Is our beloved video game character telling the tale of a mid-life crisis? In the lead-up to the October 27 release of Super Mario Odyssey, it has been revealed that he is no longer a plumber, and not only has Mario taken up grooming moustaches, he seems to have abandoned his modesty, too, and is totally fine with revealing his beach body.

Mario without his shirt on is Nintendo telling us that he’s just a human like the rest of us. Besides, wouldn’t it have been weirder if the plucky plumber didn’t have any?

When I initially came across the rumour that Nintendo and Ubisoft had gotten together to make a Super Mario/Raving Rabbids crossover game I chose to ignore it.

The very idea of the letting the trite, irritating humour that defines the latter company’s screaming mascots into Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom just felt like a bad idea to me. I was wrong! Not only is Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle actually a pretty good game, the mascots I rejected before even seeing manage to steal the show!

The world’s favourite moustachioed plumber is back, and this time he’s rewriting the rules of Monopoly.

Hasbro have teamed up with Nintendo to put together the ultimate revision to the classic board game, now 82 years of age and still going strong. Monopoly Gamer Edition is set to hit the shelves in August, but is available to order now from GameStop at the more than reasonable price of $24.99 if you can’t wait that long. And if you fancy splashing out for a bit extra, try the Collector’s Edition ($39.99) for a few more bells and whistles, including a Bowser token to play with.

Forget the Bermuda Triangle, Easter Island, and the Lizard Queen of Buckingham Palace, the biggest mystery of the modern world has to be the nearly unending appeal of one fat plumber – not a cute hedgehog or a crazed bandicoot but a portly pipe bender. It is, of course, Nintendo’s long-serving mascot Mario, who, with the October 2017 release of Super Mario Odyssey, will have appeared in more than 250 original titles since his inception in 1985. The character reportedly has a single grey hair in the latter game; with the mileage Nintendo have got from the moustachioed Italian, it’s no surprise.

IMAGE SOURCE: NintendoViewer on Facebook

If you’re a fan of video games and you’re familiar with Sega’s line of consoles, you’ve probably heard about Sonic the Hedgehog. This friendly character as been featured in countless video games on different consoles and is still popular to this day. In this article, I will give you a quick history of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and some facts on this lovable character.

“Super Mario.” (CC BY 2.0) by Tom Newby Photography

The release of any new product means another chance for a classic to come back to life in a differnt form. With Nintendo Switch already beating its expected sales targets (2.7 million units shipped by the end of March 2017), Nintendo is prepping for the release of the last game in the Super Mario franchise.

Evidently, we all love our Mario games. Mario’s various adventures through Nintendo’s Mushroom Kingdom and beyond have delighted us since childhood, and have been doing so since 1985. He’s come a long way on his adventures since then, joined by his brother Luigi and many other notable figures from the cast (obviously, they need no introduction).

With 210 million units sold worldwide, Mario is officially the best-selling video game franchise of all time, while Super Mario, the mustachioed Italian plumber is probably the most recognizable video game character in the world of gaming.

When Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto sat down to create a determined little sprite dubbed Mario for arcade game Donkey Kong in 1981, it’s hard to imagine he may have had an inkling of how enormous and definitive the Mario franchise would become.

Today the stocky little plumber with the curling mustachios is world-renowned as the company mascot of Nintendo. He has shifted more than 125 million units during his thirty-year reign as the star of over 200 games of various genres across multiple platforms.