Super Mario 64 DS is the flagship game for the launch of a new hand-held play machine, the Nintendo DS. It is also the re-release of a Nintendo 64 game that first hit store shelves way back in the dark days of 1996.

Here is what you are asking right now. Why, with a brand new piece of 21st-century hardware to promote, would Nintendo not cook up a brand-new 21st-century game to go with it? Why would Nintendo look backward instead of forward? Why why why?

Good questions. Here are the answers. Super Mario 64 is one of the very best video games ever released. It is sublime. It is beautiful and seductive. It is unswervingly magnificent. It is finger licking good. It deserves to be released and re-re-released and re-re-re-released forever and ever, as long as there are still machines that run video games and still people who like to play. It is Citizen Game.

Also, there is Nintendo's business model. If you own a Game Boy Advance, you know that many of that machine's greatest hits were also greatest hits on the Super Nintendo home system, re-packaged and re-sold to a new generation of players. Video games are expensive to develop, see, so a chance to sell a big fat load of them without having to pay programmers and artists naturally strikes CEOS and chairs of the board as a clever idea, no matter how cold it leaves the people who've already paid full price once.

The Nintendo DS looks like a Game Boy that has been working out. It has two video screens, one of which is touch sensitive. It has two speakers and stereo sound. Its powerful circuitry can render two high-resolution 3D scenes at once. It is a Game Man.

The practical upshot of all this is that handheld video games can now look and play very much like home console video games. They can be 3D. They can contain speech and elaborate music. They can be immersive and realistic. They no longer need focus exclusively on little guys who run to the right while the scenery scrolls past to the left. They can take us into virtual spaces, where we can revel in the sheer joy of wandering around and exploring and never mind whatever the official point of the exercise is.

Super Mario 64 was the first video game to offer that. It was the first to fulfill the promise of 3D graphics. It was the first to feel like a playground where we could just go and hang out. But because it was only available for the Nintendo 64, a system that took a thorough and vigorous beating from the PlayStation in the Market Share Wars of the late '90s, many people have never played Super Mario 64. Consider all that, and you will begin to see the sense in its arrival on the new DS. You will also quiver at the promise of the coming months. How many more N64 gems are also headed for the DS? (And might Diddy Kong Racing be among them?)

There are a few tweaks and changes from the original, almost all for the better. As we begin our adventure, we play not as Mario the jolly plumber but as Yoshi the friendly dinosaur. We wander into Princess Toadstool's castle. We explore upstairs and down. We notice that the walls are hung with psychedelic paintings. For a laugh, we try jumping at one of them. To our delight, we fall right through the canvas and into an elaborately detailed funhouse.

In time we find Mario, and his brother Luigi, and his evil uncle Wario, and earn the right to play as any of them. Wario, we find, is good at stomping around under water. Yoshi is good at jumping. Mario is, er, well rounded. We switch from character to character, partly to rescue the enchanted stars hidden everywhere, and partly just because we can.

There are many paintings to jump through and many worlds to explore. There are rolling boulders for you to jump over, and islands that float in the air, and angry mushrooms who need bopping on the head. There is a little penguin who has lost his mother. There are pyramids and sand dunes and vultures hovering in the sky. There are big yucky eels. There is an evil mastermind, who is also a turtle.

The game is a classic, and its transition to the pocket size is a triumph. The touch screen of your DS will be covered with greasy thumb-smears before you have had your fill of it. Take your time. Lick your fingers.