As Mario falls for the umpteenth time, after I have done nothing but adjust the camera, and I bounce my Wavebird angrily off the carpet, it suddenly hits me. This isn’t the future of platform games; if anything, it feels more like the end of the line. A grand summary of the genre, but where can it go from here?

There are countless things to delight in Super Mario Sunshine, of course. It is stuffed with small brilliancies, excelling in the kind of non-essential surprises that can make exploring a videogame world so delightful: for instance, the plank hanging by ropes from a tree on the island off Gelato Beach. An experimental squirt, and – yes! – you begin to swing, the ropes creak beautifully, and at the right moment Mario describes a gorgeous parabola through the air, collecting coins on the way. On the other hand, that apparent consistency of the water-pack’s physics isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. The FLUDD’s abilities, like too many things in the game, are artificially circumscribed to serve the game designers’ purposes, rather than the player’s. There seems no reason why, for example, if you are hovering at a great height and the water cuts off, you shouldn’t be able to turn on the hover again before you land; the pack recovers much faster in squirt mode, after all, and you are able to make a lot of little hover jumps quite rapidly if you start from ground level.

The rule of threes, meanwhile, is applied so rigorously it seems almost sadistic. Fine, it takes three body slams to defeat the glorious steam-train giant caterpillar that is the Wiggler. Three bombs to kill the Weasel, three hits to Petey Piranha. But these people who need fruit – why do they need three bananas, or three coconuts? Three isn’t a very large number, but it’s large enough to make many of the game’s tasks seem annoyingly repetitive. Oh, and time-limited fruit? Fruit that just disappears in a puff of smoke if you play around with it too long? Waaah. That just makes me feel like a baby whose rattle has been stolen. Not exactly the emotion that Mario games have traditionally induced.

Sunshine feels like a compendium of mini-games: many great fun; some horrifically annoying. (Three words: Yoshi’s Fruit Adventure.) It’s like a large jar of Quality Street, except you’re forced to eat the ones you don’t like, as well as your favourites. The way the levels are effectively cut off from each other with graffito warps means that there is little sense of a large, consistent world that all hangs together. A year after Jak & Daxter gave us a huge, lush environment in which anything you could see, you could travel to, it feels retrograde.

Shigeru Miyamoto, of course, single-handedly invented the platform genre, so he can do what he likes. Donkey Kong’s difference was that it dramatised the verticality of an arcade cabinet screen: the environment itself became a puzzle. And it is this obstacle-course concept that has persisted through the genre’s evolution in games as different as Tomb Raider and Banjo-Kazooie. Now, it’s not so much that the obstacle course idea itself has been played out, but that the player is no longer given sufficient incentive to complete it. Collecting coins has become an end in itself. (Shines, coins, whatever: they’re all just arbitrary tokens.) Well, watching a number increase doesn’t do it for me any more. Yoshi and a few extra nozzles don’t provide enough consolation. Roughly half-way through, Sunshine has not evolved sufficiently to keep me interested.

There is another way. There is a game that was hugely underrated at the time, that was a stealthy influence on subsequent instant classics, and that offered a very different take on the idea of the platform game: Ape Escape. To play it now is to recognise how ahead of its time it was. A funky gadget, a la Sunshine, that lets you explore the levels in a different way? Check: Ape Escape had the Sky Flyer, a hand-operated propeller, not to mention the wonderful radio-controlled mini-car. Amusing mini-games featuring simians, a la Super Monkey Ball? Check: Ape Escape had monkey skiing, monkey boxing, and Galaxy Monkey, a 3D shooter.

But what Ape Escape really had in abundance was character. And I don’t mean a bunch of NPCs preloaded with a few lines of textual exegesis. It was the monkeys themselves: the cute ways they would be fiddling, snoring, or staring around paranoiacally when inspected with the Monkey Radar. The way one might suddenly appear, gloriously, sitting atop an enormous woolly mammoth; or another might go postal with bombs and a machine-gun to attempt to evade capture. The way one was a fan of Bob Marley or another was named after David Ginola. It was this unity yet variety of character, along with a well-timed acquisition of new gadgets and skills, that made progress through the game compelling. Around every new corner might be a new type of monkey that behaved in an amusingly different fashion to those before.

Ape Escape’s environments were not hardcore obstacle courses of the type that Super Mario Sunshine offers. They had sections of “How do I get up there?” puzzlement, sure, but these were always in the service of the game’s central activity – capturing monkeys. And running around trying to net screaming little furballs that seem to have a life of their own is arguably far more compelling than searching for pointless virtual currency. The one-joke Ape Escape 2001 was thoroughly unworthy of its predecessor, but Ape Escape 2 is on its way, and the monkey football mini-game looks as if it will be worth the price of entry all by itself.

What we have known for two decades as the platform game seems to be at a generic crossroads. Super Mario Sunshine has arguably taken the purist money-grubbing, obstacle-course concept as far as it ever needs to go. Meanwhile, upcoming productions such as Ratchet & Clank or Haven want to push the genre further in the direction of becoming a giant Everygame, where flight-shooting stages can alternate with rollercoaster rides as well as vertically-oriented ambulatory exploration. But such maximalist approaches to the genre run the risk of lacking thematic focus. When everything including the kitchen sink is stuffed into a cartoony world of saturated colour and jolly music, the player is often left with a sense of a missing core. It’s all periphery and no centre.

For many people, the simple historical fact that it’s Mario provides all the thematic core necessary for enjoyment of Sunshine. On the whole, though, I’m on the side of the monkeys.