Paper Mario: Color Splash isn't just painting by the numbers ... that it's also ideal for those who haven't played much of the genre - for whom 'XCOM' sounds like a silly acronym from a war ...

In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door ... players can influence the game to give them the specific color they want, a process that requires a bit of planning and timing to execute.

But it's not just Paper Mario that the team drew from. "There's this whole library from the N64, like Banjo-Kazooie," Ruckdeschel says, "but also PlayStation with Crash Bandicoot. We didn't want ...