Format: DS
Release: Out Now
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo

Nintendo's E3 conference this year was a peculiarly complacent breed of jumble-sale, a wayward ramble through a bizarre variety of different products, markets, and strategies, tugged together only by the company's quiet confidence in its own judgement. Wedged in amongst treats like the troublingly named Women's Murder Club, and the equally disquieting prospect of the Wii Vitality Sensor, which promises - somehow - to finally unite the boxes under your telly with the kind of things more commonly found in the back of a speeding ambulance, Mario Vs Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! didn't really have much time to shine. 

Showing up on the gleaming white shelves of DSiWare, however, Nintendo’s clockwork puzzler presents an entirely different prospect. Next to the Conran chic of the Art Style series and the muddy dregs of Gameloft's often grim back catalogue, Mario is a beacon of shameless, uncomplicated jollity. While there might be something vaguely chilling about the ease with which this particular developer manages to endlessly mint charm from the oldest of materials, Minis is, predictably, yet another casual delight. Its tottering wind-up retrofitting of Lemmings rises in a graceful arc of challenge from the endearingly simple to the entirely devious, while a seductive meta-game - each level you beat gives you a handful of pieces to then use in the typically efficient level-designer - means that a seemingly slight offering has a lot more life in it than you might have been expecting.

None of its tricks is particularly new, of course – the Minis originally started marching back on the GBA, and even the level editor has had a previous airing in the last DS title - but there are a few significant tweaks to the gameplay, most notably that you no longer have any direct control over your mechanical charges once you set them moving. It’s a subtle change of plan, but one that deepens the tactical possibilities, forcing you to separate planning from execution on the more complex levels, where game-changers like magnets and jump-pads come into effect. While the pleasant sense of muddling through each course’s dangers as they’re flung at you is somewhat sacrificed, the keener strategic options more than make up for that, reinforcing the notion that, beneath the familiar faces and bright paintwork, Minis presents a surprisingly exacting abstract challenge.

Elsewhere, the course layouts themselves grow ever more mischievous, while your abilities to tweak your own designs and share them with other players around the world has benefited from a gentle polish and a much more generous download limit. And while it’s hardly LittleBigPlanet when it comes to user-generated content, there’s already a fearsome display of design talent to be found online.

It might be tempting to see Mario reduced to a clockwork doll with a key in his back as a telling metaphor for Nintendo's ruthless exploitation of its own world-beating IP, but the truth is that it's hard to pick up Minis without getting quickly drawn in to the series’ particular brand of cheery brainteasing. Granted, this is hardly the most drastic of sequels, but it didn’t need to be: instead, it stands as an indicator that, even as the DSi heads ever deeper into the online space, on some level at least, it’s still business as usual. [7]