Mario vs. Donkey Kong is the first game in a very long time to cast Mario and Donkey Kong as rivals.

Wait. That is only sort of true. If you count head-to-head competition in tennis and golf, if you count heated party-game battles for the title of Super Star, if you count go-kart races, then the tubby little plumber and the big cravatted ape have been sworn enemies since the dawn of the age of electronic entertainment. But you do not count tennis and you do not count golf. Nobody counts golf. It is not even a real sport.

Neither do you count go-kart racing. For while it does have winners and losers, its generous spirit of fun and camaraderie rises above all that. Go-kart racing is for bonding and team-building, just like paintball and walking on hot coals and drinking too much in the bar at Canoe. And while choosing the Super Star by rolling dice and moving tokens around an animated board may result in a bruised ego here or there, it is hardly the stuff of blood oaths and not resting until you get your revenge. So let us strike Mario Golf and Mario Tennis and Mario Kart and Mario Party and their ilk from consideration.

Now. You may remember the original Donkey Kong. It was a masterwork of game design, gorgeous in its simplicity. You controlled a rotund, mustachioed character named "Jumpman." As the action began, a big nasty ape kidnapped Jumpman's lovely girlfriend and carried her to the top of a construction site. It was your job, as Jumpman, to scale the girders and get the sweet girl back, all while dodging the barrels and fireballs Kong tossed in your path. Whenever you got near the poor maiden and rescue seemed imminent, the ape would grab her and climb even higher. You could not win. You boiled with rage. You vowed revenge, etc.

We knew from the outset that Jumpman was somehow involved in the building trades, but the details were sketchy until Donkey Kong Jr. hit the arcades a year later. Jumpman's name was Mario. He was a plumber. He was Popeye to Donkey Kong's Bluto. We knew. We understood.

Then something odd happened. Mario and his brother Luigi went on to star in dozens of games, and a giant horned turtle named "Bowser" emerged as the new Public Enemy #1. Donkey Kong himself took a star turn as the hero in a series of his own adventures, but for reasons that were never explained, his red-hot feud with Mario just kind of faded away.

This was OK. This was OK because video games are for play, not for storytelling. They have no obligation to wrap up loose threads. They do not need to tell us what happened next. If they give us characters, they do so because driving those characters around will be fun, not because of the weighty personal history between them. Why did Mario no longer face Donkey Kong? Because nobody at Nintendo had thought of a fun fresh way to pit the two against each other.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong is oozing with fresh fun. The plot, because it is inessential, is ridiculous: Mario owns a toy factory, which produces Mario action figures. Donkey Kong thinks Mario action figures sound like fun, so he goes to the factory and steals the entire production run. It falls to Mario to rescue the toys, mostly by performing tasks that echo the original Jumpman-against-ape battle.

Mario must climb ladders and leap across chasms. He must jump over the barrels D.K. throws at him, or else he must smash them with hammers. He must figure out how to get from the left side of the screen to the right, because the conveyor belt in the middle is going the wrong way and there is no obvious alternative. Basically the game plays like Donkey Kong with the best 2D graphics money can buy and 25 years of game-design expertise under its belt.

Parts of it involve the pure mechanics of timing your jumps and not falling down. Others are more like puzzles, where the path you must take is far from obvious and trying the wrong thing will get poor Mario killed. It feels both new and familiar. It is great. It ends too quickly.

The lesson here is that, when you have a big hit, it is a good idea to wait a quarter century before attempting a sequel. Or maybe it is that stealing toys will get you thumped with a hammer.