New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the next game starring the world’s most favourite plumber, comes out on November 15, but on November 5 I spent a couple of hours playing it with Nintendo of Canada’s Matt Ryan. In that time I got a good feel for the game and learned about some new features, including a reveal about how players can get hints on how to play the game.

In fact, Ryan told me I was the first Canadian journalist to be playing the final release version of the game. My Toronto-based brethren get their taste of the new platformer next week. And he warned me that if we advanced too far into the game, he’d have to swear me to secrecy about what I saw. Nintendo doesn’t want too many details about the game exposed before it’s available to players.

I was also, Ryan said, the first Canadian journalist to get my hands on the new black controllers, which become available on November 16. The glossy black Wii Remote and Nunchuk are handsome, and they’ll be sold individually (the Remote includes a Wii MotionPlus) and packaged together.

Ryan said nothing has been announced about the black Wii console being released in North America. The black system hits Europe this month in a special edition bundle.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is packaged in a red box, and the first thing I noticed when looking it over is that the game supports two control schemes. You can play with the Wii Remote turned sideways, or you can play with the Nunchuk attached, controlling running and jumping with its buttons.

But Ryan and I are purists when it comes to Mario, so we opted for the simpler single control.

The game starts off with a birthday celebration for Princess Peach. But the festivities are interrupted by Bowser and his crew who kidnap the princess and spirit her away aboard his airship.

After the brief intro, you’ll find Mario and any teammates on a world map, with multiple paths through the world. A total of eight worlds make up New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but Ryan wouldn’t tell me how many levels there were in total. “A lot,” is all he would say.

One of the big features of the new game is that it’s built with multiplayer in mind. Up to four players can run, jump, and stomp, and whether you want to play cooperatively or competitively is entirely up to you.

One person plays as Mario, a second person plays as Luigi, and the third and fourth players come in as blue and yellow Toads, citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Ryan, who had been playing single-player for a few days, said that playing a Mario Bros. game with others is a completely different experience. He was right. Moving too far ahead of the others will cause them to lose a life, or catch them in places within levels that they can’t escape from. Suddenly, the level design becomes a competitive mechanic.

We decided to play cooperatively, not competitively. It could have gotten ugly otherwise, with the two of us each trying to throw the other into enemies, off cliffs, and stealing coins.

I had a hard time trying to imagine what it would be like playing with four players. Ryan said it was chaos. Whether playing cooperatively or not, he said, “you have to be aware of your environment a lot more with four players.

Once you get a feel for how the screen zooms in and out with the positions of the other players, though, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is just as fun and playable as you’d expect from a Mario game.

There are a few new power-up. The one I enjoyed the most was the propeller suit. By shaking the Wii Remote you activate the helicopter-like power-up. You can soar into the air and get to those hard-to-reach heights, or avoid plummeting to your doom after a misstep.

Also new is the Ice Flower that bestows Mario and Luigi with the ability to throw ice balls, which freeze enemies in big cubes.

Fireball power-ups aren’t new, but are welcomed back, especially when you’re playing through some underground and castle levels where they provide a helpful source of light.

The motion sensing Wii remote is also used to control environmental objects like a seesaw platform.

When one player has reached the flag pole at the end of a level, other players have only three seconds to tag the pole, or they receive no bonus.

As before, taking paths to Toad’s Mushroom House leads to mini-games that are opportunities to collect power-ups. In saw two. One was a matching game, and another required Mario to climb into — and be shot out of — a cannon, trying to pop as many balloons as possible.

After a couple of levels, I remembered that as simple as Mario games are at the beginning, the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly.

But, in keeping with game design trends, New Super Mario Bros. Wii doesn’t penalize players.

You start the game with five lives, and if (when) those have been used up, you’re granted an additional five lives. How many times you’ve needed to add to your life pool is tracked by the “Continue” statistic.

Good thing, too, as Ryan and I used up a horde of lives trying to get past the castle at the end of the first world.

I’m glad we did, though, because the second world is set in a desert. Some levels have scirocco that can blow Mario and Luigi clear across the screen, and there are also sand geysers that help the Italian brothers gain some much-needed altitude.

In our play session, we didn’t get so far through New Super Mario Bros. Wii that Ryan had to swear me to secrecy about what I saw. But I did learn something big.

We already knew about the auto-pilot mode that can provide in-game assistance to players playing by themselves who have failed a level eight times. It’s a way, designer Shigeru Miyamoto has said, of helping gamers get past difficult sections of games.

What I learned yesterday is that gamers can also get hints on how to play New Super Mario Bros. Wii by spending Star Coins at Princess Peach’s castle. Spending coins in that way unlocks hint movies. And while I didn’t get to actually view one of these hint movies, their appeal is obvious.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight