I've been playing Rayman Origins for the past week now, blissfully ignorant of other releases and willfully disregarding the backlog of games that have built up around my desk in what some would call a "horizontal and vertical filing system". For those of you who don't know already, Rayman Origins is truly exceptional on almost every level. However one thing that certainly stuck with me was the fact that though Rayman modernizes the platformer to a certain extent, with checkpoints and so on making the game actually playable, the game still feels like a throwback and not always for the right reasons.

Rayman is a character I've heard described as "The French Mario" on numerous occasions and the comparison is apt, if somewhat unfair. He certainly shared his glory days with Nintendo's icon and similarly made the transition to 3D well. But Rayman has basically been in four "proper" games, discounting Ubisoft's literal butchering of the IP for their commercial purposes, whereas Mario is the most ubiquitous IP on the market even today. In spite of this, you rarely hear Mario in any of his guises described as "a throwback" or "nostalgic" or even "antiquated".

Describing any of Mario's starring vehicles is an exercise in stating the obvious. Mario Kart 7? Well its more Mario Kart. There are few if any elements that have been outright removed from the Mario formula, whether Mario is in a kart, jumping from left to right or 3D platforming on tiny worlds, Mario is still Mario. The format may be different and the platform may be in your hand instead of your living room but pretty much the same plumber and his bag of tricks have been played by us since the mid-90's.

Mario is also practically bullet-proof, if at any point I was to say on a forum that a Super Mario Bros game was just like the 3 others that preceded it then you and probably everyone else would reply "that's because it's fucking Mario". Timelessly bullet-proof as well, I have hit Bowser 3 times to beat him more times than I can count and so has everyone else but the word "dated" is not one that is usually used to describe any of the Mario series, which now function as their separate entities linked only by the presence of the moustachioed plumber and his supporting cast.

Of course many gamers who satiate themselves daily with the cutting edge could call Mario antiquated, and they'd be in the minority because 1 in 3 Wii's have a Mario Kart Wii attached to them. Even though the Mario Karts, the Super Mario Bros and even the more recent Smash Bros and Galaxy games have received numerous additions, they're still recognizably similar to the first games in those series. We don't seem to get tired of Mario and the aspects of his games that most modern platformers have shunned. You still collect coins to get lives, if that doesn't feel ancient to most gamers then I'd be shocked, but of the few complaints I've heard about the more recent Nintendo games with Mario and company on the cover have been to do with the formula and structure showing their age.

Admittedly, Nintendo almost always delivers that special something with a Mario title that's often absent from the competition. They also basically have a blank slate to work from, now Mario explores small planets, now he beats up Link, now he can glide in a race. Even though the ingredients are the same, ie: Mario is in a colourful world, go figure, Nintendo can reinvent the what Mario games can be several times over and still have gamers say "well it's Mario, duh". What other series can have over 4 different versions of itself operating at once with its fans buying ALL of them? You still collect stuff, you probably will have to rescue Peach at some point, Bowser will prove to be pain in the arse but it's hard to imagine a character with so many gaming identities tied to him. The games look a touch old, they sound like games from the 90's and in many senses they play like them too yet they're still awesome and well-loved with nary a "same old same old" from the gaming majority.

Why is this so? Mario's games are fantastic, in fact they're the only thing that has kept me coming back to Nintendo's otherwise unattractive systems. But no other franchise has managed to stay as fresh in my mind as the yardstick by which all platformers are judged while remaining so very similar to the aged games that preceded them. Nintendo does tend to perpetuate itself within its own microcosm while the rest of the world goes off and invents high-definition and other things Nintendo has no truck with but perhaps its innate stubbornness against evolution and progression is because like Mario, they just seem to do things right.

Maybe the overdose of Rayman has sent me down a nostalgia trip, if so I'm struggling to find nostalgia for a Mario game because if you're nostalgic for a game you'll most likely think it feels old by the time you revisit it. Though I'm by no means an uber Mario fan, the same formulas of the Kart, Bros and 3-dimensional Mario games are still superb stuff today. I'm at a loss to explain why, seeing as life counters and coins can infuriate is most other games, but I do hope it continues.