One of the biggest surprises of Nintendo's press conference was the onslaught of Mario game announcements after more than a year of no new games featuring the iconic plumber. Along with the big Super Mario Galaxy 2 reveal, the English localization of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story and the DSiware downloadable Mario VS Donkey Kong: Minis March Again, Nintendo unveiled New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a new multiplayer game in the style of 2006's hit DS title of the same name.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii brings a side-scrolling Mario platfomer to consoles for the first time in nearly two decades, and adds simultaneous multiplayer for up to four people. We got a chance to jump in as Luigi to our friend's Mario in none other than the World 1-1 level, which featured blue skies, trees, clouds, Goombas, Koopas and pipes in true World 1-1 fashion.

All characters share the same screen space (no four-way split screen here), and the camera pans in and out to keep all players visible. The characters can bounce on top of one another to jump higher, as well as grab and throw each other, though thankfully none of these does any damage. If a player dies and other characters are still in play, they'll be able to rescue him by popping the bubble is reappears in. Alternately they could leave him floating away (ouch).

Item blocks will produce enough mushrooms and power-ups for each player in the game -- unfortunately this doesn't mean that everyone gets a power-up. Our buddy snatched up both of the Super Mushrooms from the first item block, so we were left running around as regular-sized Luigi until we found another block. We paid him back later by stealing both Fire Flowers. Even better? Our favorite fictional dinosaur makes a comeback -- Yoshi eggs will appear as items around certain levels as well.

Mario, Luigi, and the Toads take to the skies with the Propeller power-up.


We also found the new Propeller power-up, which allowed us to fly around by shaking the Wii remote -- pressing down on the D-pad makes your character spin down, attacking any enemies in the way.

While a lot of mainstay features of the Mario series are in the game, the multiplayer element completely changes the pace of certain areas. Those underground hidden coin-collecting areas turn into speed competitions to grab the most coins instead of being able to take our time.

We're excited that New Super Mario Bros. for Wii changes the way you see familiar pieces of Mario platformers -- Miyamoto did us good by adding multiplayer to a format we thought we'd seen everything from. We'll definitely be bringing you more on this game before its release this holiday season.