Mario makes his long awaited Gamecube appearance, but will it live up to the high expectations placed on it after the stunning Super Mario 64 on the N64?

Nintendo's figurehead character makes his Gamecube debut in Super Mario Sunshine. The story this goes, goes something like this.. (I say something because I can't understand Japanese :/)

Mario, Princess Peach and another character that I haven't seen before, go on holiday to the Dolphic Island. When trying to land their plane, they notice a huge flower in the middle of the runway, but this flower is made of paint! Soon after you discover that a Mario Imposter is defacing the island with paint, turning the sunny paradise into a shady one. At this point you come across a new gadget that you use for the rest of the game, the water pump This useful gismo not only lets you squirt water in any direction but has a secondary function.. as a jet pack! With the water pump on your back, you begin to clean up the island, defeat the imposter and bring back the sunshine to the shadowed island.

Nintendo have used Dolby Pro-Logic 2 surround sound in Mario, and it works very well. For example, some levels require you to find, chase and spray the Mario imposter with water. In this type of level, the music changes and actually comes from the imposter. If he runs around a corner and you lose him, you can use your sound system to help find and catch him again

SMS comes complete with great jingles, sound effects and music, like previous Mario games. If you liked them this won't disappoint.

Don't worry, you don't have to just hose down every bit of paint on the whole village. Generally speaking, only the bosses spout out paint, and the paint only serves to make killing the boss harder, not for you to clean up (when you kill the boss the paint all disappears) Although to earn blue coins you must find and clean Imposter Mario's M logo. Collect 10 blue coins to trade for a shine in the 'shop' on the main island.
The control system is very intuitive. The water pack makes the game even more fun to play than Mario 64, now you can easily wall jump up a alleyway then use your jet pack to help line yourself up to a narrow landing spot. There are also other objects that you can use, like the elastic tightropes that inhabit some levels. On these you can jump very high, or hang from them then use your spray to spin Mario around the rope, then finally jump off and enable your jet pack to land safely The mesh also returns from Super Mario World (SNES) where you can grapple across it and even spin onto the other side when you punch a rotating block.

The game consists of 8 levels, this may not seem like much, but each level contains 9 'shines' this means to fully complete the game you must play each level 9 times to get each 'shine', like in Mario 64 (8 main shines and 1 for getting 100 coins on the level). There are reportedly 130 shines to collect in the whole game, you will be playing this game for quite a while =)

To earn some shines you enter a bonus level where you have no water pump, and must play 'old skool' these are quite difficult and can take many attempts before you successfully clear it.

The only negative point I can think of about Super Mario Sunshine is the camera, it sometimes gets stuck behind things and when this happens you can only see your shadow, a press of the L trigger remedies it most of the time. The camera is not a major problem however and only happens on the very busy levels where there is a lot going on. As a side note I haven't seen a perfect camera for any 3D game yet, it is a myth Mario contains a lot of Japanese text which makes it a lot harder to understand than an English version would. I'd recommend waiting for the American version to import as its released only a few weeks later than this one.

Super Mario Sunshine is a fantastic game. Updated graphics, sound and gameplay from a groundbreaking prequel making this the best Mario game to date. I can't believe I've finished this review without even mentioning Yoshi, the Water Pump add-ons, or the theme park level... maybe it was a ploy to make you buy the game to find out for yourself (or maybe I'm just a lazy bugger..)