Mario Unreal

Though we now have Mario looking fabulous in HD, most notably in Super Mario 3D World, fans and those keen to work on their coding still like to create their own flashy re-imaginings of the plumber's adventures. A recent example that went viral was a Unity-based recreation of one stage from Super Mario 64 in HD; sadly that was shot down by Nintendo, despite the fact the demo was not-for-profit and rather limited.

The latest Mario-related fan creation to go viral is 'Mario is Unreal' by Aryok Pineral, who created a video of Mario running in the powerful Unreal Engine 4. He states that "all the environment assets were taken from the Unreal marketplace, all the character actions were scripted using blueprints only, all animations were re-created from scratch as well as the PBR ready textures".

The results show the mascot running around in a range of hi-res landscapes, some of which are perhaps a little too realistic, while others have a neat painterly quality to them. It's a neat diversion from the Pixar-style visual approach of Nintendo, and this video has accumulated over half a million views in one day.

Check it out below and be sure to crank up to HD and 60fps if you can. While this writer prefers Nintendo's graphical style for a HD Mario, it's certainly an impressive effort - would you like this visual approach in a Mario game?

[source youtube.com]