Is it a spoiler to say there are ghost houses in Super Mario Run? If so, my apologies. Consider yourself spoiled. And yet, because this is Mario - and because these are ghost houses - the spoiler does not really spoil very much. I only mention the ghost houses at all because the first one - level 2-1 - was the moment at which I first sat up and started really paying attention. It's the first level where you glimpse once again what makes Mario special: not that he basically invented the trappings of the platformer, to the extent that playing through the opening few levels of his new iPhone autorunner puts you into a kind of cognitive tailspin as you realise how much it reminds you of all other iPhone autorunners and, in turn, how much all other iPhone autorunners remind you of Mario. What makes Mario special is that, even deep within the clutch of genre conventions that he created - a clutch so few perfectly good games ever escape from - he wriggles free and shows you something new.
The best example of this sort of thing - other than 2-1, which I'm going to get to in a minute - comes in one of the New Super Mario games for the 3DS, a series that Super Mario Run takes many of its cues from. I can't remember which of the old New games I'm thinking of, and that's probably part of the point. Anyway, Mario's travelling upwards inside a Koopa castle of some kind, stuck on an elevator that rises through a tower, passing coins, passing platforms, passing enemies. And then a spiked boulder falls onto the screen from the left. It rolls towards Mario. You jump. He jumps. And then it rolls off the right-hand side of the screen. Phew!
Except because this world wraps left-to-right, the boulder's back. It rolls in again. Mario jumps again. And then it disappears again. And then it returns again. This is the gimmick of this level: a boulder, an elevator, an old trick of platformers where every exit stage right is an entrance stage left. Mario, this late in his career, still has the imagination to turn all this into a sort of perpetual motion machine. The boulder keeps rolling through the hard interior of the Mario Pinball table you're apparently stuck in, the passing level furniture making each new journey it takes fresh and surprising and playful.
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