New Super Mario Bros. Wii

In a bid to outdo each other we also started paying more attention to the Wii-specific control features. When you die in NSMB, you're reincarnated as a floating bubble. You can only rejoin the action properly when another player touches your bubble to pop it. If your friends are feeling competitive there's no incentive for them to do this - better to clean up all the coins on-screen while you float around helplessly.

Or not so helplessly, as shaking the Wii remote makes your bubble drift towards them. So you end up in situations where there are three players furiously waggling their remotes while the other one mashes away at the jump button, trying to collect the coins while avoiding those bubbles. It's an excellent example of how NSMB Wii can be dynamic and fluid, super-competitive and extremely silly all at the same time.

Then we discovered Yoshi. This is when the giggling became cackling, the cheering became jeering and the swearing really started to kick in. While riding Yoshi you can not only swallow and spit out enemies, but other players. If you're playing co-operatively, this means you can fire them over big gaps or towards hard-to-reach coins.

But if you're shallow and mean-spirited, like us, you can just bounce around for ages with a rival character trapped in Yoshi's gullet, listening to your friend howl with frustration about how you should "Stop doing that for ****'s sake you ******* ****," and so on. Or you can spit them right into the path of a piranha plant as it pops up out of a pipe.

Just as we were really getting into it, the four of us were called away to an Expo meeting. I can't remember what it was for - something about did anyone know how to fashion ethernet cables out of human hair - but I remember wishing it would be over quickly so I could get back to throwing Tom into the path of flying hammers.

Unfortunately we had to let the 2000 people who'd bought a ticket for day one of the Expo into the building, and before long the Nintendo stand was too busy for us to sneak back in. So we didn't get the chance to answer some of the questions which still remain - such as what it's like to play NSMB Wii with an emphasis on co-operation rather than competition, or whether it's as much fun with two or three players.

There's also the issue of how the game plays over the long term, and whether there's enough innovation and variation to make it more than a multiplayer novelty. For answers to those questions, better wait for our review.