four representatives from Nintendo. While it’s hard to recount the flow of a full level, I can list some attractions:

-A desert level had an elevator wide enough to let four players stand in it. But the ride was made dangerous by the attack of eight or 10 Koopa turtles. We barely survived the ride to the top of the screen as they crept in from both sides.

-A level that let us all ride Yoshis showed that we could both use Yoshis to eat and spit out other players but also eat the hammers thrown by Hammer Bros. and shoot them back.

-An underwater cave level put four of us on a raft. The raft floated from left to right on a flow of some toxic purple liquid. Numbers appeared on the raft apparently indicating how much weight was on it. If too many of us—and too many enemies—got on it at the same time, we’d sink.

-An eighth-world lava level put the four of us on a roller-coaster seemingly made of bones. Hard as it was to ride the roller-coaster and still avoid enemies and jets of flame, not one of us was prepared for the roller-coaster to plunge into the lava. I guess we should have jumped. Or used Super Guide.

The game is played with the Wii Remote held sideways, as if it is a Nintendo Entertainment System controller. As we’ve noted in previews before, the main control innovation that is added to the classic Mario running, jumping and fireball-throwing is the ability to pick up and throw friends and bombs with a press of the 1 button and a shake of the Wii remote. You can use the throw both to help your fellow players out, or, as was often the case during my session today with Nintendo’s folks, to mess with them. That was my Blue Toad their Mario tossed into a spinning propeller of fire. Thanks.

Playing a Mario side-scroller with other gamers presents a mixture of benefits and calamity. Each player starts with five lives, but the level will be terminated if all four players have been defeated at the same time. If at least one is alive, though, the game can go on. The player-characters who have fallen into a bottomless pit or been temporarily killed by a Goomba will reappear floating in bubbles, wailing for help through the Wii Remote speaker. Shaking the remote or having the bubble popped by another player returns that player’s character to the action. Bear in mind that other players might be the ones who threw you into the bottomless pits in the first place.

The tossing of fireballs and iceballs—earned via classic-syle power-ups—don’t hurt other players. In one level, I found a barrel that did. Of course I picked it up and hurled it at my “friends” from Nintendo.

Bosses in the campaign include the cast of Koopalings from earlier Mario games. Bowser and Bowser Jr. are nemeses as well. In the one fortress level that we played, the first Koopaling was not any tougher due to four of us fighting him. In fact, even though the platform on which we fought him was crowded with our quartet, he took his beating more quickly. The game does not appear to adjust for the presence of multiple players, perhaps because the added players make the game harder in some spots, easier in others.

Levels appeared to be filled with hidden passageways that lead to extra coins. In the 20 minutes or so that we played the game I also saw numbered red coins and invisible coins that appear when you jump through their floating outlines (and that can be collected if you jump through them again).

A Nintendo rep told me that the game’s campaign will include the added twist of special Toad-rescuing missions. In these quests, players will have to return to cleared levels to find a kidnapped Toad and then carry him out of the level. Enemies will also patrol the game’s overworld, prompting extra challenges.

The gaame’s other half is its collection of multiplayer challenge stages. It appears that most of the stages available for this are taken from the game’s campaign, but there also seem to be some levels tailored made for this method of playing. The mode offers two ways to play: Free For All and Coin Battle. In Free For All, players can proceed through a level together, working with or against each other in pursuit of a new high score. Coin Battle was more exciting, challenging players to see who could collect the most coins in a stage.

In one Coin Battle stage, set in a Mario-style ghost house, I learned the magic of using ghosts to take out other players. In single-player Mario games, turning your back on a ghost caused the ghost to creep up behind you and kill you. In multiplayer Mario, it’s a good way to get the ghost to fly right into the Luigi standing between you and the ghost, killing Luigi (temporarily!)

Another Coin Battle stage that we tried was based on the original single-screen Mario Bros. game, though it transported us to a second board that was more of a Super Mario Bros. underground blue-brick sewer level.

The levels we played of the game were, universally, challenging. I didn’t play any of them—Campaign or Coin Battle—by myself. I wonder if that would have made any of them easier. With four players, collision and death is constant, though seldom frustrating. During an earlier demo of the game I found the pause triggered when any player-character died to be distracting. That pause is gone. The gameplay was smooth and fun, full of moments of cooperation and competition that typified the best levels of the only game to compare to this recently, Little Big Planet.

A note about the graphics: Nintendo doesn’t have new screenshots to show of the game yet, so I’m using an image from the E3 version of the game. The game looks polished if still as simple as you’d expect a side-scrolling Mario game to look. Characters animated in 3D and, most impressively, the TV screen was often full of characters. I’ve never seen dozens of Cheep-Cheeps swimming toward Mario all at once.

New Super Mario Bros. is set for release on the Wii on November 15.

Tower Climber is a vertically scrolling platformer. Your dude walks automatically, turning when he touches a wall or the edge of a platform. All you need to do is jump.

There are jewels to collect and monsters to avoid. Also, you can’t jump back down to a lower platform – miss a jump and you’ll die when you touch the bottom of the screen.

Just don’t do what I was doing, and forget that he won’t walk straight off a platform. Told you I’m rubbish.

Tower Climber [Skipmore]

I got my hands on the outer-space portion of next month’s Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time this week in Seattle. The trailer for the space stuff already explained the basics, but here’s the Kotaku take.

In a Crack in Time, the levels Ratchet can explore are set on planets and moons to which the player can and must manually fly. He has no hub world, but rather a hub galaxy. Fly it, explore it, use it as a hallway with doorways to the game’s levels and side challenges.

Ratchet travels through his hub in armed space-ship that can be upgraded with weapons, a speed boost and tow cable. The ship can be flown through several star systems, all accessed from the game’s Galactic Map. The PlayStation 3 controller’s left stick steers the ship. The right stick does barrel rolls and flip stunts. Buttons fire guns or land the ship.

The space zone I saw was grand and packed with floating space rock, a streaking comet, and colorful clusters of friendly and hostile spaceships. Navigating all of that was simpler than it looked, because flight is possible only on a flat plane. The developers at Ratchet studio Insomniac Games had toyed with letting Ratchet fly in all directions, but user feedback indicated that it was too disorienting.

I sampled the richness of the one demo outer space zone. My version of Ratchet’s ship had a pair of weapons, both infinite in ammo and capable of blowing up enemy craft. Of course, I tested them. I saw a beacon in the tail of a comet and flew to where it would have triggered a mission. I engaged hostile satellites and suddenly had to fight an attacking satellite that was so formidable it had its own health bar. I flew over some small moons upon which I had watched an Insomniac rep land Ratchet’s ship. One of those landings seamlessly segued into an on-foot challenge on a spherical planetoid. I saw a much larger heavenly body, a planet protected by security satellites that repelled my approach. The planet represented a full level of the game but I would only be able to get past its defenses if I collected enough Zoni, the aliens in the game obtainable in both story levels and through some of these outer-space optional challenges.

I was told there would be boss battles in space, including some sort of ultimate fight that is accessible only on a second playthrough of the game. But even in the first playthrough, exploration of the star systems can lead the player to some fun diversions. The moon areas — the new game’s take on the spherical world levels presented in earlier Ratchet games — serve as increasingly tricky platforming areas. They come in three variations, I was told, though I only witnessed the first of the following: Hover-boot challenges that involve fast movement over ramps and jumps; Platforming challenges that are more about the gymnastics of the genre; Battle challenges that present the series-staple goals of clearing out waves of enemies in confined arenas.

There are some less conventional elements to the space game. Ratchet’s ship has several radio stations. The tow cable he can obtain is used to haul space rock and rescue troubled ships. You can be destroyed out in the not-quite-blackness of this colorfully-populated cosmos but in the demo I played, it didn’t seem all that dangerous and likely to happen.

The space game in this new Ratchet was fun. As with everything else I’ve seen in the new game, it’s visually spectacular and a joy to move through. The closest equivalent in terms of scale and in opportunity to encounter interesting things is the ocean in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I’m not sure Ratchet’s stellar range is, proportionately that vast but the positive similarities are there.

The one open question is whether travel will be mandatory, something I’m checking with Insomniac about. travelling to a moon for a challenge once is fine. Having to fly back there later in the game would be less alluring.

There may be an efficiency in menu-based games that allow the player to hop from level to level with the click of a button. But this year I am enjoying the new grander takes on what a decade ago was presented as Princess Peach’s castle or the caves of Spiral Mountain. I like these new hubs and the places they reach.

As cautioned earlier, that PS3 box art for the new Ratchet & Clank was based on a standard template and “not final,” according to Insomniac. So don’t expect to see a well hidden multiplayer component in the final game, nor any of the other features listed in error.

“As we’ve said before, [Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time] is a single-player game, and has been planned as such from the very beginning,” reads a statement. “We’re totally focused on wrapping up the Ratchet & Clank Future story arc that we started in Tools of Destruction, and continued with Quest for Booty.”

A single screen platformer, you have to guide your elephant avatar from one yellow pipe to the other to exit the level. But it’s not quite the end.

Each subsequent sees you faced with the exact same level layout, only something has changed. The fun is in replaying the same basic area via different means, challenging you to relearn what you know over and over again.

This is indie gaming at its smartest.

This Is The Only Level [Armor Games]

In Shadow Complex, our hero is Jason Fleming, a hiker who starts ill-equipped on his girlfriend-saving quest with little more than a flashlight and a fancy belt buckle. After stumbling upon a massive underground facility housing a rogue military force, it’s clear that Fleming is in way over his head. But like Metroids past, Fleming gains new abilities and new weapons through equipment upgrades, granting him access to areas of the base where he’ll find new abilities and even more powerful weapons.

Shadow Complex could quite possibly be the perfect balance of 2D gameplay and 3D presentation in high-definition that Metroid and Castlevania fans have demanded, but not yet received. Actually, you know what? It is.

Loved
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: Shadow Complex borrows from the best, but stands capably on its own in the “Metroidvania” school. There are direct relationships between some of Shadow Complex’s and Metroid’s upgrades—Fleming’s foam gun and Samus Aran’s ice beam, for example—but Chair has brilliantly reinvented some, helping to differentiate the weapons in its Xbox Live Arcade title from the games that influenced it. Shadow Complex actually trumps some of Metroid’s power-up staples, offering a triple-jump(!) and eliminating the need for a morph ball to enter confined space. Yes, Fleming can crouch and walk at the same time.

Turn On Your Flashlight: Shadow Complex is charitable enough to make scanning for secrets painless. Fleming’s flashlight illuminates in an instant just what you’ll need to bypass certain doors and air ducts. If they glow red, they’ll require missiles. Purple doors require a foam shot. Green doors can only be destroyed with grenades. The flashlight makes scanning your surroundings effortless, something Shadow Complex completionists will likely applaud Chair for, if they’ve ever grown weary of switching on Samus’ visor or slicing every brick in sight as Alucard.

100% Pure Love: There are over a hundred items—from gold bars to armour upgrades to health expansions—to discover and collect in Shadow Complex. The design behind keeping these items well hidden is brilliant, as some are genuinely tricky to find, even when you have a clear marker on the map showing you where a power up is squirreled away. This kind of exploration and studying one’s surroundings is the kind of thing that keeps me up until 3 AM, going for “just one more save point.” In my first play through, I only managed to find 99% of the items. Three still elude me, something I’ll remedy in my second play through.

2D, Meet 3D: Shadow Complex looks gorgeous, particularly when the player ventures into the less industrialized areas or spends any time underwater. The environmental design manages to be varied enough so that even room after room of barracks and factory floors are recognisable. The addition of a Z-axis, letting players fire into the screen and beyond the 2D plane is a neat trick, but it’s the twin-stick evolution of the Metroidvania formula that’s far more enjoyable.

Power Levels On The 10s: What Shadow Complex borrows from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the Koji Igarashi-directed games that followed it is the experience leveling system. You’ll earn XP from killing enemies and uncovering new areas of the map, eventually boosting your stats, like stamina and accuracy. Chair makes this system interesting in two ways. First, if you chain together a series of non-standardized attacks—melee attacks, headshots, etc.—you’ll receive an experience bonus multiplier for each kill, encouraging the player to be creative, while also making the action more frenetic. Second, at levels on the multiple of ten, Jason will get specialised bonuses, including a health boost and… somethings we won’t spoil for you.

Proving Grounds: When you’ve burned through the main campaign enough times to do everything—finish it with 100% of the items, then with 13% of the items, then in under three hours on the hardest difficulty—you can enjoy the Proving Grounds. This is where Chair seems to have borrowed a bit from Portal, offering up a few dozen time-attack style challenges, putting your equipment skills to the test. Most are fun, some are sadistic.

Boost: By the end of Shadow Complex, you’re a total bad-ass, raining infinite missile hellfire down upon whatever mech or armoured soldier stands between you and the next door. And it feels good. Triple-jumping and hookshotting your way to almost anywhere is a pleasure. But honestly, it’s the fact that we can slide down and up ladders that may be most satisfying. Thanks for that, Chair.

Hated
The Technicalities: For as good as Shadow Complex is from a gameplay standpoint, it suffers slightly—ever so slightly—from the occasional frustrating technical snafu. I’ve faced clearly demolished doors that wouldn’t let me walk or swim through them. I’ve had the camera lock onto a spot during a scripted moment and get permanently stuck there. Beyond those bugs, the game’s frame rate and dynamic lighting can take a little too long to catch up sometimes. And only one save slot? We’re supposed to get three!

Shadow Complex has reset the bar for what we can expect from an Xbox Live Arcade title. It also happens to ranks among the best 2D Metroids and Castlevanias, thanks to its strong map and upgrade design. While outstanding graphically, it lacks in some of the visual and character charm offered by its forebears, partly because of its photorealistic near-future setting. There’s also not much meat to the story—not like there ever really is in these games, but when yours is based on a series of books, it’s worth flagging—or much all that appealing about Fleming himself.

But these negatives are the most minor of concerns. Shadow Complex is easily one of the best games I’ve played all year, appealing perfectly to my own Metroidvania collection addiction and priced well below the amount of carefully crafted content it offers. I can’t emphasise just how much of a pleasure it was to play through this game and how earnestly I’m looking forward to returning to it.

Shadow Complex was developed by Chair Entertainment and Epic Games, published by Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox Live Arcade on August 19. Retails for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15 USD). Played single player campaign to completion on Normal difficulty, completed half of Proving Grounds challenges.

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While details on what that extra content thrown in for free will be aren’t specified in the Amazon.com listing, the price drop and extra goodies really should convince you to pick up a copy of LittleBigPlanet already. I mean, have you seen how cute these Sackboy things are? Seriously

Amazon doesn’t offer a date, but it’s making it available for pre-order.

LittleBigPlanet: Game of the Year [Amazon]