If there's one thing Nintendo's plucky plumber Mario isn't afraid to do, it's try his hand at more things than saving Princess Peach. With more sports under his belt than your average decathlete, and a rather unusual tendency to invite his mortal enemies to every sporting tournament he takes part in, little Mazza's spin-offs run the gamut from karting to footie to golf, with a side of Olympic sports thrown in for good measure. Given how action-packed his schedule must be then, how is he still a little round around the middle? Maybe it's the genes. Or maybe it's all that cake Peach keeps baking him? Guess we'll chalk that up as another one of the great Mushroom Kingdom mysteries...
He's even playing on the same team as Bowser, the plonker! All those mushrooms must have turned his brain to mush...
Anyway - one of Nintendo's more unexpected announcements from their E3 Nintendo Direct show was the reveal of the brand new Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash, which will be hitting Wii U's before the year is out, promising more of the winning tennis formula we know and love. Letting you and up to three friends duke it out on the court in either singles or doubles matches, playing as all your favourite Mushroom Kingdom characters - from Mario and Peach to Bowser and Toad and many more, including a few new faces - it's another one of the big N's titles that really shines in multiplayer. Developed by the traditional Mario Tennis team at Camelot, the latest instalment looks to play things fairly safe, without mixing things up too much - but still brings with it a couple of tweaks.
The 'big' feature for the Ultra Smash is the addition of the Mega Mushroom power-up, which, if you've ever played a Mario game before, you'll instantly recognise as having a rather large effect on all who consume it. Turning your tennis star into a humongous version of themselves, and presumably bolstering your power to boot, it looks set to add another layer of silliness to the game - although Camelot will have to be a bit careful with how they balance it, because it could easily degenerate into a 'whoever gets the power-up first wins' fiasco. Perhaps as an effort to counter the Mega-ised characters, everyone now has access to a new 'Jump Shot', which makes your character leap into the air and send the ball flying down the court, hopefully making returning those tricky shots easier than before.
Super Princess Peach!
What Nintendo fail to mention - and a feature which was sorely missed from the recent 3DS entry in the series - is whether the new Wii U title will have any sort of career mode to play through. In previous (generally handheld) instalments, the tournament mode was all wrapped up in a funky little story, which gave it a pretty lengthy single player story to work towards. The recent 3DS game meanwhile, abandoned this completely, instead focussing on an actually pretty addictive mix of mini-games and dressing your Mii up in Nintendo-inspired tennis gear. At the moment, we're hoping that information on the modes outside of multiplayer will be revealed soon, or else Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash looks like it might be the most bare-bones entry in the series to date.
Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash will hit the Wii U later in the year, sometime around Christmas. Bringing yet another winning multiplayer experience for the console, and with new characters and (hopefully more) modes still to be revealed, we'll be keeping an eye on this one! In the meantime, Nintendo have served up a brand new trailer showing off the Mega transformations to help wet your appetites:
