Because of the competitive nature of multiplayer, coins are kind of a bigger deal now than they ever were. Coins feel the way Rupees or Force Gems felt in The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords games. Coins aren't worth a ton of points (I think they're worth 100 whereas a Super Mushroom is worth about 2,000) but every little bit helps. As previously mentioned, there are also "big coins" worth several thousand points. There are three per-level, similar to the Advance Coins in the Super Mario Advance series. It's usually a mad dash to get them as soon as they scroll onto the screen, and most of them function as sort of a goal for various platforming challenges.

I played several stages, and they all had a variety of cool obstacles. The first stage had literal rolling hills that moved like conveyer belts. There's one point where a warp pipe to a bonus area rolls by on the hill, and if you don't go down it in time it'll never come back. There are also some cliff sides with slight indentations in it, indicating a secret passageway. If you walk into those indentations, a circle will appear around your character (like the lantern in Zelda) that cuts out the foreground showing the inside of the cave, but everything outside the circle looks normal. One stage I played was mainly a raft floating on a river through a dark cave. Each character had a circle of light around them (so did individual fireballs) and the raft had a double-sided spotlight on it that was controlled by the tilting of the Wii remote by the first player to hit a [!] block.

There were also fortress levels in the demo. One of the ones I played featured giant rotating gears that were mostly harmless but would crush players against other gears or rotate them into 1-hit-KO lava. The game is relatively physicsy--I jumped on a Dry Bones and he shattered, causing his head to bounce into a gear and then fall into the lava. A few seconds later his scattered bones all floated back together to revive himself. Knocking his head into the lava seemed to delay his revival. Walking on the gears, in general, felt way more physics-based than the previous levels.

At the end of the fortress, we fought Morton Koopa Jr, my personal favorite Koopa Kid. The battlefield was a platform with solid blocks on either side (so that Morton could get in his shell and bounce around the inside of the platform) and lava on the outside. The whole battlefield was on a fixed screen (as opposed to the stages where the camera zooms in and out depending on how players are positioned) and there were walls on either edge of the screen to wall jump off of. His attacks were pretty similar to his Super Mario 3 attacks, going into his shell, jumping, flipping, etc. And you damaged him in the same way by jumping on his head or shooting fireballs. One new attack I saw though was using his staff to shoot a Magikoopa-like blast of a triangle, a square, and a circle. We were defeated the first time we fought him, but managed to beat him the second time. I also saw someone fighting Lemmy Koopa but didn't get to fight him myself.

At the end of each stage, your score is tallied up. Your score is tallied up by the number of enemies you defeated, coins you collected, and points you accumulate for bonus things like power ups or getting high enough on the flag pole. It's then multiplied by the amount of lives you had remaining. You always start out with 5 lives, and it can be + or - that depending on how many times you died or how many extra lives you earned. This makes 1-ups more important than they've been in a long time, re-justifying an insane dash to get them. After the lives are multiplied, the players arrange in order of 1st to 4th and the winner is declared.

I should note that the first few rounds I played, no one was being very competitive. But later on in the event, they started a 'tournament' where four players had to play level 1 and the player with the highest score was written down for consideration for the final 4 player battle. When this happened, the game became very different. There were all these competitive cut-throat strategies that we weren't really utilizing before, and it actually made the game more fun. Also, when the players all 'register' their remotes the screen seemed suspiciously more robust than it needed to be, making me think there may be more characters besides Mario, Luigi, Blue Toad and Yellow Toad. I tried holding different button combinations to see if I could change my character, but nothing worked. But it definitely felt like there was more to that screen.

Overall I had a great time. We're both really excited about this game. I hope I was thorough enough with my impressions, but if you have any specific questions leave them in the comments.