Wrecking Crew

Wrecking Crew puts Mario on a demolition site with a hammer and gives him one instruction: break every wall panel on the screen. It sounds like the simplest idea Nintendo ever shipped, and it is built on one of the company's most quietly inventive engines.

Nothing about the level is fixed, because the walls are what stop you moving. Break a panel and the route through the site changes, which means demolishing the stage in the wrong order can seal off the last wall with no way to reach it. Ladders, bombs, oil drums and the foreman Spike all push the equation around: touching a barrel sends it rolling, a bomb clears a whole row, and Spike will knock down panels himself and ruin a careful plan. There is also a design mode that lets you build and save your own stages, which on the Famicom used the cassette data recorder - a level of creative tooling almost no 1985 cartridge bothered with. On top of that, progress unlocks a second character, and the game tracks and replays your clear as a ghost, years before that became standard.

• ▸Every wall panel can be destroyed, and the level changes as you do it
• ▸Bombs, oil drums and ladders as tools rather than obstacles
• ▸A level design mode that let players build and save their own stages
• ▸Replay of your best clear, plus a second playable character