All three games share the format that 120 stars (or shines) are available, but that completing the game only requires so many. The challenge of getting every treasure remains for players who loved the experience enough to refine their skills further. It's a simple but satisfying format.

Of the three, Super Mario Sunshine was the one whose treasures I never exhausted. Rather, the game exhausted me. I think I found… 88 shines? Then I headed for Bowser, defeated him, and never looked back.

For a mainline Mario title, for me, that's exceptional. This time around, it's also why I'd saved Sunshine for last: I was excited to return to a portion of a mainline Mario title which, to me, was still new. It wasn't long, though, before I began to recall why I had found the game so stifling.

The GameCube seemed like such a technical revolution at the time, particularly after the graphical limits of the N64. The almost Pixar-like expression and animations of Luigi in his mansion seemed so profound that I responded to my first glimpsed screen shot with a simple tremor inside. Words weren't needed. If there were words, they might have been "I guess we're finally here."

In retrospect, later advents like HD and widescreen would constitute the arrival at what would feel like the settled futuristic normal. Nintendo shirked those longer than anyone, which I understood, because their higher priority was making games inviting to more players, and part of that was affordable consoles. But it meant that seemingly revolutionary period in Nintendo's history would prove more of an adolescent one. "Oh, right, that time," I found myself thinking, as I recalled playing Super Mario Sunshine on a CRT TV, with a four-by-three aspect ratio, with not even the true 480 pixels of standard definition. The slightly awkward, cramped-feeling layout of the text and interfaces were what reminded me.

Within those technical boundaries, though, the graphics were profound and lavish. Beloved Yoshi, in his permanently modern form, arguably debuted here. The summery retreat of Isle Delfino, particularly the waters of the canals and beaches, were especially impressive at the time, gently waving and reflecting like real water. Wonderfully, the game's treatment for 3D All-Stars does bring the general gameplay to proper widescreen HD.

The game's original frame rate was 30 per second, and this remains. I appreciate that, since I think games are often designed for their frame rates, so changing them downstream, even to a "superior" frame rate, can feel wrong.

The controls are also highly, non-trivially, adapted for the Switch's array of control options. Amusingly, since the game's voiced dialogue originally included the names of some of the buttons on the GameCube controller, phrases like "press the R button" are jarringly edited to "press the button."

But the controls are the woeful part of the story of the game's adaptation. Re-released GameCube titles have been sparse in the post-Virtual Console era, and I think this owes to GameCube's chief idiosyncracy: the controller's analogue, pressure-sensitive shoulder buttons. Such buttons are everywhere now, but this was GameCube's "thing" back in the day. You could gently increase and decrease the intensity of Luigi's vacuum in his mansion, for example. And in Sunshine, Mario's water-fuelled staple is a robotic jetpack and dousing hose. In combination with the main control stick for aiming, increasing and decreasing the water pressure to clean up a plaza of sludge, or to hover around, felt easy and natural.

But those analogue shoulder buttons weren't inherited by Nintendo's subsequent consoles – not even the Switch, which even the creators characterized as an amalgamation of the past consoles' DNA. And so, on the Switch, you're either firing full-blast, or you're not firing. The naturalness is gone, and there's no way around it. It's sad, but I suppose the alternative was not to re-release Sunshine at all.

Additionally, the graphical adolescence I mentioned feels analogous to period of control-based adolescence which the subsequent Super Mario Galaxy brings into focus. In Galaxy, Mario begins with his entire set of moves from Super Mario 64. I remember noticing it within a minute of playing. "Whoa, this is like a sequel to Super Mario 64!" (Or even the quieter, "this is what a sequel to Super Mario 64 should have been.")

But even under pressure to develop on Super Mario 64's triumphs as its actual successor, Sunshine's creators seemed to overlook the importance of considering Super Mario 64's moves a strict starting point. Mario retains most of his moves, including walking, running, jumping, triple-jumping, side-jumping, crouching, and ground-pounding. And I didn't notice anything off when I originally played.

But this playthrough, post-Galaxy and post-Odyssey, it wasn't long until I attempted a long jump, and I must have blinked a good couple of times before realizing it genuinely wasn't possible. History had made Sunshine the single core 3D Mario title in which Mario can't long-jump. Why did the developers eschew it?

Was it that the jetpack-enabled "hovering" was what Mario was "supposed to do" when aiming to traverse gaps and distances? This alternative works, but it's slow and stodgy by comparison, and each attempt left me quietly longing for the catharsis of Mario abandoning himself to the slight uncertainty of physics at a full run. Constraints can be a great force in service of creativity, but the player's learned conviction that Mario knows how to long jump feels as though it should have settled the decision, and it's unsatisfying that it didn't. Galaxy seemed to be Nintendo's way of confirming they ultimately agreed it should have.

(Mario's backflip is the other move worth mentioning. He can do it, but it's a kind of water-blast-aided backflip that's more difficult to control.)

That brings me to Sunshine's "secrets." The term refers to dedicated arenas, hiding one shine each, that challenge the player to perfect their Mario-style platforming with no water-based aid, even featuring a remix of the original Super Mario Bros. theme. I get the impression the developers were aiming for something that spoke to the hearts of "real Mario fans." But, gosh – something about these areas just lead reliably to frustration, and not the motivating and ultimately rewarding kind that the original Super Mario Bros. successfully bestowed. The long jump would have felt especially great in those areas. I believe they were one reason I felt ready to move on after the credits.

After returning to Sunshine and recalling all this, I'd visited most of the main areas and felt like I'd played for a good while; at least long enough to relive equal doses of enjoyment and aggravation. I checked and found I still had fewer than 20 shines. Goodness.

I had returned to Sunshine excited to finally play through what, to me, was still new. Now that I've tried it again, will I even make it that far? While it's good to stroll around Isle Delfino again, I can't say I'm certain. But we'll see.